After months of uncertainty, the Swedish group Northvolt has decided to go ahead with the establishment of a huge factory in northern Germany, which will supply batteries to one million electric vehicles from 2026, thanks to a capacity of 60 gigawatt hours (GWh).
The Taiwanese ProLogium has chosen the north of France to install a new generation battery factory. The announcement on Friday of this investment at 5.2 billion euros will result in an annual production capacity of 48 GWh, enough for hundreds of thousands of cars. In connection with the ProLogium factory, a production site for cathode materials for lithium batteries must also see the light of day in Dunkirk, according to another announcement on Friday by French President Emmanuel Macron. This investment of 1.5 billion euros will be carried by a joint venture between the Chinese group XTV and the French Orano.
Europe, which is trying to catch up with a considerable delay in the production of electric batteries for automobiles, “has the means to be in the competition”, notes Tobias Gehrke, researcher in geoeconomics at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) . “We are in an acceptable position, but the pressure is mounting,” he warns. Because the plan of the American government, which provides colossal tax credits for the green industry in order to counter the rise of Chinese power, raises fears of a flight of large investments to North America. This is one of the reasons that risked calling into question Northvolt’s choice to build its first factory outside Sweden in Germany.
Subsidies
“It is possible that we will give priority to expansion in the United States first over Europe,” said company CEO Peter Carlsson last October, putting Berlin in turmoil. The energy crisis linked to the war in Ukraine, which has caused production costs to soar, has also made Europe less attractive, he added. In a joint statement with the German government released on Friday, Northvolt said it had finally “decided to take the next steps in its expansion to Heide”, the German site chosen a few kilometers from the North Sea coast. Decisive argument: Berlin promises financial “support” for the project, unquantified, which should be added to the aid facilitated by the European Union to support the development of this industry on the Old Continent. Nearly 50 lithium-ion battery factories should see the light of day in Europe by 2030, whereas they are almost non-existent today.
Germany is the most advanced country with the equivalent of 498 GWh of projects in the pipeline, followed by Hungary (224 GWh). Thanks to the ProLogium project in Dunkirk, France is third with 170 GWh, ahead of Norway (136 GWh), according to monitoring by the NGO Transport and Environment. But according to this NGO, 68% of these projects risk being “revised downwards, delayed or interrupted”, in particular because of the increased American competition by the subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Sign of the attraction of North America, Northvolt announced Friday that it plans to build a plant in the United States or Canada, alongside the German site. A decision will be made “in the coming months,” a spokeswoman for the group told AFP.
Electricity, a paradox
Europe suffers from a huge problem of competitiveness: “We pay twice for electricity compared to China”, deplores Mr. Gehrke. We must “subsidize energy so as not to drop out”, he pleads. In December, lithium-ion batteries cost 24% more in the United States than in China. In Europe, they were 34% more expensive. For the researcher, the objective of Europe to produce all the batteries necessary for its automotive industry on its soil by 2030 seems unrealistic at this stage. Another major handicap: access to critical materials – graphite, lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt – whose supply chain is largely controlled by China.
Par automotive drafting
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2023-05-14 09:02:54
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