Northvolt assembles first lithium-ion battery cell at Swedish gigafactory | Hacker News Reader

Northvolt assembles first lithium-ion battery cell at Swedish gigafactory

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199 pointsHieronymusBosch223 comments

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There's an estimate 10 000MW additional requirement of power for Swedish Industry (3000MW surplus in the north):

- The Swedish fossil-free steel (& Direct-Reduced Iron) manufacture (9000 MW)

- Amazon/google/microsoft datacenters (2000 MW)

- Conversion to electric cars (1000 MW, currently 128MW)..

- This gigafactory (?MW 50GW Capacity)

The Swedish government plan on solving these needs with Wind turbines (Currently 7000MW capacity), which this weekend was at 1.4% capacity due to no winds.

How is that going to work, do they plan on shutting down production when there's no wind?

EDIT: If you're going to downvote, please explain why, these numbers are not made-up, they are public:

Live stats: https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/

Capacity: https://svenskvindenergi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Stat...

Steel: https://dagenslogistik.se/h2-green-steal-satsar-pa-vatgaspro...

Gigafactory: https://northvolt.com/articles/first-cell/

Average data-center consumption 100-200MW. Amazon 3x, Facebook 3x, Google 1x, Cloudflare 1x and Microsoft 1x, estimate total 2000MW.

What are you even talking about?

Electrical power supply.

All the green projects (steel, batteries etc ...) are estimated to need over 40TWH/yr if they come to fruition. That is a shitload of energy that meeds to be produced, and there is really no good answer to how to do it reliably.

Most people that write like the parent does usually reply "nuclear". I am not comvinced, but somfar there seem to be few good answers.

I’m especially annoyed by the data centers. The politicians got taken for a ride, trading precious gigawatts of electrical infrastructure for a few dozens of jobs and a photo-op with a tier 3 VP from MANGA.

Sweden is a great place to produce hydro and wind. They should do more of that and then charge a good price for it.

No need to be annoyed.

Hydro capacity is at max right now. The generation is less of a problem than transmission, a lot of new infrastructure needs to be built because data centers are hogging a lot of it.

Oh, and the data center owners got a tax rebate on the electricity:

> Sweden’s 2017 tax reform made a 97% tax cut on any electricity used by datacentres, which had the potential to reduce an individual datacentre’s total electricity bill by up to 40%. The country’s ministry of enterprise and innovation estimates that the datacentre industry saved €44m in energy consumption costs in 2018 because of the tax reduction.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252466488/Tax-changes-le...

EU wants local datacentres, so EU data is local. Infrastructure remains (fibre, buildings) even if corps leave in a few years.

It is hard to insist data be local, then make it less competitive to build local. This deal you cite, may address that.

> EU wants local datacentres, so EU data is local.

Not 100% up to speed but didn’t SCHREMS II basically say that a local data center isn’t enough?

Yes, however it's pretty certainly going to be a part of the final answer to that question. Thus we're still going to want local datacentres, but maybe we will require that they are run by EU headquartered companies that don't report to foreign conglomerates.

I can't 100% know this of course but it seems fairly obvious to me.

where can I find those numbers?

Your claimed power levels are nonsensical. A big nuclear plant produces 1 GW.

(edit: it was edited since, was talking about tens of TW before)

He/she means TWH. Hybrit (green steel) is estimated to use about as much energy as all the hydro power in luleälven (15TWH).

I don't think so. TWh (Terawatt-hours) are not units of power, but a convenient conversion from Joules (J), which measure work, aka energy. When you say "steel uses so-and-so TWH" you are omitting over how long a period it does that; if it's an annual figure or something, then that makes sense, but you can't omit that. If my house consumes 1MWh (Megawatt-hour) of energy in one year, then it's a normal house. If it draws the same amount in an hour, then my house is not a house but a mid-sized city. You shouldn't expect people to guess what time period you are talking about. You should see the error in describing "all the hydro power" in TWh, because it simply is not a measurement of power.

Usually when you're talking about electricity generation, you are trying to weigh up demand and supply. These quantities are each most naturally represented as rates of energy use, because those rates fluctuate intra-day. We mostly care about the highest point of the graph of demand in a region over a 24-hour period, because you can't build a wind farm in an hour to meet extra demand. Using Watts avoids ever having to talk about the period in question. One Watt is one Joule of energy per second. The OP clarified in an edit that they mean Watts.

When you're talking about batteries, yes, you do need absolute quantities. Currently they're only good for smoothing out small peaks and troughs in supply, so the absolute amount of energy is proportional to how long it can cover for a wind farm when the wind farm slows down. Note that when the article talks about production capacity being "60GWh per year", they don't mean watts; the batteries are presumably shipped without much energy in them. They mean "produce enough batteries that the amount of capacity in total is 60GWh". It says nothing about the energy it will take to build them, which you would measure in Watts so that you can plug it into the instantaneous supply-demand calculation. 60GWh only tells you how much total supply smoothing capacity it will be able to provide to customers.

When you are talking about carbon emissions, you aren't as interested in peak demand, and you might instead think about absolute quantities in a year, and proportions of that that have been generated by renewable sources.

I omitted "per year". In the energy debate i sweden, the "per year" art has often been sloppily implicit. I will make sure to keep it in.

The numbers given by the parent are consistent with the twh/yr number seen in swedish media

TWh/year is definitely convenient if the central purpose of the discussion is to figure out the CO2e that will be emitted to produce it, or how to reduce the total energy use. This is good, in contrast to the coal/oil lobby's laser-like focus on peak demand, because their argument has long centered on the unpredictability of renewables. If you can do what the "smart grid" folks are trying to do, and spread out energy demand over the day, then the peak is not as big of a problem. Maybe Sweden's peaks are just naturally not so dramatic.

In Australia everyone worries about peak demand because the central interaction most people have with the grid (aside from their electricity bill) is a blackout during a heatwave due to heavy air conditioner use. This is incredibly dumb, because the argument completely fails to hold up against solar, for which a heatwave is a blessing.

It's blackouts that Sweden is dangerously close to, because the majority of power is consumed in the south but it's produced in the north.

There's not only a production issue, but also a transport issue.

Yeah. Everyone's got the same problems; practically nobody has invested enough in transmission. (I'm hoping someone sees this and corrects me, I'd love to see a good example.) Good luck up there.

We have a similar issue in Norway. There's currently a huge difference in prices between north and south of Norway due to limited transport capability. It's been over 10x at times this winter[1], though on average "just" 3-4x.

In addition the water reserves for our hydro, which is like over 90% of our power generation, is quite low...

[1]: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-Pri... (December 21, Oslo vs Tromsø)

What is preventing fixes to transmission, isn't it straightforward engineering with predictable construction times that can be planned well in advance?

It is very much fixable, but the Swedish ruling party don't want to do the recommended upgrades, even though they themselves commissioned the investigations into the infrastructure..

This is all correct, and I really appreciate you taking the time to say it. Except that a megawatt is more like a small town than a mid-sized city. A mid-sized city is closer to a gigawatt.

Thanks. And you’re right, I think I was spitballing for one minute.

Isn't the point of building the manufacturing plant in the north to utilize abundant hydropower?

That’s one factor yes, perhaps the most important. Power must be cheap and reliable.

