"Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby rebbonk » Mon Jan 10, 2022 1:39 am

Of course there are far better sites. However, nobody with any sense wants a battery factory on their doorstep. As always with these things, if you want to know what's really happening, follow the money! Who stands to gain most from this development? Who stands to lose most from other possible sites?
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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby dutchman » Wed Apr 13, 2022 1:17 am

Report casts doubt on Coventry gigafactory plan

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A new report has cast doubt on the viability of a plan to build a huge gigafactory at Coventry Airport without a major car maker - such as Jaguar Land Rover - onboard. The report, compiled by academics from Birmingham City University, has said that without a key customer secured the ambitious plan could be “little more than hot air”.

Plans were first unveiled over a year ago to create a gigafactory to build batteries for electric cars at Coventry Airport. Since then the proposal - a joint venture between Coventry City Council and Coventry Airport’s owners the Rigby Group - has been given outline planning approval by both Warwick District Council and Coventry City Council.

Coventry car maker Jaguar Land Rover is not officially involved in the gigafactory plan but it has been generally understood that the facility would chiefly serve Jaguar Land Rover as it continues to make the transition from internal combustion engines to electric power. However, reports emerged recently that Jaguar Land Rover was in discussions with Envision to supply its electric vehicle batteries from a factory that would most likely be based in the North East.

The new research by Birmingham City University academics shows proposals to open the UK’s largest electric vehicle battery production facility will expose what has been described as a ‘marked gap’ in the national supply chain. The report is based on research funded by the British Academy and led by economist and regional automotive industries expert Professor Alex de Ruyter with colleagues from across the UK and Australia.

It assesses the capacity of supplier firms and perspectives of automotive workers in transitioning to manufacturing for electric vehicles.

Professor de Ruyter said: “The current mania for gigafactories in the UK obscures the fact that it is vehicle manufacturers who will determine which aspects of electric vehicle production they will conduct in the UK, and where they will source the supplies of components from. We have already seen this evidenced by recent reports of discussions between Jaguar Land Rover and Envision to potentially supply Jaguar Land Rover with batteries - possibly made in the North East.”

Although the Coventry gigafactory has received widespread support from across the region from local authorities and MPs - and is being backed by West Midlands Mayor Andy Street - no investor for the huge infrastructure project has been secured as yet. Professor de Ruyter said it can only succeed if it has a key customer, or “anchor client” and warned that without that it is “little more than hot air”.

He said: “Current talk of establishing a gigafactory in Coventry ignores the problems we have identified in securing as much value-added as possible in the West Midlands or the wider UK, as well as the need for an anchor client, ie a major vehicle company, for the Coventry site. Without concrete actions at a national and regional level - and timing is urgent - such talk is little more than hot air.”

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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby dutchman » Thu Jun 23, 2022 9:13 pm

Half a million pounds extra pumped into gigafactory plans by city council

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Coventry City Council is pumping an extra £500,000 into plans to build a huge gigafactory at Coventry Airport. The money will go on marketing the site to investors and was approved at a meeting on Wednesday (June 22).

The new electric battery factory is a joint venture by the council and the airport owners. It is set to bring in £2.5 billion of investment and 6,000 jobs to the region, and earlier this year got government support.

But no car makers have been found as partners for the factory despite plans first being announced last year. In March it was reported that Jaguar Land Rover were in talks with Envision AESC, a rival electric battery producer.

And other gigafactories are planned for areas in the north east of the UK as car makers in the country race to move to electric vehicle production by 2030.

Officers told the meeting, chaired by Cabinet Member for Jobs, Regeneration and Climate Change, councillor Jim O'Boyle, that Coventry Airport will also put in £500,000 of funding to market the site to potential investors. They said the council is "working with senior people in the auto industry" on the plans.

Shadow Cabinet Member for Jobs, Regeneration and Climate Change, Cllr Ryan Simpson asked how the money would be used given the advantages of other potential gigafactory sites in the UK.

A council officer at the meeting replied: "The thing that we really do that no other site can is, we are the only site that is currently in an existing automotive cluster. [We're] beginning to hear from investors that the North East is already saturated in terms of employment."

The officer stressed that batteries will be "much more widely used than cars" in future. Houses will have battery sinks to store renewable energy, he said.

Cllr O'Boyle also said there were benefits to making batteries in the UK as opposed to overseas.

"You don't build things abroad to then import them - it's hellishly expensive, hellishly difficult and quite dangerous," he said. "That is why it makes sense to have [a gigafactory] here."

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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby rebbonk » Thu Jun 23, 2022 9:58 pm

Coventry City Council is pumping an extra £500,000 into plans...


