Can Northvolt solve Europe’s impending electric car battery problem?
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Maybe a nitpick but it's interesting how often people confuse power with energy/storage. "gigawatt hours" is a measure of energy, not power.
From my understanding Northvolt is manufacturing batteries, so the "60 gigawatt hours" figure is referring to amount of battery storage they're making. If they were generating power it could refer to how much energy they'll generate over a year, but I don't think that's what it is.
I think it's important to get these details right as it can change the meaning significantly
Also
> building a battery factory so large it would fill 100 football pitches and produce enough power to light 6bn light bulbs a year.
Is the factory generating power? How does the factory produce this much power? Or is it referring to the energy stored by batteries it's producing?
It's important to realize that scientific terms don't really mean anything outside of science. Calling this power is like someone saying they have the flu, when they actually have a cold. It's wrong, but they weren't writing a scientific paper, they were just telling you why they stayed inside all weekend. It's important to understand that language is used that way, so you don't get too confused.
Writing about a subject with completely wrong terminology/concepts and thus severely miseducating people is another. I can already hear people claiming all batteries are based on Lithium and contain 20% Cobalt.
For most purposes knowing if it's actually Influenza isn't diagnostically important anyway, use medication to treat symptoms, stay home, rest, seek help if you don't feel better in a few days. Crazy how much of the world doesn't make this trivial for all residents - not just the US, but even many countries with some type of mandatory "sick leave" policy don't actually give all workers full pay to stay home with flu - encouraging them to instead go to work and get more people sick. And this normalises associated social expectations which also have negative consequences. If I work when I'm sick, why wouldn't I go to a bar, or visit friends?
My car use is about 10000 km/year. That does not mean it’s a velocity.
But with that corrected, 10000 km/year certainly is a speed; it's just an average speed rather than an instantaneous speed.
It’s car use accumulated over a year. It is not an average speed.
I don’t agree that there is a wide consensus that velocity must be a vector outside of physics where it actually matters. “High velocity” is a term that does not hinge on a vector being present somehow.
High velocity refers to the magnitude of a vector beyond 2D, so there is no conflict here.
Your point about "per year" technically going back to power is only applicable if you actually do the x GWh/per year maths. It's common to refer to energy production capacity as 'y kWh per year' (even though the ratio of those two components gives you the average power over that time period).
In which way is Finland a green energy hub?
If I look at [1] and [2] I see that in 2019 Finland's energy use was 55% fossil based. Sweden's was 31%. Coal was 5.10% for Finland, 0.20% for Sweden.
ps. I see there's worse... Germany 77.42% fossils, coal 17.53%. Still, I never had an impression Finland is a green energy hub (no waterfalls, no sun in winter). It is a green hub though.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/finland [2] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/sweden
You left that little part out :)
In other words, if I cannot hope to raise 2BN but still want to help save the world, what start-ups should I start?
I am thinking things like every parking space in a city will soon come with a parking meter / charge point / embedded wifi-mesh network. Other industries will piggy-back on the new battery standard(s) - my father-in-law just picked up a battery powered lawn mower ! Having one battery pack / interface for many home goods will be almost as transformative.
As a start, anything with a power cord. Taken to the extreme, repurposing all the products used in RVs for the home. Like why not have battery packs for ice boxes (fridges), stoves, etc? This will certainly help with (personal) resilience, eg future grid failures.
I've been pondering personal heating devices. Like heated gloves and foot wear. (I now have severe chilblains.) Instead of heating the whole house, or room. (Ironically, my torso remains warm and so I sweat more.) Also battery powered therapeutic heat pads and whatnot would be handy too.
The next thing I'm pondering is water usage. I'd like to direct my waste kitchen sink water (DWV) to my lawn. Maybe even reuse for flushing toilets. This is still disallowed in my jurisdiction, so I need parts and fixtures which can be quickly swapped out to pass inspections (eg selling my house). I don't understand anything about water treatment. What little I've read says I can't just catch the water in a cistern. It'll quickly go bad. So maybe there's dish soaps recipes or something that can help solve that.
I'm also pondering After Plastic™, products which aren't based on fossil fuels. I recently tried bamboo tooth brushes (meh) and dental floss (terrific). I'd love to stop buying single use plastic stuff, plastic bins, plastic trash bags, ad nauseum.
