£38m in funding for the UK Battery Industrial Centre

The funding is being provided by UK Research and Innovation as part of the government’s £610m Faraday Battery Challenge, a national investment programme delivered by Innovate UK. The Challenge supports scientific technology development and manufacturing scale-up capability for batteries in the UK.

Announced as part of the Autumn statement, this funding builds on the £36m committed by Faraday Battery Challenge in May. UKBIC said that preparatory work on construction of the facility is already underway.

According to UKBIC, the further funding for the national battery manufacturing scale-up facility will enhance its offering to customers and enable new developments:

A secondary electrode line said to offer new modular equipment capacity for coating, drying and calendering of electrodes, allowing more innovative processing methods to be developed and trialled alongside existing customer scale-up activities.

The creation of a specialist 800m² flexible industrialisation space to provide a dedicated clean and dry room environment, which can be subdivided for different use cases, for customers to develop their own individual processes or machinery under carefully controlled environmental conditions.