This country is light years behind the rest of the world and without a battery factory building programme, it can give up any hope of catching up. China has hundreds of gigafactories in the pipeline; continental Europe is on course to have 27 gigafactories by the end of the decade, a sixfold increase on forecasts made just three years ago. Similar numbers are planned in the US.
The world is about to be in glorious oversupply. So, not a business we want to get into then, is it?
I’m thinking factories producing internal combustion engines & chains of fuel service areas will be good things to get into soon.
But the UK did have a (giga)factory planned….
What happened to that again? Oh..wait!!
Car batteries are commodity products, right? Pennies on the pound stuff.
Why the fuck do we want to spend another fortune we don’t have to dabble in a low margin manufacturing business in competition with (significantly) lower cost factories in China and the USA?
Despite frequent, highly frequent claims that the cost of renewable energy is coming down, strike prices keep on going up. Our Glorious Leaders (and their loyal acolytes) are punting green energy and carbon taxes as hard as they can go, so the reason why the UK hasn’t built a battery factory yet is simply that the politicians are holding out for bigger bribes. When Keir gets in and Brexit is undone, expect things to change quite rapidly.
Put ALL the money into fracking!!
So we don’t want to develop our own gas, because fracking is BAD, and because the Grinning Turd in Number 10 slapped a windfall tax on the North Sea.
Therefore we are importing expensive American fracked gas.
Mmkay.
But when it comes to other types of eco-shit, suddenly we’re supposed to go for 1920’s style autarky. Even tho the previous decisions we made on energy supplies means it’s not even remotely possible to sustain energy intensive industries in the UK, unless we can find some other value add to offset the disadvantages of being a (much) more expensive place to manufacture things.
And given batteries are commodities, no such value add exists. They’re just batteries, an important but completely fungible component usually sold with profit margins tighter than a Scotsman’s money-sporran.
Maybe the argument is that we won’t retain car manufacturing in the UK without local battery supplies? Seems unlikely to me, but if that’s true, the government probably should’ve thought of that before banning petrol engines.
We’d be better off under Larry the Cat, wouldn’t we?
With all those new gigafactories, perhaps it’d be better for the UK to develop new, improved recycling methods, for when the expected excess are scrapped. An industry we should be good at, having coped with British Leyland rust hulks.
Steve
I think cometh the hour, cometh the cat. Reminds me of the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year award. In the Blair era, David Blunkett’s two guide dogs, Sadie and Lucie would regularly get 10 to 15 percent of the vote on the grounds that they made the most useful verbal contributions of anyone in Parliament and after the fox hunting ban were the sole occupants with a legitimate right to be there.
Somebody should tell Marlow that even schoolboys know that a “light year” is not a measure of time. Ignorant twat!
” . . . continental Europe is on course to have 27 gigafactories by the end of the decade, a sixfold increase on forecasts made just three years ago.”
What course can you plot when there is an unresolved war in Europe that’s dangerous in itself and also affects vital supplies of food and energy. More likely to lose 27 gigafactories already built. The bloke’s a twat.
. . . without a battery factory building programme, it can give up any hope of catching up.
Sale ends Tuesday. Don’t lose out. Buy now!
Dearie, well I read it as “…miles behind…”.
One glance at the pearl-clutching vapidity of that opening sentence (“This country is light years behind the rest of the world…”) was enough to make me wonder if the article was written by Ben Marlow. And it turns out my suspicion was correct. He really is an awful pantywaist.