BATTERY TECHNOLOGY UK receives government cash boost for battery technology

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The UK’s science minister Amanda Solloway recently announced that the UK government will provide around £65 million in extra funding for battery development projects and other areas of promising research.

The UK government has announced that future technologies with the potential to “transform people’s lives” such as batteries for electric vehicles, advanced medical treatments, and robotics for nuclear power plants are to receive a £65 million funding boost. This will be made available through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund which has been extended by the UK government to help develop solutions to some of today’s most prominent global challenges, such as tackling climate change.

According to the government, the extra £65 million in funding will help to make the United Kingdom the global “home” for future developments in exciting fields such as battery technology.

Battery Technology

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How will the money be spent?

A large portion of the extra funding—£44 million to be exact—is destined for The Faraday Battery Challenge (FBC) which is researching and developing next-generation high-performance batteries.

Tony Harper of The FBC said, “In order for batteries to play their full environmental and economic role in achieving Net Zero, we need to deploy at scale and build supply chains for today’s technology, shift from strong potential to commercial dominance in a new generation of batteries and continue to build world-class scientific capability to sustain us into the future.”

The funding will also be used to complete the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre in Coventry, West Midlands, which hopes to tackle the challenges of taking new battery technologies from the laboratory and into production.

As for what’s left, £15 million will go to robotics, namely the Robotics for a Safer World challenge, and £6.5 million will go to the Advanced Therapy Treatment Centre program, a network of centers that are tasked with developing advanced medical treatments for patients with conditions such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis.

In addition to bolstering battery research, the extra funding will provide a much-needed boost to the UK economy. The portion of the funding that’s going towards the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre will enable the FBC to further its research, advance battery technologies, and create over 100 skilled jobs.

BATTERY BASICS

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A focus on battery technology

As you’ll have noticed, a huge chunk of the extra funding is going towards battery research and innovation. This serves to highlight just how important it is. In fact, it may well be the most important technology in the world right now due to the pivotal role it plays in energy storage and vehicle electrification.

However, lithium-ion batteries are quickly reaching their limit, and this poses a problem for energy storage. As such, researchers are working hard to find a replacement so that electric vehicles, grid-scale renewable energy storage, and other crucial technologies can continue to be developed and evolve, making our planet greener and renewable energy more practical and accessible.

Although nobody truly knows that the answer to the so-called energy storage problem will be, it has become one of the most prominent areas of research and investment, and governments the world over recognize this.

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