By 2020 at least seven new gigawatt-size battery factories are scheduled to start operating on the continent, with another three developments rumoured.
Within a decade, these facilities will be churning out 80GWh a year. More than three times the 2017 global production capacity of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
‘Gigafactories’, a term coined in the US by Elon Musk’s Tesla, produce batteries on the scale of more than 1GWh per year. Until this year Europe had no factories of that size.
But with demand for electric vehicles on the continent predicted to surge (Dutch bank, ING, predicts that all new vehicle sales in Europe will be electric by 2035), a new battery infrastructure is coming for Europe.
Of the five leading global manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries, three are planning, or have begun building, gigafactories in Europe: LG, Samsung, and the Tesla/Panasonic partnership.
The push from these established US, Japanese, and South Korean players has prompted a number of European companies to invest in the construction of their own regionally-based gigafactories.
Car manufacturer Daimler has two planned facilities in its home country of Germany. Daimler is also working on plants in the US, China and Thailand.
A spokesperson for the company, which owns Mercedes-Benz, told Climate Home News the company would be investing more than €1 billion in a global battery production network.
Read more at Europe’s Coming Gigafactory Boom, Mapped
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