EV charger company says it won’t meet goal of creating 300 jobs in Durham
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- North Carolina canceled Kempower’s job development grant at company’s request.
- Kempower paused planned hiring in Durham after federal EV tax incentives expired.
- Kempower had just over 100 employees at its Durham facility as of late April.
North Carolina has ended tax incentives for Finnish electric vehicle charging manufacturer Kempower after the company said it would not meet its goal of creating 306 jobs in Durham.
Kempower said the loss of federal tax credits last year and an overall dip in American demand for EVs had dampened demand for its charging equipment.
“Following the expiration of key federal EV tax incentives, EV registrations declined significantly, causing several commercial and municipal customers to defer charging infrastructure projects,” Kempower’s North American president, Monil Malhotra, wrote in a June 30 grant termination request to the N.C. Department of Commerce. “As a result, Kempower temporarily paused planned hiring at its Durham facility.”
Malhotra said Kempower finished June with just over 100 employees at its facility near Research Triangle Park, where it shipped its first charging system in late 2023. The company expects to continue operating there despite no longer having a job development investment grant that could have distributed around $3 million in tax benefits.
The N.C. Economic Investment Committee formally canceled the company’s grant during a meeting Tuesday in Raleigh. Kempower has not received any public money through this incentive. To comply with its state agreement, it had to have created at least 156 jobs by the end of 2025 and 196 jobs by the end of this year at an average salary around $86,000.
Most projects North Carolina has supported with job development investment grants, its main economic incentive since 2003, have failed to achieve their initial job-creation targets. Commerce officials point out that JDIGs are performance based, with public dollars only going to companies after they hit benchmarks.
Kempower was among several clean-energy businesses North Carolina backed with JDIGs in the early 2020s, including the Toyota EV battery plant in Randolph County and the assembly plant for the electric car company VinFast in Chatham County. A VinFast campus has yet to materialize, and last year, the state also ended its incentive for the lithium-ion battery maker Sunlight Batteries USA to build a Mebane site.
In an interview this spring with The News & Observer, Malhotra said the company was “overstaffed” for the volume of business it was doing and that hiring over the last couple of years had remained flat.
Charger gap remains, Kempower says
Malhotra, who became Kempower’s North American president last year, is still bullish on the EV charging business in the U.S., despite the elimination of tax credits and other incentives by Congress and the Trump administration.
Americans are still buying EVs, Malhotra told The N&O, and the country is still catching up with demand for chargers. In mature markets in Europe, there’s one public charging port for every 10 to 12 EVs on the road, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence; in the U.S., it’s one charger for about every 31 EVs.
“The ratio of chargers to vehicles in the U.S. and North America is still out of whack,” he said. “There’s still such a huge gap between supply and demand that it gives us plenty of opportunity for growth.”
Malhotra said revenue in the first quarter of the year was more than triple the same quarter a year earlier, and the company expects business to grow by 25% each year over the next five years.
“Most industries would kill to get a growth number like that,” he said.
This story was originally published July 14, 2026 at 4:43 PM.
