[HN Gopher] Sweden's Northvolt raises $2.8B to supercharge EV ba...
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Sweden's Northvolt raises $2.8B to supercharge EV battery output
Author : cpach
Score : 184 points
Date : 2021-06-09 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| imartin2k wrote:
| In case you're interested in Northvolt and other Swedish tech
| companies: I'm curating a free weekly newsletter on Swedish tech
| in English (the only one, afaik). You can check it out at
| http://swedishtechweekly.com
| cpach wrote:
| Hey, that's an awesome resource!
| imartin2k wrote:
| Happy to hear that :))
| leogiertz wrote:
| Thank you for doing it! We've been subscribers for a while now
| and it's great.
| imartin2k wrote:
| My pleasure. It's fun, and there's so much going on in
| Swedish tech.
| gcheong wrote:
| I'm disappointed that this is only about expanding factory
| output, not some technology that would "supercharge" the actual
| battery output. Will there be enough lithium in the world to meet
| demand without some major advancements in the battery technology,
| I wonder?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Boring, incremental progress is how things get done. "only"
| expanding factory output is a pretty big part of how you make
| batteries cheaper and usable in more applications.
| amelius wrote:
| And they don't even have access to Tesla's "tabless" battery
| patent.
|
| https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/just-how-much-breakthr...
| brianwawok wrote:
| The is no shortage of Lithium, just need more mines to open up.
| The price rising will make more places profitable to mine
| Lithium.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Lithium is one of the most abundant materials in the Earth's
| crust.
| ajross wrote:
| To be fair: it also concentrates poorly (there are no
| "lithium veins"), making extraction comparatively expensive
| in relation to common metals. So there's a real problem to be
| solved here. But it's not a "shortage" and we won't "run
| out".
|
| The _other_ components of Lithium battery chemistries,
| however, tend to be much rarer. Most (by kWh capacity)
| manufactured battery chemistries today are dependent on
| cobalt, which is a rare earth with some finite quantity of
| reserves that absolutely can "run out". Some manufacturers
| (Tesla in particular) seem to be having some success moving
| off that and onto nickel chemistries. We'll see.
| ajross wrote:
| We aren't going to see major advancements like that. Lithium
| cells are pretty mature technology at this point. What you're
| going to see is tweaked chemistries and designs (c.f. the Tesla
| 4680 cell everyone likes to talk about) that make batteries a
| little cheaper or a little lighter here and there, but with
| some tradeoffs.
|
| That said: Lithium cells are already good enough and cheap
| enough for ground transportation to be practical. And that is
| in some sense the "last frontier". Static applications are
| already as well served as they ever will be, and no, battery
| powered aviation just isn't going to be practical ever (carbon
| nerds need to look at synfuels there).
|
| We had the amazing revolution in battery technology already,
| basically. And it enabled your EV and your phone. We won the
| game about 15 years ago.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| If this[0] shakes out, lithium will not be the limiting
| component. If.
|
| https://www.mining.com/scientists-develop-cheap-and-easy-met...
| nickik wrote:
| Nice company. Basically two guys who worked on Tesla Nevada and
| were like 'we could do this in Europe'. I saw some of their
| earliest talk and I was like this is a brilliant move for them,
| the European were really slow on the uptake with EV and supply
| chain localization.
|
| This gave them a really nice head start to be able to get all the
| funding.
|
| They seem to be doing some interesting stuff with vertically
| integrating cathode, but I haven't found to much information
| about that.
| tpmx wrote:
| With the quite high factory worker manpower cost here in Sweden
| I was (maybe still am) a bit skeptical against this commodity
| play.
|
| There are many examples in the past where commodity
| manufacturing projects have eventually failed badly against
| Asian competitors with dramatically lower employee costs.
| (Heck, even specifically in the battery space.)
|
| As I understand it, in the short term the primary motivation is
| providing battery volumes at a steady/guaranteed rate to their
| European car industry investors since there currently is a lack
| of stable global supply. Hard to argue against this.
|
| In the longer term, I'm guessing Northvolt is gambling that
| co2-neutral manufacturing of batteries will become an important
| enough differentiator - either by customer choice or EU
| legislation - that they'll be able to sell their batteries at
| what might end up being a relatively high premium.
| mongol wrote:
| I think it should be seen in context of automotive
| manufacturing supply chains, just in time delivery and all
| that. There are still much automotive manufacturing in Europe
| and transporting a vital part of an electric car all the way
| from Asia might not make sense from a supply chain
| perspective?
| tpmx wrote:
| I don't think they'll keep using European-built batteries
| when Chinese-built batteries are readily available at a
| noticably lower price, perhaps 5 years from now unless
| there are e.g. tax penalties in place for owning a car with
| a battery made with co2-polluting power. Consumers will go
| for the car that's 10% cheaper.