Other factors include having access to cooling water (a river), access to a port, railway, and obviously cheap land.

Maybe even two ports: Depending on the exact location, the railway could give access to Narvik, besides Luleå or whatever.

Hmm, this all feels so familiar... Let's see if it becomes a repeat of the Stålverk 80 debacle. (Link in Swedish only: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A5lverk_80)

I doubt it can be compared to that now, given how it's already a reality and in production (unlike that historic debacle)

I’m all for wind. But concerns like running at 1% capacity due to no wind for a month bring me back to nuclear time and time again.

Like Elon says, we have this amazing thermonuclear reactor (the sun) that we can harness, among other resources. But we also have the ability to make thermonuclear reactors safely on the planet and harness 100x+ more of the energy from the reaction. Seems like a no brainer.

Just to provide a couple cites that OP didn’t:

A data center can use 100+ MW easily. https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-do-d... Nuclear Plants generate 500 MW- 1TW.

wind alone can't.

But wind, solar, inter-continental connections, hydro, storage, and tidal probably can.

Now whether we put nuclear in there or not becomes a matter of cost rather than necessity.

> But we also have the ability to make thermonuclear reactors safely on the plane

We most certainly do not have the ability to make fusion reactors, at least not yet. Nuclear reactors on the other hand...

I'd take a hundred Chernobyls over the end of modern society.

Exactly. Since we've used a lot of the oil dinosaurs graciously gave us, there's not gonna be another chance at modern civilization if we fuck this up. At least for us humans.

I've heard that we've basically dug up all the easily accessible ores needed to jump-start a civilization, and all that's left now is something you need high-tech to access.

So, there may not be another chance at an advanced civilization on this planet at all.

There's geological timescales of course. But then, I don't think that helps given that we've dug everything up to the surface to oxidize.

Oil doesn't actually come from dinosaurs, but you're right about the difficulty of bootstrapping civilization without easily accessible fossil fuels. We'd best not forget our current capabilities.

I really wish hydro/wind/solar were enough to power our modern society, and I hope it gets there eventually, but the reality is that it isn't enough to meet our current (and expanding) demands.

The short term answer nobody seems to want to acknowledge is nuclear, and frankly I'm getting pretty damn tired of society not seeing it.

We need to start building out nuclear NOW so that we (and future generations) have time to figure out renewables and improved nuclear.

To twist the knife further some maniacs are now looking at hydro power and decrying it as too dangerous for wildlife. It popped in my YouTube recommend.

Like motherfucker (to the video maker). You think the salmon are going to exist if the acidity of ocean rises?

It's akin to burning in a house, fireman arrives with a hose and then I ask him, is the water iron free or not. I think I should have bigger concerns rn.

At this point, I am wondering if some of these videos are sponsored by oil associates.

I doubt these are sponsored. But some people would advocate less energy usage in general. Essentially saying we are poisoning and destroying the planet with energy usage.

I doubt people who advocate this see an acceptable way forward to reach what they want. I personally think there isn't such a way forward. But I can see arguing for a desired endstate without knowing exactly how to get there.

How is nuclear a short term answer?

It takes 20 years to build a nuclear plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant).

I think the idea is that if we instead build alternatives we will not want those plants in 20 years.

By keeping currently running nuclear plants running.

Instead of replacing them withmore CO2 emitters.

Such as Germany and other countries taking all nuclear off line.

And for what reason? Historically, the concern has been what to do with the waste. But now, because we are investing in nuclear, we are finding that we can actually re-process the waste.

And, at the worst, once rocket launch has become trivial, we can always send the waste off into the void (or sun).

Its easier to shoot stuff out of the solar system than to shoot it into the sun.

> Historically, the concern has been what to do with the waste. But now, because we are investing in nuclear, we are finding that we can actually re-process the waste.

Reprocessing of nuclear waste is by no means a "new" finding. It's been known since nuclear power reactors have been a thing, but it is politically untenable. No country with nuclear capabilities is comfortable with other countries reprocessing spent fuel, as it is a portion of the process used to create material for nuclear weapons.

As much as I want to love nuclear as an amazing source of energy, the cost and issues that arise with nuclear waste are massive and frequently discounted by people encouraging additional nuclear power reactors.

I'm not dismissing the issues with the waste. Co2 however is a much larger issue in the short term.

Yeah. That’s all I’m trying to say. You said it far better than me.

Respectfully disagree. We can and have made economically impractical thermonuclear reactors. But they fail largely because we’ve sheepishly avoided advancing the technology for 70+ years.

I’m just beating the nuclear drum in general. We need to be investing like crazy here.

We can make fusion reactors here on earth. Efficiency remains the issue. https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/us-fusion-reaction-generates...

I think you are confusing thermonuclear with fission. Thermonuclear means fusion. The first case you mention, the sun, is indeed thermonuclear.

However reactors are on earth not thermonuclear, they are regular fission. Fusion may be on the near or far horizon, depending on who you ask, but we certainly don’t have that ability yet.

My statement was less confused and more optimistic. We most definitely have the ability to make thermonuclear reactors on earth. The issue is making them work effectively for power generation.

See, for example, https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/us-fusion-reaction-generates...

I firmly believe we would have this cracked by now if we hadn’t foolishly wimped out on nuclear when there were some growing pains. Instead of investing we have countries running from nuclear. That’s a huge blunder in my opinion.

> I think you are confusing thermonuclear with fission. Thermonuclear means fusion.

Huh, TIL -- I'd always thought it meant both. Like, fission also generates heat from activity of the atomic nucleus, so it's also "thermo-nuclear" in that sense.

(So, if anyone knows: Where does the term come from -- is it from the immense heat needed for fusion ignition?)

You may be being downvoted because you have provided no citations or justifications for your claims, and because anti-electric shilling is, unfortunately, very common on the internet. The oil industry has really amazing PR.

Is "TW" supposed to be a terawatt? Because that is an enormously large amount of power. Annual human global power consumption is only 20TW.

(Edit: Since I replied to this, you changed your units, and provided sources which I haven't yet checked.)

Obviously, wind and solar cannot provide constant power, as fossil fuels can, but by building them in carefully selected locations, and combining them grid energy storage (which can be, but does not have to be, batteries[1]), un-evenness in supply can be smoothed out.

[1]: Pumped storage hydroelectricity is another example.

Yeah, I changed the units to be clearer.

Clearer?

You shrank them by 3 orders of magnitude aka a factor of 1000.

That's not "clearer", that's a huge adjustment.

I'm sorry, the units where wrong, it's been corrected.

It should, of course be 1GW = 1000 MW, to be clearer I changed it to MW.

Where was the terawatt? I only see tens of gigawatts in the new numbers.

No, they are not the same. You exchanged 10 TW with 10,000 MW.

10,000 MW = 10 GW = 0.01 TW.

> Annual human global power consumption is only 20TW.

Whatever the original post, "annual consumption" could only be measured in TWh, which is several orders of magnitude larger than installed capacity (usually given in MW). Popular media usually mix these so one has to just guess based on context.

(And annual consumption is usually misleading in this context due to seasonality of both hydro/wind production, and the higher power demand during winter.)

At least the fossil-free steel is reduced with green hydrogen made through on-site electrolysis. That means a local hydrogen store can act as an energy buffer offsetting some of the fluctuations in the grid.

