SAGUNTO, Spain (Reuters) -German carmaker Volkswagen AG and associates will commit €10 billion ($10.6 billion) to make electric motor vehicles and batteries in Spain, its chief executive reported on Thursday. That’s 3 billion euros far more than it experienced formerly fully commited.
The enterprise also declared a partnership offer with Spain’s greatest electrical power utility Iberdrola, which will established up a solar park to partly energy the battery plant to be designed in the municipality of Sagunto in close proximity to Valencia.
Iberdrola will spend 500 million euros in the electrification strategy, its Main Executive Officer Ignacio Sanchez Galan told reporters, with out providing further more specifics.
Volkswagen explained in March it would invest 7 billion euros to establish a battery plant and produce electrical vehicles at its two automobile factories in Spain, but CEO Herbert Diess stated that figure had been lifted to 10 billion with new companions on board.
“We will electrify the 2nd-premier car or truck producer in Europe (Spain) with a new giga-factory of batteries and the production of electric autos in two plants,” Diess told an occasion in Sagunto, incorporating the program was to create “a complete ecosystem of suppliers from lithium extraction to the assembly of batteries”.
Diess spoke throughout a stop by with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to the web site the place the manufacturing facility will be crafted.
Volkswagen aims to start off creating the 40-gigawatt-hour (GWh) plant in the 1st quarter of 2023, with serial production to start out by 2026. By 2030, the website will use far more than 3,000 team, the organization said.
Spain, Europe’s premier carmaker soon after Germany, past thirty day period introduced a bidding procedure for about 3 billion euros in loans and grants to market electric powered vehicle (EV) output. Volkswagen and its Spanish unit SEAT have presented a bid.
Winners of the PERTE resources, as the application that consists mainly of European Union pandemic relief money is known, will be preferred this calendar year.
The enterprise will commit 3 billion euros in the plant in Sagunto, one more 3 billion euros in four SEAT factories, which include the Martorell plant close to Barcelona, and 1 billion in Pamplona, it stated.
Volkswagen’s Spanish manufacturer, Seat, now does not sell an electric powered auto (its Mii electric city motor vehicle has bought out).
($1 = .9463 euros)
(Reporting by Emma Pinedo Supplemental reporting by Christoph Steitz Enhancing by Bernadette Baum and Edmund Blair)