Companies cancelled, closed or downsized $34.8 billion of US clean-energy projects in 2025, 61 of them, against $12.3 billion of new announcements, and EV and battery plants were more than $21 billion each of the loss. That is E2’s count, and it is the wrong headline for a buyer, because a cancelled plant is not a pile of machines: most of the $34.8 billion was never poured or bolted down. The machines that did reach the secondary market came from a shorter list: Nikola, Canoo and Arrival, Lion Electric, Natron, Fisker, Lordstown, Proterra, iM3NY, Northvolt. We read the sale orders, the auction catalogs and the state clawback letters for each. This debrief covers the cancellation calendar month by month, what a closed EV plant sells as (510 lots, two of them machine tools), the court record on price (3% to 37% of reference value), who bought and in which sector, the clawbacks, and, behind the wall, the 2026 lots worth watching and how to bid on them.
Source: E2, Clean Economy Works monthly memos, Sep 2025 to Feb 2026, project rows summed by Open Factory
Fifty-five project rows from E2’s September, October, November and year-end memos sum to $34.3 billion, 98.7% of E2’s $34.8 billion; February, June, December and October hold two-thirds of it, and EV and battery/storage rows are $29.3 billion.
The Cancellation Calendar
E2 counts cancellations, closures and downsizes since August 2022 and excludes “temporary delays and ownership transfers that do not reduce production capacity,” so the two biggest schedule changes of the year are not in the $34.8 billion. Intel told its Ohio employees on February 28, 2025 that Mod 1 at New Albany would finish construction in 2030 and begin operations between 2030 and 2031, with Mod 2 finished in 2031 and operating in 2032, on a project Spectrum News puts at $28 billion. TSMC’s second Arizona fab moved the other way: slated for 2028 as recently as 2025, it is now tooling up in mid 2026 for 3 nm production in 2027, as reported by TrendForce from Nikkei. Neither puts a machine on the market. A delay parks the purchase order; a cancellation strands the asset.
The EV rows are where the assets are. KORE Power cancelled its $1.2 billion Buckeye, Arizona cell plant in February and said it would sell the site and retrofit an existing factory instead, “around a year and a half” against a greenfield build. Freyr scrapped a $2.6 billion Georgia plant the same month. Stellantis dropped the Belvidere, Illinois battery plant, $3.2 billion on E2’s ledger. GM said on June 10, 2025 that Orion Assembly would build gas full-size SUVs and light-duty pickups from early 2027, a $4.3 billion EV downsize in E2’s row. Michigan served Gotion a notice of default in September and by October 24 the $2.4 billion Big Rapids plant was dead. December brought SK On’s $2.8 billion Tennessee row and Ford’s $1.5 billion Ohio row as Ford and SK On dissolved BlueOval SK and Ford’s December 15 8-K replaced the Ohio Assembly EV van with a gas and hybrid van from 2029 and booked about $19.5 billion of EV-related special items.
Of the $29.3 billion of EV and battery rows, the only ones that put equipment up for public sale in 2025 were the bankruptcies and closures of companies that had already installed lines, and those were a few hundred million dollars of book value, not tens of billions. GM, Ford, Stellantis and SK On keep their tooling or never ordered it; KORE, Freyr and Gotion cancelled buildings. The Lead-Time Monitor reads the same event from the other side: cancelled orders for coaters, stackers and formation racks shorten the queue for the buyers still in it, which is why the Book-to-Bill League Table shows automation OEM backlogs flattening while aerospace and power orders in the USMTO record half-year rose.
What a Closed EV Plant Sells As
Lion Electric opened its Joliet, Illinois bus plant in 2023 and its US subsidiary filed Chapter 15 in December 2024. On May 29, 2025 Workingman Capital, with Hilco Commercial Industrial, ran a timed online auction of everything inside the 906,517 square foot building: 18% buyer’s premium, payment by wire the next day, small items out by June 6, cranes, racking and paint booths out by June 13, three approved riggers named in the catalog. The catalog runs to 510 lots and we categorized every one.
Source: Workingman Capital, Lion Electric Chicago Facility auction catalog, May 2025; categories assigned by Open Factory
Of 510 lots, 102 are automated guided vehicles and transfer shuttles, 93 are benches, carts and ladders, 72 are cranes and hoists, 48 are office and IT, 36 are test and EV-service equipment (two 40,000 lb Mohawk lifts, a dynamometer, a leak analyzer), 17 are plant air (two 2022 Atlas Copco GA160 compressors, one showing 342 hours) and 13 are paint booths and Graco metering systems; two lots are machine tools.
