Construction of a huge electric car battery factory that has attracted tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer cash and been hailed as a flagship project of Boris Johnson’s levelling up policy has been put on “life support” to cut spending, leaked internal documents suggest.
Work on Britishvolt’s 95-hectare site near Blyth in Northumberland has been severely limited until February to minimise spending as it focuses on unlocking its next round of funding and critical power supply infrastructure, the documents suggest.
Government just chooses so well, doesn’t it?
Should’ve built it in Steyning !
Pile o’ money theory in action?
“Battery factories for electric cars are seen by the UK government as essential to preserving high-volume car manufacturing in Britain”
No, that just is not going to work. For starters, Mini already build more cars in the Netherlands because it’s cheaper than Oxford, and the Electric models are going to China. Toyota are not following an electric course. JLR are going to move more production to Eastern Europe. Which basically leaves Nissan.
And the problem is that China already has lots of electric car manufacturing. Not only are they cheaper but they’ve got the supply lines.
Making the cars just isn’t where the big money is. People should learn this from Apple and Dyson. Trying to win manufacturing means competing with Chinese, Turks, Poles. Have the jobs in design, engineering and marketing.
How is any factory supposed to make a profit when we have (a) ridiculously expensive energy costs and (b) cheap, high quality competition from countries that didn’t Net Zero themselves into the ground?
Let’s have a look at the motivations here. The government wants to be seen to do something. The department in charge wants to look important and expand its budget. The applicant for the funding wants to get access to the pile o’ money because many people involved will get something out of it.
Nobody in that list cares much about making batteries.
Tim Stanley was on this week’s Speccie podcast talking about his (deliberately) provocatively headlined article calling for Tory Socialism.
He’s supposed to be a Conservative and he was talking about the need for the next Conservative leader to start picking winners and protecting British companies. Its like they’re trying put NEF out of business.
I was under the impression that electric cars and battery storage was the future. I am a bit surprised it requires taxpayer dosh to get there.
Tim Stanley is a twat. “Tory socialism” reminds me of Nick Timothy, who is so fucking thick he thinks he’s a conservative, yet preaches a mix of New Labour policies and the wettest sort of one nation conservatism, the latter being a recipe for failure tried and tested by failures.
The allegedly Conservative press is full of throbbers telling us that it is time to turn away from Thatcherism and the market, as if we hadn’t had 25 years of Blairism which has landed us with a bloated state and 5 million on the dole.
MC – I was under the impression that electric cars and battery storage was the future
They are, it’s just that the future is still some way off.
Leccy cars are perfectly OK for most middle class people’s needs and budget today, tho they still aren’t as convenient or value-for-money as a diesel. I don’t see how our infrastructure can cope with a mass takeup of EV’s, the public charging infrastructure has already been overwhelmed in just the last few months. It’s just not feasible to keep building charging stations forever, the cars themselves need to be able to hold more charge and power up faster so people don’t camp out at them for an hour a time.
Batteries are the missing ingredient to making the Green Terror sort-of-work without living in the irl Hunger Games. There’s good reason to be optimistic about the future of battery tech, in 10 years they’ll probably be amazing. In the meantime, at least we can burn unsold copies of the Speccy to keep warm.
BonM4:
“Making the cars just isn’t where the big money is. People should learn this from Apple and Dyson. Trying to win manufacturing means competing with Chinese, Turks, Poles. Have the jobs in design, engineering and marketing.”
I agree to an extent, that it’s preferable to have some high value jobs than none at all. But I think that only works for a limited amount of time though.
I worked in a manufacturing company in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. A hundred years ago the area was a thriving, bustling manufacturing hotbead with companies of all types working in the area.
It’s a virtuous spiral, companies locate to the area because all the technical know-how, all the support industries, all the qualified personnel are in the locality.
Even though a lot of development work is computerized nowadays, a lot of manufacturing is still suck it and see.
Try this, try that, see what works. It’s still hands on.
Without the designers having a shop floor and the feedback that goes with it, it’s only a matter of time before the design side of things gets exported overseas too.
The only thing left of value are the Universities training the next generation of Chinese mechanical and electrical engineers.
When they finally manage to get their own Universities sorted out, and have extracted everything of value from ours, all that we will have left to support our economy is an army of humanities graduates and diversity coordinators.
