On 10th June 2026, 20 members of the Coventry Society visited the United Kingdom Battery Industrialisation Centre, which is located on Rowley Road next to Baginton Airport.
The background
In the course of an introduction to the Centre from the PR and Communications Manager, Richard Robinson characterised the UKBIC as a facility offering a ‘lab to factory’ research service to enterprises keen to engage in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries.
The Centre was officially opened on 15th July 2021, the result of a joint collaboration involving Coventry City Council and the West Midlands Combined Authority, with additional funding from the Faraday Battery Challenge under the aegis of the UK Research and Innovation, which consortium collectively contributed the required initial sum of £130 million to allow the creation of the Centre.
Further to this, an important collaborator from the outset was the Advanced Propulsion Centre based nearby at the University of Warwick Manufacturing Centre, which has as its primary focus the adoption of net zero technology by the automotive industry.
In more detail, Richard explained that the Centre is able to assist potential battery producers by using their proprietary materials to produce batteries at scale on an experimental, proof of concept basis, and then to check their products by means of so-called cell cycling tests to determine how well the new batteries perform in different environmental conditions. Throughout these processes, it was stressed that the intellectual property remains with the client at all times.
By offering services such as these, potential manufacturers can avoid the often considerable initial capital expenditure on the manufacturing equipment required until the Centre has been able to test and demonstrate the feasibility and viability of producing their new batteries at scale.
In this regard, Richard was at pains to point out that the Centre will not accept orders to manufacture batteries on behalf of a client but will instead conduct practical tests to provide the data necessary to enable manufacturers and their investors to make the decision to do so themselves.
While some clients may prefer not to make public their involvement in such development work for commercial reasons, the Centre offers services to manufacturers in a range of sectors. As mentioned above, these include the automotive industry but companies in other transport sectors and of course energy storage have been supported, in addition also to the defence industry since all too self-evidently drone technology has become increasingly important in recent years.
In tandem with this testing work, the Centre also offers a range of training programmes to support staff who are involved in battery production as well as those who need to develop an understanding of how to work productively and safely with lithium-ion batteries.
Looking ahead, the hope is to develop the Centre further through the continued involvement of UK Research and Innovation, with a projected sum of £452 million for more investment in the period from 2026 to 2030.
The tour
Following his extensive overview of the Centre’s origins and its operations, Richard conducted the group on a walking tour of the facility itself, which quickly gave a sense of the scale of this 20,000m2 site.
While many of the areas within the site are not open to visitors because of the need to maintain scrupulously clean conditions free from dust, fibres and humidity, it was nonetheless possible to look at much of the equipment in the Centre through inspection windows in the different sections of the facility as follows:
- FPL: The recently-opened Flexible Pilot Line, which allows clients to undertake smaller and more flexible work with smaller batches of materials
- ISL: The full-scale battery industrialisation line, representative of the scale employed in a gigafactory
- M&P: The Module and Pack line, where individual cells are combined into different battery packs such as so-called pouches and cylinders
Towards the end of the tour, there was the chance to appreciate the size of the storage facility for completed batteries, which for safety reasons is located behind a firewall capable of withstanding a fire for two hours and is equipped with an impressive array of fire suppression equipment.
