A number of gigafactories currently being built, Europe is becoming a growth market for battery manufacturing, which is essential to ensuring that Europe’s fast-growing electric vehicles (EV) market can source locally supplied batteries. As a result, there had been a shift recently in the European EV market share, which had grown from a forecast of 45% in 2030 to 70%. S&P Global Platts Analytics forecasts global plug-in light duty EV sales in Western Europe to rise to 6.3 million units in 2030, up from 1.3 million in 2020, while sales in Eastern Europe will reach 194,500 units, up from 20,930 in 2020. 70% of the market, providing the market remains at its pre-COVID level of 70 billion, it means 12 million EV cars sold in 2030.
While the gigafactories are being built in Europe, they will not only look to supply the European market. It’s not just a European-centric view, because for the change in administration in the US, EVs will start penetrating at higher numbers. If a company wanted to satisfy the significant demand that was clear in Europe, they’d have to comply to the Brexit agreement’s rules of origin, which had not been a detriment for Britishvolt as a UK-based company.