New £108m facility will provide world-leading testing facilities for new battery technology and train engineers in battery manufacturing
A new national centre of excellence in battery technologies, aimed specifically at electric car energy storage, is envisaged as a stepping stone to a large-scale battery factory for electric vehicles – “a Gigafactory in the UK,” according to minister for business and industry Andrew Stephenson, announcing an additional £28m funding for the centre. The total cost of the facility will be £108m, said mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street.
Coventry won a national competition to choose where the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC) would be cited, and the centre is part of the West Midlands Local Industrial Strategy, which was developed with many local businesses and is the first of its type in the country. The funding Stephenson announced is in addition to an £80m previously-announced investment from the government’s Faraday Battery Challenge – a £246m commitment over the next four years on developing automotive batteries.
The Local Industrial Strategy (LIS) sets out a long-term vision to increase productivity across the region, and aims to put the West Midlands, and Coventry in particular, back at the centre for technology development in the UK’s automotive sector. Electric vehicles and driverless cars are central to these plans.
“Putting the UK at the forefront of the design and manufacturing of zero emission vehicles is at the heart of our plans – creating jobs, growth and opportunity across the country,” Stephenson said. “Driven by the potential of fast-paced development of battery technology, this investment puts the UK – amongst a handful of countries around the world – on the next step to meet the challenge by the future of mobility. Our investment of £28m in this new facility will support the UK’s world-leading automotive industry to compete internationally, attract further investment and establish supply chains for new electric vehicle battery design and development.”
Although the automotive sector is central to the LIS, it is not the sole focus, Andy Street stressed. “The Local Industrial Strategy being launched today also highlights advanced manufacturing, medical research and the creative and digital industries as distinct strengths of the West Midlands. The Strategy will build on these strengths and other opportunities so we have a strong and resilient economic future that can benefit all communities across the whole region.”
Among other goals of the strategy is to deliver UK’s the first large-scale 5G testbed, and to develop a translational medicine and med-tech commission to accelerate the transfer of technologies and pharmaceuticals from lab to patient.
UKBIC will develop battery chemistry, electrodes, cell design, modules and battery packs, and is aimed to open in 2020. It will be managed by Jeff Pratt, who was previously general manager at Nissan’s lithium ion battery plant in Sunderland. It will create around 100 permanent jobs, but it hopes to be the springboard for 10,000 new jobs in the supply chain and related technologies once it is running at full capacity.
Tony Harper, Faraday Battery Challenge director at UK Research and Innovation, said: “This new world-class facility will allow the UK to rigorously prepare our home-grown battery technologies for global competitiveness. This additional investment will mean its ambitious facilities will be expanded and improved to meet the soaring demand of the electric vehicle global market.”
Coventry has suffered from a generation of engineering closures that have all but killed-off its long industrial heritage: textiles have gone, Alvis has gone, Peugeot has gone etc., all without replacement.
Thus, this development coupled with the resurgence of taxi building may be the signs of re-investment. I hope so. Sadly, many other areas of the UK have similar or greater needs that are not being met.
Well said James. This just goes to once again illustrate the incompetence of the our political establishment, be they Conservative, Labour or LibDem neither really cares about the working class man or women. This project will only be a real success if it generates jobs that pay the necessary salaries for people to have a respectable standard of living rather then the minimum wage / zero hour contract jobs that big business likes to create.
Great news – but why do we not hear about it being heralded from the rooftops as such by all National Media generators!?
Please make sure these programmes are joined up by teaming with others who have been working on this for at least 10 years and are nearing commercialisation, companies such as Ilika in Southampton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nonav1RtkZU
The basic problem with politicians is they have in most cases a very limited knowledge of technology in any form. It is generally that picked up from “experts” or hands on DIY. Its no accident that the general political qualification PPE which in my profession has has become an
abbreviation for “P— Poor Engineers”. Born out by the total lack of understanding the the basics of manufacturing and product development. Other successful countries Germany, USA, China, all have graduate engineers and technologists at the top level in government making logical decisions that make our lot, look a bunch of rudderless idiots, similar to the mess Brexit is in, but on the tech front. If we don’t get the tech right how long before we join the third world, very soon I think.
Batteries are not the only game in town. The so called Hydrogen economy could potential take over the whole field as developments take place.
Where is all the power coming from to charge the batteries. The required increase in power stations to meet the central heating and transport load has been kicked into the long grass as too hard to solve and it won’t get any votes. We have a serious problem right at the top of our political system that is not being addressed. Where are the technologists in Government, kept in a dark cupboard and fed occasionally when required to confirm views held by PPE graduates.
I would have been happier if the press-release said something about the technologies – and evinced some understanding of the issues of battery design and scale up (to workable sizes) and manufacture.
Industrialisation implies just the production of large numbers and that the technology and design is all fine and dandy and just waiting for someone to put the factory together – but gives no indication of how manufacturable and scalable the (unknown) cells are – nor indication of the importance of these issues.
Pouring money at problems is a very poor way of solving them – and most likely will use “best practice” machines