Tuesday 17 January 2023
Levelling Down
Britishvolt: UK battery start-up collapses into administration
UK battery start-up Britishvolt has collapsed into administration, with the majority of its 232 staff made redundant with immediate effect.
Employees were told the news at an all-staff meeting on Tuesday morning.
The firm had planned to build a giant factory to make electric car batteries in Blyth, Northumberland.
Ministers had hailed it as a "levelling up" opportunity that would boost the region's economy and support the future of UK car making.
Here's an alternative commercial possibility. Like a sustainable phoenix rising from the ashes, British Clockwork could forge a new direction in sustainable transport.
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7 comments:
As far as I'm concerned a bit of good news for a change. But I have to ask: why did a company which had not even got a factory built, or even customers for its products have over 200 employees?
Sounded like a subsidy, grant, boondoggle, vote-catching magnet scheme. I wonder where the money went. FTX?
Your clockwork green vehicle power could easily substitute for this failure.
Perhaps combined with a perpetual motion machine.
Much incoherence on WATO today. A select committee chair (I think) saying that the business is viable - but it just needs a bit of Government help to get started because the wicked private investors didn't cough up.
Maybe those wicked private investors are beginning to understand that without something cheaper and safer to make batteries and a decent way to create loads of cheap electricity to charge them electric cars are essentially a dead end technology - or a niche product for the rich while the rest of us walk?
Perhaps they discovered the newly-developed Lithium-from-seawater method (at $5/kg output instead of $80/kg mined) and gave up?
Or noticed that recharging EVs costs nearly the same per mile as ICE (proper) cars?
Or that EV batteries need to be replaced after ten years or so, at vast cost?
Or that Teslas are so badly built that they break down a lot (when not crashing and burning)?
Or that there's not enough minerals in the world to cover there 'plans'?
Or that recharging units are always breaking down, there are too few, the grid cannot support sufficient to cope with the projected EV numbers without major investment in grid upgrades (estimated to cost trillions)?
These 'coal-powered milk floats' will be long gone before ICE are abandoned.
Dave - and how much did the directors walk away with?
Doonhamer - it sounds like that kind of scheme to me too. The clockwork scheme just needs a better name and it could fly.
decnine - yes, the business is only viable as a taxpayer money pit and private investors know it.
Woodsy - I think walking and public transport are planned for most of us.
Ed - I suppose giving up did at least make some sense. As you point out, there are so many brick walls and it's not as if they are difficult to see.
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