| alkonaut wrote:
| If manpower is a visible cost (vs power, transports, raw
| materials) you probably aren't doing battery manufacturing
| right. Automated high power manufacturing should be very
| competitive close to cheap hydro power and cheap ports near
| auto factories.
| tpmx wrote:
| Half a year ago they were projecting having 3k employees in
| 2025.
| abductee_hg wrote:
| uh, are they also committing to raise the energy density, but
| then only will build bigger batteries? :)
| jorgenveisdal wrote:
| Met the CEO when he was VP of Supply Chain at Tesla. Super
| humble, super Swedish, very bright. This will be huge.
| bosie wrote:
| > super Swedish
|
| Hah, what does that mean?
| jorgenveisdal wrote:
| Hard to explain. I guess it's a Norway-Sweden thing
| bberrry wrote:
| Forgive my brazen armchairing but I question whether it's the
| right move to go all-in with Li-ion batteries at this time. Both
| solid state and Aluminium-graphene technologies seem around the
| corner and are extremely promising.
| zizee wrote:
| I am no expert either, but I would expect it will take at least
| ten years to commercialize any new battery technology.
|
| Investments made today into li-ion production would expect to
| have a return on investment in under ten years, so it makes
| sense to make such an investment.
|
| Edit: If it were to take less time to commercialize the new
| chemistry, it would be because it can piggyback off existing
| techniques. If that were the case, converting existing infra to
| the new battery chemistry would be possible. So the current
| investment would likely not be wasted.
| coenhyde wrote:
| "around the corner" is the problem. That isn't now. Li-ion is
| good enough and the tipping point has been reached where we can
| now have mass adoption of EV's with Li-ion. IMO it's more
| important to grow the EV market share with existing Li-ion
| batteries than hold off for a future tech which may not arrive.
| + Growing the EV market will spur further investment in
| alternative battery tech. bigger market = bigger investments
| antattack wrote:
| I've read few articles about it today and some are incorrectly
| reporting that Northvolt will be producing 150GWh of batteries
| after 6bln investment.
|
| $2.8bln will finance 20GWh production upgrade, therefore
| Northvolt will need to raise a lot more money to achieve 150GWh
| production.
| Growling_owl wrote:
| How come when a company is not American the intro is always:
|
| [Country's]+[company name]
|
| Whereas if the company is American it's always:
|
| [founder's name]+[company name]
|
| I don't know if it has to do with media or with the fact that
| foreign founders might want to be more in the dark compared to
| American ones.
|
| In Europe wealth is historically frowned upon so people might be
| trying to get their millions or billions in the dark and only
| speak and be relevant among decision makers circles.
|
| If that's the case then those people will dominate American
| corporate world in the future because it's appearent that being
| famous only means trouble.
|
| Besides it makes tremendous sense. Wealth gives you a megaphone
| but such megaphone is useless if people are able to look your
| speech rehersals, while you sweat,strutter and stop mid sentence.
|
| It's my opinion that the journey of an entrepreneur who wants to
| get into politcs should be:
|
| Money > Sports franchise > social relevance ..or
|
| Money > Own Rock band > social relevance
|
| Money > your own movie > social relevance
|
| It's really cringy when these SaaS guys or EVs guys try to appeal
| to the masses. You end up being hated by those who hate the rich
| and ignored by everybody else
| azinman2 wrote:
| I'm not sure about the founder part (or that it really is the
| trend you suggest), but I think it's pretty normal given HN is
| an American media property with a heavy American user base that
| anything foreign gets called out with that country. The same
| thing happens in other countries unless the subject is well
| familiar. For example, searching HN's history for Bosche
| doesn't label the company itself as belonging to Germany. ARM
| similar isn't identified by country either. This is a new
| company, and typically when manufacturing is involved, the site
| of manufacturing is labeled (even if in the US by state).
| cpach wrote:
| Good point. However, in this case the headline was chosen by
| Reuters.
| krullix wrote:
| If the founder/Investors of Northvolt had to choose, I'm pretty
| sure they would prefer their names in the title. Guess their
| names are just not famous enough, so better attribute to it to
| Sweden. More people probably knows who Elon Musk is than what
| Sweden is anyways :)
|
| //A Swede
| Growling_owl wrote:
| > More people probably knows who Elon Musk is than what
| Sweden is anyways
|
| Musk is like a weird combination of Michael Bloomberg and
| Donald Trump.
|
| He tweets like Trump, but when he gets on stage he stutters
| and speak as badly as Michael Bloomberg.
|
| Regardless of what one thinks of Trump people knew him for
| more than being just a rich guy, he was the CEO of the
| Apprentice and Yankees #1 fan for a long time.
