Britishvolt secures £40m investment for electric vehicle battery factory
The UK startup Britishvolt has gained new investment worth £40m from Glencore in the latest stage in its ambitious plan to build one of the UK’s only large-scale battery factories.
It is aiming to treble its funding with £200m in a third funding round with Glencore serving as the anchor investor. The FTSE 100 miner has already invested millions of pounds in Britishvolt in earlier funding rounds that valued the battery company at more than $1bn (£740m).
The battery factory project is seen as key to the prospects for the UK automotive industry as it moves away from internal combustion engines and embraces battery electric vehicles with zero carbon emissions from the exhaust.
Global battery supply is dominated by manufacturers in China, Japan and South Korea, but Europe and the US are racing to catch up.
The UK government has already backed the Britishvolt project with £100m from its automotive transformation fund, which aims to prevent the car industry and thousands of jobs moving elsewhere. Britishvolt is developing the battery technology before a factory being built at the government-funded UK Battery Industrialisation Centre in Coventry.
It has already carried out preparatory work on its site near Blyth in Northumberland, with construction due to start in April. The construction of the site has been backed by Abrdn, an institutional investor formerly known as Standard Life Aberdeen, and Tritax, a property investor part-owned by Abrdn, in a sale-and-leaseback agreement.
That deal will eventually be worth £1.7bn to fund the factory, the required infrastructure such as delivering the large amounts of energy needed to make car batteries, plus a supplier park and rail connection alongside the main site. The money will be delivered
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