I'd like to see the business plan and justification behind that decision. CCC hasn't exactly got a good record of this type of thing, and one might also question why they are getting involved with something that is not in their remit.
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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby dutchman » Tue Jan 17, 2023 7:30 pm

Coventry gigafactory plan in doubt after firm goes into administration

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Extensive plans for a huge electric car battery plant near Coventry have been thrown into disarray by the news one of its biggest partners could shut. Electric car battery manufacturer Britishvolt has fallen into administration and made the majority of its 300 staff redundant, administrators have announced.

The company had plans to develop its global HQ at MIRA Technology Park near Nuneaton. The shock setback could also have huge implications for plans to build a huge gigafactory at Coventry Airport given that 12 months ago Britishvolt struck a multi-million pound deal with the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC) to produce its next generation of battery cells.

In addition to its expansion strategy in the Midlands, Britishvolt was planning to build a gigafactory in Northumberland. The firm has appointed administrators at EY after failing to raise enough cash for its research and the development of its Cambois site.

It comes after months of trouble, with the company struggling to raise enough money to stay afloat. A week ago the group said it was in talks with potential investors.

"The company has entered into administration due to insufficient equity investment for both the ongoing research it was undertaking and the development of its sites in the Midlands and the North East of England," EY said. "The joint administrators are assessing the options for realising the potential value in the business and assets of the company, including intellectual property and R&D assets, for the benefit of creditors.

"The administrators will subsequently implement an orderly closure and winding down of the company’s affairs, as required. As a result, regrettably, the majority of Power by Britishvolt Limited employees have been made redundant with immediate effect.

"All those impacted are being offered appropriate support and advice." Last Monday, the company said it was seeking a deal with a consortium of investors to purchase a majority stake in Britishvolt to help secure its future.

The group’s board held further talks, but decided on Monday there were no current viable takeover offers. Britishvolt, a London-based electric vehicle start-up, has been developing a £3.8 billion gigafactory in Blyth, Northumberland, and received tens of millions of pounds of financial backing from metals giant Glencore.

But it fell into emergency funding talks in November after revealing it was close to entering administration, and managed to secure funding to keep it afloat in the short term. Britishvolt has around 300 existing employees who agreed to a voluntary salary cut for November to help reduce costs.

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Another City Council White Elephant! :rolling:
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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby rebbonk » Wed Jan 18, 2023 12:50 pm

Is anyone surprised? :roll:
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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby rebbonk » Mon Jan 30, 2023 4:31 pm

Britishvolt Was ‘Highly Risky Project’ and Government Should Walk Away From It: Energy Expert

Electric battery gigafactory has echoes of the DeLorean car factory 'disaster'


Britain should give up on plans for gigafactories making batteries for electric cars and accept that it cannot compete with countries with lower labour costs, according to an energy expert.

Britishvolt, a start-up that planned to build a huge factory in Blyth, Northumberland, went into administration earlier this month owing £100 million to creditors.

Andy Mayer, chief operating officer and energy analyst at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), said Britishvolt was always a “highly risky project” and he said the government should walk away from it or risk a repeat of the DeLorean affair.

Mayer told The Epoch Times: “Britishvolt didn’t just fail because it doesn’t make any sense to try and lead the world in battery manufacturing from the UK. It failed because their specific expression of that technology wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t ready. Nobody really wanted to buy it. So the government money doesn’t change that.”

Britishvolt planned to build £3.8 billion gigafactory on the site of a former coal-fired power station in the far north of England and said it would employ 3,000 people and produce batteries for 300,000 cars and vans a year.

In January 2022 the government announced plans to pump £350 million into its Net Zero Strategy, on top of the £500 million it invested into its 10 Point Plan as part of its levelling up agenda—which means investing in deprived areas of the north of England and the Midlands so they do not fall further behind London and the south east.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Britishvolt factory would become part of Britain’s “global green industrial revolution” and he said it would be as transformational as Nissan’s car factory in Sunderland, which opened in 1986 and employed thousands of people in a region of high unemployment.

But Britishvolt failed to reach its construction targets and the government pulled the plug on it, leading eventually to it falling into administration earlier this month.

Mayer said: “With the levelling up agenda, one of the dangers of it is this narrative that you can’t let anything fail in an area. And then you do have the risk of politicians making terrible economic decisions on the basis that they have made promises they cannot keep, and we get into something of a sunk cost fallacy that they throw good money after bad trying to prove the point and never succeeding.”

He said the Britishvolt affair had echoes of what happened in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s.