Bloke in Brum,
“It’s a virtuous spiral, companies locate to the area because all the technical know-how, all the support industries, all the qualified personnel are in the locality.”
Yes, and that’s already China for EVs. That has the gravitational pull going and we’re already too late.
“Even though a lot of development work is computerized nowadays, a lot of manufacturing is still suck it and see.
Try this, try that, see what works. It’s still hands on.
Without the designers having a shop floor and the feedback that goes with it, it’s only a matter of time before the design side of things gets exported overseas too.”
I don’t dispute it for smaller manufacturing but that isn’t how iPhones, Dyson vacuum cleaners and cars work.
“The only thing left of value are the Universities training the next generation of Chinese mechanical and electrical engineers.
When they finally manage to get their own Universities sorted out, and have extracted everything of value from ours, all that we will have left to support our economy is an army of humanities graduates and diversity coordinators.”
Well, no. We’ll have moved on to something else. Car making is a very mature industry like making socks or farming cattle. Even the engineering is very mature now to the point where little extra value is being added. At which point, let the Chinese do it.
The output of our country is in all sorts of things. People in media and politics have this fixation on car making. I remember a journalist talking about the Honda Swindon closure as a blow to the town, when it was 3500 jobs out of a working population of 140K. Most of our production is a long tail thing. Companies of 200 employees or fewer producing parking meters, replacement hips, the power management for the iPhone, or luxury furniture, or estate agency software.
@Steve
It’s just not feasible to keep building charging stations forever, the cars themselves need to be able to hold more charge and power up faster so people don’t camp out at them for an hour a time.
That’s what’s needed for leccy cars to become a genuine option for the great majority of motorists (anyone who doesn’t live in a large city, where a car isn’t needed at all), but it would require a step-change in battery technology, which is nowhere in sight.
If the supply side is not ready for EVs, and the EVs are not ready for general use to replace ICE, but it will be all sorted out with new power and new batteries by..someday, why wouldn’t you wait until someday to do the replacement when the market will do it for you? It might make more sense for the UK to specialize in petrol and diesel while the others chase their EV delusion.
I’d agree Rhoda. Of course, I find nuclear powered synfuel plants entertaining.
Pretty much nice, simple, off-the-shelf technology. Except the CO2 extraction, but that’s pretty simple too.
The only problems are:
1. you’d have to scrap some of the ridiculous regs about nuke-building, and
2. this’d all be bloody expensive.
My experience as a bureaucrat says, ‘Just do nothing!!!’
Chris – could be closer than you think, anything above 150 kWh is able to give you something approaching 200 miles of range in about 20 minutes. 350 kWh chargers are now on the market. That’s pretty good progress.
Problem is what rhoda mentions about early adopter costs. The vast majority of our public charging infrastructure is 50 kWh or less, and they break down frequently. Most cars on the road today can’t cope with 350 kWh superchargers, might as well drive them past the clock tower and hope for lightning instead.
EVs are often great products, they’re fun to drive and typically surprisingly roomy and well specced. They’re also a solution to a problem that didn’t really exist in the first place, I don’t believe any of the bullshit about climate change or people dying from diesel particulate in the UK.
But the worst problem will probably turn out to be that we decided to go hell for pleather on these things without securing cheap, reliable electricity at scale to realistically power a nation of big, fuck-off battery owners. As if the internal combustion engine was a new invention and we decided to roll them out in their millions without extracting, refining and distributing enough petroleum products to make it all work. A classic palfrey/wagon juxtashambles.
“Have the jobs in design, engineering and marketing.”
Yeeeesss… And as the asians showed, they can do those as well, often more cheaply and efficiently..
@Grikath
Have the jobs in… marketing.”
… as the asians showed, they can do those as well, often more cheaply and efficiently”
Only if you are swayed into buying a product that promises to be “Mega Super Giant Massive Galactic Best Buy”
If current trends continue, there will be no trade with China.
I’ve been on this blog long enough to be familiar with, and sympathetic to Bloke on the M4’s argument about not worrying with low value, commodity production.
It’s the same pov espoused by this blogs esteemed host. I get it. I truly do.
But I still have my reservations.
Back when this country was an economic and world power, we kick started the Industrial Revolution. We created nuclear power (essentially). Developed the jet engine. Changed the world.
