Battery manufacturing start-up Britishvolt has secured funding of £1.7 billion in a huge boost to its plans to manufacture automotive battery cells in North East England, starting in 2024.
The decision from property investor Trixtax and investment company Abrdn to put up the money came after the UK Government gave Britishvolt a smaller sum via its Automotive Transformation Fund, Britishvolt said. The company declined to say how big the government tranche was but Autocar understands it was £100 million.
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Why folk bother to comment I don't know. If this proposal was on mainland Europe the remoaners would be up in arms but the fact it's going to be built here - well they have to find some other theory to vent their disapproval.
If this isn't a good news story then what is? Would you have preferred manufacturers buy their batteries from abroad? Perhaps you'd be happy if vehicle manufacturers shut up shop in the UK and moved abroad too, just so you're able to say Brexit? Told you so.
Whether you like it or not, EV's are here to stay for the foreseeable future. If we don't embrace projects like this then we'll be left on the scrap heap, which is the very reason a once powerful British car industry is no longer. We shouldn't be making the same mistakes time and time again.
Here here. Most of the folk below clearly are doom merchants who would not be creative or skilled enough to put together this massive investment. Nothing would ever get done with that attitude. I worked with a 3rd party on a biomass project - deeply skilled people who were able to pull together a complex engineering project, a supply chain in the UK, supply contracts for energy and heat to 3rd parties, then to get the investors on board. Small beer compared to this project, but people with a real can do attitude. To attract that level of both government and private investment takes some serious groundwork to justify. There's clearly more to the work in the background than they can publish, and customers for these batteries will have been agreed on heads of terms I'd think.
Biomass. Isn't that when you chop down trees, burn them and then say its good for the environment?
While not ideal at least the trees are replaced, and do provide partial compensation for the emmisions vs other fossil fuels. The project I was involved in had only domestic tree residue from cuttings, thinnings, and a waste stream that was normally thrown onto the forest floor to decay and produce CO2 - these things are not uncomplicated in terms of their carbon cycle. An element was also the EU Emmissions scheme pushing energy intensive industries down routes like this as the paper industry needed heat and power, and other higher level renewablesare intermittent by nature and don't provide heat. So case of a business trying to do the right things (there was a small scale hydro scheme involved too), but being forced by both technology and cost in certain directions from legisialtion. Beleive it or not some businesses are run by forward thinking clever people...
WOW, what a load of negative comments here regarding positive news for uk jobs. If it was to be built in germany or France everyone would be slating the UK for not investing, you just can't win with some people.
Great for the North I say
As usual the UK is about 10 years behind the curve. This investment does not fill me with confidence. New company. unknown (and presumably unproven) technology, sited far from vehicle manufacturing and no major customers. Strikes me as another unthought idea promoted by Boris. Only scope for batteries in the UK might be to supplement renewable power generation.