In 1982 the DeLorean car company went bust, after sucking up £80 million of government money to build a factory in Northern Ireland to produce U.S. entrepreneur John DeLorean’s futuristic sports cars.

Mayer said DeLorean was a “really passionate guy who could talk the hind leg off a donkey,” and he said: “You’ve got the levelling up story of Northern Ireland, a troubled region that needed the jobs, that needed the growth and needed a success story. Then you have politicians pouring in money to make the dream happen.”

But he said the result was an “utter disaster.”

British industrial history is littered with stories of manufacturers who could not compete globally but employed so many people that it was deemed politically crucial for them not to fail.

In the early 1970s the Conservative government, led by Edward Heath, came under immense political pressure to prop up Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, a consortium of Glasgow shipyards.

Thirty years later Tony Blair’s Labour government lent MG Rover millions in a desperate attempt to keep the company, and its giant Longbridge factory in Birmingham, going but it ultimately collapsed with the loss of thousands of jobs.

Tony Woodley was the general secretary of the powerful TGWU trade union at the time and he met with Blair and the then-chancellor of the Exchequer, in a bid to get more government support for the failing MG Rover.

He has since retired and been made a peer, and last week Lord Woodley called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government to nationalise the company and press on with the gigafactory.

Woodley told the House of Lords: “Twelve years ago, the government’s Automotive Council … set aside a lot of money, £400 million, to entice battery manufacturers into the UK. It was small change compared to the billions of state money being put in by Germany, China, Japan.”

He added: “It’s not nostalgic to nationalise Britishvolt, it is strategic, irrespective of the relatively small but very important battery production by some car companies taking place now.”

But Mayer disagreed and urged the government and private investors to cut their losses and give up on Britishvolt, and instead put funding into research and development for cutting-edge technology.

He said: “If the government is going to throw money at problems it is better they throw a small amount of money at universities and advanced manufacturing centres to test the technologies of the future and if we’ve got a political goal in there, such as we think it would be a good thing to tackle climate change and provide technology that does that, then there is a social purpose behind that money.”

Mayer said the mistake would be to pump public money into a commercial enterprise which was flawed, because every time that company started running out of money it would come begging to the government and warn of the job losses.

Warning of Demands From ‘Sad-Eyed Company Executives’


“The last thing you want, is your public purse being dictated by sad-eyed company executives, who have not been able to deliver a business plan and want the government to bail them out,” he said.

Woodley, speaking in the House of Lords last week, said: “If we failed in battery megafactories, what’s the government’s strategy now for the industry? Without investment, without strategy, we’ll have no industry in 25 years’ time.”

Lord Callanan, a minister in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, replied: “The future is not state control, the future is what we are doing, which is to incentivise manufacturers to move to the UK. The case of Britishvolt is very disappointing, but the money that we had available remains on the table. We very much hope that other companies will show interest in what is an excellent sight in Cambois near Blyth, and we continue to do all that we can to encourage investment in the UK.”

The British government has said new petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2030 and Mayer said in order to produce affordable electric vehicles manufacturers would need to import them.

Mayer said: “The things that you need to engage in what can be described as commodity primary manufacturing are cheap land, cheap energy, and cheap people. On all three counts, the UK has none of those things. Our comparative advantage in manufacturing tends to be in high-value complex systems and the financing of them and the services that are attached to them.”

Mayer said: “If the German government decides that it’s going to do what the Americans are doing, and what the Chinese are doing, and pour money into creating a German battery champion, that’s great. I mean, it’s bad news for the German consumer and it’s bad news for German business generally, because they’ll be paying for it, but that’s brilliant news for us in the UK because we get cheaper batteries and then use them for producing our then cheaper cars and don’t have to buy locally made batteries at vast cost.”

He said: “The risk of the government’s approach is not that they will miss the environmental targets, which they certainly will, but that they will produce a situation where something that the British population has taken for granted for going on 50 years now, that they can afford the right to own an automobile, will disappear.”

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/britishvolt-was-highly-risky-project-and-government-should-walk-away-from-it-energy-expert_5015166.html
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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby rebbonk » Mon Jan 30, 2023 9:09 pm

Oh dear, not a good day for our 'green' zealots...

British EV startup Arrival to lay off half its staff, names insider as CEO

Britain's Arrival SA said it was laying off 50% of its employees in a move that will help halve its cash operating expenses, as the electric-vehicle startup tries to ride out a cash crunch threatening its survival in the competitive market.

The move announced on Monday underscores the pressure on EV startups that had promised to disrupt the automotive industry but are now scrambling to slash costs in the face of supply chain issues and steep raw material prices.

