Will Northvolt light up Europe’s green battery market?
Northvolt is currently Europe’s largest homegrown EV battery manufacturer. It’s based Sweden, and its investors include BMW and VW. The battery giant is also planning a gigafactory in Germany.
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00:00 Sweden, a natural paradise in northern Europe, but also a high-tech center for e-mobility
00:08 and car batteries.
00:10 There are large deposits of critical raw materials needed for e-car batteries here, an advantage
00:15 for Northvolt, a battery manufacturer with massive expansion plans.
00:21 "Ok, I'm gonna hook it up."
00:26 Emma Nierenheim is Northvolt's chief environmental officer.
00:29 Of course she drives an electric car.
00:32 And I'd like to hear from her what the products actually look like.
00:36 In particular, the battery cells that her company produces for electric vehicles.
00:40 "You put them together next to each other, so as you can see.
00:45 And first we build modules, which is a smaller component where we just put the cells next
00:53 to each other.
00:54 And then we put them all in a system and we add the electronics and the system that controls
01:00 the batteries and decides what temperature they need for optimal charging or how they
01:05 should be charged and discharged at different speeds."
01:09 In northern Sweden, there's already a gigafactory the size of 200 soccer fields for up to 4,000
01:15 employees.
01:16 And the planned annual production of batteries for one million electric vehicles.
01:21 Production takes place in what are called "clean rooms" with different battery cells
01:25 being manufactured for each carmaker.
01:28 The onboard computer in the car controls how batteries are discharged as evenly as possible.
01:34 And at the charging station, it regulates the charging so the car is charged as far
01:38 as possible above 50% within a half an hour.
01:47 Creative thinking and teamwork are important to the company.
01:50 Its lab near Stockholm has 1,000 employees alone.
01:54 One of them is project manager Marius Hoyenski.
01:58 "I think it's super exciting honestly.
02:00 I think a battery first of all is a very complex product where different people have to collaborate
02:06 to really make this happen at scale.
02:08 It's engineers from all different disciplines.
02:11 It's of course business backgrounds, it's production people.
02:16 Everyone needs to come together to really deliver to make this common mission come to
02:21 life."
02:23 Last year, 1.5 million electric vehicles were registered across Europe.
02:27 From here, they are planning two new gigafactories in Norway and Germany.
02:32 Northvolt is expanding globally, investing several billion euros.
02:36 "It's not boring because it's quite challenging.
02:40 We design and build battery cells, but we also build battery factories.
02:45 And this is what we are here for.
02:47 We are here to enable this transition with sustainable battery production on gigascale
02:54 in Europe.
02:55 So we are homegrown and we want to keep the momentum and we want to be in the front lead
02:59 and show that you can do this in a sustainable way."
03:04 Northvolt's major investors include the German car manufacturers BMW and VW, who are
03:10 also customers.
03:11 "We have the premium segment in Europe.
03:20 So the really fine brands are on our customer sheet.
03:26 And when you do high-performing batteries, we need to compete with the cars running at
03:33 200 km/h."
03:35 There are huge deposits of critical raw materials in the Scandinavian countries.
03:39 This is a competitive advantage for Northvolt, because the company needs large quantities
03:44 of magnesium, cobalt and nickel for battery production.
03:48 The old batteries are also recycled using a shredding process, which is important for
03:52 the environmental balance.
03:54 And the factories must be powered by electricity from renewable sources, which is the only
03:59 way to produce green car batteries.
04:01 "So this is the crash course, so why are you doing this?
04:06 How is it going?"
04:08 There are also production sites in the US, Poland and Portugal, and all of them rely
04:13 on recycled raw materials too.
04:16 The engineers are currently working on optimizing the recycling production processes.
04:20 "Exactly.
04:21 They will develop processes here that we can use in any hub in Germany or Poland, and where
04:30 battery packs from the OEMs or from the end of life can come back to us and be automatically
04:37 disassembled and discharged, and then eventually become those nice battery materials that we
04:42 saw."
04:44 The Gigafactory in northern Sweden is already being expanded again.
04:49 It will soon look like this in Germany too, where a Gigafactory will go into operation
04:53 by the end of 2025.
04:55 Total investment will come to 4.5 billion euros.
04:59 The demand is huge, and growing.