A vehicle plant liquidates as material handling, finishing and plant air; a battery plant liquidates as process equipment; neither is a machine-tool sale, which is why the Used CNC Auction Index will not see the EV bust in its lots. The machine tools were in the engineering shops. Canoo’s Torrance, California sale on February 6, 2025 (BidItUp, 20% premium) carried a 2020 DMG Mori DMU 75 monoBLOCK five-axis, two more DMG Mori mills, a 2021 DMS Yellowstone gantry router the auctioneer priced at over $675,000 new, a GOM scanner and a 333 hp dynamometer: a prototype shop’s list. The battery plants sold as lines. Lion’s Mirabel, Quebec pack plant went to auction on July 8, 2025 as a complete 2023 robotic NMC pack line rated 1.7 GWh (Fanuc robots, 21 Asterion wire bonders, five NHR 9300 test systems), offered whole first and then by lot. Natron Energy’s sodium-ion plants in Santa Clara and Holland, Michigan, about $74 million of assets by Tiger Group’s count, carried a Frontier slot-die coater, a 2023 Hanwha cell assembly line at 10 cells a minute and a formation line with a Fanuc R-2000iC; Santa Clara sold in bulk before the November 13 close and the Holland terms barred any buyer not domiciled in the United States, citing CFIUS. Canoo’s production robots stayed in Oklahoma City, where AssetBuilt’s June 2026 sale of the Canoo and Arrival assets spent a day on Fanuc ARCMate welding cells, a day on “dozens” of 2020 to 2022 KUKA KR 120, KR 210 and KR 280 arms, and a day on Dürr adhesive systems, with a Manz battery line as the centerpiece. A new six-axis arm lists around the $61,000 that A Robot Costs $61k works from; the Equipment Price Benchmark has no used-robot cell yet.
The Court Record: Three Cents on the Dollar
Auction houses never publish what a lot sold for. Bankruptcy courts do, and the 2023 to 2025 record is consistent.
| Asset | Buyer | Price | Reference | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nikola Coolidge plant, Phoenix HQ, 884,000 sq ft | Lucid | $30M cash and non-cash | none published | Apr 11, 2025 | ABC15 / PBJ |
| Nikola trucks, parts inventory, all IP | Hyroad Energy | $3.85M | $114M estate valuation; trucks alone $51.74M | Aug 6, 2025 | Transport Topics |
| Canoo, substantially all assets | WHS Energy Solutions (Aquila) | $4M cash plus release of $11M+ secured debt | $145M stated assets | Apr 9, 2025 | TechCrunch |
| iM3NY Endicott cell plant, all assets | Musashi Auto Parts Michigan | $10M | $140M announced cost; $142M debt | Apr 4, 2025 | ElevenFlo |
| Fisker, 3,231 Ocean SUVs | American Lease | up to $46.25M, $2,500 to $16,500 each | $39,000 to $70,000 MSRP | Jul 16, 2024 | TechCrunch |
| Proterra Powered, Burlingame and Greer SC | Volvo Group | $210M before inventory adjustment | none published | Feb 1, 2024 | Volvo |
| Proterra Transit, Greenville SC | Phoenix Motorcars | $10M | none published | Nov 2023 | Canary Media |
| Lordstown Motors operating assets | LAS Capital (Burns) | $10M | 175 parties, 9 proposals, 1 qualified bid | Oct 18, 2023 | Repairer Driven News |
| Lordstown plant, 6.2M sq ft (Foxconn) | SoftBank | $375M | Foxconn paid $230M in 2022 | Aug 2025 | Tom’s Hardware |
| Meyer Burger Goodyear AZ module and Colorado cell tools | Waaree Solar Americas; Babacomari Solar North | $29M total | none published | Sep 2025 | pv magazine USA |
| Northvolt Ett, Labs, Drei, Cuberg, Dwa, all IP | Lyten | undisclosed | none published | Aug 7, 2025 | Northvolt |
Source: court sale orders and buyer releases as reported; full table with status, sale type, auction house and lot notes at data/ev-plant-liquidations.csv
Source: court sale orders and buyer releases as reported by TechCrunch, Transport Topics, ElevenFlo, Car and Driver, Tom's Hardware; Open Factory arithmetic
Canoo cleared at 2.8% of its own stated assets, Nikola’s trucks and inventory at 3.4% of the estate’s valuation, iM3NY at 7.1% of the plant’s announced cost, Fisker’s finished cars at 36.7% of base MSRP, and the Lordstown building at 163% of what Foxconn paid for it three years earlier. Finished goods with a title hold value; purpose-built equipment inside a bankrupt estate does not, and the Canoo trustee’s filing says why: a “glut of EV related assets” at “fire-sale prices,” and no money for the “rents, security costs, and insurance necessary to maintain the integrity of the assets.” The same logic produced one qualified bid from nine proposals in Lordstown, one “actionable offer” for Nikola’s trucks after Gordon Brothers and Hilco Streambank canvassed the market, and a judge in Canoo who approved the insider bid because “no one else” bid. In the used electrical market a 2011 2,000 kW genset asks 30% of new, and a used Haas VF-2 asks 59% to 89% of list: general-purpose iron has a hundred buyers, an EV skateboard welding cell has three. The Public Bid-Tab Price Book puts the hundred-buyer price next to the quote; the court record is the price when there is one buyer.
