Gigafactory

The list of planned gigawatt-scale battery cell manufacturing plants in Europe has grown, with Anglo-Korean battery maker Eurocell announcing plans for a gigafab in Western Europe to start manufacturing at scale within 12 months.

In what has been described as a European first, Northvolt announces that the first lithium-ion battery has rolled off the production line at its Swedish manufacturing facility in Skellefteå.

A report from Australia’s Future Battery Industries Cooperative Research Centre which analysed the development of battery hubs in the U.S., Germany and Japan, has found that co-location and cooperation between industry and government were key to their success. For Australia to play the same game, it will have to leverage its wealth of resources, and clean up its act along the way.

The controlling shareholder of Russian PV manufacturer Hevel Solar says it has started construction on a gigafactory to manufacture solar ingots, wafers and heterojunction (HJT) cells in the Kaliningrad exclave of Russia, between Lithuania and Poland.

A gigafactory, as the name indicates, is a facility that aims to produce Li-ion cells at a gigawatt-hours scale of total capacity, so they can then be used in electric vehicles or stationary storage applications. The global production capacity of Li-ion cells is expected to reach 740 GWh by the end of 2021 – almost a threefold increase from 2017 – and Europe will account for 8% of the total. João Coelho, an analyst at Delta-EE, looks at how Europe plans to catch up.

LG says its new expansion plan will give it a total production capacity of more than 110 GWh in the United States.

SEAT and Iberdrola are planning to build an EV battery manufacturing facility in Barcelona with the support of the Spanish government.

Italian start-up Italvolt wants to build a €4 billion EV battery manufacturing facility in Italy. The site for the project is currently being identified, and the factory’s initial capacity should reach 45 GWh.

It was a series of firsts, including a strong full year and Megapack turning a profit, that factored into CEO Elon Musk explaining that he has “never been more optimistic or excited about the future of Tesla.” Austin, Texas, has been confirmed as the site of the next Gigafactory.

Tesla boss Elon Musk has published the first image of the planned Gigafactory in Grünheide, near Berlin, in eastern Germany.