Just a microntroller chip with Bluetooth or WiFi or NFC (or even just a number pad… could use a real time clock inside with an RSA token type solution) and a relay is all you need. The customer’s smartphone could handle the connection to the net. “Pay 15¢/kWh, and we’ll enable the relay for that amount of energy to be transferred.” (Or could be via time.)
Apartment owners could also do this, as they almost all have outlets in their garages that they (infuriatingly) usually don’t let EV owners use. Some parking lots in the north have outlets for engine block heaters.
Figure out how to do that for $50-100 worth of hardware (should be easy; I see smart outlets for less than that… $20 or even $10) and you’ve made a huge improvement on electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
We already have ubiquitous electric vehicle charging infrastructure, it’s just that people don’t realize it, yet. Every BnB I’ve stayed at since getting a BEV/PHEV has had an outlet that I could use to charge when I asked. A LOT of even on-street parking has outlets within reach and they could be integrated into meters, too.
1. Park on my drive, use my electricity - that seems simple and no legal entanglements.
2. park on the public highway and then I stretch a cable to the kerb ... that is a minefield of installation and liability.
Any good lawyers able to chime in?
Basically we in a transition from the oil age into the electricity age and specifically we are now seeing prime movers transition from being powered by oil (ICEs) to electricity (electrical motors).
Think about what changed going from draft animals to steam and from steam to oil (e.g. you can’t make airplanes using a steam engine). What is fundamentally different between ICEs and electric motors? What new ways of transporting good does this engender?
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31850765-energy-and-civi...
Look at where flight was at the beginning of the 20th century and where it was 50 years later.
In general personal mobility is a trend I can see being massive in the next 30-50 years.
Also a fun fact: The peak use of draught animals in the US was in the 1920s. That’s almost 150 years after they started bing replaced by steam and had even moved into the early stages of the oil age.
These transitions can take a looooong time.
Not sure how much of an impact you’re planning to have, but EVs are still fairly resource intensive in most metrics, especially manufacturing and space usage in cities.
One option might be to help reducing those, by conceptualizing lighter vehicles, or a way to have fewer standing around (autonomous driving).
Another option would be looking beyond electric cars. Almost any thing requires electricity, so improving its generation would have an immense impact. “Cars as we know them, but electric” is probably not the optimal future. Maybe there are better ways to get around.
Besides those far out ideas and considering your battery interface point: Maybe it’d be possible to standardize some batteries for smaller vehicles/appliances. I’m also surprised there doesn’t seem to be an after-market for EV battery packs (as in: a new pack for your EV) yet (fun fact: I think Renault has DRM on its batteries).
Horace Dediu (Asymco) advocates "micromobility". I still don't really know what all that entails. Bikes, scooters, hoverboards, ...?
I've been binging on his misc podcasts for a while. I really like how he asks questions, does analysis.
For instance: ~1.1b automobiles today, ~1.8b by 2050 (IIRC). Average lifetime of ICE vehicle is 30 yrs. So getting to carbon neutral just by replacing the current fleet won't happen fast enough. We'll need alternatives to automobiles, like public transit and scooters.
I digressed, things like electric bikes do partly solve the last mile problem. Biggest threat to their adoption is having to share the road with cars. My constant suggestion is grade separated bike lanes.
Emergency electric start gas generator with downstream battery and inverter. Keeps battery full. Generator is sized to average load not peak and doesn't run all the time.
Being a PG&E customer makes life interesting.
The other business I find interesting is water catchment systems as the water goes away. It could be that your roof is entirely sufficient to provide household needs even in a drought year.
Every year is one step forward and two steps back. The future's so bright, you gotta wear tinted safety glasses.
Electric cars use significantly less parts. There are less things that need to be made, and they require significantly less people to make them.
Electrification will take longer than people believe, but once it comes there will be adjustment period.
It would affect electricity usage by refineries.
And if distance to market is such a crucial factor (b/c it sounds like the may business will be battery recycling), why not the geographic south? Albania also runs on 100% hydro and I'm sure the wages are a tiny fraction of Norway (not to mention the environmental/bureaucratic issues)
I noticed Northvolt employees are here, so maybe they can fill out the fluff a bit. Why Northvolt and not Southvolt?
