The reconversion of the Spanish motor industry to produce battery-powered vehicles seems to have no turning back. All brands with an industrial presence in Spain have taken advantage of European aid to secure production lines for a component that represents a third of the cost of an electric car: the battery. Stellantis, Seat, Ford and Renault have pulled the Strategic Project for the Recovery and Economic Transformation of the electric vehicle (Perte-VEC) to jointly secure almost 100 million euros of non-refundable subsidies to launch electric battery assembly lines , to which are added three gigafactories that will supply the batteries that are connected to those batteries. The call closed last week by the Ministry of Industry has achieved the goal it sought: to create that first protection cord for Spanish factories in the face of the disruption of the sector, which needed nearby facilities to save on a critical component such as batteries, but also heavy and expensive to transport. In this line of aid, 550 million euros have been distributed, which is added to the 877 million distributed in 2022 in the first call of this Perte, less than 30% of what was intended, which has forced new windows to be enabled. .
As a counterpart to these investments, projects that are not so close to the vehicle assembly lines have been more discreet. Activities such as the extraction and treatment of minerals or the recycling of already used batteries, which in the future could be an important field of business due to the lack and increase in the cost of raw materials, have barely captured a quarter of the Next Generation funds distributed in this call, which has two legs: one focused on the electric battery value chain (550 million in total in addition to credits) and another more focused on the production of vehicles and components (344 million in subsidies and 215 million in soft loans).
![In blue the projects with definitive assignments and in gray those that are still in the allegations period](https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5dl3Z/full.png)
“We are very proud of the performance of this call. It is a resounding success and responds to an industrial reality. We have approved 26 projects from 21 different companies and all of them are key to the new industrial revolution,” says Héctor Gómez, the acting Minister of Industry to EL PAÍS, who highlights the improvement in automotive jobs and greater “social cohesion.” and territorial”.
The map of Perte-VEC aid in its version for electric batteries shows a strategic distribution over the territory of the new battery cell factories. To the Volkswagen Group gigafactory in Sagunto (Valencia), decided in the first call of the Perte, are now added the Envision one in Navalmoral de la Mata (Cáceres) and foreseeably the one that Stellantis will build in Figueruelas (Zaragoza), the latter still pending of obtaining greater public resources after receiving 56 million, an amount very far from the 200 million to which the Franco-American group aspired. Despite this, these two facilities have absorbed almost half of the non-refundable aid distributed in this call (a total of 528 million euros, without taking into account assigned soft credits), to which are added other smaller ones. A notable project for its innovative spirit is that of Basquevolt, which aims to produce more advanced solid-state batteries in Vitoria. It will receive 14.6 million to manufacture batteries that provide greater autonomy to vehicles.
The allocated resources (only 21.2 million have been left unassigned, in addition to 187 million in loans with advantageous interest rates) will accompany investments of billions of euros. Of the 26 approved, nine correspond to investments that focus on the extraction and treatment of raw materials and the recycling of batteries to obtain new resources. That part of the value chain, which a report from the European Court of Auditors called for to promote to gain competitiveness against China and the United States in the field of electric cars, has been left with a quarter of the total aid from this Perte window. , 123 million euros.
Change of criteria in the final phase
This type of investment, further removed from the direct supply of car factories, took a giant step in the latest allocations of funds made by the Ministry’s technicians. BASF’s project to build a new metal refining plant in Tarragona was approved at the end of October with a contribution of 15.8 million in aid. Lotte, with an investment of 400 million euros to produce elecfoil, a basic element for battery cells, secured 49.26 million last Wednesday. Previously, both reports had been dismissed and were only rescued after the allegations period. These investments have also been ultimately added to the plan to produce lithium hydroxide in Cáceres, by Tecnologia Extremeña del Litio, with an allocation of 18.8 million and other projects.
“We have not been able to create a powerful industrial sector and our view of the economy is always so short-term that it costs more to carry out these types of projects: regarding electric car technology, Spain has little to say,” laments Luis Romeral, director of the research group on Motion Control and Industrial Applications at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, regarding the difficulty of carrying out industrial ideas that are more independent of car factories. The ministry has ended up rejecting other proposals from Basf, five from Ficosa and even an investment to build a battery recycling center in Seat.
“Yes, there are initiatives, but it is true that from the investment point of view they are not of such magnitude, but there are projects for components, battery management or some compound… But it is true that at the level of investment are not so attractive,” says Míriam Pérez, director of PWC Consulting. Jordi Esteve, partner of the consulting firm, affirms and points out that perhaps the time has not yet come for Spain to have all the production factors of a battery: “Some of these projects may arise,” he ironically, “in the Perte-VEC 74 or without help, but there will be a time when once you have the two or three cornerstones of production, you fill in the missing holes.”
New help line
Gómez, who has overcome the fear of repeating the fiasco that was the first call of the Perte-VEC, in which barely 29% of the available resources were spent, calls for “not dissociating line A [centrada en baterías] of B, specifically oriented to the value chain and where we have received 75 investment plans”, and which it expects to have awarded in the first quarter of next year. In that same period, it is planned to create a new line that is expected to be the last hoard of aid for the automotive industry, 1.2 billion euros, the distribution of which still does not have clear criteria.
“It will be a line that provides continuity to the existing Perte and resolves their shortcomings,” explains the Minister of Industry, optimistic in any case with the distribution of resources that, together, are expected to mobilize 8.6 billion euros in investments. The novelty of this last line of aid will be that it will be executed through the National Innovation Company (Enisa), a small public entity that this year has had a budget of about 120 million euros. The State business entities are the oxygen tank that the Executive has found to be able to prolong the time margin for companies to make investments.
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