The event brought together experts from ongoing European projects to discuss the cells supply issue, emphasising the need for a collective European action.
On 2 October, the BMS Alliance hosted the webinar “Securing cell supply: navigating external dependencies in European battery projects” bringing together leading experts from BATMAX, ENERGETIC, NEMO, and NEXTBMS projects, to discuss one of the most pressing issues in today’s EU energy market: Europe’s dependency on battery cell supply – a key aspect of the broader challenge of achieving European energy independence.
The session, moderated by Maitane Berecibar, Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel & Head of the Battery Innovation Center, featured the following speakers:
- Md Sazzad Hosen, Research Professor and Senior Researcher, MOBI – Electromobility Research Group at VUB, representing NEMO.
- Noshin Omar, Founder and President of Avesta Holding, representing BATMAX.
- Anh-Tai Hoang, Public Affairs Officer at Forsee Power, representing ENERGETIC.
- Markus Berger, Senior Project Leader at Robert Bosch (GmbH), representing NEXTBMS.
The speakers highlighted several key challenges of the European battery sector. These include supply risks for raw materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite, which make Europe dependent on imports and vulnerable to geopolitical tensions, also considering the limited domestic capacity for refining and producing these materials. In addition to this, large-scale projects are facing investment and financing problems, due to high costs and slow approval processes.
Regulatory complexity adds uncertainty, and European companies must compete with well-established players in North America and, above all, in Asia. Other pressing issues include shortages of skilled workers, the need to develop recycling infrastructure to close the materials loop, and high energy costs that challenge sustainable manufacturing.
The Q&A session touched questions on practical hurdles such as the complexity of shipping prototype batteries across Europe, and on the lack of public financial support in advancing battery technologies from demonstration stage to full pre-commercial stage (so-called TRL7-8).
As Prof Berecibar pointed out at the end of the webinar, these issues are shared by numerous battery-related projects across Europe. This reinforces the idea that European energy independence is facing very serious challenges, intertwined with broader economic and geopolitical issues – challenges to which all the members of the entire European community, ranging from institutions, companies, universities, research centres… and projects are called to face, collectively.
This is also the reason why synergies like the BMS Alliance exist: not only to exchange ideas and know-how on batteries technical aspects, but also to create a platform where these broader challenges could be jointly addressed.
