From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Go woke, go broke!
From Northvolt:
Stockholm, Sweden, 12 March 2025 – Following an exhaustive effort to explore all available means to secure a viable financial and operational future for the company, the Board of Directors of Northvolt AB today announced that it has filed for bankruptcy in Sweden.
Like many companies in the battery sector, Northvolt has experienced a series of compounding challenges in recent months that eroded its financial position, including rising capital costs, geopolitical instability, subsequent supply chain disruptions, and shifts in market demand. Further to this backdrop, the company has faced significant internal challenges in its ramp-up of production, both in ways that were expected by engagement in what is a highly complex industry, and others which were unforeseen.
Despite pursuing all available options to negotiate and implement a financial restructuring, including a Chapter 11 restructuring process in the United States, and despite liquidity support from our lenders and key counterparties, the company was unable to secure the necessary financial conditions to continue in its current form. The Board therefore determined that this is the only available solution while the company pursues all realistic options to obtain financing to continue operating during the Swedish bankruptcy process.
It should be underscored that in engaging in this process, the company found significant traction with potential partners and interest from investors — something which illustrates the strong underlying value and future potential of Northvolt and is testament to its accomplishments. Ultimately, however, with limited time and financial resources available, the company was unable to conclude the necessary agreements to secure its future.
Following the filing, a Swedish court-appointed trustee will now oversee the process, including the sale of the business and its assets and settlement of outstanding obligations. The process will be conducted in accordance with Swedish insolvency law, with a focus on ensuring an orderly transition for employees, partners, and creditors. Northvolt has nominated Mikael Kubu as Trustee.
The entities Northvolt AB, Northvolt Ett AB, Northvolt Labs AB, Northvolt Revolt AB and Northvolt Systems AB filed with the Swedish court. Northvolt Germany and Northvolt North America are not filing for bankruptcy in their respective jurisdictions. As wholly owned subsidiaries of Northvolt AB, any decisions regarding these entities will be made by the court-appointed trustee of Northvolt AB in consultation with the Group’s lenders at the appropriate time.
Northvolt recognizes the significant impact of this outcome on its employees, suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders. The company is working closely with relevant authorities, trade unions, and partners to ensure that employees receive the support and information they need during this transition.
Obviously two major factors lie behind this bankruptcy:
- The lack of demand for EVs in Europe
- The impossibility of competing profitably with batteries made in China
There is no prospect of either of these two challenges being resolved soon.
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Wotta surprise.
$13 bill in debt was the core problem. Batteries that work is hard
Not enough subsidies was the real problem. That and the sensible cronies bailing out with their profits before the house of cards came crashing down.
The public money of course will be used to bail out those in the know who cashed out early. That is where the real profit is made. No actual batteries were harmed in the making of this money.
I have actually seen a $2.00 bill… but a $13 bill is probably only available in Sweden. lol
Seems like a standard excuse now.
When you own the supply chain, you can cause considerable disruption.
I wonder who owns the supply chain for the bulk of the raw materials that go into a lithium battery?
“The lack of demand for EVs in Europe”
There is no lack of demand. From industry source Rho Motion there was a Jan&Feb year on year BEV increase of about 29%:
“The European EV market continues to grow at 20% YTD. The Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) market takes the lion’s share of this growth at 29% YTD, with Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) modestly growing at 2% YTD. Most European markets are up YTD, with the exception of France which remains down due to the introduction of a weight tax on PHEVs which began in January 2025 which has led to a decrease in PHEVs by 48% YTD. However, BEV sales in France are now up by 1% YTD. The German and UK BEV market continues strong sales with both over 40% YTD.“
Chinese competition is the problem.
If there is a rebound in 2025, it is too late for Northvolt. Sales of BEVs were down 2024 compared to 2023. It is too early to determine if a sales lift in two months is going to be sustained through the year.
Chinese bought 60% of BEVs sold globally so far in 2025. The rest of the market is insignificant.
You can only afford to operate a BEV for a useful purpose if you are able to run it on cheap coal generated electricity.
Nick,
When governments force people to buy EVs sales grow.
When consumers have a choice, they choose ICE.
Interestingly, forced EV sales in December were 2m units and in January 1.2m units.
Plus, as you point out, hybrids have the strongest sales, another clear sign that consumers reject EVs.
Here is the makeup of new regs in Jan 2025. Nearly 60% have a battery:
Hybrid, especially mild hybrid, makes perfect sense, You don’t pay much more, if anything. You get better mileage. You have no range or recharge problems, and excellent performance, No weight penalty. The electric supplementation gives excellent performance on startup.
BEV’s though, if you are not in the niche segment of older, country dwelling, low local mileage, with off-street parking, do not. They cost far more to buy and to run – if you use, as you have to, public chargers. If you can find one that works. They are far heavier, so more tire wear. Range limited in cold weather particularly. Cost more to insure.
