On Wednesday 28 February, Agratas, the battery business of the Tata Group, officially confirmed that it will build its planned battery plant at Gravity Smart Campus in Puriton, Somerset.
Tata said that battery production activities at the plant will start in 2026. According to SMM's relevant research statistics, it will have a design capacity of 40GWh and its products will be cylindrical NMC cells. The plant's products are mainly power batteries, which can supply batteries for about 500,000 electric vehicles per year. The company says it will contribute nearly half of the battery manufacturing capacity required by the UK automotive industry by the early 2030s. As well as supplying brands such as Tata Group's Jaguar Land Rover, the plant also plans to supply other carmakers and produce energy storage batteries in the future.
The site was once the Royal Ordnance Factory, manufacturing high explosives. It was owned by BAE Systems and finally closed in 2008.In 2018, the area was purchased for millions of pounds by the Salamanca Group, a UK business investment bank.The Salamanca Group is building it into a mixed-use industrial and commercial park covering 625 acres.Agratas has invested in a battery factory that is planned to take up around half of the park, making it the largest brownfield project in the UK's electric vehicle sector to date. It is said to create around 4,000 permanent jobs in Somerset in the future.
SMM believes that the plant's relatively smooth progress so far has been pivotal in boosting the UK's electric vehicle industry after a number of current setbacks to planned mega-factories. The automotive manufacturing export industry, which has long served as the UK's balance of trade, is in dire need of transformation. The Britishvolt and AMTE super-factory construction plans, which had been highly anticipated earlier, have collapsed due to factors such as the difficulty of obtaining stable investment for start-up companies. These setbacks make the transformation of the UK automotive industry face uncertainty and pressure from external competition. As the Tata Group, which owns Jaguar Land Rover and other British brands, has ploughed into the British market for many years, and has good political and business relations as well as strong capital, it is currently the only one that has the hope of completing a super plant for power batteries and putting it into production in the UK within three years, in addition to AESC.
Considering the three-year one-time extension of the value-of-origin ratio in the UK-EU tariff waiver at the end of last year, this project is expected to be fast-tracked due to the urgent need for local batteries for UK OEMs. SMM expects that the project will effectively drive the layout and development of related upstream and downstream industrial chain enterprises in the UK after it is put into operation. The Tata battery plant will help increase the autonomy rate of electric vehicles in the UK, enhance its competitiveness in the domestic and international markets, and get rid of the current industry chain's dependence on specific countries.
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