The UK has strategic ambitions to build several battery factories in the coming years. We find out how the sector is getting along.
I am peering through the window of a chamber containing what looks like a gigantic roll of kitchen foil. Inside the room, workers in coveralls and face masks monitor screens. Any fibres, hairs or dust could damage the sensitive chemical processes they’re working on, so the space needs to be kept spotlessly clean, with several changes of filtered air each hour.
This is the coating room on a production line at the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC), set inside a vast hangar on the outskirts of Coventry in the UK’s West Midlands. I’m being given a tour of the facility to see how batteries are made.
Stretching 80 metres along one side of the hanger are two, near-identical production lines running in parallel. Each line does much the same thing, but one side is intended for creating the positive side (cathode) of a battery and the other the negative side...