EU companies seem to be unable to get their gigafactories up and running. Britishvolt, Italvolt cancelled. Freyr and Beyonder are moving out. Northvolt is struggling with quality issues, after almost two years after launch. After so many grand announcements, things look like they are fizzling out.
I don’t have the answer. But what I know is that launching large-scale manufacturing is f***ing hard even if you’ve done that once already. Or even twice.
When I was just starting out in my manufacturing career, I was charged with building wind turbine manufacturing in Russia. I was not sure if we could pull off blade manufacturing. So I’ve talked to Vestas, Enercon, Siemens, GM, and so on to learn about blade manufacturing.
At one time, I was sitting in a meeting room at Charles de Gaulle airport with a representative from Gamesa (they were not yet acquired by Siemens at that time). We were talking about possible localization of manufacturing of blades in Russia and that’s when he told me this story.
Gamesa was setting up blade manufacturing in the USA. The factory was closed after three years of operation. The scrap rate was over 50%. And they couldn’t find a way around it. That was when I decided that we were not going to even try to localize blade manufacturing.
I remembered this story when I read recently about Northvolt’s woes. I can only hope that Northvolt investors will have enough patience, and its engineers and workers enough diligence to overcome the current manufacturing difficulties.
There is a way around it. EU doesn’t manufacture its own chips. But it does manufacture the equipment needed to make those chips. And its companies design chips. And the chips are then made in Taiwan, at TSMC factories.
Nothing wrong with doing the same with batteries. EU could focus on development, and outsource making batteries to, say, Korea or Japan. For full disclosure - I am working with JR Energy Solution, a Korean electrode foundry, offering manufacturing-as-a-service for lithium-ion electrodes.
Or is there another way? I would love to know your thoughts.