I would much prefer the well organised environmental/bureaucratic issues in Sweden compared to the 'issues' you would have in Albania.
Northern Europe population is far better educated. Power is cheap and green. Easy rail and ship connection to central Europe where most car factories are (far easier then from Albania). You have many battery mines developing in that region. Talga Resources has graphite mine right there and battery materials mining is developing all over Northern Europe.
In fact there is a huge explosion of battery related industry in that same region. Northvolt is just company that will soon be operating around the Baltic and Northern Europe.
> b/c it sounds like the may business will be battery recycling
For a decade plus their main business will be battery cell production.
> Corporate tax rate 22%, Mineral Production tax rate 0.2%. (1)
Also, the location has to do with special, naturally occurring deposits of anode materials nearby. iirc, either silicon or graphite forms "clumps" of just the right size and shape in this region, enabling them to skip some steps of the manufacturing process.
(1) https://www.talgagroup.com/irm/content/why-sweden.aspx?RID=3...
Totally uneducated guess, but northern Scandinavia (and Finland) have already been used for datacenters for precisely those temperatures, and if it didn't matter it could be anywhere else with a decent "green" energy mix, like France, southern Sweden, Austria, etc.
Also Albania simply doesn't have the infrastructure and the same access to a highly educated workforce that Sweden has.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/5ea705b50670db414...
Can't find higher quality right now but the data should be more or less correct.
https://www.orovel.net/insights/li-on-battery-gigafactories-...
edit: found OP https://twitter.com/zennroland/status/1353821694411026434
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/md1526/im_terry_colli...
So, while this is an issue that needs to be addressed, it is not much of an issue in terms of electric cars. They need in an order of magnitude, that they have the control over where the Cobalt actually comes from.
Nevertheless the automotive industry works hard on Cobalt-free batteries.
If child labour is a thing for you, then you should think about the cheap stuff from China, that contains any sort of battery.
[1] https://www.humanium.org/en/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-child-...
Child labor is voluntary in the sense that these children have no parental support and no better options. The way to help them would involve providing better options or institutional support rather than an attempt to regulate what amounts to a black market activity.
These areas where child labor is still a thing, they are generally backwaters where there is no sanitation let alone large schools with "high" quality housing and food for orphanages
A non-trivial amount of these kids have nowhere else to go, or they must work to assist with family income and this is the highest income they can get
So yes, this is very much a black market issue, "at best" the areas where the cobalt is could be liased to large international companies like RioTinto, but then that would mean that the children would just move to working in other sources of income
But again, these topics are not easily marketable for the general western public
> Cobalt plays a vital role in catalysing the removal of sulphur from oil, contributing to a more sustainable society. ... By using a cobalt oxide-molybdenum oxide catalyst (CoMOX), the sulphur can be converted into hydrogen sulphide (H2S).
I really don't get this.. why do some people seem to think that not buying EVs or not using cobalt batteries will get rid of child slave labor?
If anything, increasing the amount of cobalt that's produced could improve the situation. It may push produces towards more efficient and industrialized production. It might make DR Congo more wealthy. And using it in a product where people care about environmental and social costs puts more focus on the whole child labor issue (unlike fuel and metal alloys, where it's more "out of sight, out of mind")
Short term, maybe. Sales projections for electric cars in Europe are likely... optimistic.
Long term, yes (Northvolt and other competitors), because markets are fairly efficient at generating sufficient supply given a long enough window.
Half of Europe has already announced phasing out ICE-based cars in the next 10-15 years, Audi has announced they're shifting off of ICEs. A shift towards fully electric is inevitable.
I don't even mention other factors like charging time (during vacation time we have queues on gas stations, where fueling car lasts 2 minutes), extending abilities of electric grid to meet larger demand, fixing last mile electric network to do the same. There are some ideas like bidirectional charging, smart charging, etc. but we don't know if we any of this can be actually applied.
Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars, as they are very expensive, there are no trained non-official repair shops, parts supplirers, so people are forced to use official, overpriced repair channels, so they keep pushing them.
[1] https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/06/20190624-uk.html
In terms of charging times, many people simply charge at home. On average EV users spend less time at fast charging stations than ICE drivers do at gas stations especially if you include time driving to a gas station. If you’re filling up everywhere you park you only need fast charging on several hundred mile trips.
