Electrification of the UK’s automotive, marine, aerospace, rail and energy storage sectors will see domestic demand for an additional 55GWh of batteries.
In a report highlighting this need, the Faraday Battery Challenge said this is a “large” opportunity to cement battery manufacturing within the UK’s industrial landscape. It also emphasised the need for collaboration to meet increased supply needs and support the UK’s electrification.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) allotted a £610 million budget for its Faraday Battery Challenge, led by Innovate UK and in partnership with the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, the Faraday Institution and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
The report, published 29 April, said that the automotive sector accounts for about 90% of UK demand, with 35GWh of the 55GWh projected additional need for the auto sector.
This additional demand comes as part of Faraday’s forecast UK battery demand, which will total 100GWh annually by 2030 and around 160GWh by 2035.
Domestic battery production plans have seen Agratas, part of the Tata Group, begin construction of a £4 billion gigafactory with 40GWh output. The firm claims it will meet almost half of the projected battery needs for the UK automotive industry by the early 2030s.
Particularly in the transport sector, decreased battery production costs will spur demand and exploration of ‘low-cost-good-enough’ alternative battery chemistry could cut costs significantly, especially if battery technology is shared across sectors.
The Fraday Battery Challenge said in the report that a cost-effective alternative to nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries is essential to growth. It suggested lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) are cheaper alternatives to which European supply chains could adapt.
Collaboration and domestic production
Other sectors with smaller battery demand — which the report said still have a “significant impact” on UK industry, employment, gross value added (GVA) and exports, especially in niche automotive markets — need aggregation and collaboration.
Across all sectors, additional research into cost, charging performance and safety improvements will be necessary to unlock more uses for batteries.
For stationary batteries, Faraday said battery cells themselves only form “a fraction” of the total cost of stationary storage applications. It identified a growing trend for LFP cells in stationary storage, due to a low levelised cost of electricity and advantages in thermal runaway and sustainability. However, the UK currently lacks a volume manufacturing industry for stationary energy storage.
The report highlighted that demand for batteries in stationary storage applications could be affected by failure of other technologies, such as pumped hydro storage, but that even if demand were to increase, unless a domestic production industry is established then UK business could miss out on the benefits.
Earlier this year, the Faraday Institution opened a call for expressions of interest in the initial phase of its first ‘Transformational Challenge’ for long-duration storage technologies.
The challenge is part of Faraday’s electrochemical energy storage research portfolio, and seeks projects “that look beyond incremental improvement” to consider instead areas that have not yet been the subject of significant research.
It has also committed to researching solid-state batteries for longer EV range. Earlier this month, Mercedes-Benz began road tests for a solid-state EV battery system developed in partnership with US-based Factorial Energy.
