UK funds battery & e-mobility projects with £25 million
A series of battery, electronics, mining, and recycling projects have scooped up a share of £25 million in government funding this week designed to help scale up the supply chain for electric vehicle manufacturing and recycling in the UK.
The aim of the funding pot is to develop “high-value, end-to-end electrified automotive supply chain” in the UK, with a particular focus on critical battery-production materials such as lithium. The grants were awarded as part of the Automotive Transformation Fund (ATF), which will eventually invest up to £1 billion in various e-mobility projects. For this round, a total of twenty-two projects, which comprise 35 UK-based companies and research organizations, have each secured grants worth up to £2m each through a programme aimed at supporting large-scale industrialisation led by the Advanced Propulsion Centre.
The focus for the projects was laid out across the following areas: Batteries, Battery Critical Materials, Recycling, Fuel Cells, Motors and Drives, Motor Critical Materials, and Power Electronics. Some areas received more attention, with six projects focusing on batteries, two on battery critical materials and one on recycling, while fuel cells and drives also were represented by five and four funding recipients, respectively.
“I am pleased the APC has announced £25 million of funding to 22 projects from our Scale-up Readiness Validation competition. These successful projects will support the UK automotive industry, by increasing confidence in large-scale manufacturing investments and building electrified supply chains,” said Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) chief executive, Ian Constance, adding: “It is vital in the transition to net zero that the automotive sector seizes the opportunity to grow the industry, create or safeguard jobs and build on the expertise anchored here in the UK.”
“This announcement underlines the commitment to support the automotive sector, one of the UK’s strategically important industries, as it makes an unprecedented transition towards net zero,” added APC Automotive Transformation Director Julian Hetherington. These are not the only projects the Automotive Transformation Fund have been involved with lately, however. In July, an undisclosed amount of funding was confirmed for Britishvolts new battery cell factory, for example.
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