For some time already, EU-funded initiatives have extended their contributions beyond the technological progress. A growing number of initiatives are looking for ways to bring their experience to the policy table and contribute to future decisions that may have an impact on their research and the broader industry they are serving. One of the objectives of our hub is to help gather input and portray the realities of the battery R&I sector, showing what is working efficiently and what can still be improved at policy level.

Many of the EU-funded initiatives that helped launch of the Cluster Hub “Materials for Batteries” have already reached or are approaching the final project stages. This usually reveals most of their technological achievements, some of which have already been presented at our annual workshops and covered in our post-event articles.

One question that we often asked in the public events and the internal gatherings we have organised over the past four years is “Does Europe provide the conditions to test, demonstrate, finance and deploy R&I results rapidly enough?”. Most answers aligned and we grouped them under broader conclusion lines. The main obstacles identified appear to be practical:

• limited pilot and demonstration infrastructure;
• difficulties moving from laboratory scale to industrial scale and unsupported technology transfer mechanisms between research and industry;
• insufficient finance for first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plants and high upfront investments needed to operate at scale;
• fragmented and unaligned funding programmes;
• regulatory and permitting uncertainty across Member States;
• persistent vulnerabilities in raw material supply chains;
• limited demand for secondary materials.

The purpose of the paper “Considerations for R&I priorities in Europe’s battery raw materials chains” is not simply to catalogue the shortcomings of the battery sector, but to propose possible ways to reduce their impact and help Europe move more quickly from research outcomes to industrial deployment.

Download the paper

With contributions from Cluster Hub members: BATRAW (GA 101058359), LiCORNE (GA 101069644), GR4FITE3 (GA 101103752), RELiEF (GA 101069789) and MaaSiveTwin (GA 101138334).