Britain’s future arrangement with the EU will have an enormous impact on how it can back private entities to increase its battery production.
But Nadjari fears that without urgent changes to the status quo on state aid rules, the Britishvolt gigafactory project and others like it could unravel, potentially dealing a bitter blow to the UK car industry’s future.
Germany, Sweden, Poland, and Hungary, meanwhile have all emerged as key leaders in the next generation of car manufacturing with various commitments to building gigafactories. The European Commission has also approved €3.2bn of public funding for research on the supply chain.
Sweden’s Northvolt, which counts both VW and BMW as investors, wants to take a quarter of the market by 2030. “But the other 75pc needs to come from someone,” says Northvolt’s Wigardt.
Only 3pc of the world’s battery manufacturing capacity is currently based in Europe – a figure that is about to rise sharply. By 2030, the EU hopes there will be 16 gigafactories operating across the bloc with a total output of 446 gigawatt hours (GWh) – enough to power around nine million electric vehicles a year, or about half of the 18.5m cars produced on the continent.