The development of cost-effective, reliable, and high-performance battery cells will be essential to strategic sectors in Europe such as the automotive industry (electro-mobility) and the electric power sector. However, the world production of battery cells is largely dominated by Asian companies. To reduce the gap with the battery cell production in Asia and become a world leader, the EU must have independent capacity to develop, upscale and produce battery cells.

LiPLANET aims to build a more competitive Li-ion battery cell manufacturing ecosystem and increase the production of Li-ion cells towards industrial scale, by bringing together the most relevant European Li-ion cell pilot lines and the main stakeholders of the battery sector.

The creation of a network of Li-ion cell pilot lines will allow to exploit synergies between pilot line operators, identify knowledge and equipment gaps, organise joint trainings as well as, favour collaboration with industry and academia, and facilitate the access to market.

For this purpose, different activities have been designed:

• the mapping of the European Li-ion cell pilot lines and the implementation of a network,
• the creation of a standardised legal framework and a data exchange platform for the cooperation between industry, academia and pilot lines,
• a round-robin test to compare qualification methods,
• the development of a roadmap to reach industrial scale production.

LiPLANET’s consortium is formed by recognised entities in this field. In that sense, they will be in a good position to create awareness of the network. The grounds of the project and sustainability of the network (based on a series of services provided to the battery industry) were first discussed during the European Battery Cells R&I workshop in January 2018 in Brussels, and during a dedicated workshop in September 2018 in Frankfurt.