BLYTH, Northumberland (CU)_In September last year, UK battery startup Britishvolt began preliminary work at Britain’s first ‘gigafactory’ manufacturing batteries for electric cars, that is currently being set up Northumberland. In January this year, the company secured £100 million in government funding, alongside backing from fund manager Tritax and investment firm Abrdn, whose collective investment is expected to reach £1.7 billion. This week, the company revealed that it will invest more than £200 million in another new facility, which will be set up in the West Midlands.
Britishvolt will lease a site at Hams Hall in Warwickshire for a facility to test manufacturing methods that can be used at the factory that is being set up in Northumberland. The move is expected to give the battery startup access to the significant number of engineers working in the West Midlands, the centre of the British automotive industry, where BMW produces petrol engines and Jaguar Land Rover is planning a battery assembly centre.
According to Britishvolt’s property director Paul Franklin, the Hams Hall facility would enable the UK to “build on its home-grown battery intellectual property and level up the country ready for the energy transition”, as the company looks to lead “the UK’s journey into re-industrialisation” with the first full-scale battery gigafactory.
A gigafactory is generally used to describe battery plants with annual capacity of more than 10 gigawatt hours. The only other planned battery plant of a similar scale in the UK is an investment made in Sunderland by Shanghai-based greentech company Envision. Efforts are also being made to build a gigafactory at Coventry airport, although the project is yet to attract a major investor. It hopes to secure investment from a major automotive company, with British multinational automobile manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover seen as a best fit for the project.
