It is an important event in the history of French industry. On Tuesday, the ministers Bruno Le Maire, Agnès Pannier-Runacher and Roland Lescure inaugurated the first electric battery factory on French soil, in Billy Berclau, near Lens. This is the gigafactory of ACC (Automotive Cell Company), a joint venture between Stellantis, TotalEnergies and Mercedes.
Tuesday is the first block of the gigafactory to be inaugurated, of the three that the factory will have. It is in this 700 meter long, 100 meter wide and 35 meter high block, a kind of “cathedral” of the electric battery, that production will begin in the coming months. On the 34-hectare site, 180,000 m2 of workshops will eventually be built.
2,000 jobs by 2030
It took 18 months to get this first block out of the ground, “it was a race against time,” they tell us. Machines for producing and assembling lithium-ion batteries arrived at the beginning of the year. They all come from Asia because there are still no manufacturers in Europe capable of offering these battery-making machines.
After commissioning this summer, the first series production is expected at the end of the year. These batteries will then be sold, for the time being, exclusively to two of ACC’s shareholders, namely Stellantis and Mercedes. Largely enough, according to ACC, which indicates that the order book is full through 2028.
At Billy-Berclau, ACC has a target of 13 GWh of annual capacity by the end of 2024, initially with 600 jobs, and 40 GWh by 2030, with 2,000 employees, which will enable 500,000 electric cars to be equipped. This is a quarter of the goal set by the government of 2 million electric cars produced per year by 2030.
It is no coincidence that ACC chose Billy-Berclau. This gigafactory is built right next to the PSA site in Douvrin, which builds engines and gearboxes for thermal cars. In short, it is a site doomed to disappear and more than half of the employees will work in the gigafactory in 2030.
More generally, Hauts-de-France asserts itself as the European center of excellence in this area with a veritable “battery valley” in development.
An economic and political symbol for Europe
This inauguration is an extremely strong symbol on an economic level. France is in the process of creating from scratch an industry that, for the moment, does not exist or hardly exists in Europe. Most of today’s electric batteries are produced in Asia.
If European car manufacturers are to stay in the race, it is essential that they master this lithium-ion battery technology. “We have a train behind China, but it is still possible to catch up,” says ACC. With this in mind, the joint venture, which has invested €7 billion in the Pas-de-Calais site, will open a further two gigafactories in Germany and Italy in the coming years.
This gigafactory is also a very strong political symbol. France and Germany have jointly injected 1.3 billion euros in public aid for this project. The German Transport Minister will also be present along with his French counterparts. More than a factory, Billy-Berclau is the illustration of a European and French leap to recover industrial sovereignty.
Batteries going from Pas-de-Calais… to the stratosphere
TotalEnergies has invested in ACC through Saft, its arm specializing in batteries and in particular lithium-ion electric batteries. It is a flagship in its field but, until now, it did not produce car batteries. Still, they were used in quite a prestigious setting: when Thomas Pesquet roams space, he does so with a Saft battery.
Source: BFM TV