That is interesting.

As you must know, steel is an alloy of iron and carbon, the carbon in question coming from, you know, coal.

So how exactly it can be "fossil-free"?

Fossil free steel is steel produced by not burning carbon in the process.

It simply means it doesn’t burn fossil fuels and emit (fossil) CO2.

Carbon can still be used for the alloy itself. That’s not an environmental problem.

"fossil free steel" is a marketing term which means that (fossil) carbon is no longer used for reduction and process heat. This accounts for the vast majority of the carbon needed in steel production.

Carbon that is absorbed into the alloy will stay there for a long time. Until the metal rusts away completely, which is ideally decades at least. But you’re right that it’s not stored indefinitely, it does go into the atmosphere eventually.

Your numbers and/or units are wrong.

Sweden's power consumption in 2020 was 172.7 TWh [0].

That's an average power supply of 19.7 GW (172.7e3 GWh / 365 / 24h).

So either you show numbers for annual consumption but have the wrong unit (TW where it should be TWh) or your numbers are absurdly high.

[0]https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...

Units where unclear, it's been corrected. Numbers are correct though, see the sources.

Sweden and Norway has a lot of hydro power.

When wind mills in Denmark are running then Norway stops their hydro and imports cheap electricity from the Danish wind mills. They save up the water.

When the Danish wind mills stands still then Norway sells expensive electricity from hydro.

Denmark is a very good place for wind mills so the combination is a win-win. It's crazy to look independently at each country because that is not how the electricity market works in Northern Europe. The countries are very interconnected.

It just so happends that the wind often blows during the day in Denmark and stand stills during night. So this back and forth happends almost every day.

When you ignore hydro power in NO/SE it shows that you don't know anything about the electricity market in Northern Europe.

It is true that we have a lot of hydro power, however it is pretty much fully utilised as it stands (they're talking about hundreds of additional MW when they talk about expansion, which will not do much in the grand scheme of things), and with all of this additional load, as well as fast ongoing electrification of our vehicles, it seems unlikely that additional wind farms will be able to pick up the slack.

Obviously I'm hoping I'm wrong here, because the alternative is nuclear which is apparently still a no-no word in most political circuits over here, and thus is unlikely to happen. Even if nuclear were to happen, ramping it upp will take much longer than the pace of this additional industry and electrification...

I'm worried we're going to end up in a crisis where we have to build up capacity quickly, and the only reliable and fast way of doing so is through fossil fuels.

According to "Energikommissionen"s research, Swedish hydro could be greatly built out with minimal effects on the environment.

[0] (2015 article) https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/dags-att-bygga-ut-vattenkraf...

I found that article as well, it cites no numbers, and according to Vattenfall the plan is for an additional 600MW by 2023... Hardly enough given everything discussed here.

https://group.vattenfall.com/se/nyheter-och-press/nyheter/20...

Yes, because I couldn't find the Energikommissionen official publications any more, same goes for net stability documents being removed from government sites (from 2013).

I'm actually cautiously optimistic for once, the MP ("Greens") rage-quit out of the administration opened up for S to skip the MP imposed blockade of the long-term storage decision. If that finally gets done it at least removes some uncertainty if any company wants to start making plans for a new plant (Yes, it's almost idealistically hopeful but the blockade did impose a lot of uncertainty).

Hydro in general has two metrics that matter. How many MWh can you generate per year (pretty much, how much water falls in a year), and how much MW can you generate at any given moment (ie. How fast can the water come out of the lake at top speed).

As the price of electricity varies more and more hour to hour, it becomes worth installing new generators to generate more MW, so you can do all the generation in a short time window to get the best price.

But there are strict limits as to how much water you can release downstream, too.

The bottle neck right now is distribution, and building power lines is costly and takes a lot of time because you have to cross peoples properties, plus all the usual NIMBYism.

Denmark is pretty bad with respect to renewables. They have increased their oil consumption in the past years, they have increased the so called "other renewables" which is in fact, burning wastes because they recycle nothing. They are running at 70% on non renewables.

So, Denmark is definitely not the Nordic country you want to use as reference[0]. Sweden is a completely different story[1].

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Burning waste for electricity makes financial/carbon/environmental sense until you have eliminated all fossil fuels from your grid.

Denmark has had a reduction in carbon intensity per GDP similar to the EU average, which has brought them close to France and Sweden, who've been low for a while but haven't improved as much over recent times as say Germany.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?end=2...

Buried waste sequesters carbon, burned waste doesn’t. From a global warming standpoint replacing a low efficiency wasting burning power plant with a much higher efficiency natural gas power plant is a net gain for the environment. Not just is it less CO2 in the atmosphere it’s also less lead, arsenic, etc.

Burying waste may sequester carbon, but also potentially creates a host of other environmental issues down the road when stuff starts leaking into the groundwater.

Proper incineration + smoke scrubbing is, as far as I know, the best way to eliminate organic (as in chemistry) waste in an environmentally friendly way, eg. PVC.

“Potentially creates” is a solvable problem. Further the ash from burning municipal waste is very toxic and still needs to be stored somewhere. The volume is significantly reduced, but waste disposal benefits from the square:cube law reducing the volume doesn’t save that much effort.

As long as smoke temperature quenching, smoke scrubbing etc is done correctly, I can only see that the ash is less toxic in total than the waste, as eg. chlorocarbons are handled by incineration.

Still toxic, but less in total. Unless I am missing something?

It really depends on what was burned. I suspect in general municipal waste probably gets less toxic in total but more difficult to handle. That said toxicity in general is less of an issue than what escapes into the environment, and here I think traditional waste disposal has real advantages.

PS: As an example wet wood ash normally has a PH of 9 to 11 which can cause mild chemical burns while I burned wood is harmless on it’s own.

I am really unsure where they are getting those numbers from, I guess it may be fuel usage in cars that causes the oil usage, because it is certainly not electricity production where only about 1% is oil [0]

[0]: https://en.energinet.dk/Green-Transition/Renewable-energy-in...

While Denmark definitely has a long way to go in terms of energy consumption, it is demonstrably false the we “recycle nothing”.

At my local garbage/recycling facility where you can offload gardening waste, tires, washing machines, cardboard etc. there are 20+ categories into which you must sort your trash - one of those is incinerated.

France threatened to cut the power to Jersey a few weeks ago, Ukraine faced its own threats from Russia, so I will still look at something as strategic as electricity production along borders. Cross border electricity grids are all good until there is a conflict or a major shortage (remember what happened to EU cooperation on PPE in early 2020 when EU countries were seizing PPE crossing their borders).

The odds of Nordic countries fighting each other are astronomically low.

Russia was always profiting off Ukraine, while France and the UK have generally been at odds (yes, all those micro-states count as British as far as the French are concerned).

The situations you're presenting are not comparable.

And regarding PPE, yes, everyone was doing it initially but the rest of the crisis was handled together. If anything, I think the EU received extra powers to be able to handle similar crises in the future.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the energy market disruptions lead Swedish and Norwegian grid operators to put restrictions on cross-border energy transfers, in violation of their co-operation agreements: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-06/europe-s-...

> The odds of Nordic countries fighting each other are astronomically low.

War? Sure. Political fights are not that unlikely though.