|
| He also speaks with the utmost confidence, this is a great
| social skill and you can use it at will if you don't need the
| academics and the high IQ people on your side...in politics
| it's one person, one vote
| alex_young wrote:
| I moved from California to Switzerland for a couple of years,
| and more than one person asked if I was going to learn
| Swedish. It's kind of sad really.
| nickik wrote:
| > I'm from Switzerland
|
| > Oh amazing, Sweden is beautiful
|
| _pikachu face_
| chartpath wrote:
| US-bias is lame, but I can think of a couple counter-examples
| where it doesn't usually need to be mentioned: e.g. Shopify and
| Spotify. Could it be that once a company is successful then it
| doesn't come up as much?
| cpach wrote:
| This is a big thing for Sweden, especially for the region of
| Norrland.
|
| I guess one could say that Norrland is like Sweden's Montana or
| something like that.
|
| Currently Norrland is receiving lots of business interest and
| investments. Northvolt is one example. H2 Green Steel is another.
| For the local population I believe this is very good news. It
| should give lots of job opportunities that will spill over to
| other areas such as service jobs.
|
| Some reasons that are often cited why Norrland is a good location
| is the availability of clean energy from hydropower[0] and that
| there is also a high level of competence already when it comes to
| modern manufacturing methods.
|
| _[Edit: province - region]_
|
| [0] Totally different story in the south of Sweden where nuclear
| reactors have been decomissioned, and the energy availability
| seems to become more and more uncertain.
| rags2riches wrote:
| (Norrland isn't a province. It's one of three regions of
| Sweden, roughly the two northern thirds of the country by area,
| containing nine of the twenty-five traditional provinces.)
| cpach wrote:
| Good point! I edited my comment.
| GaylordTuring wrote:
| This is further complicated by the fact that Sweden is
| divided into 21 administrative units (the twenty-five
| traditional provinces are non-administrative units), in
| Swedish called "regioner" (formerly "landsting"), where five
| of these are situated in Norrland.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It may be also relevant that (from Wikipedia) it only has
| 1.2M /10.3M = 12% of the population of Sweden.
| notJim wrote:
| Way more than Montana, which has only .3% of the US
| population, though Norrland and Montana are similar in
| absolute numbers.
| nodesocket wrote:
| Interesting. I've been to Stockholm a few times extended and
| definitely heard of Lapland, but not Norland.
| Lapland wrote:
| Lappland is a part of Norrland, but both of these terms are
| used in a historical sense as cultural/geographical
| regions, and nowadays replaced by counties
| nodesocket wrote:
| Username checks out. :-)
| alkonaut wrote:
| Norr means "north". Norrland is the Northern 2/3 of the
| country. It's not formally defined but more like the
| "Midwest" and similar. Lapland is a part of Norrland.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Lapland is a historical province in Sweden. You'll also
| find a northernmost part of Finland with the same name:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapland
|
| One area around three national parts (Padjelanta, Sarek,
| Stora sjofallet) is also called Laponia.
|
| But the political division of Sweden around that area -
| that's Norbottens lan, so that's the subdivision that
| people care most about in their day-to-day life.
| cuspycode wrote:
| Finland was historically a part of Sweden for about 600
| years, and the northernmost part was called Lapland.
| Nowadays that part is split into Swedish Lapland and
| Finnish Lapland. Norrland (literally "northern land") is
| the name for the part of Sweden that is north of
| approximately 61 degrees northern latitude, so it includes
| Swedish Lapland but also a lot more.
| zibzab wrote:
| Green Steel sounds extremely interesting.
|
| If this is succesful, I hope it leads to big changes in other
| heavy industries.
| cpach wrote:
| I fully agree. I'm very excited to follow this development.
| jlundberg wrote:
| Here's a link with more info in english on the topic:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-23/hydrogen-.
| ..
| occz wrote:
| Is Province really the correct nomenclature for Norrland? I'd
| call it a region at best.
| GaylordTuring wrote:
| Region in English, yes, using the definition from Wikipedia:
| "In geography, regions are areas that are broadly divided by
| physical characteristics (physical geography), human impact
| characteristics (human geography), and the interaction of
| humanity and the environment (environmental geography)".
|
| Absolutely not "region" in Swedish though, which refers to
| the 21 administrative units that Sweden is divided into.
|
| I've always found it extremely difficult to translate these
| concepts between different languages.
| mongol wrote:
| Norrland is one of three landsdelar. Wikipedia translates it
| Lands of Sweden.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lands_of_Sweden
| nickik wrote:
| Telga, one of my favorite battery supply companies is up there
| too. They will be locally mining, refining and coat graphite in
| the same area.
|
| Its a really cool company, I recommend people check them out.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Good. We need as much battery capacity as possible. We need to
| overbuild it so batteries are super cheap and carmakers are
| begging customers to buy EVs.
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