Mercedes opens a battery plant in Alabama, part of a Southern wave.

WOODSTOCK, Ala. — The auto business’s shift to battery energy is anticipated to result in job losses as a result of it takes fewer employees to construct an electrical automobile than it does to construct a automobile with a gasoline engine. However that in all probability gained’t be the case in Alabama.

The state this week turned the beneficiary of a manufacturing unit that can construct battery packs for a Mercedes-Benz electrical sport utility automobile. The German carmaker has a big manufacturing unit advanced close to Tuscaloosa, Ala., the place it has constructed standard S.U.V.s because the Nineteen Nineties.

Mercedes has provided these factories with inside combustion engines made primarily in Europe. Now these imported elements will slowly get replaced by batteries made in the US.

“For the state, that is most positively a web optimistic,” Ola Källenius, the chief govt of Mercedes, mentioned in an interview after an occasion on Tuesday to mark the opening of the battery manufacturing unit in a rural space a couple of miles from the present manufacturing unit.

The battery plant, which is able to make use of 600 individuals and start full operations in April, is an instance of how the shift to electrical autos is fueling a wave of funding within the South.

Mercedes has invested $1 billion within the huge facility in Woodstock, Ala., and to retool the corporate’s manufacturing advanced in close by Vance to provide a line of electrical S.U.V.s.

Automakers are constructing or planning greater than a dozen new factories to make batteries for electrical vehicles, nearly all in Southern states. Ford is planning a fancy to make electrical pickup vehicles in Stanton, Tenn., which is able to get its batteries from a brand new plant in Glendale, Ky.

Alabama officers are “ecstatic” concerning the Mercedes funding, mentioned Fitzgerald Washington, the Alabama secretary of labor, one in every of a number of public officers who attended the inaugural occasion.

Though the realm has a low jobless price, Mr. Washington mentioned that the manufacturing unit provided better-paying, extra extremely expert jobs, and that it could draw employees from elements of the state with unemployment above 10 p.c.

The manufacturing unit will initially use imported battery cells, the elements that retailer vitality, to assemble battery packs that may be put in in autos. However Mercedes introduced this week that it could work with Envision AESC, a Japanese battery maker, to construct a cell manufacturing unit at a location to be decided, in all probability within the area.

The push to provide U.S.-made elements could also be accelerated by rising geopolitical tensions, together with the Ukraine warfare, which have disrupted provide chains. Mr. Källenius mentioned Mercedes would have wished to have native cell manufacturing in any case, however added, “On this time of insecurity and uncertainty, it definitely makes that call perhaps much more clear.”