Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest to open advanced battery plant in UK
Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest is planning to open an advanced battery plant in Oxfordshire later this year, creating up to 300 new jobs.
In an exclusive interview with Sky News, Forrest - founder of Australian iron ore company Fortescue - said he was expanding operations at WAE Technologies, the technical offshoot of the Formula 1 team, which he bought last year.
The new plant in Kidlington will work on batteries and fuel cells which could be used in heavy goods vehicles in the coming decades.
News of the new plant comes just a day after Britishvolt collapsed into administration, with 300 job losses.
Accountancy firm EY, which has been appointed administrator, said the firm had gone into administration "due to insufficient equity investment for both ongoing research…and the development of its sites in the Midlands and the north east of England".
Founded in 2019, Britishvolt initially attracted investment from a range of companies as well as a pledge for £100m of government funding. It intended to build a build a £3.8bn gigafactory producing sustainable, low-carbon batteries at a large site in Blyth, Northumberland.
Sky noted that the Williams plant has a different focus - on high density batteries for large trucks, such as those used by mining companies - and its output will be considerably lower than the promised levels of Britishvolt. Nevertheless, the news is likely to assuage concerns that Britain's aspirations of developing an EV industry are doomed.
Speaking on the fringes of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Forrest told Sky: "We invested heavily in British technology, British knowhow and British work ethic last year. But then we've said: 'Listen, it's great you've got the most advanced, innovative prototype batteries in the world… but we've got to get into manufacturing'.
"So last year, we started building a large factory in Kidlington. We'll open it in April. It will [create] hundreds and hundreds of new British jobs.
"And that's only the start. I want to expand it from there and I want to take that technology to Australia, to North America. I want to really stop the British brain drain and bring the smartest British engineers… home.
"These are batteries which are going to be everywhere: in motorbikes, cars, trucks, even even our huge mining trucks in Australia, even trains."
The plant at Kidlington will produce up to 400MW/h per year of battery modules and fully assembled integrated power systems - so it cannot be considered a "gigafactory" (which produces more than a gigawatt-hour of cells each year), Sky said.
Even so, these batteries are aimed at a different market, for higher density, higher performance batteries.