British Volt, a UK company which was looking to establish an enormous battery factory in Northern England collapsed recently, partly due to the failure of the British government to be forthcoming with £100 million of funding.
The funding had been conditional and the company basically failed the 'risk assessment' hurdles the government had put in place.
The factory was going to be the fourth largest in the UK, focused on producing batteries to power electric cars and was set to create 3000 jobs.
But it's not too risky for private capital.
In fact the factory is still going ahead, but now it's going to be built (potentially) by an Australian startup called Recharge Industries which put together and aggressive package to take over British Volt which included plans to build said factory for £3.8 BN.
NB there were THREE bidders overall for this take over which strongly suggests this project has a decent chance of succeeding even though this is no small infrastructure development proposal, so no surprise that while this is a start up the company is under the New York based investment firm Scale Facilitation.
The startup now plans to develop a 30 GWH factory in Northumberland and build Lithium batteries with materials free from Russia and China, reducing future supply chain risks.
The bidders were apparently most attracted by British Volts intellectual capital which included patents, designs, technical licences and supply chain partners which give the company a dominant position in the UK market.
And now with an Australian firm owning the company, and with Australia being one of the largest producers of Lithium in the world, it looks like the factory has a decent chance of succeeding.
A missed opportunity by the UK Government?
So what we have here is an innovative company looking to play a major role in the development of Britains' new green infrastructure and the government can't even find £100 million to support it.
I guess this is a case of the UK government having extremely risk averse investment criteria along with it being unwilling to be forthcoming with any additional funding.
This would have been a great opportunity for the government to commit to a
major project as part of a kind of new Green New Deal maybe within some sort of public private partnership.
The fact that there was so much interest from Private capital, and the final bid was 'aggressive' suggests this project has a good chance of success.
But now any profit generated from the factory is going to be leaving the country for Australia and the United States!
NB the take over deal still needs to be finalised.