Foreign media: The first European independent car battery factory put into operation will reduce dependence on China

Reference News Network reported on January 26 that the Economic News Network of Buenos Aires, Argentina, recently reported that Europe has produced its own batteries and has begun to try to reduce its dependence on China.

In Skellefteo, just 200 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, in northern Sweden, a milestone for the European automotive industry was achieved on December 28, 2021 – the first entirely European-made electric vehicle battery pack rolled off the production line. This is not a joke, but a transcendent fact. Because while Europe is the continent that is pushing hardest to promote electric vehicles as a way to help decarbonize environmentally friendly mobility, Europe has not had its own battery factory.

In August 2021, not long ago, the Swedish company Norte Volts announced that they would start producing their own electric vehicle batteries by the end of last year.

This is the first step in being able to deliver EV battery packs starting in week 1 of January 2022, as stipulated in the company's commitments to larger companies such as BMW, Scania, Volkswagen, Volvo and Polestar.

The battery pack was developed by Northern Volts' plant in Västerås, Sweden, "North Volts Laboratory", which has been in production since the beginning of 2020. In the coming years, the company's production capacity will be increased to 60 GWh per year in order to fulfill the contracts signed by Northern Volts with these automotive customers worth more than 30 billion euros.

The most important significance of this milestone is that when the overall manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries began to be realized in European countries, the automotive industry on the european continent began the process of reducing dependence on China. To date, China is the world's largest producer of batteries, and all European factories are supplied with batteries from China. With the Asian giant's energy strains and production restrictions between 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, the dependence on raw materials for ELECTRIC vehicle production has been exposed as never before.

In fact, the rise in freight rates is another major obstacle for European industries to import parts from China, and the European automotive industry has had to absorb the cost increase that reached the pre-epidemic level 10 times, while trying not to pass on the cost increase to the sales price of the car.

Northern Volts' Swedish plant is just the company's first, and it will set up another factory in Gothenburg, where Volvo and Polestar are headquartered. They will also set up factories in Germany. (Compilation/Tian Ce)