Two LGES Facilities Declared ESS Mass Production. The Public Record Doesn't Show What's Available.

LGES's Q2 2026 earnings call confirmed that ESS-cell production started at the Ultium Cells facility in Spring Hill, Tennessee (the GM joint venture) in May, and at L-H Battery in Fayette County, Ohio (the Honda joint venture) in June. L-H Battery separately declared "mass production" on 2026-07-01. Both sites count toward LGES's stated target of exceeding 50 GWh of North American ESS production capacity by year-end.

What can a buyer determine from the public record about how much these two facilities are producing, at what quality, for whom, and whether any of it is uncommitted? Answering that requires walking each available disclosure type and marking where it stops.

Issue #7's conversion registry laid out a proof ladder running from customer agreement through compliance documentation, on the principle that every rung needs its own evidence and clearing one implies nothing about the next. For this audit the relevant states are:

1. Company-declared SOP
2. Converted GWh
3. Stabilized yield
4. Customer qualification
5. Accepted recurring shipments
6. Uncommitted allocation

Company SOP declarations

L-H Ohio. The 2026-07-01 announcement says L-H Battery began "mass production of ESS battery cells." LGES's Q2 transcript corroborates with a June start. Neither source reports converted GWh, line count, utilization, yield, cell chemistry or format, customer-qualified volume, or shipment quantity.

Spring Hill. Ultium's 2026-03-17 announcement describes approximately $70M in retooling for JF2-format LFP pouch cells for storage, with the site's prior NCMA automotive-cell production consolidated at Warren, Ohio. LGES's Q2 transcript confirms the May start. The Ultium facility page still lists "more than 45 GWh" for the site, a figure inherited from the EV program. A 2022 Tennessee economic-development filing references a 50 GWh expansion target, also automotive.

Those inherited nameplate numbers do not transfer. An EV-to-ESS conversion keeps the building and some of the fixed assets, then resets the product, the customer base, the qualification status, and the compliance position. A line retooled from NCMA pouch to LFP pouch for a different application has to re-establish yield on a new chemistry and re-qualify with buyers who were not previously customers of that line. How many GWh of ESS cells the retooled lines can produce, are producing, or have qualified is not derivable from 45 GWh of automotive nameplate. GM's Q2 10-Q carries aggregate Ultium JV accounting with no Spring Hill, ESS, or LFP breakout.

Both facilities have cleared state 1. These disclosures reach no further.

LGES quarterly aggregates

LGES's H1 2026 DART filing — DART is Korea's equivalent of EDGAR — reports production capacity, output, and utilization for the energy-solutions business in monetary terms rather than physical GWh: KRW 27.954T of calculated capacity, KRW 14.760T of production, 52.8% average utilization. The filing explains that capacity is derived from production value divided by average utilization. Sales combine EV, ESS, and small-application batteries with no facility, geography, or application split.

The Q2 call adds direction without magnitude at the facility level. North American ESS shipments grew. ESS revenue rose approximately 30% quarter over quarter. Quarterly North American production incentives — Section 45X credits, which LGES calls AMPC — increased 27% to KRW 241B. Second-half ESS production is projected at "at least twice" first-half levels.

All of those figures cover the entire North American ESS network. None is divided among L-H Ohio, Spring Hill, Holland, Michigan, or any other site.

The temptation with a consolidated credit figure is to back it out into eligible kWh. That doesn't work here. Section 45X pays different per-kWh rates by eligible component type — electrode active materials, cells, and modules each carry their own rate — and LGES does not disclose the component mix behind the KRW 241B. No combination of the disclosed figures yields L-H Ohio's Q2 output or Spring Hill's ESS utilization.

Vertech as downstream demand evidence

Cells from both facilities route through LG Energy Solution Vertech, LGES's US storage-integration arm, which discloses named customers and portfolio-scale agreements: 7.5 GWh with Excelsior, 5 GWh with Qcells, and 6 GWh with DTE Energy. A Michigan PSC filing independently confirms the DTE equipment-supply agreement, with project schedules and commercial terms substantially redacted.

Vertech's website reports 19 GWh of US integrated-storage projects "installed, in construction, and in contracting" and 30 GWh globally "deployed, ordered, and in contracting." Both blend completed and incomplete commercial stages into one number, which makes them unusable as a shipment proxy. A Vertech spokesperson separately told Energy-Storage.News that the company planned to produce and deliver 50 GWh of US storage projects during 2026 but declined to name specific projects; that is trade-reported, not a filing.