Now I think that in the brave new world yet to come, the highly technological, increasingly sophisticated world that we are entering, we are the ones who belong on the B-Ark.
Ah, we don’t have enough electricity to power an eletricity storage battery factory… or new homes in West London. More EVs & Heatpumps?
A “We Told You So” example dismissed as ‘climate denier’ conspiracy theory
On a similar note:
No new homes, businesses [or EV Charging, Heatpumps] in West London as electricity grid runs out of capacity
Housebuilders have been told it could take until 2035 to get new developments hooked up to the electricity network
https://archive.ph/CdTwm
telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/07/28/no-new-homes-west-london-electricity-grid-runs-capacity/
And/Or
https://www.ft.com/content/519f701f-6a05-4cf4-bc46-22cf10c7c2c0
Will Gov’t now see sense and cancel EV & Heat Pump mandates?
Nope:
Ms Truss said she remained committed to making the UK a Net Zero carbon emitter by 2050
[We’re screwed again. Ms Truss, listen to Lord Frost and end ‘net zero’]
https://archive.ph/7LqHS
telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/08/11/liz-truss-no-windfall-tax-energy-companies/
Lord Frost: Britain should end focus on ‘medieval’ wind power and go all in for nuclear and fracking
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11094685/
@MC, Steve
+1
The ONLY reason there are any milk floats at all is because they have been decreed by the five year plan, said plan stating that actual cars will be banned from sale in 2030 (spoiler, they won’t be, they can’t be)
Had some genuine breakthrough occurred to produce a battery that could be charged as fast as a real car could be fuelled (that was also practical to manufacture – tiny spoiler that) then some genuine entrepreneurs and venture capitalists could then have made a go of it.
This would still leave the other minor spoiler of producing the requisite power and means of charging (utterly trivial for a real car). How to ram 70-100kW or whatever into a battery in a minute (which is what genuine parity would require) without all these problems of heating etc. Well, best of luck with that on a large scale in the real world.
This is what we are being sold. Nothing less. You have to sucker gullible fools up front after all.
I think some of these gullible fools are starting to realise the pup they’ve been sold.
Popcorn time is not far off
If only a standard had been agreed, where standardized battery packs are replaced at the ‘petrol station’ in just a few minutes – automatically dropped out of the vehicle’s floor and replaced with a fully-charged pack. But that would have required sense and communication between manufacturers…
Speaking as someone used to working with electricity, I find something capable of delivering 350kW/h horrifying. Especially in the hands of people absolutely clueless about electricity.
@Steve
The problem with fast charging is that, if done too often or too frequently, it knackers the battery. Tesla superchargers will refuse to deliver a fast charge if they work out you’ve been using them too often, because they don’t want to be replacing the battery under warranty.
@Ed P
If only a standard had been agreed, where standardized battery packs are replaced at the ‘petrol station’ in just a few minutes
Not possible, the battery packs have to be used as structaral members, like engine & gearbox in MCs. Otherwise vehicle would be ~1 ton heavier and range massively depleted
This has all been covered before eg Musk’s lorry – 40 ton vehicle with 4 ton load
Open Your Eyes and See
https://youtu.be/9lwqmewI484?t=398
Speaking as someone used to working with electricity, I find something capable of delivering 350kW/h horrifying. Especially in the hands of people absolutely clueless about electricity.
Even in the hands of people who should know about electricity, it doesn’t take much to get to very dangerous voltages.
I work with LV systems regularly. 415V 3Ph, 60A.
Enough to end you if you aren’t careful.
One day, we get a call that the sockets in one area aren’t working where we had had issues recently. So four of us (me, shift buddy, our lead who wanted to make a good impression with the client, and client manager in charge of maintenance) went to check the distribution board. All fine. Checked the step down transformer. All fine. Then we went to check the 3 phase fuses that feed the transformer. One appeared to be a bit popped out, like it hadn’t been installed properly. So the client manager reaches into the cabinet to push on the fuse to push it in… while its live.
Needless to say, we had all backed away so fast when he did this, he wondered where we had all gone.
This guy had worked in maintenance for years and really should have known better.
Don’t worry though, turns out that the supply was fine, it was a duff piece of equipment they were using.