Australian startup Recharge Industries has confirmed that it has completed the takeover of Britishvolt—the UK company that failed to build a battery factory in northeast England.
Founded in 2019, Britishvolt had promised to build a £3.8 billion ($4.6 billion) gigafactory to produce batteries for electric cars in Blyth, Northumberland. The company said it would employ 3,000 people and produce batteries for 300,000 cars and vans per year.
However, the project ran into serious difficulties months ago as it started to run out of cash before it had even cleared the site in preparation for construction.
In mid-January, Britishvolt appointed restructuring specialists EY-Parthenon as administrators after failing to raise the cash it required for further research and the development of its Cambois site.
It emerged earlier this month that Recharge had been selected by auditors as the preferred bidder to take over the majority of the business.
In an interview with the BBC on Sunday, Recharge’s chief executive David Collard said the deal had now been finalised.
“What we are bringing is validated technology,” he said. “The U.S. defence industry has validated it and it is already supplied to the UK navy through a subcontractor.”
Founded in 2022, Recharge is an Australian company that is owned and run by New York-based investment fund Scale Facilitation.
Collard said the Britishvolt brand name would remain, but that the business would initially focus on batteries for energy storage.
It then intends to produce batteries for high-performance sports cars, he said.
Collard confirmed the business retained the ambition to complete construction of the Blyth factory.
Much-Trumpeted Venture
In January 2022, the British government announced plans to pump £350 million into its Net Zero Strategy. This was on top of the £500 million it invested into its 10-Point Plan (pdf) as part of its Levelling Up (pdf) agenda—which means investing in deprived areas of the north of England and the Midlands so they do not fall further behind London and the southeast.Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Britishvolt factory would become part of Britain’s “global green industrial revolution”—and he said it would be as transformational as Nissan’s car factory in Sunderland, which opened in 1986 and employed thousands of people in a region with high unemployment.
The British government has said that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2030. Britishvolt expected to fulfil the demand for the batteries needed in around one in four electric vehicles sold on the British market.
Domestic EV battery plants are also seen as essential to keep UK car production from shifting to mainland Europe. To comply with trade requirements with the European Union, a large proportion of an EV—by value—must be built in Britain to avoid EU tariffs.
The plan was to develop a 95-hectare site where a coal-burning power station once stood, and to use Norwegian hydro-electric power transmitted some 447 miles under the North Sea via the world’s longest interconnector, the North Sea Link.
But Britishvolt simply could not raise enough cash to keep going. The company had been promised £100 million in government funding. To protect taxpayers in the event that the firm failed, however, that money was only available if the company met certain milestones—which it never did.
In recent months, the business tried to find enough cash from private investors to stay above water, including from mining giant Glencore. But its efforts fell short.
‘Highly Risky Project’
The bid to rescue Britishvolt has been supported by politicians in both main parties, but it is not without controversy.Andy Mayer, chief operating officer and energy analyst at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said Britishvolt was always a “highly risky project.”
He said Britain should give up on plans for gigafactories making batteries for electric cars and accept that it cannot compete with countries with lower labour costs.
Mayer told The Epoch Times last month: “Britishvolt didn’t just fail because it doesn’t make any sense to try and lead the world in battery manufacturing from the UK. It failed because their specific expression of that technology wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t ready. Nobody really wanted to buy it. So the government money doesn’t change that.”
Mayer said: “With the Levelling Up agenda, one of the dangers of it is this narrative that you can’t let anything fail in an area. And then you do have the risk of politicians making terrible economic decisions on the basis that they have made promises they cannot keep, and we get into something of a sunk cost fallacy [where] they throw good money after bad trying to prove the point and never succeeding.”