The DTE announcement says cells will come from "Michigan and other US or Canadian facilities" without naming either audited site. None of the reviewed Vertech disclosures assigns a customer, system, shipment, or backlog quantity to L-H Ohio or Spring Hill.

Vertech establishes demand: named buyers, executed agreements, portfolio scale. It does not let you trace a cell from a specific factory to a specific customer, which is what state 5 requires.

Closed DOE financing routes

L-H Ohio does not appear on DOE's advanced-vehicle project list. Honda's 20-F describes the $2.530B transaction as a purchase-and-leaseback of buildings, not federal financing.

Spring Hill was covered by Ultium Cells' $2.5B ATVM loan, which financed construction and tooling at Spring Hill, Lordstown, and Lansing. DOE accepted full early repayment on 2025-05-13 after $1.8B had been disbursed, and states that it stops monitoring projects once a loan is fully repaid. The surviving environmental review describes the original NCMA automotive program, not the 2026 conversion.

Federal lending is normally one of the few routes by which operational milestones surface to outside observers, through disbursement conditions and borrower reporting. That route is closed for both facilities.

Samsung SDI as disclosure comparator

Samsung SDI's filings mark the ceiling of what Korean producer disclosure currently reveals, which is useful for calibrating what LGES's reporting architecture could plausibly provide even at its most forthcoming.

Samsung's English Q2 release refers qualitatively to "AMPC benefits from increased local production in the United States." The Korean preliminary-results filing is more specific: Q2 consolidated operating profit included KRW 107.7B of Section 45X credit. The half-year DART report reports KRW 175.769B of first-half other operating income from expected US advanced-manufacturing production credits.

The Korean filing surfaces a consolidated quarterly amount the English release omits entirely, a pattern I've documented repeatedly across Korean battery makers, where the KRX-language regulatory filing carries data the English investor materials do not. But the more granular disclosure still allocates the credit to nothing: not facility, not chemistry, not application, not eligible kWh, not customer, not uncommitted capacity. Samsung's production table lists StarPlus Energy among overseas operations while publishing capacity and utilization only for small batteries and selected electronic materials.

The most informative Korean producer filing in this cycle gives you a consolidated AMPC number and no decomposition. LGES's architecture is built the same way.

Syrah's 45X payment as calibration

Syrah Resources disclosed receipt of $11.7M from the IRS as an elective payment for its 2024 Section 45X credit. It matters as calibration because Syrah's Vidalia facility was publicly described as running at qualification-stage volumes when the credit was claimed and paid.

Section 45X requires an eligible component to be "produced by the taxpayer" and "sold" during the tax year. The final regulations apply federal income-tax principles to determine whether a transaction qualifies as a sale. They set no minimum-volume threshold, no final-qualification requirement, no repeat-order test. Form 7207 captures facility-level production and sale information but never asks whether the buyer completed qualification or placed a second order.

A qualification lot or trial lot sold to a customer is therefore not categorically excluded from eligibility. Run that in reverse and it constrains what any future 45X disclosure can tell you: a valid claim does not establish stabilized yield, completed customer qualification, recurring commercial volume, or open allocation, because none of those is a statutory predicate. And as established in Issue #7, the underlying facility-level return information is confidential under Section 6103. No public registry connects 45X claims to facilities, volumes, or buyers.

If LGES or its JV partners eventually surface facility-attributable 45X amounts, that will confirm tax-recognized production and sale occurred at those sites. It will not distinguish a qualification lot from a commercial-scale shipment.

The evidence map

That is consistent with the Issue #9 finding that public evidence supports zero GWh of US-manufactured cell supply simultaneously in production, quantified at facility level, and available to an unaffiliated buyer.

The reasons for the gap are worth separating because they have different durations. LGES's aggregate reporting protects competitive position across a five-site ramp where site-level utilization and yield would be commercially sensitive; that constraint is a choice and could change. Vertech's blended-stage portfolio figures do similar work, signaling scale without exposing execution status at any particular site. DOE monitoring ended with repayment and will not resume. Section 6103 makes facility-level 45X claims permanently unobservable from outside the IRS, regardless of what any producer decides to volunteer.

For a buyer evaluating domestic ESS cell supply from L-H Ohio or Spring Hill, the record confirms that production started and that LGES has a downstream channel with named customers and portfolio-scale agreements. How much is being produced, at what yield, for which customers, in what quantities, and whether any of it is unspoken for — none of this is answerable from public sources under the current disclosure architecture.