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£40 million Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund investment in business and research will develop the next generation of automotive batteries.

New projects by UK businesses and researchers will tackle some of the biggest challenges preventing the uptake of electric vehicles in the UK.

A total of 27 projects involving 66 organisations will share around £40 million to support the design, development and manufacture of batteries for the electrification of vehicles.

The grant funding comes from Innovate UK under the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

Improved battery management

A major barrier in electric vehicle adoption is their lifespan and range.

Current electric vehicle batteries aren’t as good as their combustion engine counterparts and degrade quickly. Drivers are also unsure of their vehicle’s ability to cover certain distances due to charge levels and limited charge infrastructure.

Clean-tech start-up Brill Power will lead a consortium to address this.

Christoph Birkl, CEO, Brill Power, said:

We have to improve batteries, we have to make sure we can get more energy into every battery, we have to make sure we can get them as efficient as possible, get every joule of energy out of those batteries to make them live as long as the cars live.

Working with E-Car, it will explore how its battery management control system can be used to enhance the battery manufacture and performance of electric vehicles.

Christoph continued:

At Brill Power we’ve developed battery control and management technology that can make lithium-ion batteries live for up to 60% longer.

We do that by individually managing every cell in a battery pack without having to replace the entire battery. We can just replace the individual modules.

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