Between the North Station and the Plaza del Ayuntamiento de València, a large part of the industrial future of the Valencian Community is decided. PowerCo, the company that will manage the SEAT-Volkswagen battery plant in Sagunt, has set up shop in a building in the center of Cap i Casal.
The company has been actively searching for various profiles, finance or human resources professionals, since mid-January with the idea that they will join the company on March 1, the same month that work is scheduled to begin. on the grounds of Parc Sagunt 2 to erect the future gigafactory.
In fact, since last Friday they are looking for a construction manager who will be in charge, among others, of coordinating the work, processes, safety and quality. Times are pressing because the automobile company projects that the plant will be working in 2026, and in this way the Valencian Community wants to consolidate its position as the sustainable mobility hub of southern Europe. But it is not a flash in the pan, they warn from the Valencian automotive sector, since companies have been working on this transformation of an entire sector for a long time under the cover of the shift from the combustion vehicle to the plug-in one.
They explain it from AVIA, which brings together 122 automotive companies and which a few months ago wanted to reaffirm this thesis by changing its name and making it clear that it is an automotive and mobility cluster. “It is a mistake to want to separate the automotive industry from sustainable mobility, because, today, it is the same sector, the same concept and it is the same business fabric that has to respond to new needs. And it is showing that the Valencian companies in the sector are perfectly adapted to this change”, explains Mónica Alegre, president of AVIA.
They even put a date on that previous work: 2017. It is the date of creation of Mobility Innovation Valencia, the tool that AVIA designed and with whose funds it finances the transformation of the automotive sector towards sustainable mobility. Jackie Sánchez-Molero, its director, explains that “it was created because the Valencian automotive companies saw the need to diversify from classic automotive to that other type of mobility years ago and thought that the only way to do it was with innovation.”
Companies, technology centers, startups participate… and in the last year and a half interest in the sector has been increasing. Sánchez-Molero assures that his conferences are “very intense” because there is great interest in developing projects, finding partners or creating consortiums and concerns come from all over Spain, also from Europe.
“The Sagunt gigafactory contributes to show the rise of an industry that many people want to join, right now we are a very important pole”, warns the head of the MIV.
Because until now, the sector did not live only from Ford, they come to say. Mónica Alegre defends that in the Valencian Community there is a business fabric related to the automotive industry and sustainable mobility that is “competitive, excellent, with highly qualified technical teams and the ability to adapt to the demands of their projects”.
Some examples are the companies that accompany the Volkswagen Group in the business group that encompasses the Future electric vehicle value chain: Fast Forward, which was presented on Thursday in Madrid and in which companies established in Valencia work, such as Gestamp, Glavista or Gonvarri, and the Valencian companies NUTAI, from Silla, and Órbita Ingeniería, from Alcàsser. Also PowerCo itself, whose headquarters are in Valencia.
“Far from hiding innovations and projects, we are at a time when it is necessary to share and help us improve,” AVIA manager Elena Lluch said this week about the transnational platform that pools projects from various regions, including the valencian
The fact that a battery plant is going to be installed in Valencia is a boost for the rest of the industries, explain all the actors. The visibility of the projects is much higher, as are the expectations, especially in employment. The Valencian Administration has always focused on this aspect, which also attributes part of the success that the automotive industry is already savoring. It remains to be seen how the needs of the new industries fit in with the size of their workforces, a question that particularly worries the unions of Ford Almussafes, which will also go up to electricity production from Valencia.
At the presentation in Madrid of Future: Fast Forward, the Minister of Territorial Policy Rebeca Torró, pointed out that “in the Valencian Community we have spent months of great joint work with this public-private collaboration from minute zero and we have already started with the first steps in this great project, which will mean 3,000 direct jobs and 33,000 induced ones. That means more growth and stable, quality employment for the Valencian Community”.
“It will have a strong impact, because highly qualified and specialized profiles are going to be needed and that is stimulating the design of training as it is added to other training already underway by universities or research centers like ours”, explains Ignacio Casado, Director of Communication and Marketing of the Technological Institute of Energy (ITE).
Casado believes that there is a “solid context, with many years of work and technological research” and envisions “unbeatable prospects: there is much to do and we are prepared,” he says.
Without forgetting the park of suppliers that the gigafactory itself will create, the synergies that will occur between companies and the opportunities that it opens up for each other.
Already last summer, in a meeting between the CEV and SEAT’s Executive Vice President of Purchasing, Alfonso Sancha, the latter stated that the gigafactory will generate purchases worth 8,000 million euros. Normal that its implementation in the Valencian Community is celebrated as a triumph for the sector in so many ways.