THE Blyth GIGASITE
The Blyth facility will be one of the largest manufacturing plants in Europe
THE GIGASITE
Blyth on the beautiful North East Coast of the UK is the perfect place to position a battery gigaplant. Why? It has excellent transport links which are crucial for transporting both raw materials into the gigaplant and shipping the finished product. Blyth has superb access by rail, road or via the historic deep-water port. It also has easy access to clean, green energy, benefitting from access to Norwegian-sourced clean hydro power via a 450-mile connection under the North Sea and other renewable sources of power. We are looking forward to working closely with everyone in Blyth and becoming a full and active member of the community.
THE GIGAPLANT
What is a Gigaplant?
A gigaplant is another way of saying large factory. The Britishvolt gigaplant is the first of its type in the UK and will be making world-class lithium-ion batteries at scale.
At full capacity it will be capable of producing over 300,000 batteries per year that will power future electrified vehicles, or act as energy storage devices for capturing renewable energy. Now that the world is increasingly electrifying, these types of batteries have been identified as strategically important for the UK’s automotive and energy sectors, as well as the UK economy as a whole.
Like any factory our gigaplant will take raw materials, in this case predominantly lithium, cobalt, and metals. This will then go through a number of processes: mixing, layering, forming ageing and drying. The finished cells are then produced, which are then put into bespoke battery packs to fit a particular vehicle or application.
Sustainability
Our mission at Britishvolt is for our entire operation to be as close to carbon-zero as possible. We have been clear all along. There is little point in producing batteries for zero-emission electric cars if the batteries that power them have not been produced in a sustainable way.
We are enabling this on many fronts. Battery gigaplants consume a lot of energy so we are committed to using clean, renewable energy.
Our supply chain is being highly-localised wherever possible and we intend to co-locate key suppliers on-site. We will ship our batteries in the most efficient ways possible and the very fact that we are making world-class lithium-ion batteries in the UK is a positive step for the carbon footprint of the UK. We are reducing the need to import large and complex products from other battery manufacturing centres, which are predominantly in Asia.