Ricardo secures £972K UK government grant for AMBERS modular battery system
What's the deal? UK engineering consultancy RicardoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has secured £972K in government funding to design a next-generation modular battery system called AMBERS (Advanced Modular Battery Systems). Consortium partners are contributing an additional £940K, bringing total project investment to roughly £1.9M.
The funding comes from the Battery Innovation Programme, a £452M UK government initiative delivered by Innovate UK and backed by the Department for Business and Trade. Ricardo is leading a consortium that includes cell manufacturer VolklecDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and pack manufacturer HyperbatDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Unipart business that will build the batteries at its Coventry site.
The modular packs will use 21700 power cells with integrated water-glycol cooling, configurable in different series and parallel arrangements to suit automotive, aerospace, off-highway, and defence applications. Ricardo says the baseline design targets a pack power density of 2.6kW/L and energy density of 220Wh/L — figures it claims would make it one of the best-performing packs on the market.
Why now? The project sits within the UK government's Industrial Strategy, which runs the Battery Innovation Programme from 2026 to 2030 with the explicit goal of building sovereign battery supply chains. Britain has struggled to attract large-scale cell manufacturing compared with European rivals, and initiatives like AMBERS aim to close that gap by proving that high-performance packs can be designed, sourced, and assembled domestically.
"Customers will no longer have to invest millions of pounds in development," said Temoc Rodriguez, Ricardo's global technical expert in electric propulsion systems. "They will be able to purchase the baseline battery pack design or only spend a smaller amount in customisation based on the AMBERS architecture."
What could go wrong? The total project budget of under £2M is modest by battery industry standards, where gigafactory investments run into the billions. Scaling from a demonstrator to volume production will require far larger commitments — and the UK's track record on battery manufacturing has been patchy, as the collapse of Britishvolt showed.
Competition is fierce, too. Asian cell makers dominate the global market, and European rivals backed by EU subsidies are ramping up fast. Ricardo will need to prove that its off-the-shelf modular approach offers compelling cost and time-to-market advantages to win orders beyond the consortium.
The signal: Ricardo is a mature global consultancy rather than an early-stage battery startup, which means AMBERS is less about proving a technology concept and more about productising existing engineering IP for off-the-shelf sale. The project's multi-sector scope — spanning automotive, aerospace, off-highway, and defence — suggests the commercial bet is on versatility over volume, targeting fragmented markets where bespoke battery development costs are prohibitive and sovereign sourcing requirements give UK-based suppliers a structural advantage.
Read more: ricardo.com
