Owner of Jaguar Land Rover to announce Somerset battery gigafactory
The expected plant, which will be built by Tata Group and have significant public investment, may create thousands of jobs
The owner of carmaker Jaguar Land Rover is expected to announce that it will build an electric car battery gigafactory in the UK, backed with £500m in government funding, in what would be a major boost for the British car industry.
Jaguar Land Rover’s owner, the Indian conglomerate Tata Group, has been locked in negotiations for months for state aid for the project, which would aim to produce 40GWh of batteries a year, enough to power hundreds of thousands of electric cars.
An announcement of the plans for a plant in Somerset is expected as soon as Wednesday, although some details of the agreement have yet to be finalised, said one person briefed on the plans.
The failure of Britishvolt, a gigafactory startup which collapsed after securing pledges of £100m in government support, has cast a shadow over the future of carmaking in Britain.
A Tata gigafactory would likely create thousands of jobs. It will join one other battery plant at “gigafactory” scale in the UK: the Envisionplant in Sunderland, which is owned by a Chinese corporation and supplies Nissan.
The deal is expected to include direct grants to support the construction of the factory, as well as investments in the local infrastructure. The total support is expected to be as high as £500m, said a person involved in the lengthynegotiation process.
The planned location in Somerset would ensure relatively good transport links to Jaguar Land Rover’s car factories, which are concentrated in the Midlands.
Talks on a gigafactory had made progress in recent weeks, but there is still no agreement on parallel negotiations over Tata’s steel plant in Port Talbot, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. The steelworks require investments worth £2bn or more to upgrade to new technology capable of producing steel without carbon emissions.
One source close to Tata said that Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chair of Tata Group, has arrived in the UK. The leader of the conglomerate had been due to visit the country earlier in the summer in order to finalise the deal, but that was delayed.
Tata had shown some signs that it was preparing for a gigafactory. Last week it published a job advertisement for a “cell developer” to work for its new battery division.
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A No 10 spokesperson said they were unable to comment on a commercially sensitive matter.
Jaguar Land Rover declined to comment.