Isobel Sheldon.
She's electric.
Meet the woman leading the charge into our all-electric future...
Isobel Sheldon, chief strategy officer at Britishvolt, is at the centre of the plans for Britain’s biggest battery manufacturing facility: a Gigafactory that would become second only in the world to Tesla.
Photos by Stan Papior and courtesy of Isobel Sheldon
PEOPLE
Q What was it that led you into the automotive industry?
IS I suppose really it goes back to when I was about 7 or 8 years old and my dad was repairing his car. Like most young children, I wanted to go and help dad out, and I found myself curious about what made the car travel. As a child, the only thing I could see were the exhaust gasses coming out of the exhaust pipe so I thought they were what pushed the car down the road. My dad, being an ex-RAF engineer and technician, sat me down and talked about how an engine works and how this mechanical beast moved. I remember being horrified that we were sucking out oxygen from the air. Naively, I was worried that would use up all the oxygen needed for us to breathe. So, in a strange way, I sort of jumped on the pollution wagon at that age without even realising it. I was desperate for there to be a different solution.
I kept that early fascination for how things work, and started my career at 16 years old as an electronic technician. Later, I managed to blag my way into the drawing office for a company making huge quarry trucks and telescopic handlers, learning on the job. After various positions in design for manufacturing operations I eventually got head-hunted into a role right in the heart of the automotive industry – a dream for someone like me who was bit of a petrol head at that time. While in that role, I saw the first Toyota Prius – the very first one – in Toyota’s head R&D centre in Nagoya, Japan, and it set up a train of thought in my head. Thanks to a hobby interest, I was aware of lithium ion technology being used outside of things like camcorders and mobile phones and it slowly dawned on me that this was going to be the future… but don’t forget, this was back in 2001!
Q Exactly, it was very early days… what gave you the confidence to dive into the world of battery technology and how did your career develop?
IS I mulled it over in my mind for a while and I did a bit of background investigation. Eventually I just decided to throw caution to the wind and leave my job to set up a design and development company for lithium batteries. I started with a laptop and a mobile phone and big ideas; I managed to find some capital; I went out and bought a second-generation Toyota Prius and linked up with a company in California that was doing the electronics for battery management systems. Between us, in 2004, we generated the first lithium ion powered plug-in hybrid in the world – and the first one to be sold commercially as well.
It was incredibly successful until the recession hit and so much of the funding for these kind of projects dried up. There just weren’t that many people embracing this technology back then – Elon Musk was one of them of course, but he had the benefit of $300 million in his pocket whereas I had just £50k to work with! So, I had various roles as a battery specialist for a number of years, working as part of the executive team that got the Government-funded Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC) off the ground… And now I’m at Britishvolt working on probably the most exciting project of the decade!
Thanks to a hobby interest, I was aware of lithium ion technology being used outside of things like camcorders and mobile phones and it slowly dawned on me that this was going to be the future…
Q You’ve witnessed, and been part of, an incredibly accelerated period of change for battery technology – has that been key to keeping you inspired?
IS Yep, there’s been a tremendous amount of change: not just the drive down in cost, but exponential increase in the energy density (storage capacity) of batteries. I’ve seen a lot of chemistry come and go, and an awful lot of people come and go, too. Many come in thinking they are going to grab the industry by the scruff of its neck, shake it up and make it better – without really appreciating how challenging it is. I’ve said for a long time, if batteries were easy, we would have been driving electric vehicles 30 years ago!
So, it is a challenging industry… and I suppose the fact it keeps offering these challenges is what appeals to me because you will never get the perfect solution; you are always just going to be striving towards it. I think that need for continuous improvement is what has sustained me over the years.
Q Do you think that level of accelerated change will continue for the next 10 or 20 years?
IS That is an interesting question. You will always have incremental improvements, but that big step change – where we make, say, a 50 percent improvement – is a little bit elusive at the moment. The best scientists around the world are spending an awful lot of brain power trying to resolve that. There is a lot of exciting research going on but, typically, new ‘discoveries’ (so to speak) can take between six to seven years before being manufacturing-ready. So, if we’re going to hit C02 reduction targets by the latter half of this decade, all the decisions about technology need to be made now… Anything that comes along as a game changer would have to have crazy economics to justify starting again. So, essentially, lithium-ion technology is where we’re going to be for the next 10 years. But as we go in to the 2030s, I think those ‘over the horizon’ technologies will come closer to market.
Q Exciting stuff! Presumably the Gigaplant project is going to play a major part in making this all-electric future possible?
IS Absolutely – it’s massive… not just in ambition but scale: it’s the country’s second largest industrial investment in recent times and will be the 16th largest building in the world.
I like to think of it as the lithium-ion battery coming home to roost. It was Professor John Goodenough at Oxford University who invented it, and it was then licensed out to Sony and commercialised. British industry over the last 40 years has followed this trend – we’re really good at inventing stuff, we just aren’t always very good at manufacturing it.
To have a chance to marry up the UK’s automotive industry with the need to preserve the planet is incredibly special… and exciting!
Q Yes, there’s arguably been a major disconnect between research, testing, and manufacturing – do you see that changing?
IS The industrial strategy in years gone by hasn’t been very well joined up. I’ve been involved in helping academics get to their funding choices, and I think the industrial steer is what has been missing in those programmes. I see a change though… that scale up piece – that commercialisation part – is what we were missing; there was always a gap. Now, we’re trying to fill it and, luckily, we have an industrial strategy that is prepared to help bridge that gap.
Q How do you see battery production featuring the context of the circular economy and the move towards zero carbon?
IS For me, taking the carbon out of the supply chain is a critical step moving forwards. It’s no good if we are building batteries for low emission vehicles if we’re using industrial processes in places like China. We are just enforcing that C02 problem.
Of course, the fundamental issue is that the price expectation for those processes is set by what you can get in China. We need to level up somehow to make sure that, not just the UK, but the rest of Europe can compete with the Far East effectively. So that zero-carbon approach must come with support for a change in how things are structured here in the UK, to make sure we can anchor not just the Gigaplant here, but also all of those significant elements of the supply chain too. We need to be much more vertically integrated, not just as a company but also as a nation and supply chain. Then you need to look at recycling and reclamation at the back end of this. There is a challenge to be risen to on that front for the recycling industry.
Q So lots of work to be done...!
IS Absolutely, but you know, it’s going to be so good for the UK – especially our automotive industry. We all know that if battery and manufacturing doesn’t take off here in the UK, the automotive industry will start to move away. It is vitally important to protect that industry and protect those jobs.
To have a chance to be part of that and to marry up the UK’s automotive industry with the need to preserve the planet is incredibly special… and exciting! The worst (or perhaps best) thing anyone can say to me is ‘that’s impossible’ – I have to make sure I go out and prove them wrong.