Acelerar a produção de baterias: o Sunlight Group acolhe o projeto BATTwin para garantir a soberania energética europeia
Athens, 08 July 2026 – Sunlight Group, a member of the Olympia Group and a leader in integrated and innovative energy storage technologies, hosted the 8th consortium meeting of BATTwin, a European-funded project, at its landmark industrial complex in Xanthi, Greece.
The primary objective of BATTwin is to support Europe's strategic shift toward energy sovereignty. With over 80% of global lithium-ion battery production concentrated in Asia Pacific, Europe must rapidly scale domestic production capacity while remaining cost-competitive.
In this context, industrial scaling of new production lines remains volatile, with initial scrap rates frequently reaching 15% to 30%. As manufacturing defects are typically detected only during final testing phases, following production, substantial volumes of critical raw materials are routinely wasted, compromising both the financial viability and strategic security of Europe’s battery ecosystem. The BATTwin project addresses thus accordingly this vulnerability by creating a "digital twin”, namely a real-time virtual replica of the factories’ cell production lines.
As a key industrial anchor for the project, Sunlight Group’s industrial complex in Xanthi serves as a critical validation ground where this technology shifts to heavy industrial reality. Spanning 90,000 square meters with an annual capacity of 9 GWh, this flagship automated facility is one of Europe’s most advanced battery manufacturing hubs. By providing a scaled, operational ecosystem, Sunlight offers the consortium the real-world data infrastructure required to train and validate complex predictive algorithms on a commercial scale across diverse cell geometries and chemistries.
From July 2nd to July 3rd, the two-day gathering brought together pan-European technology, research, and industry partners to discuss technical achievements, ongoing work, and the next steps toward the implementation and validation of BATTwin’s digital twin platform.
The consortium partners were in addition invited to technical site visits of Sunlight’s automated cell production lines to align data integration protocols between the physical machinery and the BATTwin digital platform, setting up the framework's core industrial pilot validation.
About BATTwin
BATTwin aims to develop a novel multilevel digital twin platform towards Zero-Defect Manufacturing in battery production, that will reduce defect rates in battery production lines. The solution integrates four pillars, namely:
(i) a multi-sensor data acquisition and management layer, supported by data semantics through a Digital Battery Passport data model,
(ii) process-level digital twins, modelling the critical stages of electrode manufacturing, cell assembly and conditioning through multi-physics, data-driven and hybrid approaches,
(iii) system-level digital twins, based on simulation and analytical modelling,
(iv) user-centric, goal-driven digital twin workflows, increasing the explainability of digital twins and driving the user in system design and control.
The approach is tested in Sunlight’s and Verkor’s facilities, two industrial pilots producing different battery chemistries and geometries, validating the flexibility and scalability of the approach towards Zero Defect European Gigafactories.
The BATTwin project is coordinated by Prof. Marcello Colledani, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, and has received funding from the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency under grant agreement No. 101137954.