Aluminum is the metal you throw out without thinking about it. Cans, foil, the tray the takeout came in, all of it cheap enough that nobody feels bad about binning it.<\/p>\n
What that price hides is that pulling aluminum out of ore is one of the most electricity-hungry things American industry does.<\/p>\n
On July 27, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House Senior Counselor Peter Navarro and South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson turned up at a smelter in Goose Creek, outside Charleston. They were there to mark the end of a restart that had taken most of a year and about $50 million.<\/p>\n
The plant is Century Aluminum’s Mt. Holly, and what it got back was one potline. Century says the added metal lifts total U.S. primary aluminum production by roughly 10 percent<\/a>, which tells you less about Mt. Holly than it does about how little of this the country still does.<\/p>\n Feeding that potline is the part nobody put on a banner. Run the plant at its full rated 230,000 tonnes and the electrolysis alone draws somewhere around 397 megawatts, continuously, every hour of every day, for as long as the plant is alive.<\/p>\n Every ounce of primary aluminum in the world comes out of a Hall-H\u00e9roult cell, a design patented in 1886 that turns 140 this year and has never been replaced, because nothing better has worked at scale.<\/p>\n A cell is a steel box lined with carbon, holding alumina dissolved in molten cryolite at around 1,780 degrees Fahrenheit. Enormous direct current goes in through carbon anodes, oxygen comes off the top and eats the anodes, and liquid aluminum puddles on the floor of the pot where it gets siphoned off.<\/p>\n Most of that electricity is not doing chemistry. It is keeping the bath molten. Cut the current for a few hours and the whole thing freezes into a block of rock that is, for practical purposes, the end of that pot.<\/p>\n Which is why a smelter cannot behave like a normal industrial customer. It cannot power down overnight, it cannot shed load when the grid gets tight in a heat wave, and it cannot take a cheap interruptible rate. It buys a flat, enormous, permanent block of power or it does not open.<\/p>\n The Department of Energy put a number on this in a 2016 bandwidth study of U.S. aluminum manufacturing, which pegged electrolysis at 23,388 Btu per pound of aluminum<\/a> for a typical American plant. That is a 2010 industry average, not a meter reading at Mt. Holly, and it is worth saying so plainly.<\/p>\n Converted, it comes to about 15.1 megawatt-hours per tonne. At 230,000 tonnes a year that is 3.48 terawatt-hours, or 397 megawatts running flat, which is a mid-sized power station working all year for one factory.<\/p>\n Two independent checks say the conversion is sound. When Century struck a power deal with Santee Cooper back in December 2020, it told the SEC the contract would provide a minimum of 290 megawatts<\/a> to run Mt. Holly at 75 percent of capacity.<\/p>\n Scale that to 100 percent and you get 387 megawatts. The physics estimate lands 2.6 percent above the company’s own floor, which is about as close as you get without reading the plant’s meter yourself.<\/p>\n The second check is the industry’s. The Aluminum Association reckons a new 750,000-tonne smelter would burn about 11 terawatt-hours a year. Run 750,000 tonnes through the DOE figure and you get 11.3. Close enough that everyone is clearly using the same arithmetic.<\/p>\n For scale, South Carolina’s entire fleet of power plants adds up to 24,706 megawatts of net summer capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration’s state profile<\/a>. One factory in Berkeley County wants 1.6 percent of that, permanently.<\/p>\n It also explains why the contract matters more than the metal price. At full output, every extra dollar per megawatt-hour on the power bill costs this single plant about $3.5 million a year.<\/p>\n Mt. Holly opened in 1980 and has been supplied by Santee Cooper, the state-owned utility, ever since. It was the last primary aluminum smelter built in the United States, which is a fact that quietly does a lot of work in this story.<\/p>\n In 2015 the plant cut production in half and laid off around 300 people during a dispute with Santee Cooper over what it was paying for electricity, with cheap imported metal squeezing from the other side. A 2020 deal clawed it back to about 172,500 tonnes, or 75 percent, and there it sat.<\/p>\n Century announced the final restart in August 2025 and signed an extended Santee Cooper agreement that October. Century’s annual report lists the term as running through December 31, 2031 at “service-based rates,” and that is the entire public disclosure. No price, no volume, no escalator.<\/p>\n First hot metal from the restarted line came on April 16, 2026. The ribbon-cutting followed in July, with Century chief executive Jesse Gary saying the 10 percent bump in domestic output “is just the beginning.”<\/p>\n Century’s July statement does not use the phrase, but Gary and local reporting from the event both put the plant back at full capacity for the first time since 2015. The company’s own release sticks to the 10 percent figure and a headcount above 600.