The second gigafactory of Rosatom for the production of batteries will be built in Moscow

“Rosatom» will build a second battery gigafactory in Moscow. This was stated on August 14 by the CEO of the state corporation Alexei Likhachev at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin (the transcript was published on the Kremlin website).

“We are building a plant in Kaliningrad, we agreed with Moscow – thanks to Sergey Semenovich [Собянину] – on the creation of a similar plant,” Likhachev said. He added that the state corporation is “seriously entering” electric propulsion and is thinking about the targeted supply of a complete electric drive, including an electric motor, a gearbox and an inverter.

The representative of Rosatom specified that the agreement with Moscow would be signed “in the near future.” Its terms, according to the interlocutor, are now being negotiated, it is about building an enterprise “commensurate” with what Rosatom is currently building in the Kaliningrad region. He declined further comment.

Vedomosti also sent a request to the Department of Investment Policy and Industry of Moscow. Representative of Renera (part of the fuel division of Rosatom) TVEL), which is building a plant in Kaliningrad, did not answer calls. The press service of TVEL declined to comment further.

A Vedomosti source familiar with the details of the project claims that the new plant is planned to be located in New Moscow, it will produce batteries for electric buses and Atom cars.

Renera started construction of the first large-scale full-cycle plant in Russia for the production of fuel cells and assembly of batteries in October 2022. The enterprise with a capacity of 4 GWh per year will be created on the territory intended for the Baltic NPP (the project is closed), the first production is expected in 2025 .

Drives for electric vehicles and urban electric transport will be assembled at the Kaliningrad site using the technology of the South Korean Enertech, which is the technology partner of the project and is controlled by Renera. At the first stage, the plant’s capacity will be 50,000 batteries per year, then production can be expanded to 120,000–130,000 batteries (about 14 GWh per year). Initially, the project was estimated at 26.3 billion rubles, but in January, Kommersant wrote, citing an updated roadmap for the development of accumulation systems in Russia, that the capex had grown to 51.5 billion rubles.

KPMG analysts previously estimated the capacity of the Russian electricity storage market at 126 MWh in 2020. They predicted that by 2025 it would grow to 4.7 GWh, and by 2030 to 25.5 GWh (Vedomosti) wrote about it on February 16, 2022). In terms of money, the drive market in 2020 amounted to $44 million, by 2025 it was predicted to grow to $500 million and to $1.2 billion per year by 2030. The positive trend, according to KPMG analysts, will be achieved mainly due to the development in Russia electric transport.

Rosatom’s plans to build a plant in Kaliningrad are very ambitious, but with the current configuration, the cost of Russian batteries will be higher than, for example, imported Chinese batteries, independent auto expert Sergey Burgazliev believes. He recalls that factories in China produce millions of batteries a year. According to him, in order to achieve a competitive cost of full-cycle production (including the production of cells), the factory in Kaliningrad must produce at least 250,000 batteries per year, i.e., the production volume must increase 5 times from the design one.

Independent industrial expert Maxim Shaposhnikov estimates the production of electric vehicles in Russia in partnership with Chinese companies at 50,000-100,000 per year in the coming years. That is, the need for batteries for new cars from 2025, according to his estimates, will be from 3 to 7 GWh per year.

The concept for the development of electric transport until 2030, approved by the government of the Russian Federation in the summer of 2021, provides that by the end of the first stage (2021–2024), it is planned to produce at least 25,000 electric vehicles and launch 9,400 charging stations across the country. According to the document, by 2030, every tenth car produced in Russia should be electric, and the number of electric filling stations should grow to at least 72,000. According to Alexey Zhikharev, director of the consulting company Ensolve, by 2030 the total demand for battery cells in Russia will exceed 13 GW h, taking into account the adopted concept and the already announced plans of Russian companies for the production of electric vehicles and electric buses. The total budget of the concept is estimated at 591 billion rubles. until 2030, of which more than 80% are extrabudgetary sources.

Burgazliev calls the concept, which was developed by the Ministry of Economic Development, overly optimistic. He also recalls that in Russia there is no production of domestic passenger electric vehicles yet (existing production facilities still assemble electric cars based on Chinese models. – Vedomosti). Therefore, it is not clear how the production in Kaliningrad will be loaded, not to mention the Moscow site, the expert is skeptical.

So far, the largest project for the development of electric transport in Russia is the Moscow electric bus. As of June 2023, more than 1,000 electric buses were operating in the capital, and Sobyanin promised that by the end of 2024 there would be twice as many – 2,200 units. Three-quarters of the electric buses for Moscow were supplied by Kamaz, the rest by the GAZ group.

There are no active projects for the production of passenger electric vehicles of domestic design in Russia yet. In January 2022, two companies, Motorinvest and Electric Vehicles Manufacturing Rus, applied for the conclusion of special investment contracts (SPIC) for the production of electric vehicles, which will allow them to receive benefits and guarantees that the conditions for projects will not worsen.

In July of this year, a pre-order was opened for the purchase in 2025 of Atom electric vehicles manufactured by Kama. The startup was founded in the summer of 2021 by Kamaz CEO Sergey Kogogin and businessman Ruben Vardanyan. In 2022, Renera acquired shares in Kama JSC for RUB 6.2 billion. (the size of the package was not disclosed), follows from its reporting for last year.

A KPMG review from February 2022 noted that even if the Russian electricity storage market reaches its forecasted values ​​in 2030, it will still occupy only about 1% of the global one, which in 2030 will be $425 billion, or 2030 GW h.