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Members of the Bainbridge Rotary Club met at the Kirbo Center for their weekly meeting on Tuesday. This week’s guest speaker was Chip Dunn, Chairman of the Board with Anovion Technologies. Dunn began by showing the audience a brief video recap of Anovion’s June groundbreaking.

Following this, Dunn gave a bit of background on Anovion, beginning with its formation from two other companies. He discussed the company’s thermal technology, and how the technology and industry for manufacturing synthetic graphite was off-shored. The Bainbridge facility will be the first large-scale factory of its kind not just in Georgia, but in North America.

Synthetic graphite is predominantly used in lithium-ion batteries, with much of the production based in Asia, China in particular. Dunn emphasized that this facility is not just about green energy and electric vehicles, but job and energy security. “This story about Anovion is as much about this whole EV phenomenon, electrification, decarbonization, all these buzzwords,” he said, “as it is about national security, and energy security, and re-shoring of jobs, and bringing technologies back to America that China took 30, 40, 50 years ago.”

Anovion is currently in discussions with battery manufacturers. “Our customer base that we’re gonna bring to Bainbridge is the who’s-who of electric vehicle battery makers, or it could be a bunch of smaller guys, or both,” Dunn said, “the smaller guys are guys none of us have ever heard of before, but they’re working on batteries for military applications, or medical devices, things like that.”

Dunn closed by giving the Rotary Club a commemorative plaque.