Northvolt news

[nativewolf]

Anyone see the news that Northvolt has built the first EU designed and manufactured Li battery cell?

Sweden's Northvolt reveals it has built the first lithium-ion battery cell in Europe

Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt announced that on December 28th, it successfully produced the first lithium-ion battery cell to be designed, developed, and built completely in Europe by a homegrown company. “Last night, the commissioning of the Northvolt Ett gigafactory in northern Sweden...

www.teslarati.com

Congrats to all those guys but at the same time. Holy cow...that is depressing. A 60 GW factory just putting out beta cells, 4 year old effort. They need to be at 600 GW.

Supposedly there are almost 40 battery projects planned for the EU. Supposedly they will deliver about 1400GW so..who knows. Only half are funded. Of those they are in various stages of work. I have no idea where the Tesla plants actually fall out in terms of numbers, multiple different numbers. I can only assume that they plan for the plant to deliver slightly in excess of the production of the berlin facility.

Anyway, congrats to Northvolt, god help you EU...you are going to need it.

 

[Brando]

I think 2 to 4 of the founding worked for Tesla. I guess this shows how hard execution actually is. Wonder how much sweden government regs slowed down this startup ?? prismatic format NOT 1650 or 2170 - how lame is that.

which chemistry ?? LiFePO4 would probably be lowest cost. no fire concerns (that would be good - ask gM)

 

[nativewolf]

Prismatic could be ok, 2170 has reached a peak. 4680 is such a better cell format.
LiFe would make the most sense but not sure if that's the direction they took or not. Glad they got it going at least.

 

[heltok]

I have a feeling that Northvolt and Green Steel will be a very costly hobby project for the Swedish government and in 10 years we will be talking about it as a scandal. Will a few hundred unmotivated immigrants housed in barracks up in social democratic Norrland, in high tax Sweden, far away from the consumers, actually have any chance against Tesla, CATL, BYD, Samsung etc? Why would they? Because they have one guy who worked a few years at Tesla? Because they got tons of financing? That will only hinder them as they will never have the need to be lean...

Imo they will be slow to ramp, have bad yield rates, never reach profitability and the competition will quickly saturate the market.