Also, Norway is not part of the EU, so they can sell (or not sell) electricity how they please.

Denmark and Norway have been a single country/union for more years(290) than United States of America has existed (245).

We share so much culture and language that Denmark going to war with Norway would be like New York going to war with Boston.

LOL, yeah, oh well, Ukraine and Russia always been together. But one old gremlin named Putin with a use of propaganda in 7 years made 70% of a country according to polls to be OK to kill their used to be beloved neighbors.

So don't underestimate the power of propaganda and crazy ideas politics can embrace.

The Swedish hydro is currently under a lot of pressure. It is overused and need to be reduced in order to prevent extinctions of multiple species. The existing plants are old and need be repaired, and a majority of them has failed the regulative requirement for environmental preservation. Some are arguing that the law need to be changed, possible including EU law, or they won't be economical viable to get them into compliance.

As one comment on the news said, it is not viable to dig out new rivers. Someone in Norway could comment if they can expand their capacity, but I suspect the answer is the same there. Hydro is good but its a finite resource, and we now know the effect it has on fish and other animals that need the water to be traversalable.

Talking about the energy grid of Sweden, how many know that the single biggest contributor to carbon emissions in south of Sweden is an oil power plant? A country full of hydro and still, that is what tops the charts each year.

> Talking about the energy grid of Sweden, how many know that the single biggest contributor to carbon emissions in south of Sweden is an oil power plant? A country full of hydro and still, that is what tops the charts each year.

It's an oil plant, of course it's going to be a big contributor if it's running. Peaker plants are almost always fossil based, especially in regions that do not have hydro like the south of Sweden. Add to that the fact that the electricity demands outside of Sweden make the oil plant profitable from time to time. I think they run it more often ever since 2 of Ringhals reactors closed last year though, but even when they weren't closed I'd expect it to be the biggest contributor. Do you know if that was the case?

What I have read is that the plant operated only for a total of a few days each year before the nuclear reactors was closed down. Karlshamnsverket was built in in 1970, and the south of Sweden had a nuclear plant in Barsebäcks until 2005. It was the combined effect of both Ringhals and Barsebäcks that created the market situation where Karlshamnsverket operates regularly all over the year when ever demand goes up.

Given the amount of hydro Sweden have, it is a bit of a black mark on the country that an oil plant actually get to run as much as it does. Its worth noting that Norway doesn't seem to use a lot of oil based peaker plants. I wonder if the oil that get burned in Sweden actually comes from Norway.

Between 2016-2020 it had an average running time of 67 hours. For this year it's somewhere between 500-700hours I think, so closing Barsebäck had no real influence on this.

Norway doesn't have nuclear either, they can easily regulate using pretty much only hydro. Most of the time this works for Sweden too, but when it doesn't it's nice to have an alternative. Even if it's spewing a ton of carbon into the air. The oil for Karlshamnsverket mostly comes from Russia.

Do you know why they are buying it from Russia instead of Norway? Funding Russia, especially individuals there with ties to the fossil fuel industry, seems like a poor decision when at the same time there is a bunch of trade sanctions against Russia.

At any rate, I don't think its a very "nice" to subsidize the fossil fuel industry in order to have the alternative to burn oil. There are 8760 hours during a year, so for most part of that we simply are giving away tax money in order to keep the plant ready in the case of high demand. That is a very high price pay for the pleasure of spewing carbon into the air. If we instead reserved a higher portion of the capacity from hydro, and invested in more peak production by modernizing the generators (and at the same time invested in more environmental friendly design!), hydro and nuclear could manage what Norway is doing. A energy grid free of fossil fuels. That would be nice to have and something I would prefer over an oil plant.

I don't know to be honest, the oil from Russia that's refined has a lot of sulphur so maybe it's just because it's cheaper?

Spewing carbon into the air is still a smaller price to pay than not having electricity when you need it in my opinion. While hydro tends to be quite reliable and predictable I wouldn't want to bet everything on it, just like wind and solar you are still dependent on the weather albeit to a much lesser extent. At least a part of your reserve power needs to be independent of the weather. On a global scale it's just a drop in the ocean.

Energy potential in the atmosphere, in this case meaning the oceans and the air, will always depend on the weather, by definition. The alternative is mining uranium and carbon.

I don't understand your comment. I said wind, solar and hydro are weather dependent?

"just like wind and solar you are still dependent on the weather albeit to a much lesser extent."

Hydro power is more consistent than for example solar which can change instantly even though both are weather dependent.

Does interconnect serve 100% required capacity? IIRC in a lot of places they are like 10-20% tops.

On demand power generation is going to be key in any attempt to transition to a (more) renewable energy mix. What Storage options exists today that can produce substantial amounts of power other than pumped hydro?

The utter disregard for what works is insane.

In Norway which basically is the land of hydro prices has spiked 3-5X because Germany and UK decided to fuck up their power generation and decommission a bunch of nuclear and fossil plants making them reliant on wind and russian gas.

> other than pumped hydro

What your reason to exclude pumped hydro in this logical reasoning?

And also regular hydro power as a storage already complements wind power since you can choose to not use it when there is wind. You don't need to pump the water.

The UK is not reliant on Russian gas. Most imports come from Norway. And we have an active program to build new nuclear power stations to replace those at end of life.

Also, the UK currently has 20GW of battery storage in the pipeline. It starts quickly and is even being designed for frequency response providing full load within 1 second. That is very useful in dealing with nuclear or grid failures.

  > How is that going to work, do they plan on shutting down production when there's no wind?

This isn’t completely mad. We are entering a new era of power where it’s price is going to fluctuate throughout the day/week (more than before) and industry will scale up and down depending on price/availability.

Automated production lines are “easy” to start/stop.

I think we will also see compute pricing in the cloud react dynamically to cost of power. It makes more sense to run compute intensive (none real-time) tasks during peak power availability.

That's if you can assume that peak usage can be supplied, if it can't, there will be a loss of frequency (<50hz). When that happens, entire regions have to be forcefully shutdown, meaning there's no electricity to use even if you wanted to.

Sweden have been dangerously close to this already, I expect it to happen now when the real winter starts.

My point is that prices will be dynamically raised as 100% usage is approached. That way larger energy users in industry are pushed to scale down operations temporarily.

Already governments/suppliers have agreements with large users to scale down during peek usage to ensure no loss of frequency, my suggestion is this is expanded to the whole of industry and made dynamic based on pricing.

I suspect that some consumer protection would need to be introduced so domestic customers don’t see quite the same level of price fluctuation.

My point was that, if you stop and start frequently, the balance of the network will be extremely hard to maintain so you'll get blackouts that can span wide areas or even the whole net.

Even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure that Swedish industries CAN scale down even if they wanted to, because the cost to start up again would be greater than shutting down.

It's like, surely you can "scale down" an electric smelter. Only that would mean almost rebuilding the furnaces afterwards.

And it's sort of "simple" for the iron smelters.

Try to shut down an aluminium smelter at an hour's notice. I'm not sure if it wouldn't be cheaper to build a completely new facility afterwards.

Many such smelters already act as grid connected batteries. Since they store heat, they can vary their electrical loads and get paid for doing so.

Pretty much anything that heats, cools or pumps water can do this, but the big users are the easy place to start.

