At the moment the project Navalmoral gigafactory It goes ahead and will take its first steps in the execution of earthworks in less than two months in Expacio Navalmoral. The delay announced by the Ministry of Industry for the new call for the PERTE (Strategic Project for the recovery and economic transformation) of the electric vehicle (VEC) does not condition, at least for now, the plans of the Chinese giant in Extremadura; but the truth is that the financing of the Envision mega-plant is still up in the air and the company warns that without the same support that other initiatives like the one they promote have already guaranteed, they will not be able to continue: “We are working with good will because we understand that the central government is going to help us to the same extent that it has helped other projects like ours. But we can not go ‘lung’ and provide all the financing to have to compete later with companies that have not needed to do it like us. We could not compete like this,” says José Domínguez Abascal, non-executive president of Envision Spain, in statements to this newspaper.
The company plans to start at the end of March the first phase of the works through a license that would only give them permission to carry out these earthworks on the plot of the Navalmoral industrial park. The planning with which they work, if the doubt of the financing is cleared, is that throughout the summer the construction phase begins with the foundation and that the production of batteries for electric vehicles starts at the end of 2025 or early 2026. The calendar remains unchanged for the moment in the absence of definitive clearing of the financing.
The PERTE has always been the great asset due to the amount of funds it moves (there are 2,100 million), but not the only one. Envision is pending the resolution of the application that it presented last December to receive aid through Regional Incentives. It is one of the ways that they have always explored and that they activated after being left out of the first call for the PERTE of the electric vehicle last October.
“The project will not be able to continue if it does not have the same help as Volkswagen; we will not be able to compete”
The company has maintained the idea of attending the new call for these aids that the Ministry of Industry then announced for the first quarter of 2023, after 75% of the 2,975 million were left without being awarded; and it still remains in that scenario, because it considers that is “an important part of the plan” to get the battery project off the ground. The point is that the Ministry of Industry has decided to delay its call to undertake a comprehensive reform of aid, since the previous allocation did not meet expectations and some of the main tractor projects, such as the Navalmoral gigafactory (within the Venergy plan championed by Envision and Acciona) ran out of funds. Among the novelties that are being proposed is extending the deadline for submitting proposals and allowing unitary projects to compete instead of plans that included dozens of proposals and companies in the previous model. The term that Industry has now given places the new PERTE in the first half of the year.
400 million in aid and 2,500 investment in the battery plant
In Envision they understand that this change in plans does not have to delay the deadlines and that is what they ask for: “Any delay always adds difficulty. But if the delay in the PERTE is for the better; to facilitate the procedures and to have more agility, welcome”, insists the non-executive president of Envision Spain. The company aspires to obtain aid to cover 16% of the 2,500 it plans to invest in the gigafactory. They would be around a hundred through the Regional Incentives (it is the number that they considered requesting); They formally requested last December and must be resolved by the Ministry of Finance in the coming weeks. The rest would depend on financing from PERTE-VEC until it reached 400 million, a figure similar to that which Volkswagen has secured for its gigafactory in Sagunto through the first PERTE call. “The project cannot go ahead if we do not have the same options as Volkswagen or Arcelor Mittal, because we will not be able to compete,” Domínguez Abascal insisted.
Rain of millions of PERTE for the Volkswagen plant
The Volkswagen project, which includes the Sagunto gigafactory to which Extremadura also aspired, was the one that received the most aid in the first PERTE call. After the complaint raised by the firm for the provisional award of 167 million and the threat to drop the project if there was insufficient aid, the Government increased aid to the Sagunto gigafactory and the electrification of Volkswagen with European funds up to 397 million of euros. The company aspired to about 500 million; it didn’t get them, but still the German automotive giant lobbied and ultimately got the biggest slice of the PERTE pie (45% of the awarded funds). There was funding for a dozen projects.