Absent some form of compulsion they will not get to majority market share any time soon. Certainly not in the UK Government planned timescales.
“You have no range or recharge problems”
I don’t have a hybrid but a friend does. He said the gas tank is smaller than an ICE car- minor issue maybe, but still an issue.
A downside with hybrids is that there are two drive systems that can go wrong rather than one. Maybe not a problem when they are still new enough to be under warranty but potentially very expensive when older. And don’t forget that some hybrids are of the plug-in type.
Its the difference between a mild hybrid and a plug in hybrid. You are right about plug-ins, which have both an electric and a regular drive system. But the mild hybrid just has an input from an electric motor into the regular transmission, and its only used for adding traction – getting going from stop, or when accelerating from very slow speed. Whereas plug in hybrids will typically do around 50 miles on battery alone.
The additional complexity of a mild is minimal and well compensated by the fuel savings. The best mild hybrid was previous generation Prius. I think they have now gone to plug in. They also used, presumably still do, an Atkinson cycle ICE. The fuel savings were really dramatic, and they are known for trouble free high mileage use and long life.
Suzuki Vitara is also a nice mild hybrid, though not so fuel efficient. With the proviso that the lithium battery is mounted under the drivers seat! Ouch!
I have had a Nissan Qashqai ePower for 2 years. The drive comes entirely from the electric motor and the battery is kept topped up by a relatively small ICE. It sems the ideal solution, providing very good full economy with the excellent acceleration of an electric motor. Obviously there is no gearbox, so the weight problem of other hybrids is eliminated.
Are you sure that there is no transmission? From what I have read most electrics have a two speed transmission. The problem is that as electric motors spin faster, they become less efficient. As the motor turns, the current going through the windings has to switch several times per revolution. The bigger the motor, the greater the inductance of the windings, and the slower that this switch can occur.
How do they go in reverse without a gearbox? Does the electric motor change direction?
No one in their ‘right’ mind would ever buy an EV. Hybrids? Yes.
And China uses coal as its main source of energy.
If there really was ‘no lack of demand’ it would not be necessary to legislate for the sale of EVs. What you can see from the UK is that in 2024 BEVs were 20% of new sales.
This might seem like a roaring success till you look a bit further. First of all it is below Government targets, which are 22% this year, and rising in subsequent years. So this means that sales of ICE cars will start to attract fines this year.
Second, look at the makeup private versus fleet. The huge difference is that when you get a fleet car, that is taxed as benefit in kind, but EVs are given a subsidy in the form of a tax allowance compared to ICE. Its 100% first year allowance.
The numbers for 2024 are: 77% fleet, 20% private buyers.
If there were a free market, no compulsion on manufacturers and no tax or other subsidiesm EV sales would drop like a stone. Chinese or not.
They have their niche: older people doing few local miles, living in the country with off street parking and charging. Maybe for a second car, though they are very expensive for that. But for everyone else they are basically unsaleable, if not heavily subsidized.
This isn’t a judgment about global warming or emissions. Its a judgment about the fit of a product into a market segment, and an assessment of how large that market segment is. EVs are not replacements for ICE in present day uses.
You can also tell this by falling used prices in the UK. Look them up on Auto Trader. Demand is just not there at any price that the industry can supply.
The UK Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) recently said (13 Feb) its research showed growth in consumer demand for EVs was lower than expected with only 1 in 8 new buyers planning to switch to electric in the next 3 years.
They also talked about “Flattening of sales, production down, plants closed or consolidated, jobs lost” and “that private consumer demand for EVs is weak” and noted the industry incurred costs of £4.5bn last year in discounting EVs to meet government sales targets.
michel,
The question here is why Northvolt is in trouble. It isn’t because EVs aren’t selling. They are, and the reasons are not relevant to the fate of Northvolt.
Yes, those people who can
1. Totally ignore any ‘carbon’ emission limitations
2. Totally ignore any health and safety requirements
3. Uee slave labour
4. Get loads of dirt cheap coal-driven electricity
5. Happily make batteries that so spontaneously combust because they’re never held accountable
It’s all pretty obvious when this is taken into account.
Good luck with that fantasy. Try asking real people, in the real world, especially here in Australia. EVs are a joke for most of us outside of the latte-drinking classes, and with good reason.
Wait until subsidies dry up, and most UK and European vehicle manufacturers have shut down because of the insane Net Zero fines being levied. Industry will probably never recover, and those jobs will never come back.
Absolutely hilarious! More government intervention causing more problems than they ever even tried to solve.
Re lack of demand the UK Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders recently noted that the industry incurred costs of £4.5bn last year in discounting EVs to meet government sales targets
OK, you don’t like China. That doesn’t change the fact that they are in the market, and a formidable competitor. That was Northvolt’s problem.
Seems to me, that Northvolt, KNOWING that China was in the (control) position it was in… jumped into the water when not knowing how to swim. Was it subsidized? That might be the only reason that investors/shareholders expected any sort of ROI.
