Fascinating article & film by Ed Conway of Sky News on the processes and arms race to make EV batteries
Worth reading /watching to understand challenges for the UK auto supply chain.
Here's a snippet:
Three important principles when it comes to the green energy transition.
The first is that we are unlikely ever to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions without making a staggering number of batteries. We need batteries for energy storage to counter the inherent intermittency of renewable power sources like wind and solar. We'll need them for our homes. Most of all, we'll need them for our cars.
The second principle is that the onset of the electrical age turns the industrial hierarchy of the car business on its head. In the internal combustion engine era - which is to say the past century and a bit - the single most important part of a car was its engine. But in the electric era the most valuable part of a car is likely to be the battery.
This might sound like superfluous detail until you recall that much of this country's motoring expertise and heritage is bound up in engine design and production. Battery manufacture, on the other hand, is something which at present happens mostly elsewhere.
Consider: when Jaguar Land Rover built its new all-electric Jaguar I-Pace car this British-designed car was actually contracted out to a plant in Austria.
The great fear of the motoring industry, and the government, is that something similar happens with all UK car manufacture in future with hundreds of thousands of jobs being lost as engine manufacture goes the way of the dodo.
It's only 93 months until 2030 when the UK will bans the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines.