Powering up a British battery boom

In the desert just outside of Reno, Nevada, stands a building that, seen from above, dominates the otherwise featureless landscape and – in terms of its footprint – dwarfs pretty much any other building on the planet.

This is Tesla’s Gigafactory 1, a vast lithium ion battery factory set up to satisfy the firm’s sky-rocketing domestic demand for electric vehicle (EV) batteries and, through economies of scale, fulfil its vision to bring affordable electric motoring to the masses.

When complete the facility is expected to have an annual battery production capacity of 150GWh per year, enough for 1.5 million cars. Add this impressive boast to the Tesla CEO’s famed knack for generating publicity, and it’s no surprise that the plant has attracted a fair amount of international attention. But Gigafactory1 is by no means the only show in town.

Indeed, around the world, in a bid to drive down costs and simplify supply chains, battery manufacturers and car makers are in a fevered race to establish similarly vast facilities to produce the cells, modules and packs that will power the EV revolution.