AESC has today welcomed formal planning permission for the UK’s first at scale battery manufacturing plant at the International Advanced Manufacturing Park (IAMP) in Sunderland, UK.
The 12 GWh-capacity Gigafactory, with state of the art battery technology, will form part of a £1bn partnership with Nissan UK and Sunderland City Council to create an electric vehicle hub supporting next generation EV production and accelerating the transition to net zero carbon mobility.
Today’s planning decision secures AESC’s multi-million pound investment as part of the transformational project, that will employ over 1,000 people. Construction of the new building on IAMP – which spans land in South Tyneside and Sunderland – is due to begin in 2022. This will pave the way for potential future investment of £1.8bn on the site to generate 35GWh capacity and 4,500 new high value green jobs by 2030.
The company’s existing Sunderland plant has been supplying batteries to Nissan for the LEAF electric vehicle for the last nine years. The new scaled up Gigafactory will produce batteries to power more than 100,000 EVs annually, using new latest generation battery cells with a third more energy density to improve range, efficiency and exceptional performance, including 100 per cent safety record/zero critical incidents.
This investment will not only power Nissan’s next generation EVs, but also support the growing localisation of vehicle parts and components production, advancing technology and making batteries and EVs cheaper and more accessible to a growing number of customers.
