BritishVolt gets £1.7 billion funding for EV battery Gigafactory – Lotus a likely partner

British EV battery start-up Britishvolt has secured £1.7 billion funding for a new battery gigafactory in Nothumberland. Lotus is a likely partner.

As we move towards an age of electric cars, we’re going to need an awful lot of batteries to power all those new EVs. And we need a chunk of that production in the UK.

Now, Britishvolt has secured funding for their battery Gigafactory in Northumberland totalling £1.7 billion – including an unspecified contribution from the UK government’s Automotive Transformation Fund, thought to be around £100 million.

The new Gigafactory – in Blythe, Northumberland – is already under construction with plans to be churning out up to 300,000 battery packs a year by 2028 – some 48GWh of power – with the first phase, due by 2024, churning out a bit under a quarter of that.

The new Gigafactory is expected to create up to 3,000 new jobs – and almost twice that in the supply chain – when it’s fully operational. The promises are very similar to those from Nissan’s new battery Gigafactory in Sunderland, which isn’t a million miles away.

Britishvolt isn’t saying yet who their customers will be – although they do say they will have an announcement soon – but according to Automotive News Lotus has signed a preliminary agreement with Britishvolt to team up on battery manufacturing and R&D for their new range of EVs.