Britishvolt had hoped to build a battery plant in the North East, but collapsed into administration.
The company that promised to buy collapsed UK gigafactory Britishvolt has been hit with a winding up petition as creditors chase it for unpaid wages and other monies owed.
Recharge Industries UK, led by Australian entrepreneur David Collard, was issued with a winding up demand by Tom Cowling, a former board member at Britishvolt and its chief governance officer, court records show.
Mr Cowling spent two years at Britishvolt, leaving in August last year, according to his LinkedIn profile. He declined to comment. Details of the winding up petition were not publicly available.
It is the latest legal action against Recharge, which promised to buy the assets of Britishvolt out of administration and revive the project but has struggled to follow through.
Administrators EY said in February that the prospective buyer remained “in default of the business sale agreement” and has yet to pay the full £8.75m owed under the deal. Work on developing the site has remained in limbo.
Two recent employment tribunal judgments, seen by The Telegraph, show Recharge was ordered to pay a total of £240,000 to two former senior employees for “unlawfully” failing to pay wages. In each case, Recharge failed to file a response, the judgments said.
Among those owed money were Timon Orlob, its former chief commercial officer. He declined to comment on the judgment.
Britishvolt had hoped to build a £3.8bn battery plant in the North East, near Blyth, creating thousands of jobs. However, it collapsed into administration last year.
Sadiq Khan’s controversial Ultra-Low Emissions Zone scheme for London was supposed to put the rocket-boosters under electric car demand.
With the Mayor pressing ahead with a highly-contentious scheme that forces non-compliant petrol and diesel car drivers to pay an eye-watering £12.50 a day to drive into the capital, the expectation was that hundreds of thousands of motorists would rush out to their nearest forecourt and snap up an electric version, triggering an explosion in sales of Nissan Leafs, Teslas and other battery-powered models.
True, sales are steadily increasing but not in the vast numbers that proponents of electrification anticipated or would like to see.
Proportion of cars on UK roads
In fact, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the car industry has misjudged the scale of demand quite badly. Vertu, which is one of Britain’s biggest car dealerships, has become the latest big name to admit that the sector is already suffering from a dramatic oversupply of battery-powered vehicles.
Indeed supply is outstripping demand to such an extent, that prices are tumbling rapidly.
The warning follows the extraordinary decision of German car titan Volkswagen in July to halt electric vehicle production at its sprawling Emden factory in north-west Germany and lay off a fifth of its 1,500 employees after sales of electric models fell 30pc short of forecasts.
Unwanted electric cars are piling up on American forecourts too leaving some dealers to refuse further deliveries until the backlog has eased.
One hopes politicians the world over are paying attention because what we are witnessing is another example of how the top-down economics of net zero increasingly don’t stack up: with the introduction of an entirely arbitrary 2030 ban on petrol and diesel cars, the Government is forcing manufacturers to churn out millions of vehicles, regardless of whether the market actually exists or not.
The deadline should be scrapped without further ado. This “cart before the horse” approach of trying to stimulate demand by creating supply is the wrong way round and almost never works in business.
Start-up Britishvolt tried something similar, promising to build a giant battery factory in Blythe, on the Northumbrian coast that would churn out enough batteries every year to power 300,000 cars.
Yet there was an even bigger flaw at the heart of its plans: it had failed to secure a single order – a situation that hadn’t changed by the time it ran out of money at the start of the year.
It’s hard to fault the intentions of the great net-zero crusade – a greener planet is something everyone should want to see. But far too much of it is built on hope rather than reality.
The Government’s policy on wind energy has proved to be similarly divorced from fact. The Contracts for Difference scheme, which guarantees a fixed price for the electricity that is produced for 15 years, is an effective incentive during more benign times but when overheads are surging, as they are now, it quickly becomes an impediment to progress.
With ministers showing little willingness to bend on prices in the face of rampant cost increases, major projects are being ruthlessly abandoned.
The biggest setback has come off the Norfolk coast after Vattenfall announced it would shut down construction of its Boreas wind farm. The 1.4 gigawatt development was set to power around 1.5m homes but the Swedish energy outfit insists a 40pc surge in costs, driven by inflation, supply issues and rising wages means it is no longer viable.
Without more generous state subsidies others will surely follow suit, shattering Britain’s stated ambitions to nearly quadruple offshore wind capacity from 14GW currently to 50GW by the end of the decade.
Yet perhaps nothing underlines the Alice in Wonderland disconnection of ministers more than the campaign to force the population to green their homes with heat pumps.
Even a ban on the sale of new oil boilers from 2026 has failed to convince people to make the shift largely because the cost of converting your home can be huge, so too the disruption and upheaval from having one installed, while much of the technology suffers from several major flaws.
It might explain why, in spite of a Government scheme that pays bungs of between £5,000 and £6,000 per household, less than 14,000 vouchers have been claimed since it was launched in May last year.
Naive politicians aren’t the only ones. Virtuous investors have wasted huge sums on other ‘green’ innovations such as fake meat that have turned out to be busts.
Perhaps the venture capital industry has got better at picking winners, though that seems doubtful. At one stage it could hardly have been worse.
A study by the American academic Ben Gaddy in 2016 found that of the $25bn ploughed into so-called “clean-tech” ventures, 90pc were abject failures, and close to all of them could be considered poor investments.
Here in the UK, the problem is compounded by our willingness to remain silent as more productive hi-tech industries that Britain should be building its future on are auctioned off to the highest bidders.
The takeovers in quick succession of Cambridge-based biotech firm Abcam by an American rival and of Staffordshire drug IT specialist Instem by French private equity make a mockery of our ambition to be a life-sciences powerhouse. This country’s help-yourself attitude to opportunistic foreign raiders has to end.
Equally, perhaps the time has come to accept that the economics of net zero are more fantasy than reality.
It’s a pity Marlow and his likes were not banging the drum years ago, before we were lumbered with Net Zero nonsense.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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