Image: SUNLIGHT. A €105 million (US$127.6 million) push to develop low-cost, environmentally-friendly lithium-ion battery technology by Sunlight, a designer and manufacturer of batteries headquartered in Greece, will receive €49.9 million in grant funding.
Specialist battery company Sunlight, a member of Olympia Group, will significantly increase manufacturing capacity and create new jobs at its state-of-the-art plant in Xanthi, northern Greece, following a €25 million, 10-year loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) which was confirmed earlier in Athens today.
A company spokesperson told Energy-Storage.news today that Sunlight wants the lithium battery technologies it develops to play a key role in areas including automated guided vehicles, electric buses and shipping, as well as in “smart storage systems for renewable energy sources”.
Of its EUR-560-million business plan, the company will invest EUR 450 million to boost its sales network and production capacity up to 6.3 million battery cells by the end of 2023. This effort includes investment in equipment and mergers and acquisitions.
Sunlight is currently the third largest manufacturer of batteries in the global motive power battery industry, with about €1 billion of consolidated annual sales and a workforce of approximately 3,100 people.
ReLiFe (Recycling Lithium Ferrophosphate) is a project developed in collaboration with a consortium of partners, aiming to demonstrate, initially at pilot scale, an environment-friendly and cost-effective technology for recycling lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) scrap and end of life (EoL) batteries.