December 27th, 2022
There is a spirit of optimism: more than 30 Gigafactory projects are currently being planned in Europe, which will eventually produce more than 1,000 GWh of battery capacity – and that every year! In this podcast we discuss why we Europeans should actually build batteries ourselves and why this is so important for our automotive industry.
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Our guest, dr. Heiner Heimes is senior engineer at the “Production Engineering of Emobility Components” (PEM) chair at RWTH Aachen University. As an expert in battery production technology, he emphasizes that the development of lithium-ion batteries is an extremely demanding task and requires a wide range of skills: knowledge of chemistry, physics, mechanical and plant engineering, engineering and power electronics.
In recent years, Europe has focused primarily on reducing the knowledge deficit compared to the Asian region. From the point of view of our guest, quite successfully: With each new planning project, it is now becoming more important to master all those challenges that arise from ramping up the production of different battery cell series.
Dr. Heimes gives an assessment of which cell formats will prevail in the future and how the European battery factories have to deal with flexibility around innovative cell chemistry. The central question in this podcast is which unique selling point European batteries could have in contrast to Asian competitors and how European cell manufacturers generate the most added value.
By the time combustion engines are phased out in 2035, Dr. Heimes with the construction of approx. 8 million battery-powered vehicles annually in Europe. In the best case, the European batteries required for this should be safer, more durable, more sustainable, but above all convince with their “made in Europe” quality.
