Jaguar Land Rover owner Tata agrees to build the U.K.’s biggest automotive battery gigafactory backed by government subsidies thought to run into several hundreds of millions of dollars.
The company’s global battery subsidiary, Agratas, will invest £4 billion ($5.1 billion) into building the plant on a brownfield site near Bridgwater, Somerset, in England’s West Country not far from JLR’s vehicle production plants in the Midlands.
BBC News reports that the new plant is expected to create 4,000 jobs and thousands more in the supply chain, with vehicle battery-pack production scheduled to begin in 2026. The plant, planned for the Gravity Smart Campus in Puriton, is the first Tata Group gigafactory to be built outside its domestic market of India.
This brownfield site had been a Royal Ordnance Factory following WWII until it was decommissioned in 2008. Agratas will be the first occupier on the site, taking up about half of the land available. The company claims that by the decade’s end, the plant will produce nearly half of the anticipated vehicle battery requirements of the U.K.’s auto industry.
It estimates the plant will produce 40GWh of battery cells annually, enough to supply approximately 500,000 passenger vehicles. Tom Flack, CEO, Agratas, says, “We care deeply about the communities we operate in, so it's imperative to us that we work with, and listen to, our new neighbors as we build our factory in Somerset.”
