Warwick researchers to help power Faraday Battery Institute

The University of Warwick is one of seven universities that are coming together to launch the Faraday Battery Institute, a Government-backed £65m research centre.

The institute will be responsible for building the UK’s status as a global leader in battery research and technology. The administrative base of the institute will be at Harwell Science and Innovation campus in Oxfordshire.

Business Secretary Greg Clark said: “The Faraday Battery Institute will have a critical role in fostering innovative research collaboration between our world-leading universities and world-beating businesses to make this technology more accessible and more affordable.”

The seven founding partner universities are Cambridge, Newcastle, Oxford, Southampton, Warwick, Imperial College London and University College London. It is being funded through the the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

A four-year, £246m investment under the umbrella of the Faraday Research Challenge was launched in July “to ensure the UK builds on its strengths and leads the world in the design, development and manufacture of electric batteries”.

The Faraday Research Challenge is divided into three streams – research, innovation and scale-up which is designed to drive a step-change in transforming the UK’s world-leading research into market-ready technologies.

Clark added: “We have huge expertise in this area already and the Faraday Battery Institute collaboration between our seven founding universities provides a truly unique opportunity for us to bring together our expertise and an effort in this area behind a common set of strategic goals to ensure the UK exploits the jobs and business opportunities.”