The Australian market for EVs is flat at around 5% of new car sales. There are 88 models competing for that 5% share of market 🙂
Chinese competition is
theJUST ONE OF THE MANY problems.I wonder when Polestar will fold. It suffered declining y-o-y sales of about 20%.
Nothing needs to be said. The inevitable result is self explanatory
Northvolt bankruptcy puts future of German battery factory in doubt
The future of battery manufacturer Northvolt’s planned factory in northern Germany has been cast into doubt after the Swedish company filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday.
Operations for Northvolt’s German subsidiary are to continue, but the billion-dollar factory project is wholly owned by the Swedish parent company, raising questions about what impact the bankruptcy proceedings might bring.
[…]
Northvolt has already received around €600 million from the German state-owned development bank KfW, half of which is guaranteed by the federal government and half by Schleswig-Holstein.
Northvolt goes… South
Always wondered why they built it almost on the Arctic Circle a long way away from markets.
Money, money, money
Labour is facing a backlash over a key net zero role being advertised with an annual salary equivalent to £255,000. The Chair of the Low Carbon Contracts Company, sponsored by Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, would earn £102,500 a year to work two days a week. Daily Express
You going to apply? 🙂
There is a thread in Dutch here where an ex-employee discusses this. He also points to a whole thread here in Swedish started by another ex-employee..
What it boils down to is an overly complicated management structure with too many layers and a production line that was subpar in terms of quality, reliability and documentation.The production line came largely from Wuxi Lead, a Chinese company. There was an enormous 100% in-house tech stack, poorly specified, written in Go running on AWS Lambda writing to DynamoDB.
No wonder they failed.
The fact China’s economy is in the dunny means that their state sponsored industries will be unloading even more of their products at bargain basement prices. The numbers may start to suggest that EVs are popular as of right, a thing which we should all be wary of. Meanwhile, if your neighbour buys one, make sure their insurance for fire is all encompassing…you. Perhaps fire departments should insist that those purchasers meet stringent regulations. Like that their vehicle has to be parked a significant distance from buildings and that breathing apparatus should be distributed within a given area.
Breaking —
TRUMP LOVES COAL
Trump from Truth Social, “I am authorizing my Administration to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL.”
We love coal! We have hundreds of years worth of it!
The coal R/P is ~120 years. And this includes what in the oil world would be classified as Proved, Developed, Non Producing, and Proved Undeveloped “reserves”. Hot tip: In the US oil/gas biz, investors almost always count only Proved, Developed, Producing for making biz decisions – which makes US, oil investors the world’s savviest.
The coal “reserves” mass also assumes continuation of the current, nearly world wide, Ben Dover environmental, safety, health practices, shirking of asset retirement liabilities, and crawfishing on freely assumed health insurance and pension obligations (admittedly a largely US problem).
I wish I could find the WUWT pic that accompanies many posts here. You know, the fisherman with his arms extended, and the other fisherman holding up the actual fish behind him..
So much for the dream of batteries as pursued by the Government of Quebec
“Obviously two major factors lie behind this bankruptcy:
That and the fact this ideology-based business requires the suspension of the laws of physics and economics to be viable.
Didn’t the Quebec pension plan and/or Canadian Taxpayer invest $$ Billion in Northvolt? Wasn’t Mark Carney now PM and head honcho of Canada the economic adviser to the Canadian Government at the time? Should pension plans invest $$ Billions in unproven technology when a country’s retirement fund is at risk. Railways are a great, stable investment in Canada because there is no competition. You can’t build pipelines. There is no possible foreign competition or tariffs.
In a boat, car, train, plane, bridge, etc weight is everything to the designer. You work backwards from your weight budget to arrive at your solution.
A hybrid potentially makes sense because in theory you can eliminate the ICE transmission and drive train with an electric drive and reduce BEV battery requirements to reduce weight. It is this weight reduction that is key.
Except that if you want to run your electric motor efficiently, you are going to need a transmission.
Basically, big motors don’t turn fast.
Weight budget doesn’t always come from engineering considerations, however. Nor from stone tablets falling from the skies.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190514171716/www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/administration-plans-100000-new-highway-deaths/
If one has an extensive weight budget, and use it, one usually finds one overweight and unhealthy.
I found this on chatgpt:
“Mark Carney has been actively promoting investment in Northvolt through his role at Brookfield Asset Management, where he focuses on sustainable finance. He has advocated for pension funds and institutional investors to support green energy projects, including Northvolt’s battery production expansion. The Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO), which manages over $73 billion in assets, has invested $400 million in Northvolt, aligning with its strategy of backing energy transition initiatives.”
Oh Canada!
Carney and the Lieberals will try to memory-hole that piece of info immediately.
The important questions for me are who produced the electricity that would charge the batteries and who would buy the electricity from the battery owners?
Looking at the head photograph, I wonder how many of those parked vehicles are EV’s…..