Who Bought
Source: Open Factory compilation of court sale orders, auction notices and company releases
Twenty-five transactions, ten sectors: seven with no disclosed buyer (the Lion, Natron and Canoo auctions, Natron’s bulk sale, Nikola’s private-treaty inventory), three battery makers (Lyten, SK On, Ford converting Glendale), two EV makers (Lucid, and Canoo buying Arrival’s gear), two owners retooling for gas (GM, Ford), two truck and bus OEMs (Volvo, Phoenix), two fleet operators (American Lease, Hyroad), two founders buying back (Burns, Aquila), two solar buyers (Waaree, Babacomari), two data-center owners (SoftBank at Lordstown, Blackstone’s QTS building a GBP 10 billion campus on the Britishvolt site) and one auto supplier (Musashi).
The aerospace and defense buyers the trade press expected are not on any sale order, catalog or release we read; the only defense link is Lyten, which sells lithium-sulfur cells into “drone and defense markets,” and AssetBuilt listing “aerospace applications” as a target use for Canoo’s KUKA arms. That squares with the machinery data. Aerospace ordered the most machinery on record in the first half of 2026, value about a third above the prior half, and it bought new five-axis machines from the Japanese builders, not used AGVs from a bus plant. The buyers who did show up wanted the building (SoftBank paid $375 million for 6.2 million square feet and the power behind it, Manufacturing Dive reports), the cells (LG Energy Solution paid about half of $2.14 billion for GM’s share of the 98%-built Lansing plant), or the fleet. The Datacenter MEP Cost Table prices what SoftBank avoided by buying a powered shell, and the Large-Load Cost Table shows why a plant with an existing interconnection is worth more in 2025 than the truck factory it was in 2022.
The Clawbacks
The states that paid for the plants want the money back, and the record shows how little was ever out the door. Kentucky lent Ford and SK On $250 million up front as a forgivable loan for Glendale; with the plant closed, Ford has taken on the whole loan, the first $10 million repayment falls in March 2027, and Ford has offered about $2 billion and 2,100 jobs to convert building one to battery energy storage while it markets building two. Michigan’s Strategic Fund approved $715 million for Gotion in 2022, about $540 million of it tax breaks; MEDC says none of the $125 million Critical Industry Program grant was disbursed, while FOX 17 reports $23.6 million of a $175 million package had been handed over and the state wants it back. Oklahoma approved about $100 million for Canoo and paid $1 million, repayable within 30 days if 80% of the jobs went within 18 months. Our Next Energy has repaid $3.3 million of a $15 million Michigan loan against a $200 million grant that was never drawn.
Across Kentucky, Michigan and Oklahoma, about $290 million of roughly $1.3 billion in approved incentives was actually disbursed to the four projects above, and $250 million of that is one loan Ford now owes. For a buyer the clawback letters matter for one reason: a state that has served a default notice holds a repayment claim against the site, and the clean-title rule in How to Write an RFQ for Capital Equipment applies to a building as much as to a machine.
What to Do Monday
Register with the five houses that ran these sales (Workingman Capital with Hilco, BidItUp, Tiger Group, AssetBuilt through BidSpotter, Gordon Brothers) and ask for the PDF catalog: the Lion catalog carried lot locations, rigging contacts and removal dates the listing page did not. Price every lot against a new quote before inspection day, using the Quote Check band for compressors, switchgear and chillers and the Tariff Exposure Calculator for anything you would otherwise import: a used KUKA in Oklahoma owes no duty, a new one from Augsburg owes the 15% Annex III rate in Tariffs, September 2026. Budget the premium (18% at Lion, 20% at BidItUp and AssetBuilt) and the rigger on top of the hammer, and put the removal deadline into the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule as a fixed date.
Behind the paywall: the six 2026 sales we would attend, including AssetBuilt’s two battery-equipment auctions in October 2026 and the $14 million of never-installed Nikola refueling gear nobody bought, plus the bid sheet for used robots and battery lines (inspection, rigging, warranty transfer, controller licences, the CFIUS clause), priced against the Public Bid-Tab Price Book.