Construction will start this year on one of the first factories explicitly made to produce batteries for electric vehicles, located in Victoria.
Australia no longer manufactures automobiles, but local factories may soon play an essential role in the growing electric-vehicle industry.
According to The Driven, the US-based company Recharge Industries has announced plans to construct Australia’s first large-scale electric-car battery plant and has assigned the engineering consultancy firm Accenture to help build the infrastructure at Geelong’s Avalon Airport.
By the end of this decade, the factory, which is about an hour’s drive southwest of Melbourne, will, according to Recharge Industries, produce up to 30 gigawatt hours (GWh) of batteries yearly and employ between 1500 and 2000 people.
Ford confirmed that it had 60GWh of battery supply last year, enough to produce an estimated 600,000 EVs by 2023.
Construction will start in 2023
Construction on the Geelong facility is expected to start in the second quarter of 2023, according to the company, which is supported financially by its parent company, the US investment firm Scale Facilitation.
According to the company, the technical partnership between Recharge Industries and Charge CCCv (C4V) will “accelerate planning, engineering, and construction” by utilizing C4V’s supply chain, blueprints, and technological ideas.
Establishing a sovereign manufacturing capability to produce state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery cells is critical to Australia’s renewable energy economy – meeting national demand, generating export income, and securing supply chains,
Our factory, which we are building with the assistance of Accenture’s engineering and capital projects expertise and underpinned by C4V’s [intellectual property] and battery technology, will create thousands of jobs and attract large-scale investment from key players in Australia, the Indo-Pacific region, and other parts of the world
Rob Fitzpatrick, CEO of Recharge Industries released a statement to the media
Even though the battery factory would be the biggest in the nation, it wouldn’t be the first. Energy Renaissance’s Newcastle facility launched in 2021 and began generating about 1.02GWh of storage capacity yearly.
