The flagship Faraday Institution will bring together the best minds from 7 founding partner universities and industry to make the UK a global leader in battery research and technology.

The Faraday Institution, with £65 million from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, is part of government’s £246 million investment in battery technology through the Industrial Strategy.

Business Secretary Greg Clark has today (Monday 2 October) announced the consortium of UK universities that will form The Faraday Institution, a new £65 million research institute responsible for building the UK’s status as a global leader in battery research and technology.

The institution will bring together the expertise and insight from its 7 founding partner universities, industry partners and other academic institutions to accelerate fundamental research to develop battery technologies. Ensuring the UK is well placed to take advantage of the future economic opportunities from emerging technology.

The universities forming the institution are:

Imperial College London

Newcastle University

University College London

University of Cambridge

University of Oxford

University of Southampton

University of Warwick

Announcing this major investment in the UK’s research base Greg Clark said:

Through the Faraday Research Challenge we are cementing our position as the ‘go-to’ destination for battery technology so we can exploit the global transition to a low carbon economy. The Faraday Institution will have a critical role in fostering innovative research collaboration between our world-leading universities and world-beating businesses to make this technology more accessible and more affordable. We have huge expertise in this area already and The Faraday Institution collaboration between our 7 founding universities provides a truly unique opportunity for us to bring together our expertise and an effort in this area behind a common set of strategic goals to ensure the UK exploits the jobs and business opportunities.

With £65 million of funding through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ( EPSRC ), the Institute will invest an initial £13.7 million to set up a headquarters.

EPSRC Chief Executive Professor Philip Nelson said:

Climate change and moving towards low carbon economies mean the demand for clean energy production and effective energy storage, in the UK and globally, is rising. The Faraday Institution will bring leading academics in the field of battery development together to explore novel approaches that will meet these challenges and accelerate the development of new products and techniques EPSRC is pleased to be helping establish the Institute, and the drive to keep the UK a prosperous and productive nation.

The Business Secretary confirmed in July that the government would be making an investment of £246 million, over 4 years, in the Faraday Research Challenge to ensure the UK builds on its strengths and leads the world in the design, development and manufacture of electric batteries.

The Faraday Research Challenge is divided into 3 streams - research, innovation and scale-up which is designed to drive a step-change in transforming the UK’s world-leading research into market-ready technologies that ensures economic success for the UK.

The Faraday Research Challenge is just 1 of 6 areas that the government, together with business and academia, identified through its flagship Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund ( ISCF ) as being one of the UK’s core industrial challenges and opportunities, where research and innovation can help unlock markets and industries of the future in which the UK can become world-leading.

As part of cementing the UK as a global leader in autonomous and battery vehicles, the government will unveil shortly the winners of its first £55 million Connected and Autonomous Vehicles ( CAV ) testing infrastructure competition.

This follows the government opening its £100 million CAV test bed competition in April, inviting proposals for how to create a cluster of excellence in driverless car testing, along the M40 corridor between Coventry and London, to accelerate the development of this technology, grow intellectual capital and attract overseas investment in the UK.

Notes to editors

The institution will host its administrative offices at Harwell Science and Innovation campus.