The battered battery manufacturer Northvolt has now also filed for bankruptcy in his home country of Sweden. Despite intensive discussions, it was not possible to create the prerequisites for the survival of the company in its current form, Northvolt admitted on Wednesday.
The bankruptcy application at a court in Stockholm is “the only viable solution”. At the same time, all realistic options are pursued to secure the financing of operational business in bankruptcy proceedings. The US subsidiary and the Germany subsidiary made no bankruptcy application, emphasized Northvolt. In November, Northvolt had already initiated a renovation process in the USA in accordance with Chapter 11 of US bankruptcy law.
Warning experts
Northvolt had encountered difficulties when he run up his battery production, important customers had jumped off. The company was the greatest hope of building up an independent production of batteries for electric cars in Europe and thus competing with the dominant manufacturers from Asia.
Europe's path to your own supply of batteries remains difficult. This is also evident from a recent study by the Fraunhofer Institute for System and Innovation Research ISI, which was published in the magazine “Nature Energy”. In it, the experts see only a 50 percent chance that the goal of 90 percent self-sufficiency is achieved in 2030. And there are good arguments that this is too optimistic. At least one supply of 50 to 60 percent consider the researchers around Steffen Link to be relatively secure.
Overall, the demand for battery cells in Europe will probably exceed the value of one terawatt hour per year by 2030, the researchers write. For their study, they simulated 1000 scenarios for the need and production. There were also cases in which the need is exceeded, but the opposite was more common, as Link explained.
“Especially against the background of global uncertainties and escalating trade conflicts, independence would be an important point to avoid delivery bottlenecks and to secure the competitiveness of the Europe location,” it said. After all, batteries are not only a key technology for cars, but also for energy supply.