There's even startups trying to melt aluminum purely to use it as a storage medium: https://www.alcircle.com/news/azelio-recycled-aluminium-to-s...

I've seen similar by Salt-X, they use molten salt.

Glad science is being done on this, but it seems hard, the salt causes korrosion issues, so it doesn't last long.

Eh.

I'm talking about primary smelters, the ones that take bauxite as input.

You just can't. It'll ruin the chemical composition, the electolysers, you'll have to throw out (somehow, very expensive in itself) a lot of fluoride in various nasty forms, electrolyzer lining, electrodes, etc. This would cause weeks of delays and $ tens of millions lost.

It just can't be done. And it's never done unless a hydroelectric dam fails or something of that magnitude.

alcircle.com is just barely less insane. but just barely. Even NaK eutectic makes more sense.

Do you have any sources on the claim that it have been close to causing loss of frequency? In Denmark that relies quite a bit more on wind they are saying that it should happen for no more than 5 minutes this year (and that may higher than what actual happens, as they have averaged less than 1 minute per year the last 10 years).

Furthermore the ENTSOE Mid-term Adequacy Forecast 2020 [0] forecasts Scandinavia to have between 0 and 0.1 hour loss of load expectation.

[0]: https://www.entsoe.eu/outlooks/midterm/

There is a lot of industrial processes that take hours or days to ramp down or up and sudden loss of electricity breaks equipment/infrastructure. Yes they have local batteries/generators for backup but those should not be used during "normal" operations.

Quite true, and those industries would need to either adapt to a new energy pricing model or innovate on technology to be able to scale more rapidly.

Just because there is a status quo doesn’t mean that change cannot and should not happen.

Which probably means just running more generators.

Which probably also means they will not be competitive with foreign companies

And price accordingly. It's only logical that the price of energy input is reflected in product price.

Exactly, if you want your aluminium extrusion immediately during high electricity prices you pay a premium, or wait for lower prices. Industry will just have to adapt to the new normal.

Here in Finland they innovated a long time ago by building/owning more electricity production capability than they use and selling to themselves "at cost" instead of market rate when it makes sense.

This also ties into the nuclear reactors (and the new OL3 reactors) where the parts of the industry that use lots of electricity (paper/cardboard/cellulose here in Finland) are the biggest single owners. Basically they want to be damn sure they can get the electricity they need when they need it at a price they can still make a profit from whatever they use it for.

At least for the steel industry stuff quoted in OP the electricity consumption is mostly to produce hydrogen gas. The gas will then be stored in giant underground chambers and after that used in the steel production. This works extremely nicely with wind power since the electrolysis decouples the electricity consumption from the steel production. This means that the steel plants will act as stabilizers and modulators of the electricity prices in the whole region to a certain extent (together with the hydro plants and batteries presumably).

I don't think many production lines are going to be start stop.

If your production line is only running 70% of the time, and all of your running costs actually scale with that (which they almost certainly wouldn't), then you are still looking at 30% less return on capital investment. And most high energy consumption industry has massive capital requirements.

Instead I think the adaptation will be in energy storage (both at consumer and producer) and simple energy overprovisioning. I have hopes for storage. Especially low efficiency but incredibly cheap and scalable storage.

If we can store 30% of wind surplus in summer and use it in winter, that would be amazing. It would also help ensure energy security.

From pointing out that renewable isn't the whole story yet in the past on here good luck with not getting down voted.

There needs to be a solid configurable baseline that is low carbon which is combined with some transient energy store such as these batteries (if they're designed to not just make giant fire mountains when they fail).

Nuclear meets that very well as does diversifying into wave or hydro.

Either they:

have plenty of other power sources they can ramp up when there is no wind

plan to use large scale storage

some combination of the above

or it will not work.

Thankfully HYBRIT is a smart consumer with the explicit goal of taking advantage of cheap wind power. The hydrogen production is oversized to allow a buffer to be used.

What sweden sorely needs is off-shore wind power which has higher capacity factors and do not completely correlate with on-shore wind. Currently there is only one miniscule park located in Öresund.

Hopefully the military soon starts agreeing to some projects...

You had time to look up all these links with big scary numbers, but couldn't take the time to find out how wind power works as part of an integrated low carbon grid? Your own link shows the hydro working to complement wind.

Mentioning that wind isn't constant is about as insightful as the regular "sun doesn't shine at night" input whenever solar comes up. The giant billion dollar global industry that has been building out renewables at an increasing rate for decades has, somewhat unsurprisingly, already spotted those two facts. It baffles me that people keep bringing them up like they've won an argument by revealing the big secret that everyone is ignoring.

btw your wind capacity figure is correct, for 2017, but it's doubled in the 5 years since, just like it doubled the 5 years before.

How you complement something doesn't matter if the total capacity isn't there and if multiple countries are all consuming their energy, which is currently happening (this driving prices waaay up), you're looking at potential grid shutdowns due to networks not being able to maintain their frequency. Also, if you go below or too high in frequency, which can happen often in the summer with renewables (like in Germany, you got paid to use the electricity), you're unable to export it because, again, the frequency won't match the other countries grid.

Germany shutting down 10GW of nuclear in 2022 is going the an interesting experiment in how bad it can go when you don't have enough planable electricity any more. [0] https://eike-klima-energie.eu/2021/09/05/deutschlands-beinah...

Not sure why the 2017 figure matters, if it's 1% of capacity it's still a fraction of total capacity if it's 2x or 5x more.

See comment below about the linked article being part of a misinformation campaign: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736480

Thanks for pointing it out, I can't edit the comments any more.

Hm. Yeah. That may be the case, but IMO it doesn't really matter if the change is anthropogenous, or not. The thing is, there is much wishful thinking in all parties, on every side of the fences. And as it happens, not all of the points raised against the others are invalid. It's just that they are forbidden by groupthink, virtue signalling, and so on.

So...in the spirit of considering all options, to get the real big picture, some of them maybe shouldn't be discarded so fast. OFC 'follow the money' should be applied, but still...

> 'follow the money'

https://www.politico.eu/article/chinese-wind-farm-investment...

It's certainly a topic with a lot of nuance, but in this particular case, there's no valid argument made and EIKE is known for deliberate misinformation. There is unanimous scientific consensus (a rare thing!) about climate change being real and anthropogenic. Anyone trying to argue this point in 2021 has no place in a factual debate.

You know? I know the site by name, mostly by comments from some german sites I visit. Telepolis.de, mostly, but this controversy popped up elsewhere. I just spent about 30 minutes there, and skimmed the headlines, abstracts, and saw they published articles stating climate change is anthropogenic also. Though they stated explicitely that's not 'their' position.

Furthermore, one big fart, or many smaller belches of volcanic activity can change/tilt/whatver all the interconnected systems in other ways. Then what?

Anyone who argues this, has no place in a marketing-war of ersatz-beliefs.

Personally I prefer riding around the Georgia Guidestones on Blucifer.

Yeehaaw!

I cited sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29736480

I opined.

The simplest explanation of why Sweden is not plagued by regular massive blackouts is that your facts, math, and assumptions are wrong/incomplete.

Simply put, it's not a closed system.

