UK battery tech will be energised with a huge quarter-billion-pound boost in funding over the next four years, according to Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark. But the encouraging news doesn’t stop there – with an announcement by BMW that it will begin production on a new electrical Mini in Cowley, Oxford. While the electrical motor for the car will be built in Germany, this is still reassuring news for the UK’s automotive-energy industries, especially as BMW claim that they ‘neither sought nor received’ post-Brexit incentives from the Government.

The Faraday Challenge will encourage competition, collaboration and innovation

Secretary Clark announced the project’s title – the Faraday Challenge – yesterday at an event hosted by the Resolution Foundation, a living standards think-tank. He said: “…We need to ensure that we find and seize opportunities to work more productively – as a country, as cities and regions, as businesses and as individuals. If we can do so, we can increase the earning power of our country and our people.

“If every part of Britain is to prosper in the future we need to ensure that we have the right policies and institutions in place to drive the productivity – which is to say, the earning power – of the economy, and the people and places that make it up.

“I am today launching the Faraday Challenge, which will put £246 million into research, innovation and scale-up of battery technology.”

The battery tech sector could undergo a makeover to improve collaboration and creativity

The Faraday programme forms the newest component of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy, released in January 2017. One of the stated aims of the Industrial Strategy is to create a ‘Challenge Fund’ to encourage R&D in experimental areas such as robotics, clean energy and biotechnology. Battery tech will spearhead this campaign, meaning that the sector could also benefit first from strong shakeups and collaborations. These include, for the first time, the unification of ‘fundamental research, innovation, and scale-up’, as recommended by Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) Sir Mark Walport.

Sir Mark was commissioned by Secretary Clark to estimate the viability of investing in battery R&D. He said in his review to Secretary Clark that the potential for innovation from collaboration in battery tech was extraordinary. He said: “…My overall conclusion is that the UK does indeed have world class science capability that could be deployed to powerful effect on this industrial challenge if Government were to evolve its current science and innovation model a further logical step. This would involve creating an overarching ‘application inspired’ approach to explicitly join up research funding at three levels; fundamental research, innovation, and scale-up.

“Doing so would drive improved efficiency of translation of UK science excellence into desirable economic outcomes, would leverage significant industrial investment in the form of a ‘deal’ with industry, and would send a strong investment signal globally.”

The boosts could keep the UK automotive industry fully-charged

Professor Richard Parry-Jones, a veteran engineering leader with decades of experience in the automotive industry, will chair an overarching committee named the Faraday Challenge Advisory Board. The Board will ensure that the programme remains co-ordinated by keeping track of the coherence and impact of the challenges.

Incidentally, the automotive industry is one that is poised to be shaken-up by innovations in battery tech, especially as emissions rules tighten across the globe. According to the Financial Times, Secretary Clark has been involved with secret discussions with insiders at Ford and Peugeot to encourage them to manufacture car batteries in the UK. Jaguar Land Rover has also expressed its desire to make future models of its first electric car the I-Pace in the UK. Nissan too already produces around 23,000 batteries in Sunderland for both the Leaf car (which is also assembled on the site) and the e-NV200 van (assembled in Spain). And only today BMW announced it will begin production of a new fully-electric three-door Mini at its plant in Cowley, Oxford, in 2019.

These encouraging signs could grow confidence in the UK car industry as it moves towards Brexit and reliance on renewable energies. The industries have yet to be married on a grand scale, with only 19,000 out of 1.7 million cars manufactured in the UK fully-electric. A further 86,000 were hybrid, powered by both electricity and fossil fuels. But there is plenty of room for expansion, with Swiss auditor UBS estimating that around one-third of all cars by 2025 will be battery-powered.

The UK is certainly up against fierce competition, with China, Korea and Japan producing almost all of the world’s output of electric batteries for cars. The Tesla ‘Gigafactory’ in Nevada has also been in production for around two months now, and yesterday released a batch of 1,500 Model 3 batteries.

But there have been yet more encouraging signs from the UK sector too. Researchers and industry leaders were recently contesting for government approval of a National Battery Prototype Centre to be built in Coventry. Developed by the University of Warwick’s Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), the 25,000 square meter space is planned to be built in under a year and could create 10,000 local jobs.

By encouraging the development of both sectors, the UK could stand to strengthen its position as an innovator of future-tech, even post-Brexit. This is the hope of Secretary Clark, who said at the Battery Prototype Centre panel that he hoped the new centre in Coventry would “position the UK at the cutting edge of battery development”.