The GP does have a point there. A lot of vacation travel in Europe happens by car - the traffic jams at the summer holidays on the route from Munich down to Slovenia and Croatia or from Munich to Italy are legendary, and this one drive and how it works out is what determines the purchase decisions for many Germans.
I'd love if the railways could be used - but the network especially in the Balkans is shoddy, international booking is a nightmare, it is about 4-8x (!!!) as expensive as a car ride for a family of four... so yeah.
8 weekends/year * 2 days * 8h/day * 200kW fast charging * 20c/KW premium (over electricity rates) = 5,120$ per year. Fast chargers cost ~50k to install so payback is only 10 years.
Granted this assumes higher than normal rates for those weekends, but not excessively so.
My guess is, IRL it's not as lucrative in practice as your math makes it out to be.
However, EV fast charging locations along major highways tend to have a lot of unused capacity.
In the evening this road will be full, bumper to bumper. There are many streets like it. https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fk68kARYkuxS6FnN8
There are things that can be done about it, e.g. lamp post charging but it's not simple.
This is one of those transition points where charging infrastructure needs to be appropriate for the number of EV’s. Building out massive infrastructure early is simply a waste of money.
That report seems dubious. The math simply doesn't add up.
For instance, the report claims that to replace all the cars on the road in the UK, it would take "... 2,362,500 tonnes of copper... [which is ] at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018."
But the world produced 16,890,000 tonnes of copper in 2020 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_copper_pr...). From that same page, it seems that the annual copper production has not changed much in the last 5 years.
So it's not half of annual production, it's more like an eight.
Secondly, to replace all the cars on the road in the UK (~33M units), at the current replacement rate of ~2.5M/year (https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/uk-total-auto-industry-sales-f...) would take about 13 years. So now we're talking about about one eight of annual copper production spread over 13 years, which would be about 1% of annual production per year.
Of course ICE vehicles also require quite a bit of copper...
It seems not unreasonable that replacing all vehicles in the 5th largest economy in the world would take ~1% of the copper output of the world (assuming zero recycling!) over a period of 13 years.
Lithium exists in huge amounts and projects are underway all over the world. Literally in every continent. The lithium market is growing like crazy.
There are also many cobalt, nickel and graphite projects underway. I think the article might have mixed up copper and nickel.
This doesn't account for the huge amount of lower tier cars that will use LFP or High-Manganese cathodes. Or for the fact that even high nickel cathodes will basically remove cobalt as well.
Switching to high density anodes such a Li-Metal or Silicon will massively reduce the materials requirements per car on the cathode side as well.
Not to mention that sometimes in the next decade we might go away from the transition metals completely.
> Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars,
You clearly don't know anything about car industry.
I'm not sure this is a real motivation for them. I know a lot of people with EVs (Norway), and I don't know of anyone who has had a problem with the car unique to EVs requiring repairs. I had a problem with the lead-acid 12V battery, but it was on the warranty anyway. Others with the same model has had problem with the gearbox, because the parking mode engages a bolt in the gearbox that can break if you put the car in park while the wheels are rolling... anyway, that's just because it was not a clean-sheet EV design. It's a hold-over from ICE version of the vehicle. So that's yet another source of expensive repairs that goes away with clean-sheet EV design.
Most issues with battery pack is still within warranty on most cars on the road. So in the short term, issues with the battery must be a huge cost for car makers.
Training of repair technicians for EVs is also quickly becoming quite routine here. I don't know how the situation is with non-official repair shops here, but don't think training is the issue there.
Meanwhile, service costs are lower than for ICE. So there must be less service/repair revenue in general.
Tesla is a bit different of course, don't think there's much non-official repairs being done there, but it has more to do with software, vertical integration and being a new brand, than being an EV. A friend with a BMW (ICE) has had similar problems with being locked into overpriced service/repairs.