Sweden is connected to the rest of Europe. So, German, Danish, British, Norwegian, etc. grids can import and export power as needed. The entire continent of Europe produces wind (and other power) at a pretty steady and predictable pace. Power is big business since selling it in the market is pretty lucrative. And since wind is pretty affordable, a lot of the supply is wind based these days.

Basically, Sweden can produce cheap power locally most of the time and import more expensive power when they need to. Having a surplus means they export more power than that they import over time. It's just market dynamics. Because the way weather works, if there is no wind locally, that just means there definitely is some wind elsewhere. That's why Europe gets away with having so much wind power. The amount of wind power it produces fluctuates but not nearly as dramatically as you seem to believe.

It's a rapidly growing market because as you note there is plenty of demand for more power. Hence, the rapid roll out of the cheapest way to produce it world wide: wind.

Yes, it is connected, which means that when multiple countries are at a loss, then other can help out - but when all countries area at a loss or when the frequency don't match, which is currently happening, prices sky-rocket, electricity cannot be transported and black-outs are bound to happen unless turning to regional shut-downs.

Which, by the way, is what happened in Germany recently [0], they had to be saved by multiple countries, shut down of large industry (Costing a lot in damage) - all to prevent black-outs. How will that be handled when Germany shuts down 10GW of nuclear power 2022, if it's already not enough?

If you have 0% wind and you add 0% more wind, you get 0% wind...

[0] https://eike-klima-energie.eu/2021/09/05/deutschlands-beinah...

Not sure how different facts would help, when issues are actually happening.

You probably didn't realize, but EIKE is a right-wing climate change denier "think tank", falsely claiming that antrophogenic climate change does not exist[1]. Their claims are widely discredited and considered pseudoscience[2][3].

The linked article is an alarmist piece about the alleged risks of renewables and does not quote any reliable sources. I couldn't find any independent claim that anything unusual or alarming happened on August 14. Load shedding is a normal procedure and almost certainly didn't cause "a lot of damage" - it's industrial customers buying electricity at a discount in exchange for disconnecting from the grid when needed. This is only done for industrial processes that can be safely interrupted (like aluminium processing plants).

If anything, it shows that the mechanism works as intended. There wasn't any notable frequency deviation on Aug 14 in the European grid. All the graphs look normal - there was a ~15 GW deficit in Germany which was compensated[4], well within normal operating parameters.

In spite of the increasing complexity of managing the power grid due to renewables (a real problem which requires significant investments to solve), the German power grid is more reliable than ever[5].

[1]: https://eike-klima-energie.eu/die-mission/grundsatzpapier-kl...

[2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europ%C3%A4isches_Institut_f%C...

[3]: https://www.quarks.de/podcast/quarks-science-cops-der-fall-e...

[4]: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&...

[5]: https://app.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/energie/energiewirt...

Thanks a lot for the clarification, I was unsure if the claims where as bad as they seemed.

It IS a problem in Sweden though, since we transport large amounts electricity over an under-dimensioned grid from the far north to south.

Agreed - Germany has a similar north-south issue and NIMBYs protesting against construction of new high-capacity power lines aren't helping.

The alarmism is misplaced, though. There's less excess capacity these days than some are comfortable with and more investments are needed (and ongoing), but we're far from risking blackouts or being reckless. Grid planners are a conservative bunch.

Alarmism about blackouts is indeed bad. The grid planners have enough fossil fueled power plants on reserve (paid through subsidies), and the rising costs from such plans are indication that they are indeed planning ahead. Countries in the northern parts of EU have enough fossil fueled capacity to survive on 0% wind for long periods of time, even in winter, which is somewhat being demonstrated right now. When the wind is up and running again those plants will go back to operate on standby and getting paid to do so.

For now it just a money and political issue. Continuing to buy and expand the fossil fuel capacity is not very popular or cheap, and continuing paying for reserve energy through subsidies isn't very popular. The political goal in EU is to reduce those subsidies, through the numbers in the yearly report tend to show the opposite. When faced with the choice of following the political goal and blackouts, grid planners choose a stable grid.

Nordic countries have had a really advanced electricity trading market for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool

There are custom ERP:s for example that are developed for power companies.

No, the simplest explanation is that they’re supplementing the (unpredictable) “green” power by oil/gas.

> The entire continent of Europe produces wind (and other power) at a pretty steady and predictable pace

Indeed: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

An attempt at a serious answer now that it looks like you fixed the units in your post.

One key part is recognizing that “energy TRANSITION” accounts inherently that we are not talking about the design of the final end state 50-100 years from now, as doing so is not useful to the conversation as there are too many unknowns that far ahead. Better to recognize that you do not need 1:1 mapping of energy storage to power usage requirements in this “toy” example as fulfilled by li-ion production.

In practice:

- Solar and wind generation compliment each other structurally (sunnier when less windy, windier at night, seasonally too) meaning that in practice you only need a fraction of power capacity per amount of solar and wind generation. The best summary I’ve come across for this is some of Tony Seba’s/RethinkX’s work on “super power”[1]

- it is always sunny or windy somewhere. More renewables increase the incentive for deeper and longer distance grid interconnections, meaning continental differences in generation can be “smoothed out”

- li-ion energy storage is great for same day fluctuations(storage measured in hours), less so for longer. Other energy storage tech platforms have different economic properties leading to more sensible deployments (the other end of the spectrum is making hydrogen gas via electrolyzer to then convert back via fuel cell - best for storage measured in months)

- You also need to factor in the nuclear and hydroelectric sources existing 50 years from now, as well as the natural gas to bridge the variability until then.

Could go on but there is lots out there discussing the involvement and feasibility of having a very renewables heavy grid.

The key thing is that we need to build as much of all renewables, in as many places as possible ASAP. Penetration of both solar and wind as we can already see can operate well on grids with virtually 0 energy storage. Worst case you can always curtail production. Curtailed production represents someone’s energy storage opportunity.

[1] summary/intro - but read source material https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/01/16/solar-wind-storage-su...

It's not that easy, if you consider the environmental issues with digging down large power cables, creating power converters for every single unit, maintenance and replacing after 20 years, employment and network balancing - compared to a single nuclear facility that lasts up to 80 year, it's an order of magnitude easier to maintain, convert and install.

There's been studies and books written on the subject [0], sources at the end.

[0] https://www.analys.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/lcaer-om-ka...

Cable and network management are not a moonshot. Utilities and power producers will adapt, don't underestimate the power of an industry's learning rate.

> - li-ion energy storage is great for same day fluctuations(storage measured in hours), less so for longer. Other energy storage tech platforms have different economic properties leading to more sensible deployments (the other end of the spectrum is making hydrogen gas via electrolyzer to then convert back via fuel cell - best for storage measured in months)

For the steel making part of this, the idea is to replace coal with hydrogen gas in the iron to steel process, so making hydrogen gas of the electricity is the actual wanted output and not just a way to store energy.

Yes we will of course need nuclear.

But our ministers in charge claim it's an "old" technology.

Makes me wonder if they ever go sailing...

Regarding feeding

> The Swedish fossil-free steel (& Direct-Reduced Iron) manufacture (9000 MW)

with wind power, then yes, it make total sense. What most of that energy consumption is used for is splicing water to hydrogen (which is then later on used in the steel process). Having a couple of weeks of hydrogen in a buffer may not be totally free or problem free, but it is quite straightforward and totally feasible. That means the electricity demand can become very elastic and sensitive to demand, which is a great feature for electric stability. If production would need to shut down due to lack of wind then there is a need to build a bigger buffer.

