Northvolt was a shiny new startup with a pretty logo that promised to “make oil history” by making the cleanest electric car battery the world had ever seen. The Swedish company founded in 2016 was seen as a huge driver for Europe’s dream to become carbon neutral, and would drastically cut the continent’s reliance on China for imported electric car batteries. Some of the largest car-makers out there, including Volvo, Volkswagen and BMW, rushed to place their orders, and investors virtually poured money into the company. Then, Northvolt’s production plan began to fall apart, and people working at its main plant mysteriously started to die.
The enthusiasm was palpable when Northvolt finally opened the doors to its lithium-ion plant in the small Swedish town of Skelleftea, near the Arctic Circle, in 2021. The company, led by Tesla’s former chief products officer Peter Carlsson, was going to do what no one else had previously managed to do: produce “the world’s greenest battery”. It also planned to build battery cells composed of 100 percent recycled nickel, manganese and cobalt.
"Swedish politicians were saying that Sweden was on its way to becoming a battery ‘super power’," Christian Sandstrom, an associate professor at the Jönköping International Business School and a columnist for national business weekly Affarsvarlden, recalled. “And Northvolt was going to be one of the leaders in Europe’s ‘Green Transition’,” he said, referring to the European Union’s plan to drastically cut its dependence on fossil fuels to the point that it can declare itself carbon neutral by 2050.
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The EU also hailed the way Northvolt would help it cut its dependence on China for products essential to developing its own electric car industry.
“Batteries are a strategic component of European competitiveness,” Maros Sefcovic, vice president of the European Commission, declared.
Astronomical sums
A timeline on the company’s website shows how, in the span of just a few years, billions of euros were injected into the company from hopeful investors, generous lenders and car companies placing future orders.
After entering into deals and partnerships with brands like Volvo, Scania, Volkswagen and BMW, it also announced plans to build additional plants in Gothenburg (in southern Sweden), Poland, Germany and Canada.
“Enormous sums went into it,” Sandstrom said, noting that the investments alone are estimated at around €5.3 billion.
Northvolt's staff quickly swelled to more than 6,500 people from more than 100 countries, and there was talk of the company going public.
Then, at the end of last year, Swedish business daily Dagens Industri obtained a classified copy of Northvolt’s upcoming financial report which showed that the gigafactory (large-scale manufacturing plant producing electric car batteries) in Skelleftea was nowhere near meeting its production goals, and that it was more than struggling with its deliveries.
“At most, [the production at the plant] has been at around 5 percent” of what it was supposed to be, Sandstrom said. Something was clearly not working like it should.
Mystery deaths
The news was immediately followed by an extremely turbulent six-month period for the company.
In January 2024, a 33-year-old Northvolt employee was found dead in his bed after working a shift at the Skelleftea plant. A month later, a 19-year-old man was found dead in the same manner, and in June, a third man, in his 60s, collapsed and died on his balcony after coming home from work.
Swedish police have launched an investigation into the apparently inexplicable deaths.
The probe is still ongoing and is expected to be concluded at the end of this year.
Around the same time, worrying reports about the workplace environment began circulating, with staff claiming they had been forced to handle toxic waste without the proper safety equipment or that that they had been exposed to dangerous gases.
“One colleague started bleeding from the nose all the time. Then she lost her fingernails,” Siri Almqvist, a Northvolt employee who had worked at the plant, told union magazine Dagens Arbete.
In an investigative report published by daily Dagens Nyheter, some 26 serious workplace accidents have been reported by Northvolt staff since 2019.
Gag order
In May, just weeks before Northvolt was due to publish its interim report, the startup announced it was pushing its plans for an initial public offering on the stock market until next year.
When the report was finally published, it was a bombshell. It showed that not only was the company not producing what it should, it had also fallen into a deep black hole of debt.
At the same time, German premium car maker BMW announced it was cancelling its €2 billion battery cell order with the company.
“A well-managed, well-functioning company is not plagued by problems like this,” Sandstrom said, noting that at this point they had “pretty much become impossible to handle”.
At the end of September, Northvolt announced that it would have to let go of 1,600 staff, representing around 20 percent of its workforce, in Sweden.
“The recent production records at Northvolt Ett [the company’s Skelleftea plant] show that we’re on the right track, but the decisions we make today, regardless of how tough they are, are necessary for Northvolt’s future,” CEO Carlsson said in a statement.
In the meantime, the once media-friendly entrepreneur has stopped granting anything but necessary interview requests, and was recently filmed asking staff “to not comment to the media on the situation”.
For Sandstrom, it is just a matter of days before "green dream" Northvolt will have to declare bankruptcy.
“Northvolt is the biggest green bubble in Europe to burst,” he said, noting that during its eight-year journey Northvolt “has gone from zero... to zero”.