High demand for electric vans has brought legacy players including General Motors' (GM.N) BrightDrop, Ford Motor Co (F.N) and upstarts Rivian Automotive to the front, with Tesla (TSLA.O) slashing its EV prices intensifying competition further.

Arrival, which also named insider Igor Torgov as its chief executive officer on Monday, had in November warned that it may not have enough cash to keep its business going toward the end of 2023.

The company has shifted its focus to the United States in order to benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides incentives to spur EV manufacturing and adoption.

The layoffs will reduce Arrival's headcount to 800 and cut the cost of business operations to about $30 million per quarter, including benefits from already announced moves like reductions in real estate and third-party spending.

Arrival did not disclose if it expects a charge from the layoffs. It did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Torgov, who joined the company from Russian retail tech firm ATOL in 2020, takes the helm after Denis Sverdlov took up the role of chairman in November.

The company, which had $205 million in cash at the end of 2022, said it would provide more details on its business plan when it reports quarterly results on March 9.

Subject to raising additional funds, the company expects to start production of the van in Charlotte, North Carolina next year.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ev-startup-arrival-lay-off-half-its-staff-2023-01-30/

It ain't gonna happen! :rolling:
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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby dutchman » Thu Mar 02, 2023 11:20 pm

Coventry gigafactory: JLR owner's plans disappointing - mayor

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The owner of Jaguar Land Rover's decision not to build a car battery factory in Coventry is "disappointing", West Midlands Mayor Andy Street says.

Tata Group is reported to be considering either Somerset or Spain for its gigafactory.

It had been hoped the car maker would choose a site at Coventry Airport which has been identified for a gigafactory.

Mr Street said there were "technical aspects" of that site which had not met the firm's criteria.

However, the mayor rejected the suggestion that the decision was a "snub" to Coventry where JLR has historical links.

"Just because they [potentially] build the battery factory in Somerset does not mean they are snubbing their home city," he said.

"It's disappointing news, but they will still be employing lots of people in research and development and, of course, there's all the questions of the supply chain that will support this and their support for the manufacturing plant so it's not all bad news."

Outline planning permission was given last year for a gigafactory at Coventry Airport with the hope of creating 6,000 jobs on the site.

The mayor insisted the JLR owner's decision was "not the end of the road" for the project.

"There are already negotiations with other potential investors and we are very, very confident that our offer is a very good one for them," he said.

It has been reported by the Financial Times that Tata is asking for £500m in government support to build a battery factory in the UK rather than Spain.

Andy Palmer, chairman of the battery maker InoBat Auto, told the BBC the amount of money "doesn't seem unreasonable" as energy costs are higher in the UK than Spain.

He added that the UK had to compete with the US and European Union in terms of incentive packages.

Mr Palmer, the former head of Warwickshire car maker Aston Martin, said: "I think it's really important now that the UK government decides if it wants a car industry. If it does then it needs to provision probably a lot more money than it has so far."

:bbc_news:
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Re: "Coventry Airport gigafactory plans to be developed after council approval"

Postby dutchman » Thu Jun 29, 2023 3:32 pm

Coventry City Council offers £1m gigafactory funding to speed up plans

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Coventry City Council and Coventry Airport could provide £1million to speed up plans for the West Midlands gigafactory. The council says that, if approved, it would "significantly reduce the time and cost" required for the West Midlands Gigafactory to become operational.

It believes this would make the site even more attractive to global investors. The new funding would be used to undertake the "detailed work" required to prepare the site for a future investor.

This includes planning, surveying, ground investigations, highways, and architectural work, as well as commissioning specialist battery and power supply services. The funding would also support the marketing of the site to international audiences.

As part of the plan, Coventry City Council would provide £500,000 over two years. The same amount would be provided by joint venture partner, Coventry Airport.

Cllr Jim O’Boyle, Cabinet Member for Jobs, Regeneration and Climate Change, said: " Without urgent action, the UK will lose out in the global race to develop batteries at scale. As the heart of the UK automotive sector, Coventry and the West Midlands must be at the very centre of the electrification strategy.

“The West Midlands Gigafactory is therefore critical to our future economic growth, job creation, and sustainable future. Coventry City Council, along with our private sector partner, has taken the initiative to deliver this national priority which will benefit every corner of the country.

“The Coventry Airport site is the only available proposed gigafactory location in the UK, which is ready for investment, with planning consent in place, but we must keep up the momentum. Global requirements for battery manufacturing are fast moving. Additional funding will help the West Midlands Gigafactory keep pace and allow us to continue to promote the opportunity on the international stage.”

The proposal will be discussed at a meeting in July.

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