The steel plant isn’t built along the south coast though, where the wind turbines will be, it’s built in the opposite end of Sweden (boden).

The north of Sweden is exactly where most of the big wind turbine parks will be. You have plenty of open space and limited NIMBY. NIMBY is also the reason why you were under the impression that most turbines are going to end up in the south of Sweden, it leads to disproportional attention in the media.

Hm, you're right, from the maps I saw in state media, it all looks like it would be along the south coasts and Germany's coast. But there's just as much if not even more MW going to the north!

It's probably a projection error as well. The normal maps really don't show how big the north of Sweden really is.

That's funny. I'd have thought most maps are based on the standard Mercator projection, which is infamous for exaggerating sizes more the farther north you go? (The commonly-used blatant example used is how Greenland looks almost as big as Africa on a flat map, but on a globe it's tiny in comparison.) So unless you've seen some weird non-standard map, the north of Sweden probably looks bigger than it ought to, not smaller.

The new wind park that is intended to provide the energy for this is not along the south coast but also in northern Sweden though. Also, last I heard neither the exact location for the windmills or the steel mill are set in stone yet.

Language is funny. A couple of years ago, "Gigafactory" was a silly word that Elon had made up.

It still is. What does it even mean? As far as I can tell it's just a somewhat large factory producing electronic cars.

Well, there was a TV show on Discovery in at least the Netherlands, called Megafactories, is this really that much larger? Car plants are pretty large as they go already.

So, after some DDGing, the biggest car plant is Volkswagens' in Wolfsburg, Germany [0] at 6.5 million square meters, while Giga nevada has 11.5 million square meters [1], so twice the size. So it's big, but to go from mega to giga, you'd really need a 1000x increase, rather than a mere 2x increase :-).

The Northvolt facility does not qualify for the Giga-prefix IMHO.

[0] https://motoroctane.com/news/213409-largest-car-factories-wo.... This page actually positions Giga Nevada at a lower rank, so probably outdated

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Nevada

Pretty sure the name comes from the idea of producing Gigawatt-hours of battery capacity in one factory (which it does), rather than from the footprint.

Yeah, thought so too after I posted my comment and walked away. Oh well

I was under the impression that Giga referred to GigaWh of batteries per year produced

Cylindrical Li-ion factory with more than GWh/month or 10k cars/month worth of claimed capacity

Elon made it up for the factory that produces cells in Nevada. It means a factory that produces many GW/hs of batteries a year.

This terms has been widely adopted in the battery industry for large cell manufacturing plants.

Tesla has since used this terms more for all its factories. And part of the plan is to build factories where cell production and car manufactures is colocated.

terrafactories are coming, so don't be surprised, nothing silly it's just a capacity and scale of a factory.

"Terafactories". For planet-manufacturing facilities, you have to consult the HHGTTG.

> We want more women to find a career at Northvolt. That’s why we ask permission to track your visit at northvolt.com (read more here).

Commendable, if true. Was hoping to read an explanation in the link but it just showed the privacy policy.

Disappointing.

Good catch. That's great framing for a cookie consent. And you're also not rejecting Cookies, you're refusing them.

Yeah, that was weird. What do their cookie policies have to do with helping women find a career at Northvolt? A quick search for related keywords on their privacy policy page reveals nothing on the topic.

That aside, I'm really excited about Northvolt and what they're doing, it sounds like really interesting work.

Google Analytics gives you demographic data like gender. I guess that could be leveraged to target job ads but the fact they didn’t even bother putting up an explanation tells me it’s just guilt tripping you into accepting cookies.

I didn't _think_ GA provided a mechanism for a site owner to target a user in real time based on their gender though. I just assumed everyone got the same popup regardless of gender.

> I guess that could be leveraged to target job ads

That sounds like a great way to be mentioned in the news next to the words "discrimination lawsuit"

Not if it's done to actually make sure listings are viewed by a representative group of people in the industry. Don't always assume the worst.

If anything, most companies have huge biases in the way they conduct recruiting. Take home tasks excludes those taking care of a child alone in larger degree than other groups for instance, posting listings only on HN would skew the people applying heavily. Etc etc.

Making sure you've reached all groups is actually laudable.

At the same time, a friend who interviewed there got told "You need to work hard and probably on evenings and weekends too". Not a big selling point in Sweden where work / life balance is important (especially to those having or wanting a family).

Isn't one of the execs ex-Musk employee? Sad to see this culture creeping into EU.

Oh, he is very much imitating Musk.

Inhumane working conditions, getting tons of money from the government, toxic work environment, ignoring OSHA, you name it.

Was just recently investigated for sneaking in unregistered immigrant workers into their facility. Obviously they were working extremely long hours + weekends for peanuts while sidestepping all safety rules.

has nothing to do with Tesla. Long hours yes, but a paid one, so it's a decision made by workers. Nothing wrong with that.

> Long hours yes, but a paid one, so it's a decision made by workers. Nothing wrong with that.

Not in the EU generally, and especially not in Scandinavia.

At least in Norway working overtime is only allowed up to a legally specified limit, even if you volunteer for it. The limit is 400 hours per 52 weeks and that will require permission from the Labour Inspection Authority (Arbeidstilsynet).

See https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/en/working-conditions/working...

That's not how it works. We have employee protections that are intended to prevent exploitation. If those are failing, there is definitely something wrong with that.

Feels like classic confirmshaming. I wonder if we should raise a flag with IMY.

Oh that's a dark pattern I wasn't aware of. Thank you!

Gigafactory becomes the retina display of manufacturing.

What is so special about this Factory? Isn't that there are 30 similar projects building around the world? US alone has around 15 gigafactories planned/building by 2026?

a few by tesla and the rest:

Manufacturer Location Expected Opening

Ford Northeast of Memphis, TN 2025

Ford & SK Innovation Central KY 2025

Ford & SK Innovation Central KY 2026

General Motors & LG Chem Lordstown, OH 2022

General Motors & LG Energy Solution Spring Hill, TN 2023

General Motors & LG Energy Solution To be determined (TBD) TBD

General Motors & LG Energy Solution TBD TBD

SK Innovation Northeast of Atlanta, GA 2022

SK Innovation Northeast of Atlanta, GA 2023

Stellantis & LG Energy Solution TBD 2024

Stellantis & Samsung SDI TBD 2025

Toyota Southeast of Greensboro, NC 2025

Volkswagen Chattanooga, TN TBD

Because they were really early in terms of Europe. This is the first European company to build large scale cell production.

The guys who started the company worked for Tesla on GigaNevada. They then went to Europe and start this new company.

Most of the factories you made are made by the traditional South Korean companies and maybe some Chinese one.

> Marking a new chapter in European industrial history, the cell is the first to have been fully designed, developed and assembled at a gigafactory by a homegrown European battery company.

This seems like a ... is this true? This boast made me feel sad. Is this really how far behind European manufacturing is?

I don't know, but I don't find it hard to believe that it was the first to be built at a _gigafactory_, Europe has other means of manufactoring other than gigafactories.

There are many qualifiers in that sentence, homegrown european company means no outside investers, gigafactory means it's not a small factory, fully designed, developed and assembled.

