Europe's First EV Battery 'Gigafactory' Starts Production

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland)--Europe's first homegrown "gigafactory" for the production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries has produced its first lithium-ion battery cell in Skelleftea, Sweden.

The Northvolt Ett factory in northern Sweden is located in the main cluster of mines and mineral resources. The production milestone makes Northvolt (Stockholm, Sweden) the first European company to design and manufacture a battery on the continent. The cell is of a prismatic cell format and was developed at Northvolt Labs' industrialization factory in Västerås, Sweden. Commissioning and upscaling of the factory will continue through into 2022, when the first commercial customer deliveries will be made.

Peter Carlsson, chief executive officer and co-founder of Northvolt, said: "Today is a great milestone for Northvolt which the team has worked very hard to achieve. Of course, this first cell is only the beginning. Over the course of the coming years, we look forward to Northvolt Ett expanding its production capacity greatly to enable the European transition to clean energy."

Industrial Info is tracking a number of projects associated with Europe's first and largest EV battery project. The plant aims to start large-scale manufacturing this year with an initial annual capacity of 16 gigawatt-hours (GWh), or enough batteries for 250,000 cars, and this will ramp up to at least 32 GWh by 2024, with the potential to expand to 60 GWh in the future. The company said it now has to fulfill over US$30 billion worth of contracts it has secured from key customers, including BMW (Munich, Germany), Fluence, Scania (Södertälje, Sweden), Volkswagen AG (Wolfsburg, Germany), Polestar (Gothenburg, Sweden) and most recently, Volvo Cars (Gothenburg, Sweden). Last month, Northvolt and Volvo Cars agreed to open a research and development centre next year as part of a US$3.3 billion investment. The new R&D centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, will be launched this year, creating "a few hundred jobs" and which will be followed by the construction of a new battery manufacturing plant, or gigafactory, at an undisclosed location in Europe. For additional information, see December 22, 2021, article--Volvo and Northvolt Confirm EV Battery Alliance.

The joint battery plant with Volvo will have a potential annual battery capacity for approximately half a million cars per year. It will start construction in 2023, with large-scale production in 2026, and is expected to employ up to 3,000 people. In addition to automotive contracts, Northvolt is working with Fluence, which specialises in energy storage technology, software and services, to deliver grid-scale battery energy storage systems. Last year, Northvolt announced a US$200 million investment to ramp up its stationary energy storage manufacturing capacity.

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