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BEIJING, December 23 (TMTPOST)— BEIJING, December 21 (TMTPOST)— Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), the world’s top electric vehicle (EV) battery maker, is accelerating expansion in Europe, a homeland for many traditional auto giants.

Source: CATL

CATL and Gresham House Energy Storage Holdings plc, an alternative asset management group in United Kingdom, recently established global strategic cooperation partnership.  Both parties entered into a long-term agreement to supply up to 7.5 GWh of battery energy storage systems (BESS), with a target to increase the scope to 10 GWh of BESS for use in utility-scale energy storage.

Gresham House is owned by Gresham House Energy Storage Fung plc , the UK"s largest owner of utility-scale BESS that are powering the renewable energy transition. CATL believes the partnership will speed up the deployment of BESS, a crucial technology for enabling the deployment of renewables on an even larger scale and achieving global carbon neutrality targets.

The partnership came as CATL just announced a milestone in battery production in Europe. The battery giant said earlier this week that Contemporary Amperex Technology Thuringia GmbH (CATT), its first plant in Europe as well as the first one outside of China, has kicked off serial production of lithium-ion battery cells in December as scheduled.

CATT received the permit from local government in April to become the first company approved to make batteries in Germany. CATL planned to initially achieve the annual capacity of 8 GWh and create 1,500 jobs when the cell production in CATT started. With investment of up to 1.8 billion euros in total, CATL is scheduled to increase the production capacity to 14 GWh and total local jobs created up to 2,000 jobs in the future.

In August, CATL announced to invest 7.34 billion euros to build a 100 GWh battery plant in Debrecen of east Hungary, its second battery plant in Europe. The move is expected to better cope with demands in European market and improve CATL’s global production network development as the new plant is located in the heart of Europe, and with close proximity to some auto plants of its customers such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Stellantis and Volkswagen. Just a month later, Matthias Zentgraf, CATL’s regional president in Europe, revealed his company was considering building the third facility to produce electric vehicle-used batteries in Europe.