Giga Factories and Battery Companies

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Dr. Kai-Philipp Kairies

Hope you are doing well NanoEE read the comments.
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The US did so much harm in the 70's and 80's shipping manufacturing jobs out of this country. Need to bring trades back to schools or the US will be a third world country in 20-years..

The Unraveling of Europe’s Battery Dream

In recent days, numerous reports have surfaced about the current situation at Northvolt. Among them, one particular article aligns closely with my perspective, and if you’re in the battery industry, I highly recommend reading it (link below).

The crux of the problem, as I see it, lies in yield rates and a pervasive self-deception. Many Europeans continue to believe in the fairy tale that the Western world produces the highest quality products, while the East—especially China—manufactures cheap, low-quality commodities.

This is a dangerous delusion.

Tim Cook recently discussed why Apple relies on manufacturing in China:

“The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is… The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields…”

The same holds true for batteries. The most critical parameter in battery production today is the yield rate—the percentage of produced cells that meet specifications. Improving yield rates is a complex process that demands thousands of iterations of trial and error across numerous machines and countless process parameters.

This endeavor requires the coordination of hundreds of experts, many of whom work for supplier companies like machine manufacturers or material suppliers. In China, these experts live and work just around the corner and can be brought into meetings within a day. In Northern Sweden, they need to be flown in, which takes time, and once they arrive, language barriers and intellectual property concerns can further complicate matters.

Currently, there is no place in Europe that has even five percent of the battery talent density of Ningde, China— CATL’s home turf.

Europe’s plans to build a homegrown battery industry face significant challenges. Without acknowledging and addressing the talent gap and the logistical advantages that regions like China have developed over decades, Europe risks falling behind in a critical sector for the future of energy and transportation.

It takes a village to raise a child and perhaps it takes a multi-faceted mega industrial complex with decades of experience to build a battery. It’s about time we get started.