There will be no Tesla-style lithium battery manufacturing projects in Germany, according to German mechanical engineering association Verband Deutscher Maschinen- and Anlagenbauer (VDMA).
Peter Haan, spokesperson of VDMA battery production and head of business development OEM industries at Siemens, said at World of Energy Solutions conference in Stuttgart, Germany, that the country is able to manufacture battery cells entirely with production technology “made in Germany”, but lacks big projects.
“There are many small projects, but no Tesla-like project. I can’t see something similar in the near future here,” Haan told BEST. He added that a large mass-scale project like Tesla’s ‘Gigafactory’ would accelerate more investments in battery production.
At the moment, manufacturers of battery production technology are searching for customers in Asia. “The mechanical engineering companies can’t decide where batteries will be produced. That’s the job of battery makers,” he said.
The lithium-ion battery research centre for the development of electric vehicle batteries in Ulm, the ZSW (Zentrum für Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung Baden-Württemberg), is a start to show that Germany could be competitive in the world market, according to Haan.
“But Germany has to reduce costs in battery production and improve quality,” he said. The VDMA has published a roadmap to tackle these challenges in the German production industry for large-scale lithium-ion batteries in order to sell competitively on the world market by 2030.
