Australian battery company, Recharge Industries, has acquired insolvent British battery startup, Britishvolt, in a deal that has saved Britishvolt’s planned battery cell factory in Northumberland. Recharge Industries plans to focus on batteries for stationary energy storage and high-performance sports cars, rather than producing battery cells for major car manufacturers.
The purchase price for Britishvolt’s assets remains undisclosed, but it is known that the remaining employees will transfer to Recharge as part of the deal. Work on the UK plant is expected to start within the next six to twelve months, with the first products from the manufacturing facility coming to market by the end of 2025.
Britishvolt first made headlines in 2020 with plans to build a battery cell factory in the UK, but reports of a difficult financial situation had been circulating for months. In August 2022, founder and CEO Orral Nadjari withdrew from his position, officially clearing the way for the “next phase” of the project. However, the Guardian reported in the summer of 2022 that construction work on the Blyth site would be severely limited until February to minimize spending due to a lack of funding. When the British government rejected a 30 million pound funding advance at the end of October, there were even more substantial indications that Britishvolt would soon have to file for insolvency. That time came in mid-January 2023.
Recharge Industries is an Australian battery startup owned by US investor group Scale Facilitation. The company is reportedly planning its own battery cell factory in Australia with an annual capacity of up to 30 GWh. According to the BBC, Recharge Industries and Britishvolt are similar in many respects. For example, they are both startups with little production experience.
David Collard, founder and CEO of Scale Facilitation, said: “What we are bringing is validated technology” and that “the US defence industry has validated it and it is already supplied to the UK navy through a subcontractor.” The technology Recharge Industries plans to use via a license comes from US technology partner Charge CCCV, or C4V for short. When completed, the factory could create up to 8,000 local jobs.
However, if Recharge Industries focuses on the stationary storage market and niche automotive applications, local cell supply to British vehicle plants of Ford, General Motors, Jaguar Landrover, and BMW will still look bleak on the island. Only Envision AESC in the vicinity of the Nissan plant in Sunderland, England, currently has plans to do so.
