ACC officially opened its battery gigafactory in France in June last year. With the capacity to produce 56,000 battery cells per day, or more than 2.4m modules per year, the company says this is the equivalent of 200,000 to 300,000 cars per year, depending on the type of vehicle and the battery capacity.
With the capacity to produce 56,000 battery cells per day, or more than 2.4m modules per year, the company says this is the equivalent of 200,000 to 300,000 cars per year, depending on the type of vehicle and the battery capacity. The site was built in 17 months at a cost of €800m.
This includes logistics to get material to the factory and to get the cells out. This is using all renewable electricity; simplify and delete anything you can. I think the battery pack or the battery itself should be simpler. I think the factory should be simpler; you should fight to use less pipe, use less electricity.
The factory will produce lithium-ion batteries designed to be directly used by UK carmakers in next-generation EVs. Domestic battery manufacture is seen as crucial to the success of future UK car production and key for the transition to net zero, with around 200GWh needed by 2040 to meet demand from car manufacturers.
And despite cell pushes and subsidies that drive the sector, for the full transformation what we really need is to ensure that batteries are also competitive on the market and building at scale fast, and to continuously reduce capex [capital expenditures] to actually allow us to get there. Daphne Luchtenberg: Fantastic.
Battery experts say it costs about $80-100 per kWh to produce an average cell, revealing the scale of the US support. The European Battery Alliance, an umbrella group of policymakers and companies, has suggested support of $14/kWh for production only of the greenest batteries, executives say.