Slovak battery manufacturer InoBat has announced that it has signed a memorandum of intent with the Government of Serbia for the construction of a battery factory for electric vehicles with a total capacity of 32 gigawatts.
The factory, as stated, should be opened in 2025 with an initial capacity of four gigawatts, the agencies report.
The Government of Serbia has agreed to provide funds in the amount of up to 419 million euros, including grants and tax credits to support the project, InoBat announced.
This information was confirmed by Prime Minister Ana Brnabić, who said that through the partnership with InoBat, Serbia “contributes to a green future and sustainable development”.
InoBat said it wants to build a gigafactory in Western Europe and one in Eastern Europe. The company’s goal is to gradually increase production capacity by four gigawatts, which, based on the signed contracts, should cost about 350 million euros individually.
Rio Tinto and InoBat
What one part of the media reports is that he is one of the investors in the Slovakian company, Rio Tinto.
At the end of last year, the company announced an investment in a Slovakian company, and on that occasion, the director of the battery material production sector at Rio Tinto, Marni Finlayson, said that this “creates hope” that a certain amount of batteries will be produced in Serbia.
“The Jadar project has the potential to position itself as the largest source of lithium in Europe for at least the next 15 years”, she said and added:
“Given that ‘Jadar’ has the potential to produce enough lithium for around one million electric vehicle batteries per year in accordance with the highest environmental protection standards, we believe that ‘Jadar’ will be a key supplier of batteries for the European market.”
“Side by side with the company ‘Rio Tinto’, we will continue the further development of our production capacities and we will cooperate closely on the development of the ecosystem for batteries, at the center of which will be joint efforts for general decarbonization”, said the CEO of the company “Inobat Auto” Marjan Boček.
This is the second factory that will produce such batteries in Serbia. ElevenEs, a development industrial project of the multinational company Al Pack Group, signed an agreement with EIT InnoEnergy in October last year , which announced strategic cooperation in the construction of the first gigafactory of LFP lithium-ion batteries in Europe, in Subotica, Bonitet writes.
