Scottish Battery Factory Goes Bust in Fresh Blow to U.K.’s Net Zero Industry
AMTE Power, a high-performance battery developer, has called in administrators in a fresh blow to Britain’s Net Zero industry as orders dried up. The Telegraph has more.
The company warned in the summer that it was in financial trouble and had days to find a new backer or help from existing shareholders.
An investor pulled the plug on fresh funding after plans to build a new plant in Dundee were scrapped.
AMTE said in a stock market notice: “The board has no other options to secure finance in the time available and has therefore concluded that the company has insufficient funds to continue trading.”
It said it appointed FRP Advisory as administrator to find a buyer and trading of its shares are suspended.
The company, which is based in Oxfordshire but has its main operations in Thurso, planned a 0.5GWh half-gigafactory in Dundee to make batteries for potential clients such as BMW and Cosworth.
AMTE had a long history in developing lithium cells, making some of the first examples in the 1990s. Recently, AMTE said it tested cells that can be charged fully in six minutes in a breakthrough for charging technology.
However, it has been making a loss. It did not get the firm orders it needed from carmakers and other potential customers, or a patient investor that could fuel an expansion in production. …
AMTE’s fate mirrors that of Britishvolt, another would-be independent U.K. gigafactory.
Britishvolt was the brainchild of former investment banker Orral Nadjari, who saw the looming demand for batteries from carmakers in the U.K. and a gap in the market for an independent producer, planning a £3.8bn factory in Blyth, Northumberland.
But it ran out of funding after borrowing became more expensive. At the time of its demise in January, the company had signed initial deals with carmakers such as Aston Martin, but it had secured no firm orders.
Meanwhile, most of the biggest carmakers in the U.K., including Nissan, JLR, Mini and Aston Martin, have secured alternative supplies for cells.
Worth reading in full.
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I think what he actually saw was an opportunity to secure huge taxpayer subsidies for an inevitably loss-making operation.
China use cheap electricity from coal plants to make fabrication economical at scale. A British competitor facing our grid prices simply cannot hope to compete.
“…an opportunity to secure huge taxpayer subsidies ..”
Elon Musk is the master. They call him the subsidy truffle hound. All while his dribbling fans cheer him for “Saving The Planet” ( oh look another starship blew up)
Downvoters, I can only assume you object to the word dribbling!
Pssst, he doesn’t care about Free Speech, either.
Good news. No doubt they hoovered up a few millions in tax monies and subsidies. There is no demand for EVs, no need for them and they are eco-destructive and far too expensive. Case closed. There is no ‘climate crisis’. Never has been – unless natural processes have created one.
Let’s hope this heralds the beginning of the end of this Stupid rape of the world’s resources ! W-nkers the lot of them !!
This is not a business it’s a criminal enterprise laundering tax payer money. We should be happy the powers that be have pulled the plug citing the bottom line or whatever. The next government after labour leave us without a functioning energy grid by the late 20s will have the task of removing all such subsidies and restoring use of coal etc.
Eh? Aston Martin is one of the biggest carmakers in the UK? Mentioned alongside Nissan, JLR and MINI (capital letters as per their branding)?
I can see I’m now going to waste a few hours digging into sales figures.
So all those highly paid “green jobs” we were promised was just the load of bull we thought.
Meanwhile, China is making a fortune over the Net Zero suicide policy the Eco Nutters in Government are pursuing.
Oh look a promising new industry has gone to the wall. What are we going to do?
I suppose this is another example of how we hit those green targets – send the work abroad, reduce our ‘carbon footprint,’ reduce employment at home, divest the country of new skills, claim massive improvements in our green target scores, bump up Johnny Foreigner’s profits and make this country poorer.
Marvellous. Uncle Klaus will be pleased.
For some unknown reasons Fishy and chums were clearly not convinced about this burgeoning, new world-leading industry otherwise they would have “invested” and subsequently bolstered their investments with tax payer funds.
Its a common story. A market driven by political incentivisation totally distorted by subsidies for a product few really need. 0.5GWh market means an annual production 10,000 car batteries of 50kWh. or nearly 6,000 tonnes of batteries. What is not said is where the supplies of raw material is going to come from and that needs political clout. UK has but one factory, Chinese owned next to the Nissan plant in the NE.
The whole idea of batteries in electricity generation is to counter the intermittency of wind and sun. So can batteries actually do that? Currently NO. ——Only a tiny fraction of electricity is stored in grid scale batteries. Something like one or two watt hours worth for every million watt hours. But governments still want to press ahead squandering money like it is going out of fashion on this. If storage is to be used for let’s say a whole day of no wind then a battery system costing 5 times the amount of the actual wind farm itself would be required. ——-Talk about putting good money after bad. No one in their right mind would indulge in this fantasy economics. So as the head of the National Grid (Steve Holliday) said about 10 years ago. “We are going to have to get used to using electricity as and when it is available”. —ie if the wind happens to blow. The NET ZERO people are like someone jumping from a plane before they have invented the parachute.
As usual, the luddites out in force that want to tar any new energy source or storage as part of ‘Net Zero.’ Advances in battery technology serve many useful functions: powering portable devices as well as hybrid and electric cars, buses and trains, however the electricity is generated, smoothing demand in grid suppliers, providing power to remote locations in off-grid solutions. Time to start thinking critically, doing proper economic analysis and technical research, rather jumping on the journalist blanket dismissing of batteries, electric vehicles and renewable energy as something out of hand, which is just as stupid as stopping all oil and natural gas developments.
Batteries are useful for many technologies. But for energy solutions at grid level they are currently not viable. No one is against technologies that work and are better than what came before them, but unfortunately wind and sun are part time technologies that require battery storage to be useful and that storage currently does not exist. The waste from wind turbine blades, solar panels and batteries full of difficult or impossible to recycle products are a massive headache as regards disposal, and mostly end up in landfill . Millions of tons per year are having to be disposed off like this. ——-So much for protecting the environment. That is a total myth