In a cloud of dust, a truck drives onto the vast esplanade, loaded with a huge container from China. Inside the “box”, which arrived via the port of Dunkirk, is yet another XXL machine. “Since January, we have received a dozen of these gift packages every day,” smiles Matthieu Hubert, General Secretary of Automotive Cells Company (ACC).
This company founded in 2020 by Saft (a subsidiary of TotalEnergies) and PSA (now a member of Stellantis) will start up before the end of the year, here in Billy-Berclau (Pas-de-Calais), the first ” gigafactory” French. A factory capable of supplying the automotive industry with some of the battery modules it needs to take the turn towards electrification, while Europe has set the end of the commercialization of thermal engine vehicles at 2035.
One after the other, the machines take place in a building which, with its dimensions (600 meters long and 100 meters wide), could practically house two copies of the largest ocean liner in the world. Assembly mobilizes half a thousand people and an armada of construction machinery. The building culminates at 35 meters and will house equipment for mixing a powder containing nickel, manganese and cobalt. A ” crepe batter “ which will go into huge stainless steel vats, before being spread on strips swallowed and spat out by a succession of twelve cylinders.
“Batteries, sinews of war”
“Before mounting the rest of the chain, each machine is tested and adjusted”, slips Nathalie Bailleul. Like a third of the 2,000 people who should have joined ACC by 2030, this technician has worked for a long time – more than twenty years – in the production of heat engines, a few hundred meters away, within the Française de mechanics, another subsidiary of Stellantis weakened by the rapid electrification of the sector.
“Previously, I was in charge of mechanics, machining. Today, my job is above all chemistry,” summarizes Nathalie Bailleul. This employee has just spent a year in Charente, in Nersac, in a pilot plant built by ACC to test its processes before launching mass production, especially here, in Billy-Berclau.
“In the ongoing electrification of the automotive sector, batteries are the sinews of war, insists Yann Vincent, the director of ACC. They represent 40% of the cost of the car and largely determine its performance. »
However, to date, the market is largely dominated by Asians, with the Chinese far ahead, but also the Japanese and Koreans. For their part, the Americans are betting on the plan adopted this summer, the Inflation Reduction Act, to attract players in the sector to their territory, with generous subsidies.
“The construction of gigafactories in Europe is a matter of sovereignty”, observes the boss of ACC. An issue that pushes players to make all-out agreements to secure their supplies of raw materials, including by widely resorting, tomorrow, to the recycling of used batteries.
Europe in support
An issue which, above all, leads to “forced march investments” : 800 million euros have been injected into the construction of the first block of Billy-Berclau, a site which should have three by 2030 – just like the two ACC factories which are currently emerging from the ground in Italy and overseas Rhine.
France and Germany have granted ACC 1.3 billion euros in subsidies with the backing of the European Union, which has agreed to relax its competition rules to launch this sector, with the hope of seeing the emergence a battery “Airbus”.
The first block of Billy-Berclau alone will be able to equip between 200,000 and 300,000 vehicles per year. By 2030, ACC’s production, all sites combined, should be eight times greater. “That should then represent half of Stellantis’ needs. Knowing that we also have a vocation to serve other customers, including Mercedes, our second shareholder,” slides Matthieu Hubert.
A gigafactory attached to the Renault Douai site
The race is on. In the North, Renault has entered into a partnership with two other battery producers: on the one hand, the French Verkor, in which it holds a minority stake and which should lay the first stone of its gigafactory in Dunkirk at the end of 2023-early 2024; on the other hand, Envision AESC, held by the Chinese (1) and to which the diamond group has ceded a third of its site in Douai (North).
On the spot, for the moment, nothing spectacular, barely an embryo of a building which houses an elevator shaft. But when it opens, in the first half of 2024, the Douai gigafactory will have 1,000 employees. A figure quickly set to double. Enough to restore color to local employment.
To fully understand what is at stake here, all you have to do is enter the neighboring workshops, at Renault. Upstairs, employees are already preparing 500 batteries a day, assembling the modules on aluminum trays – produced by the Korean LG in Poland – and a system to keep them at an optimum temperature of around 20°C.
Weighing 400 kg, occupying most of the floor of the vehicle, these batteries are placed on the assembly line one floor below, inside electric Mégane (Mégane E-tech). The workshop will also soon assemble the batteries for the future electric Scenic, expected later this year, and for the new electric Renault 5, the production of which will also start in Douai in 2024.
The electric vehicle, engine of reindustrialization
“We will soon be able to pick up our modules directly in the garden! », laughs Maxime Ripital, the head of the battery department, showing through a bay window, below, the location of the future gigafactory. “Deliveries to Renault will begin in the first quarter of 2025”, anticipates Envision AESC. As the load increases, production could triple.
What reinforce the ambition of Hauts-de-France to become “the valley of the battery”. The region wants to make the electric vehicle and its ecosystem the engine of its reindustrialisation. A form of third industrial revolution, after the mine and the thermal car. The three gigafactories could eventually represent 22,500 direct and indirect jobs in this basin.
————
“Allow States to massively help our industrialists”
Diane Strauss
France Director of the NGO Transport and Environment
“We need to localize the battery value chain as much as possible in Europe (extraction of raw materials, refining, transformation, manufacture and assembly of components, recycling). The European authorities have drawn up a framework to ensure that security of supply goes hand in hand with compliance with social and environmental standards. Similarly, the Commission requires transparency on the carbon footprint of the battery. Finally, with regard to the recycling of metals, the Union has set itself satisfactory objectives, except for lithium. We need a more proactive policy and allow states to massively help our industrialists, as the Biden administration does across the Atlantic. »