What does Northvolt’s bankruptcy mean for Europe’s battery ambitions?
Once heralded asEurope’s best shotat competing in the global battery industry, Northvolt has filed for bankruptcy in Sweden. This followsits bankruptcy filing in the USlast November.
Northvolt’s hopes at securing further investment to support its operations fell through on Wednesday, following the company’s struggles to ramp up production at its gigafactory in Skellefteå, Sweden, beyond one gigawatt-hour despite a planned capacity of 16 GWh. This led BMW to cancel a $2 billion supply contract in June last year.
Plans to integrate cathodeand precursor production were also shuttered last year as the company focused its efforts on cell production.
This is a major blow forEurope’s gigafactory ambitionsas Northvolt was the largesttier 1 cell producer owned by a European companyby announced capacity.
“One potential contribution to Northvolt’s struggles were the broad ambitions across multiple steps of the supply chain, which were difficult to manage for a startup, and remaining homegrown producers in Europe seem to be wary of following that model,” said Evan Hartley, research manager at Benchmark.
What does this mean for Europe?
In Europe, Northvolt is also developing Northvolt Drei in Germany with a planned capacity of 60 GWh.
Though Northvolt’s German developments are technically beyond the scope of the bankruptcy filing in Sweden, it is likely confidence in the project will fall and risk of it failing has increased.
Although Europe’s battery pipeline is set to more than double between 2025 and 2030, even without Northvolt’s gigafactories, much of this comes fromAsian cell producers.
“Europe has a maturing battery industry, and has seen impressive investment in LFP battery capacity in the past year, indicating that the region is following trends in advanced markets in Asia,” Hartley said. “However, the majority of that capacity is owned or has involvement from Chinese or South Korean manufacturers, with Northvolt having represented the largest homegrown ambitions.”
Benchmark provides a full spectrum of world-leading market intelligence for lithium ion battery cells, including monthly prices, capacity assessments, market forecasts to 2040 with a dynamic lithium ion battery cost model, and Benchmark’s Battery Emissions Analyser.
For more information, please fill out this form and out team will get in touch:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>