The factory looks more like a pharmaceutical laboratory than an automobile assembly line. The Nersac pilot site, near Angoulême, stands 1 kilometer as the crow flies from the banks of the Charente. The building (24,000 square meters) is powered by a vast roof of solar panels. Inside evolve nearly 200 employees in white coveralls, charlotte in headgear, mask and gloves of rigor.
This is where Automotive Cells Company (ACC) is testing processes for manufacturing lithium-ion electric car batteries, with a view to equipping three huge factories currently under construction, “gigafactories”according to the terminology popularized by the American Tesla: one in France, in Douvrin (Pas-de-Calais), one in Germany, in Kaiserslautern, and one in Italy, in Termoli.
The Nersac site was not chosen at random. It belongs to Saft, a historic battery manufacturer, which became part of TotalEnergies in 2016. Three years ago, Saft launched into automotive batteries by creating the company ACC with manufacturers Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz, and with the support of the French and German governments. The factory is equipped with forty-eight induction furnaces a hundred meters long which heat the famous “ink”, an alloy powder of cobalt, manganese and lithium oxides intended to be “printed” on a aluminum foil to make up series of cathodes, one of the two battery electrodes. The other, the anode, consists of a graphite powder deposited on a sheet of copper. This chemical phase is followed by a mechanical step consisting in cutting electrodes to the size of the desired cell, and a final electrical phase consisting in activating the cell.
A job shock
ACC is booming. The firm recruits one person a day in Nersac, and its research and development center, opened in 2021 in the Bordeaux conurbation, already employs more than 600 people. A symbol of the meteoric acceleration currently being played out in the world of batteries. The electric battery was certainly invented in 1800 by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta. But the announced end of the combustion engine, scheduled for 2035 by the European Union in the name of the fight against global warming, is today causing a real revolution in the world of electricity.
“It is clearly the automobile that is causing the current boomobserves Christophe Pillot, director of Avicenne Energy, a consulting firm specializing in this field since the early 1990s. The figures are eloquent: the generalization of the electric car will cause a growth of 30% per year in the production of batteries over the next ten years, without anything countering this scenario, since there is no substitution at this stage. »
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