The Faraday Institution

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ISCF
ISCF
ISCF
ISCF
ISCF

£669,148,645

Jan. 1, 2018

Sept. 30, 2023

Summary

The battery is the most important component of electric vehicles, determining performance, range, vehicle packaging, cost and vehicle lifetime. The automotive industry is a UK success story, employing 814,000 people and turning over £77.5bn per year. The UK is home to Europe's largest automotive battery and EV manufacturer. Our automotive industry is committed to the transition from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles, preserving and expanding jobs and prosperity. The UK will not succeed if it has to rely on Asian or US supply chains for batteries. It will not succeed by simply catching up with today's lithium batteries. We must leapfrog current technology by carrying out more effectively and at scale basic research in batteries and then translating it more seamlessly into innovation and manufacture. This is the ambition of the Faraday Challenge, announced and funded by government, with its three elements: the Faraday Institution (research), Innovate UK (development) and the Advanced Propulsion Centre (industrialisation). The Faraday Institution, in particular, must invest in the UK science and engineering base so that it drives innovation, delivering leading edge battery technology for Britain.

We propose to establish the Faraday Institute headquarters (FIHQ) as an independent organization, based at Harwell, the centre of UK science, and with a satellite office at the National Battery Manufacturing Development Facility once completed. It will not belong to any University or group of universities, nor be aligned with particular companies. It will be a UK resource. The FIHQ will be governed by an independent board drawn from academia, industry and independents. It will contain an Expert Panel bringing together in one organisation the UK knowledge base in batteries. The Expert Panel will translate industrial needs for better batteries into specific research challenges and scope calls for proposals from the University sector to carry out research to meet these challenges. It will support intellectual leadership to the Research Projects within the universities, review the projects, advise the board on allocation and reallocation of resources and stop/start of projects. Dedicated personnel will work to ensure research with the greatest scope for exploitation is transferred to innovation and ultimately manufacture. Intellectual property will be owned by the universities but pooled, forming a portfolio of battery IP with a value greater than the sum of its parts. The headquarters will run a training programme. This will include are PhD cluster with the students placed in the universities alongside the FI Research Projects but also with a strong cohort ethos across the Faraday institution. Training for industry and government will be a strong element of the FIHQ activities. . By carrying out strategic research in batteries as a nationally managed portfolio and with greater scale and focus, we will not only enhance the quality and capacity of UK battery research, but also establish the UK as the go to place for leading battery technology. By doing so we will supporting the future UK manufacturing industry, jobs and prosperity.

Potential Impact:
IMPACT SUMMARY FOR JES

Together with the rest of the Faraday Challenge, the FIHQ will push research through to commercialisation to attract inward investment in the form of two gigafactories (or equivalent) in the UK by 2030 and £10bn's of value for the UK from cell/ pack manufacture.

Firstly, we will develop a better understanding of what industry really needs. Using the close links between the FIHQ and Faraday Challenge Advisory Board, on which the FI Director and Chief Scientist sit, we will ensure better translation of industry needs into UK battery research. Through our expertise we will also inform industry on the latest global developments and suggest where they can be competitive. Secondly, we will strengthen the pipeline from research through scale up to industrialisation, ensuring alignment between the FI, Innovate UK and the APC activities, and thus fostering and accelerating the translation of research into technology and its commercialisation. Thirdly, we will build an accelerated process for commercialisation, recognising that not every innovation needs to pass through the formal chain of research, scale up and industrialisation to reach the market, with its decade-long (at least) timescale. We will build a programme for rapid "spin outs" of promising technology and will offer "spin ins" to UK SMEs - allowing those with promising ideas, but lack of capital, to access our facilities and equipment in order to develop their ideas. Finally, we will develop the capabilities that industry needs. In addition to the research breakthroughs we deliver, an equally important output of the FIHQ is to ensure that we build the knowledge and capabilities in batteries that industry need to be more competitive. We will build better battery capabilities in the UK industrial base through a national training curriculum and coordination for the different institutions to deliver it.

By the end of 2017, we will put processes in place to take action in each of these four areas. We will also develop metrics to chart our progress: estimating the value created by our research (enterprise value of companies/ products, investment, jobs, exports); and tracking the number of people trained up for industry and academia. In addition, as we are the first of the ISCF programmes, we want to share our experience (both successes and missteps) with subsequent ISCF programmes to assist them in developing their own approaches.