On the charge: How UKBIC is helping to accelerate the UK's battery manufacturing ambitions

There’s little doubt that the UK stands on the verge of a battery manufacturing revolution.

It’s estimated that by the end of the next decade Britain could be home to as many as seven giant battery gigafactories: huge facilities capable of producing the high volumes of batteries required to satisfy the automotive industry’s inexorable and rapid shift to electrification. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly clear that without these factories - given the high cost of batteries - the commercial case for making cars in the UK will disappear.

As things currently stand, the UK’s largest battery factory (and at one time the largest facility of its kind in Europe) is the former Nissan plant in Sunderland (now operated by Chinese firm Envision AESC). With an annual capacity of 2GWh per annum, this plant is dwarfed by many of the sites springing up around continental Europe: where 450GWh of battery production is expected to be in place by the end of the decade.