French President Emmanuel Macron presented this Friday two industrial investments worth a total of 6,700 million euros for the production of electric batteries for vehicles in the port of Dunkirk (north), which will result in the creation of 4,700 direct jobs.
The first project, which will be in charge of the Taiwanese company ProLogium, foresees the construction of “an enormous battery factory”, with an expected investment of 5,200 million euros and that will have 3,000 employees, explained Macron during a visit to this neighboring city in north of the country, close to the Belgian border.
The ProLogium plant is expected to start operating in 2026 and will have a production capacity of 48 gigawatt hours (GWh), which is equivalent to the batteries needed to equip between 500,000 and 700,000 electric cars per year.
It is the fourth gigabattery factory announced for construction in France.
If fully realized, the country will have a production capacity of more than 170 GWh at the beginning of the next decade, enough to supply around 3.4 million vehicles per year.
The president also informed about a second project by the Chinese company XTC with the French company Orano, for the construction of a factory with 1,700 workers to produce cathodes for lithium batteries.
These investments are in addition to others already known, which should allow the creation of 16 thousand industrial jobs in Dunkirk and in that region between 2022 and 2030.
Macron said that to accelerate the pace of industrial deployments, on Tuesday next week, French Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire will present a “green industry” bill.
One of the objectives of this text is to speed up the procedures, in order to “ensure that all the authorizations are given to a project in nine months” and even in less time if it is of national interest.
The French Head of State also promised to give more coherence to French and European aid programs to favor local production over imports from outside the EU.
“We are going to put our help and our prizes on European productions”, he said, after stating that this is not about protectionism, but about favoring the European industry, which is the one with the strictest environmental standards.
On the other hand, Macron pointed to some controversial statements made yesterday, calling for “a European regulatory pause” in relation to environmental measures.
Today in Dunkirk, he stressed that it is a question of giving stability to companies and also of demanding “reciprocity” in trade, so that products entering the European Union (EU) are subject to equivalent standards in environmental terms.
His office stated that the “pause” to which Macron refers is not about establishing any moratorium or annulling the regulations in force or those being discussed, that is, that France supports the “Green Deal” so that the EU meet the climate objectives, which, as the Élysée recalled, are “the most ambitious in the world”.
Source: Renascença – Noticias by rr.sapo.pt.
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