But yeah we've been far too reliant on the global trade network until now. Maybe a ghost of colonialism.

The Term gigafactory is doing the heavy lifting in this sentence. There are a lot of smaller scale operations that do design, development and assembly in Europe like Varta Microbattery[1]. They provide a lot of the batteries used in the modern wireless earbuds like the airpods pro[2] and also some of the Samsung galaxy buds[3].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VARTA

[2]https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Pro+Teardown/127551 look at step 8

[3]mentioned in the same article and step as the Airpods above

Sad that the extremely high taxes (and price rises) on electricity in Sweden mean diesel cars are still cheaper in some parts of the country.

We should push for all vehicles in cities to be electric at least. The Tesla 3, Honda E, etc. are perfect for that.

Don't forget Polestar 2, those are selling like hot-cakes as well.

Only 4.5k registered in Sweden atm. So no not really?

https://www.car.info/en-se/polestar/stats?from=2020-01&to=20...

Even amongst EVs only the brand only makes 9th place.

https://www.car.info/en-se/stats/?from=2020-01&to=2021-12&vd...

Well deserved as well. They are really nice cars!

> Sad that the extremely high taxes (and price rises) on electricity in Sweden mean diesel cars are still cheaper in some parts of the country

Average power consumption for an EV is 0.2 kWh/km. The current (very high) price of 1.5 SEK/kWh gives a price of about 3 SEK per 10 Km for an EV.

Diesel price in Sweden right now is about 18 SEK/Liter (also a record high). A good diesel car needs maybe 0.7 liters per 10 Km => 12.6 SEK per 10 Km for a diesel car.

So an EV is still more than 4 times cheaper when comparing the cost to power the car.

> The current (very high) price of 1.5 SEK/kWh

The average December price was around 2 SEK/kWh in southern Sweden, which after net fees/tax/vat is around 3 SEK/kWh for home charging. Assuming a charging efficiency of 85%, and Tesla given range numbers are accurate, that should give around 6 SEK/10Km. But actual range should decrease in winter weather.

> A good diesel car needs maybe 0.7 liters per 10 Km

An efficient diesel is around 0.5l/10Km depending on driving style. So it's close to parity with electric at the moment.

The unit price per kWh is quite low in Sweden though, the base price (network fees etc) is the big part.

In September, I used 75 kWh, and paid 4.5kr/kWh[1] (exchange rate to € is about 10:1, so this comes out to 0,45€), in November, with higher unit prices, I paid 3,4kr/kWh for 236 kWh[2] (about 0,34€) since the base price distributes over more usage. Per-unit price is about 1kr/kWh, so an efficient EV at 30kWh/100 km comes out to 30kr/100km, while an efficient ICE at 5l/100km comes out to 80kr/100km (at the current price of about 17kr/l).

It's not like gas is cheap here and taxed low.

[1]: 119kr for the usage, 222 kr for the network [2]: 335kr for the usage, 222 kr for the network

I tried the same calculation, nice to see that we are in the same ballpark at least

Most cars sold in Norway are now electric.

Not the solution to anything, though. The end goal should be to rid cities of cars, and make it easier for people to walk, ride a bike or take public transport. Better for the grid, environment, noise, health, communities etc.

Is any slightely larger than average factory building now a Gigafactory?

No. It has to be about 1000 times bigger than a Megafactory.

I can see how they'd use Gigafactory for a factory that's only one order of magnitude larger than a Megafactory. On the other hand, I don't see anyone talking about a Kilofactory...

Perhaps we'll need Terafactories soon.

Assuming that "Giga Nevada" actually is a Gigafactory, an ordinary Factory would then be 2.86400 mm^2.

Maybe it's measured by volume rather than floor area?

For battery factories specifically, the term is used for factories producing more than 1GWH per year. That was unusual before EVs became a thing. This particular factory is supposed to scale to about 60GWH capacity. That sounds like a lot but it's only a million 60KWH batteries that would go into e.g. a decent EV. With most ICE car production disappearing over the next two decades, we'll need a lot more factories.

Tesla has actually started talking about Tera factories a few years ago. That's roughly what they'd need to produce 20M such vehicles. And of course they have more need for batteries with their grid storage and truck business. So, it's easy to see how they'd end up with multiple tera factories if they keep on growing like they have been.

World need Terrafactories ! 20 of these, and we complete the transition to EV. This factory is a drop in the ocean

Its really sad that such achievements in Europe always comes from public investments and not private only funds https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pt/ip_20_...

Elon's giga factory benefited from enormous tax breaks which in effect is the same thing.

Government budgets in the US are enormous because a lot of it is used to benefit domestic businesses. Like car manufacturers in Detroit, who were bailed out a couple of times instead of allowing them to go bankrupt. Despite all the help they have gotten over the years, they still seem to be struggling.

So, yes, European countries also support their businesses in a similar way. Same with China and Russia. That's just how that stuff works. We're talking trillions here. Getting your hands on some of that is just part of running a business.

In Tesla's defense, they have actually been arguing for less subsidies. Right now their biggest issue is that politicians seem to be insisting on subsidizing mainly Tesla competitors (e.g. the before mentioned Detroit based manufacturers) while making a lot of effort to ever name Tesla in their speeches.

I was always under the impression that large factories in the US get huge tax rebates for a couple of years or other concessions as a way to encourage the plant to be built there and not in the next state?

The EU giving out loans to finance projects that fit their strategic goals doesn't seem any worse than that

Would you care to elaborate on why this is sad?

I think this article it's a good summary of what I think. https://babinec.com/2020/10/the-problem-with-public-money-go...

What is a lower-case-g gigafactory? Just a factory that makes lithium-ion batteries?

i 'd assume it makes gigas

I am looking for a contractor who can do turnkey pouch, and/or prismatic cell factories for a client in South Asia.

good news!

Instead of batteries why can't we reverse the turbines in hydro power plants?

Pumped hydro is in fact an energy storage method. It just requires having a dam, which is obviously not a workable solution in many (most?) places.

In some places it's a lake/reservoir uphill of a river instead of a dam.

If you already have a dam and turbines it's obviously better to just run them in generating mode.

But pumping stations also exist where it makes sense.

This exists, and is called "pumped hydro" energy storage.

But it needs favorable geography and/or huge use of space.

There isn't a single technology for all our energy storage needs, pumped hydro, batteries and lots of others all have their niche and efficient use cases.

Harder to put a hydroelectric dam in your Tesla Roadster.

In case of no wind, all Tesla owners should connect their car to the grid with a long cable and reverse in a circle.

It's already the case, check https://app.electricitymap.org/ and look at the hydro storage on the left. Usually it stores energy during the night (a least in France last night).

Intreresting fact: Sweden is dotted with mines. Many of these are defunct and abandoned. There are plans now to convert several abandoned mines to pumped hydro.

That is, water is pumped from lower to higher levels in the mines, instead of up a hill to a reservoir.

Great use of existing infra that would be way to expensive to dig for that purpose.

I have not heard about this, and the concept sounds very scary. Old abandoned Swedish mines have a tendency to poison ground water with metals and other pollution unearthed by the mining process.

https://www.sgu.se/mineralnaring/gruvor-och-miljopaverkan/

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