The facility in Skelleftea, which aims to compete with US electric vehicle giant Tesla and Asian lithium-ion battery makers, completed its first battery cell late Tuesday, according to Northvolt.
“The cell is the first to have been entirely conceived, developed, and built at a gigafactory by a native European battery firm,” Northvolt said, adding that it “marks a new chapter in European industrial history.” According to the company, once fully operational, the site would be able to generate enough batteries to power one million electric vehicles yearly, with an annual production capacity of 60 gigawatt hours (GWh). “Today marks a significant milestone for Northvolt, and the team has worked tirelessly to achieve it,” said the team. “Of course, this first cell is simply the beginning.”
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We expect Northvolt Ett to significantly increase its manufacturing capacity in the future years to help Europe make the shift to sustainable energy,” he added. Tesla is set to open its first plant in Europe in the near future, and Asian competitors have large operations in Poland and Hungary, but until today, no European company had maintained a significant facility. Northvolt, one of Europe’s major battery aspirants, has already received orders worth $30 billion (26.5 billion euros) from European automobile titans like as BMW and Volkswagen in Germany, as well as Volvo in Sweden, with whom it aims to build a second European facility. The new facility, nicknamed “Northvolt Ett” (Northvolt One) in Swedish, already employs 500 people and will most likely employ 3,000 when it achieves full capacity.
The first commercial deliveries will take place in the first half of 2022. Carlsson and Italian Paolo Cerruti, both former Tesla workers, created the Swedish startup in 2016, which has already secured several billion euros in finance. Volkswagen, Goldman Sachs, BMW, Nordic funds, and, since 2020, Spotify founder Daniel Ek, a Swedish billionaire, are among its recognized owners. Northvolt has benefited from European funds in addition to private finance as the area catches up on its electric car production capability.
Faced with China, which dominates the market, Europe accounted for just three percent of world battery cell production in 2020 but aims to corner 25 percent of the market by the end of the decade, with several factory openings planned. The Covid-19 pandemic had threatened Northvolt’s goal of launching production before the end of the year. Fredrik Hedlund, the head of Northvolt’s new gigafactory, told AFP that the site should achieve production capacity for 300,000 vehicles, or 16 GWh, within the next two years. The gigafactory will only consume renewable energy, according to Northvolt.
Its location, some 200 kilometres (124 miles) from the Arctic Circle, was chosen because it is near important sites of renewable production in northern Sweden, including hydropower. “Making battery cells is a very energy hungry industry,” Hedlund said. “We have the objective to having the greenest cell on Earth.”