Batteries, not Brexit
Nicht der Brexit, sondern Batterien werden darüber entscheiden, ob Autohersteller wie Jaguar Land Rover und BMW in Zukunft auch Elektroautos in Großbritannien produzieren.
The feeling of relief in the British car industry was almost palpable when Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) said in July that it would invest billions in producing new electric vehicles in the UK. After the closure of two other UK automotive factories in five months — Honda in Swindon and Ford in Bridgend — JLR boss Ralf Speth was clearly pleased to have good news for the 2,500 workers at the Castle Bromwich plant. Yet Speth also struck a note of warning. Not on Brexit this time but on the future of the car sector in the absence of a British battery industry. “One thing is clear: if batteries go out of the UK, then also the automotive production will go out of the UK,” he said. The combination of the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, the entry of Tesla and
planned decarbonization targets has set carmakers struggling to make vehicles powered by lithium ion batteries. BMW’S new electric Mini will be manufactured in Oxford, and the PSA Group said that if a no-deal Brexit was avoided, it would build its new Vauxhall Astra cars in Ellesmere Port, with electric versions expected to follow.
Where the batteries will be sourced remains to be seen. A new JLR facility in Hams Hall, between Coventry and Birmingham, will import battery cells from Asia to be assembled into packs, while BMW will import packs from Germany.
The opportunity for a global car industry to enjoy explosive growth is enormous — and without a battery industry, the jobs of 114,000 workers making the UK’S combustion engines could disappear by 2040, the government-backed Faraday Institution warns.
By then, the UK will need annual battery capacity of as much as 200 gigawatt hours (GWH) — 100 times more than current production — to make batteries for the UK’S 1.8 million vehicles, the Faraday Institution forecasts. That alone would be equivalent to 13 of what Tesla founder Elon Musk calls “gigafactories” — those capable of producing 15 GWH a year or more.
The Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC), a Coventry-based programme to direct £1 billion (€1.11 billion) in public and private investment into clean car tech, estimates it will cost about the same to build a single gigafactory. Ian Constance, the former senior manufacturing executive for Ford who heads the programme, says he wants to “concertina the process” of creating a proper supply chain, allowing the UK to steal a march on rivals.
He has a mandate to see to it that, by 2023, 30,000 British jobs are preserved for the future (as well as preventing 50 million tonnes of CO2 emissions), so he wants to pull as much of the battery value chain into the UK as he can. It also makes sense for a future British electric vehicle (EV) industry to source its batteries from the UK, he says.
“If you are going to make EVS in volume, shipping lots and lots of batteries from Asia is going to give you a very long, high-cost supply chain, which is going to have millions of pounds’ worth of stock on the water,” he says.
Missed opportunity
The UK has already missed one shot at a world-leading battery industry. The lithium ion battery was invented at Oxford University in the late 1970s, but Japan’s Sony commercialized the technology.
That was a “disaster” for the UK, which must not be repeated, according to Mark Amor-segan, chief engineer at the University of Warwick’s Energy Innovation Centre, one of the key sites working with battery chemical mixes and welding methods to try to pack in the power.
Some battery factories already exist in the UK, but on a smaller scale. Packs for the Nissan Leaf are produced by AESC, in Sunderland. Hyperbat, a joint venture between the Williams group (Formula One) and component maker Unipart, has retooled an old car exhaust factory to produce low volumes of batteries for sports cars such as the Aston Martin Rapide E or the Lotus Evija.
Paul Mcnamara, technical director at Williams Advanced Engineering, says gigafactories in the UK would only really make sense to supply UK production, meaning one of the big manufacturers would need to make a commitment to buy British. “The danger we face in the UK is: even if a champion like JLR says we’re going to have electric, it’s not that difficult to import from other countries,” Mcnamara explains.
The threat to British jobs has already been underlined, after Ford said it would close its combustion engine plant in Bridgend. Union representatives pushed for investment to upgrade the factory for new electric technologies, but Ford said it would locate battery production only near car plants.
“If we’re going to keep assembly operations here, then we need battery facilities,” says Steve Turner, assistant general secretary for manufacturing at Unite the Union. “We’ve got to fight for future investment to make sure it stays in the UK.”
Enormous challenge
The scale of the challenge is huge — China has already spent billions subsidizing its electric vehicle industry and the German government has reportedly earmarked €1 billion to support a consortium producing electric car battery cells.
Some in the industry are sceptical that investments in smaller projects in Britain will be enough, particularly with Brexit uncertainty. Yet the APC’S Constance is confident that a British battery industry will bloom — although talks with potential gigafactory investors are still months from a conclusion.
“We need to have something here by the middle of next decade,” he says. “There’s so much potential demand in the market, but these things cost a lot of money.”
“If battery production goes out of the UK, then automotive production will go out of the UK”