{"id":9721,"date":"2021-02-26T12:42:47","date_gmt":"2021-02-26T12:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/?p=9721"},"modified":"2021-07-26T15:29:15","modified_gmt":"2021-07-26T14:29:15","slug":"revolutionising-the-battery-sector-in-the-uk-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/revolutionising-the-battery-sector-in-the-uk-and-beyond\/9721\/","title":{"rendered":"Revolutionising the battery sector in the UK and beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"
Britishvolt is looking to lead the lithium-ion, and beyond lithium-ion, battery sector by implementing a sustainable, highly advanced manufacturing and business strategy to deliver on the exacting needs of its customers and assist in the acceleration of sustainable transport and the renewable energy sector.<\/p>\n
The site for its gigaplant has now been chosen, and with post-Brexit rules on the sourcing of batteries and related materials coming into force, the timing appears right for this ambitious new endeavour.<\/p>\n
The Innovation Network’s International Editor, Clifford Holt, spoke to the company\u2019s Chief Strategy Officer, Isobel Sheldon OBE, about how it will benefit the UK and European economies and how Britishvolt will stand apart from its competitors.<\/p>\n
The founding ethos behind Britishvolt<\/a> was set well before the coronavirus pandemic; even before the improved environmental view of the car buying public was formed. We saw a significant opportunity to enter into the battery business because of the increasing demand resulting from the automotive industry moving towards electric vehicles. Indeed, every public electric vehicle that was released in 2020 sold out some 18 months of production capacity within just a couple of days; the public is now ready for a wider roll-out.<\/p>\n The automotive industry has been lagging behind in some ways, however, and was perhaps caught a little off guard by the internal combustion engine ban that is being brought into the UK and some of other European nations. Nevertheless, this ban has meant that some of the plans have been accelerated, and we are starting to see those changes now occurring, filtering through from the OEMs.<\/p>\n BMW has gone on public record saying that it wants to supply the market with 250,000 EVs by 2023 and that 20% of its product mix will be EV by 2025. Ford has announced that by 2030, all of the cars that it sells within the UK and Europe will be electric, and Jaguar has outlined a 15-year strategy which will see it phase out diesel vehicles. This huge demand is creating a supply gap in the battery market in Europe, as the rules are changing \u2013 the UK and Europe will be unable to import from the Far East from 2024-2027, and so domestic manufacturing is an imperative to support the UK and European automotive industry.<\/p>\n We also want to ensure that we are outperforming our competitors. There is a lot of battery capacity being put into Europe at the moment, but much of it is on legacy technology and legacy manufacturing assets. Britishvolt, however, is starting with a reimagining of the battery manufacturing process, meaning that we can bring the latest and greatest technology and processing capability to the battery sector, providing elevated performance while staying cost competitive.<\/p>\n In addition, the lithium-ion battery was invented here in the UK, and our activities present an opportunity to bring it home, ensuring that for the first time in decades we actually capitalise on the inventiveness of the UK academic and research space. We have some of the best minds in the world working in battery technology here in Britain, and it is also receiving an enhanced level of support \u2013 for instance, via the UK Government\u2019s Faraday Battery Challenge. We need to capitalise on that.<\/p>\n Thus, when we look at the landscape for batteries in Britain today, including the government\u2019s support, the industrial strategy, the internal combustion engine ban in 2030, the full internal combustion engine ban in 2035, and the road to net zero in 2050, plus the government\u2019s stated ambition that batteries are going to be an important strategic lever for the country to pull moving forward, it is clear that we are in the middle of government strategy, and have also developed a great business proposition.<\/p>\n We are certainly on track to achieve our ambitions, too. Construction of the factory is scheduled for the third quarter of this year, with production expected to start at the end of 2023. The first phase, going into 2024, will see the first 10 gigawatt hours, with the second 10 gigawatt hours being achieved by 2025, and the third 10 gigawatt hours in 2027.<\/p>\n We began not so long ago as a start-up and have quickly grown into an established player in the business. We have a robust plan, and we are now executing on that plan.<\/p>\n The free trade agreement has opened up market opportunities right across Europe, and we are in conversations with all of the automotive industry here because the way we intend to approach the market is very different to the incumbent suppliers. Poor sales were seen for compliance vehicles, and the battery industry had to concentrate on creating a small range of products and selling them to as many OEMs as possible. Now that each individual brand\u2019s volumes are starting to build into a sizeable requirement in their own right, this allows us to tailor per brand.<\/p>\n Over the last 70 years, the automotive industry has differentiated in terms of powertrain, but in the future that will change to the need to differentiate on battery performance. That is, an electric BMW will need to drive like a \u2018traditional\u2019 BMW, and the same is true for the other brands. This means that taking the battery from one brand and putting it into another is simply not going to work. That customisation at the brand level, the appreciation of the brand value, and tailoring the cells to meet the performance requirements expected from those OEMs is incredibly important.<\/p>\n This is relevant to the UK because the materials science and the technology development that has been taking place here is years ahead of most of the rest of the world. There are thus developments that we can utilise and can implement in manufacturing that are simply not available in the wider cell market at the moment. That will help us to create that brand positioning, which will be crucial to taking on the likes of Tesla, which may have market dominance at the moment, but which does not have the level of quality that we would like to achieve.<\/p>\n Alongside this, contributing to UK PLC GDP is an important part of our vision for the future; we will be involved in the levelling up agenda in the northeast of England, for instance, meaning that we are able to spread that economic benefit; upscaling and hiring local people to work in our facility with well paid jobs is a really important part of the Britishvolt ethos.<\/p>\n From the beginning of last year, our strategy has been to ensure that we disconnect our supply chains from countries which take an unsustainable view of the environment. A perfect example of that is China, which has a very coal-dominated electricity generation system and which uses non-Western business practices which are resulting in some quite substantial environmental- (and health-) related concerns, not least with regards to air quality.<\/p>\n This is a massive problem for the battery sector because, in the past, materials were sourced from such places because they were cheap, but the negative impact on both the environment and people\u2019s lives needs to now be considered.<\/p>\n The relocation of the battery sector to Europe for European demand is thus a very welcome development, and the increase in regulation and restrictions for importing those high-carbon intensity materials fits very well with the strategy we set last year. We are therefore looking at concertinaing the supply chain, bringing it as close together as possible, whilst also using a very high renewables content on the front end, meaning that even the necessary energy intensive processes can be run at very low-carbon intensity levels. Then, because we are co-locating as much as possible, we can look at site-wide energy efficiencies and energy recovery and reuse, which offsets some of the high cost of renewables in the UK as compared with China.<\/p>\nThe UK Government has identified the development of current and future generations of battery technology of strategic importance to the UK\u2019s manufacturing sector and key to sustaining our valuable domestic automotive industry. What role will Britishvolt play in this?<\/h3>\n
Given that, post-Brexit, battery packs must have 30% of their content sourced from the UK or EU at first in order to trade tariff free as part of the agreement, with those requirements getting stricter starting in 2024, how crucial is your enterprise to both the UK\u2019s and Europe\u2019s electric mobility future? And how will you ensure that Britishvolt\u2019s batteries will be tailored to customer needs?<\/h3>\n