Britishvolt’s blueprint involves a 30-gigawatt-hour plant, to be built on a 93-hectare site in the English county of Northumberland. The factory as currently envisaged would be Britain’s fourth-largest building.
Recharge’s plant in Geelong would also ultimately be 30 GW/h, and both facilities would use tech supplied by US firm C4V, which involves no cobalt or nickel.
Major supplier
Mr Collard said buying Britishvolt would not distract Recharge from its Geelong plans. On the contrary, he said, it would help him get the Australian project up and running more quickly.
“This is the definition of synergy. We now have so many economies of scale, and we have a global manufacturing footprint that aligns,” he told The Australian Financial Review.
The Britishvolt project will initially target energy companies requiring battery storage, but it is expected to be a major supplier to the British automotive industry, which is only just gearing up to produce electric vehicles at scale.
Recharge lobbed its bid for Britishvolt, which collapsed in the middle of last month, on January 25. By February 5 the administrators had picked the Australian company as their preferred bidder from a field of four contenders.
The price has not been disclosed, but had been expected to land in the low tens of millions of pounds.
Recharge will now push ahead with both projects at the same time. It plans to begin construction of the Geelong factory next year, for an initial 2GW/h, with input from US engineering giant Jacobs. Construction in the UK is also up to 12 months away.
A computer-generated image of Britishvolt’s proposed battery gigafactory in the north of England.
Mr Collard said he had already visited the Northumberland site, and was “struck by the similarities to our Recharge Industries site in Geelong”.
Noting the EV industry’s dependence on China, he described Recharge’s pair of projects as “a flagship for friendshoring”.
“Backed by our global supply chain, strategic delivery partners and a number of significant customer agreements in place, we’re confident of making the Cambois gigafactory a success and growing it into an advanced green energy project,” he said.
“We can’t wait to get started, and want to start as soon as possible.”
