00:00Hello, I'm Ian Griffin, Deputy Editor of Midlands Business Insider, and I'm here at the UK Battery
00:23Industrialization Centre, which as it indicates, is looking at ways of making batteries for the
00:32electric vehicle market, from small cars to heavy vehicles, and also other applications.
00:41I've been given an hour-long tour of the whole factory, the whole production process,
00:47absolutely fascinating the detail, the kind of intellectual capacity that goes into
00:55the production of these batteries. They're obviously looking at this centre of ways of
01:02lengthening a battery's life, making them more powerful, obviously getting away from that range
01:07anxiety in electric vehicles, and also looking at the weight of them, looking at
01:14obviously reducing the cost, and that obviously comes in not only what's contained within those
01:20batteries, but also the ways of producing those batteries, which this centre obviously helps
01:27and advises businesses on. They're working with OEMs, they're working with small
01:36startup businesses, but obviously creating the batteries of the future, the batteries which will
01:42power the cars we're probably all going to be driving in 20-30 years' time. So absolutely
01:48fascinating insight into the production of batteries, basically, and here is one that
01:58I've been, this is a dummy one by the way, there's basically 4,000 of these go into a Tesla. I've
02:06just been shown the whole kind of process from start to finish, how one of these or a live one
02:12of these is made, and again it was really mind-boggling, and the know-how and skill
02:17that goes into it at this centre is absolutely world-class. I'm Sean Gilgun, I'm the Managing
02:23Director of UKBIC. UKBIC is UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. We're a centre that was
02:29set up with government funding to help the industry scale from battery development to
02:34battery industrialisation. Okay, so this pack is a series of modules which are obviously made up
02:40of a series of cells, so each individual module has a number of cells in, normally six to eight
02:46cells, pouch cells. Those cells make up a small module, those modules are then created into three
02:52sub-modules which you then put all together in a series of series and parallel arrangements
03:00to form the final pack, which obviously goes on a Nissan Leaf vehicle. What we're here to do is help
03:07companies on their development journey as they bring new technology at various stages of that
03:12technology development from early prototype scale through to scale up and industrialisation and
03:18ultimately hopefully to commercialisation. And so that's what we do, we help with that piece in the
03:22middle where we help companies scale and industrialise, and that could be from a cell
03:26technology point of view, so helping companies with components, electrodes etc, or building cells
03:31for core battery cell technology, or it could be for developing their module and pack technology
03:38for their end applications, or it could be training and development. So we help companies
03:44by bringing them in to work on the line with us to help their teams upskill and train, and it's
03:50vital that this facility is here to help the industry in this country, because what we're
03:56doing is we're protecting the jobs and prosperity within automotive markets and adjoining markets
04:01in these applications that are vital for economic growth of the UK. We have to protect and support
04:08the automotive industry and batteries are a key part of that for the future, and so what we do,
04:13what we're very proud of, is helping companies along that development journey to be able to scale
04:18and industrialise their battery technology, so that we can help these companies become
04:22the battery powerhouses of the future, to support our local automotive market,
04:27but also to help some niche battery applications that are coming along that are just so exciting.
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