Octopus Energy and CATL are bringing a battery-swapping model already used at scale in China to Europe’s growing electric truck market.
The UK energy company and the Chinese battery giant announced a new joint venture today at Octopus Energy’s Energy Tech Summit in London. The venture, called “Swaptopus,” aims to build a network of battery-swapping hubs for electric trucks across the UK and Europe.
The partnership combines CATL’s battery technology and experience operating swapping stations in China with Octopus’s energy supply, trading, and software capabilities.
Instead of charging up a large truck battery, drivers would pull into a swapping station, remove the depleted battery, install a fully charged one, and hit the road again in just a few minutes:
Octopus Energy Group founder and CEO Greg Jackson explained to us at the summit, “We’ll have a massive stack of batteries at these stations that we can fill with the cheapest electricity at the cheapest times. You can give a truck 500 kWh of electricity, but you took it from the grid when the grid was empty. You’re using spare capacity making electricity cheaper for everybody, cutting the cost of trucking and cleaning it up.”