Edit: > I don't even mention other factors like charging time (during vacation time we have queues on gas stations, where fueling car lasts 2 minutes), extending abilities of electric grid to meet larger demand, fixing last mile electric network to do the same
These are mostly "fixed" in Norway, and it has taken less than 10 years (most development has been in the last 5). I regularly drive 2h trip to a cabin in 27kWh Kia Soul EV. I've driven cross country in a 70kWh Tesla Model S. In both cases the charging I've needed has taken exactly 0 extra minutes of my time, because in the first case we need to buy food on the way, and in the second case we took way more breaks than we spent waiting for fast charging. There can be queues at specific times on some congested charging stations. But it's getting better as EVs get bigger batteries (people can drive farther without fast charging) and more people get charging in their garage or street-side charging. Charging stations often have more chargers than fuel stations have fuel pumps, and they're not as burdened by people charging/fueling for their daily needs, since most people charge at home for that.
Studies indicate that you wouldn't need to produce much more electricity if there's a bigger effort to make buildings more energy efficient, and the grid doesn't need expansion if most charging is done at night.
Running cars mostly on current battery technology seems entirely feasible to me? Perhaps a bit inconvenient at times, but far from disaster.
Even if the chemistry doesn't improve, we can always move to a model where you quickly swap batteries at a 'petrol station' instead of slowly charging them.
Of course, a hybrid world is also entirely feasible: where most cars are electric, but some people with long range needs drive a hybrid like a Prius or even ICE-only car.
(After all, from an environment point of view, 90% of people moving from ICE to electric is 90% as good as the full move. Economically, the people with the minority technology will lose out on benefits of scale, of course.)
Lots of things get announced, particularly from governments and auto manufacturers.[1] Doesn't mean anything.
[1] If all their (government and automakers) announcements led somewhere by now I'd be able to sleep while my car self-drove me to my vacation destination. Governments particularly are prone to be wrongly optimistic when announcing their policies.
In a few years, the situation changed from a few power plugs in the corner of a parking and some street charging to hundreds of chargers in big parkings, the airport has more than a thousand, business areas hundreds, fast charger in all gas stations, and a lot of home chargers. It will scale up.
These remind me of EU state adherence to carbon reduction targets. I would be - very - suspicious of anything a company in this industry, or a country, promises when they have something to gain from making a target and little or nothing to lose from missing it.
> A shift towards fully electric is inevitable
Agreed, but keep in mind that electrification itself took 50-60 years to play out. It will eventually happen, but it will happen over several decades.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...
I was referencing the 2020 NDC targets (55% by 2030), but fair enough.
At that cost they will be just repackaging Chinese, or Japanese materials, sans the cathode which they will be making, and which is the most expensive material in the battery.
Almost every battery maker outside of China don't do even that, and they just package ready made cathode/anode/separators into casings.
And of course we produce our own cathode and anode for cylindrical and prismatic cells.
And we're hiring by the way: https://northvolt.com/career/roles/
Source: I work at Northvolt.
(1) not my primary responsibility, but you sometimes get to put on weird and unexpected hats at Northvolt!
I am a bit surprised to hear that a battery will have software.
We have two software engineering at Northvolt, one working on automating our gigafactories, and another working on battery systems as described above.
There are many challenges related to battery production and even more companies competing on solving those problems. Sourcing materials like lithium, cobalt, etc. in a sustainable way is one of those challenges and there are multiple companies working on that. It's a solvable problem. It could be as simple as just forcing companies to source responsibly and only work with suppliers that have some really strict policies against using child labor.
We can't even do that with coffee, water or palm oil (just to cite these). Cloth/shoes companies are still using child/slaves, most tech product still contain materials mined in very shady mines by kids/slaves in Africa.
"it's simple", "it's just a matter of", "we'll fix it in the future", "it's just an opportunity to find solutions", this is all wishful thinking.
If a block like the US or EU suddenly puts a whole lot of strong regulation on the coffee market, it likely will result in 90% coffee being problem free, but also costing 2-3 times as much and it just isn't as much a priority to be worth that.
They are already doing that.
The problem you have is that it is impossible to figure out where an atom came from.
The waste majority of cobalt is mined in traditional large operations. Only a small part of cobalt comes from small mines and only a small part of that is done with child labor.
The major cobalt buyers already work only with the big traditional mining companies. However there is a simply demand for cobalt and somebody will the smaller artistically mined stuff. There are many buyers who don't care.
Cutting out the whole mining sector outside of the large producers would also not be very ethical. There are programs underway to validate and certify some of these smaller mines but there are far to many to seriously do that from the outside.