![]() The rub is if these European facilities cannot be delivered in a timely manner, then this could be a Kodak moment for the European automotive industry. This requirement for new Gigafactories will put significant demand on many areas, including the need for very large sites with hundreds of Mega Watts of power available, manufacturing process systems, clean and dry room equipment as well as the minerals, foils and chemicals necessary for battery manufacture.Īll of this will need to be provided alongside the development of recycling technologies, which will ultimately deliver a sustainable “cradle to cradle” (rather than the traditional ‘cradle to grave’) strategy to meet the forthcoming European legislation on battery production and re-use. This is enough to equip 10-17 million 60kWh electric vehicles, which roughly equates to Europe’s current annual total domestic vehicle sales. In Europe alone, 38 Gigafactories for Li-Ion battery cells have been announced - these facilities will generate between 6 GWh of batteries per year by 2030. The growth in EV adoption is largely down to the phasing out in many European countries of the internal combustion engine by 2030. Timing is everything, manufacturers need to scale-up now or lose out to those who have In these battery manufacturing facilities, large parts of their production areas, which can be over 600m long, have complex requirements including the need for clean rooms (rooms with filtration to achieve very low levels of dust/particles), with certain manufacturing areas also requiring very low humidity levels, which is a challenge in itself. Even though battery manufacturing has been around for many years, the sheer scale required due to the exponential growth of Electric Vehicles (EVs) should not be underestimated. Unlike car manufacturing facilities, battery production is more akin to pharmaceuticals/microchip manufacture in its complexity. Gigafactories have more in common with the pharmaceutical industry than the automotive industry Tesla is best known for the Gigafactory nomenclature, so it is surprising then that the UK’s Envision 2.5 GWh facility in Sunderland, supporting the Nissan Leaf, opened in 2012, predating Tesla’s first Nevada Gigafactory by some four years. Gigafactories are so named as they provide Giga Watt hour (GWh) levels of battery manufacturing output, with a 1GWh facility providing enough batteries for approximately 17,000 vehicles. Understanding the genesis of the ‘Gigafactory’ – did Tesla take a ‘Leaf’ out of Nissan’s book? Over the coming paragraphs, we will explore how these complex facilities are stretching the technologies used in the design of what is a unique built asset, and how these Gigafactories are at the heart of our future industry. But what exactly is a Gigafactory, and what makes it distinct from a typical car or engine plant? With the EV revolution in full-swing, news of Gigafactories being built around the world is becoming commonplace.
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