UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC)

Insider Media

The UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC), on the outskirts of Coventry, is key to the future of a British automotive sector lagging behind when it comes to battery technology. In fact the centre is so important that senior executives from two of the UK’s biggest automotive rivals, the US and Germany, are building their own versions. The £130m site is turning world-class battery knowhow into commercially viable energy packs. This is critical if the UK is to be a part of the brave new world of decarbonised transport. Insider deputy editor Ian Griffin paid a visit, interviewing managing director Sean Gilgunn and getting a tour of the facility from Nick Sheppard, the production lead for cell assembly.

Transcript

00:00Hello, I'm Ian Griffin, Deputy Editor of Midlands Business Insider, and I'm here at the UK Battery

00:23Industrialization Centre, which as it indicates, is looking at ways of making batteries for the

00:32electric vehicle market, from small cars to heavy vehicles, and also other applications.

00:41I've been given an hour-long tour of the whole factory, the whole production process,

00:47absolutely fascinating the detail, the kind of intellectual capacity that goes into

00:55the production of these batteries. They're obviously looking at this centre of ways of

01:02lengthening a battery's life, making them more powerful, obviously getting away from that range

01:07anxiety in electric vehicles, and also looking at the weight of them, looking at

01:14obviously reducing the cost, and that obviously comes in not only what's contained within those

01:20batteries, but also the ways of producing those batteries, which this centre obviously helps

01:27and advises businesses on. They're working with OEMs, they're working with small

01:36startup businesses, but obviously creating the batteries of the future, the batteries which will

01:42power the cars we're probably all going to be driving in 20-30 years' time. So absolutely

01:48fascinating insight into the production of batteries, basically, and here is one that

01:58I've been, this is a dummy one by the way, there's basically 4,000 of these go into a Tesla. I've

02:06just been shown the whole kind of process from start to finish, how one of these or a live one

02:12of these is made, and again it was really mind-boggling, and the know-how and skill

02:17that goes into it at this centre is absolutely world-class. I'm Sean Gilgun, I'm the Managing

02:23Director of UKBIC. UKBIC is UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. We're a centre that was

02:29set up with government funding to help the industry scale from battery development to

02:34battery industrialisation. Okay, so this pack is a series of modules which are obviously made up

02:40of a series of cells, so each individual module has a number of cells in, normally six to eight

02:46cells, pouch cells. Those cells make up a small module, those modules are then created into three

02:52sub-modules which you then put all together in a series of series and parallel arrangements

03:00to form the final pack, which obviously goes on a Nissan Leaf vehicle. What we're here to do is help

03:07companies on their development journey as they bring new technology at various stages of that

03:12technology development from early prototype scale through to scale up and industrialisation and

03:18ultimately hopefully to commercialisation. And so that's what we do, we help with that piece in the

03:22middle where we help companies scale and industrialise, and that could be from a cell

03:26technology point of view, so helping companies with components, electrodes etc, or building cells

03:31for core battery cell technology, or it could be for developing their module and pack technology

03:38for their end applications, or it could be training and development. So we help companies

03:44by bringing them in to work on the line with us to help their teams upskill and train, and it's

03:50vital that this facility is here to help the industry in this country, because what we're

03:56doing is we're protecting the jobs and prosperity within automotive markets and adjoining markets

04:01in these applications that are vital for economic growth of the UK. We have to protect and support

04:08the automotive industry and batteries are a key part of that for the future, and so what we do,

04:13what we're very proud of, is helping companies along that development journey to be able to scale

04:18and industrialise their battery technology, so that we can help these companies become

04:22the battery powerhouses of the future, to support our local automotive market,

04:27but also to help some niche battery applications that are coming along that are just so exciting.

Category

Transcript

Recommended