<\/p>\n Mark Schlag, who manages the smelter’s carbon plant and has worked there 22 years, told the SC Daily Gazette<\/a> that closing a plant like this one means taking away “the American dream that I’ve been able to live.”<\/p>\n The United States produced an estimated 660,000 tonnes of primary aluminum in 2025 and imported 4.4 million tonnes of crude and semi-fabricated aluminum, according to the U.S. Geological Survey<\/a>. That is 6.7 times more bought than made.<\/p>\n USGS counted six primary smelters across five states last year, of which only four were producing. The Aluminum Association<\/a> puts the count at 24 operating smelters in 2000 and four now, and blames electricity deregulation that began in 1977, calling it the single most important factor behind the industry’s collapse.<\/p>\n Set against that, Mt. Holly’s extra 50,000 tonnes is a real number and a modest one. It also explains the percentage: when the national total is this small, one potline moves it by a tenth.<\/p>\n Recycling is the other half of the picture and it is not close. Running the DOE’s own figures across the full chain, primary aluminum takes about 33,295 Btu per pound from alumina refining through casting, while secondary aluminum from scrap takes about 2,796.<\/p>\n That is 8.4 percent of the energy. The Aluminum Association’s headline number for the same comparison is a 95 percent saving.<\/p>\n What recycling cannot do is make the metal in the first place, and it inherits whatever alloy mix the scrap arrived with. Aerospace, defense and a good chunk of automotive sheet still want primary metal, and transportation alone accounted for 36 percent of U.S. aluminum consumption last year.<\/p>\n Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone hoping this restart is the start of a trend. The Aluminum Association’s own analysis says a smelter needs roughly $40 per megawatt-hour on a 10 to 20 year contract to compete globally, while technology companies are signing data center power deals north of $115.<\/p>\n Century has already been on both sides of that trade. Its Hawesville smelter in Kentucky went dark in 2022 on power costs, and in February 2026 the company sold the site to an affiliate of TeraWulf for $200 million plus a 6.8 percent stake in the high-performance computing and AI data center going up there.<\/p>\n Century’s annual report is blunt about where that money went: a large portion was earmarked for restarting the last potline at Mt. Holly and for its next smelter project. A dead smelter sold to a data center paid to wake up a live one.<\/p>\n That pattern is turning up all over the old industrial map, including the West Virginia steel town now making iron-air batteries to keep a Google data center running<\/a>. The land and the transmission lines were already there. The industry using them changed.<\/p>\n The tariff argument runs alongside all of it. Century credits the Section 232 duties, raised to 50 percent on most aluminum imports in June 2025, for making the restart worth doing.<\/p>\n The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has argued the same duties push input prices to levels American manufacturers cannot absorb. Both of those things are being said about the same policy.<\/p>\n Century’s much larger bet is a joint venture with Emirates Global Aluminium, announced January 26, 2026, for a 750,000-tonne smelter at Inola, Oklahoma. EGA takes 60 percent, Century 40. It would be the first new primary aluminum smelter built in the country since Mt. Holly in 1980.<\/p>\n Century’s annual report says construction is expected to start by the end of 2026, subject to detailed engineering and to finishing negotiations with Public Service Company of Oklahoma on a long-term power supply agreement. That agreement does not exist yet.<\/p>\n Which puts the whole thing back where this story started. The metal is not the hard part, the alumina is not the hard part, and the site is not the hard part.<\/p>\n Somebody has to promise 11 terawatt-hours a year, at a price a smelter can live with, for a decade or two. And they have to do it in a market where the buyers with the deepest pockets want the same electricity for servers.<\/p>\n Century reports second-quarter results on August 6, the first look at what the completed Mt. Holly ramp actually cost and produced. That number will say more about whether American smelting is coming back than the ribbon-cutting did.<\/p>\n South Carolina, meanwhile, keeps stacking up strategic-materials projects, including the $1.2 billion rare earth magnet plant going up in Blacksburg<\/a>. Every one of them will be arguing over the same grid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Aluminum is the metal you throw out without thinking about it. Cans, foil, the tray the takeout came in, all … <\/p>\nThe pots never switch off, and that is the whole problem<\/h2>\n
Century’s own SEC filings back into the same number<\/h2>\n
Ten years at three-quarter power over a fight about rates<\/h2>\n
Four smelters left, and recycling does the same job on a sliver of the power<\/h2>\n
A data center will outbid a smelter for the same electrons, every time<\/h2>\n
The next one is 750,000 tonnes and still has no power contract<\/h2>\n