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The Guardian said the Blackstone Group would buy the 95 hectares (235 acres) near Cambois in Northumberland to tap into its links with renewable energy, according to recipients from one of Britishvolt’s companies.
The newspaper says administrators have disclosed how much they are paying for the site, but Northumberland County Council documents show the local authority would create a £110 million “investment and growth endowment fund” as a result of the deal.
The report notes that Britishvolt “burst onto the scene in 2019,” promising to build batteries to power British electric cars. The company won the backing of then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a promise of £100 million in subsidies, before collapsing in early 2023.
The site once housed the Blyth Power Station, a pair of coal-fired units.
Recipients Bob Maxwell and Julian Pitts of the Begbies Traynor Group were quoted as saying that Blackstone is making plans to turn the site into “one of the largest knowledge centres in Western Europe”.
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The Guardian said the council had retained the option to buy it for £4 million, the value paid through Britishvolt, if the owners failed to build a gigafactory.
The startup had promised to create up to 3,000 jobs in the region with an ambitious plan to build a second car battery gigafactory in north-east England that would rival China’s AESC plant in Sunderland. Britishvolt has managed to attract tens of millions of pounds of investment from FTSE 100 Ashtead and Glencore corporations, as well as Tritax, an asset investment arm of asset manager abrdn.
However, the task failed because Britishvolt spent a large amount of cash on its own battery generation and failed to secure the orders it needed to unlock more funds. Construction of the site began, but The Guardian later revealed that it had been brought to “life”. support” in the summer of 2022.
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