Indonesia's second battery plant is running at Karawang, making cells for vehicles and for grid storage

PT Contemporary Amperex Technology Indonesia Battery, known as CATIB, began operating at Karawang in West Java in July 2026. Groundbreaking took place on 29 June 2025, which puts construction at roughly thirteen months.

The company is a joint venture bringing together Ningbo Contemporary Brunp Lygend, a subsidiary of the Chinese battery manufacturer CATL, alongside PT Antam Tbk and Indonesia Battery Corporation. It is the country's second operating electric vehicle battery plant, following the Hyundai LG Indonesia facility that opened in July 2024.

First phase capacity is 6.9 gigawatt hours a year. A second phase of 8.1 gigawatt hours would bring the total to 15 gigawatt hours, enough on the company's account to supply roughly 250,000 electric vehicles. Total investment for the full build is put at about USD 1.2 billion, equivalent to around Rp21.19 trillion.

Ahmad Erani Yustika, Secretary General of the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, described the plant as having started operating even if still in stages. Formal inauguration by the President remains to be scheduled.

Cells rather than assembly

The detail that distinguishes this facility is where it sits in the production chain.

CATIB is not a pack assembly operation taking imported cells and putting them into housings. The site covers battery cells, modules and complete packs, with roughly a kilometre of the facility given over to cell production before packaging begins. Cell manufacturing is the capital intensive and technically demanding part of the chain, and it is the step that most battery ambitions stop short of.

Aditya Farhan Arif, Director at Indonesia Battery Corporation, framed the economic case in terms of what processing adds. Taking nickel through to batteries, he argued, can multiply value by up to a hundred times against exporting raw ore, provided the integrated supply chain and the market demand both exist. Around 600 employees were trained in China ahead of start up.

The two conditions attached to that claim are the whole argument. A hundredfold value multiple is not a property of the mineral. It is a property of a complete chain running from ore through refining and cathode production to finished cells, with buyers at the end of it. Any link missing and the value stays where the chain breaks. That is why a cell plant matters more than its capacity figure suggests, and why the storage demand discussed below is not a secondary detail.

The thirteen month construction period is also worth noting on its own. Industrial facilities of this complexity are not usually delivered that quickly, and the pace suggests the site preparation, permitting and utility connections were resolved ahead of the build rather than during it.

The storage half of the output matters here

Reporting on battery plants tends to treat them as an electric vehicle story. This one is explicitly not only that.

Production is split between electric vehicles and battery energy storage systems, the stationary batteries that hold electricity for the grid rather than for a car. That second category has become the more immediately relevant one for Indonesia's power sector.

A country installing 100 gigawatt peak of solar needs somewhere to put the electricity when the sun is up and the demand is not. Domestic cell manufacture and a national storage requirement arriving in the same year is a useful coincidence.

The scale of that requirement is already visible. The Bali component of the 100 gigawatt peak programme alone pairs 1,000 megawatt peak of solar with 3,300 megawatt hours of battery storage. The national electricity plan for 2025 to 2034 puts renewables and storage at roughly 76 percent of 69.5 gigawatts of planned additions. Storage on that scale is an industrial input requirement, and until now it was one that would have been met entirely by imports.

A rough comparison makes the point. The 3,300 megawatt hours for Bali alone is 3.3 gigawatt hours, close to half the plant's first phase annual capacity. One province, within one tranche of one programme, absorbs a substantial share of a year's output. That indicates the question is not whether domestic demand is sufficient to sustain cell manufacturing, but whether procurement is structured so that the demand reaches the factory that exists inside the country.

A plant that will run partly on its own solar

One further detail is worth recording. Indonesia Battery Corporation plans to install an 18 megawatt solar system at the site by 2027.

That is a meaningful array for a single industrial facility, and it addresses a question that follows battery manufacturing everywhere. Cell production is energy intensive, and the emissions embedded in a battery depend heavily on the electricity used to make it. European and other export markets increasingly price that embedded carbon, whether through border adjustment or through customer requirements. A plant generating a share of its own power from solar improves both its operating cost and its position in markets that ask how the cells were made.

The move also places CATIB in the same pattern as Transmart and Danone, which is rooftop solar on industrial and commercial sites that already exist, installed because it lowers the electricity bill and the emissions together. What differs here is that the product itself is an energy storage device, so the plant is in effect making the component that allows solar like its own to work after the sun goes down.

Sirkularium's read for government and public institutions

Three observations follow.

The first concerns pairing manufacturing capacity with domestic demand. Indonesia now has cell production and, through the 100 gigawatt peak programme, a very large storage requirement. Whether the second is met by the first depends on procurement design rather than on geography. Storage tenders written so that domestically produced cells can compete on realistic terms would close the loop that the nickel downstreaming argument depends on.

The second concerns the embedded carbon question becoming commercial. The 18 megawatt solar installation signals that the operator already understands this. Public institutions can help by ensuring that renewable supply is actually available to industrial estates at the scale plants like this will need, since on site generation alone will not cover a facility at 15 gigawatt hours.

The third concerns the skills base. Six hundred employees trained abroad is how a first plant starts. It is not how an industry sustains itself. Vocational and engineering training in cell chemistry, process control and battery safety, developed with the operators now present in the country, is the difference between hosting a factory and holding a capability.

What to watch next is whether the second phase proceeds to the 15 gigawatt hour total on the timeline indicated, how much of the output is directed to storage rather than vehicles, and whether the 18 megawatt solar installation is delivered by 2027. The formal inauguration still awaiting a date will also be the occasion when verified production figures are most likely to be given, and those figures are what will show how close the phased operation has come to full first phase capacity.