Norran's journalists after a long work shift 12 March 2025, the day when Northvolt went bust.
It is March 13, the day after the disastrous news was announced. Northvolt has gone bankrupt. The journalists at Norran sit in the conference room, hollow-eyed after yesterday's intense news day. It almost feels like the hangover from a far too late night out.
We listen absentmindedly to the day's job plan, our minds wandering. Many of us are likely wondering what the future holds: for the factory, the jobs, and for all the people who have brought life to our town. We are also grappling with what actually happened.
Northvolt got the billions, they had the staff, the building, green energy, the machines and the research – and the backing of all of Skellefteå. They promised the greenest batteries in the world and to make Europe independent of China, thousands of jobs and several new factories around the world. How could it have ended like this?
Northvolt announces its venture in Skellefteå autumn 2017. Present at the press conference is MD Peter Carlsson, Minister for Industry and Commerce Mikael Damberg and municipal commissioner Lorents Burman.
One explanation that's now widely known is that there were problems with production. As early as last August, we revealed that the factory wasn't producing its own cathode materials—a key component of the battery cell—but was instead importing them from China. However, no signals about the situation being as dire as it actually was ever emerged publicly. On the contrary, the company stated it was producing more cells than ever. Was cathode production the only issue, or were there others?
In August 2024 Norran revealed that a large amount of material for the cathode part of the batteries was imported from China.
Northvolt has cited the pandemic and logistical hurdles as causes for their issues, stating they've repeatedly postponed timelines and "not been able to ramp up fast enough." Should we have seen this coming sooner?
We recognize that Skellefteå residents will demand an explanation, and as a local newspaper, we're expected to provide one. But how do we achieve that? Getting access to various Northvolt managers has been nearly impossible since the bankruptcy, and among staff, loyalty to the company remains very strong. Gaining insight into their finances is proving difficult.
However, ever since the first round of redundancies, we've noticed a shift. As Northvolt's problems have mounted, tip-offs have slowly begun to trickle into our inbox, revealing what's truly happening behind the factory gates. Employees have become more accessible, despite non-disclosure agreements and directives to avoid speaking with the media, which still deter some from talking openly.
Norran has rarely got permission to come inside the gates and tell the readers about the production. The employees have kept quiet about what it was like to work there – until things started falling apart.
When we finally tally all the tip-offs, they are plentiful. We start making contact, and it turns out that many people are both frustrated and disappointed, even though they were also once proud of their workplace. They are keen to talk. Eventually, founder and former MD Peter Carlsson also shares his story. Some of what he then reveals explains aspects within this series of articles.
To truly understand what happened when Sweden's largest industrial project collapsed, we need to step back in time and start from the beginning. We begin in November 2017, just after Northvolt announced that the battery factory would be located in Skellefteå.
At that time, the company didn't possess large sums for projects of this magnitude, holding "only" SEK 120 million from its initial investors. A project office was established in Stockholm, and Peter Carlsson, along with co-founder Paolo Cerruti, traveled extensively, attempting to attract more funding for the factory.
Paolo Cerruti was one of the key people when Northvolt was taking shape.
Things progressed slowly. Beyond a collaboration with ABB, they secured 100 million kronor from Vestas for a joint battery platform project. Crucially, however, not a single penny had yet been earmarked for Skellefteå.
The following year, prospects began to improve. Scania invested 100 million kronor, as did Siemens, and Northvolt received a smaller bank loan from the European Investment Bank. Their first customers also started placing orders.
Yet, this was also when Northvolt's original plans began to shift, and side projects started to emerge. First came the plans for a factory in Poland, followed later by a lithium refinery in Portugal.
The pilot line is about to start up in Västerås 2019.
Simultaneously, they were working to launch a pilot line project at Northvolt Labs, built in Västerås. The idea was that a similar project would later be scaled up in Skellefteå.
In our search for answers about this initial phase, we stumbled upon a podcast featuring an interview with Landon Mossburg about Northvolt. He was one of the early recruits who worked intensely to get everything running at the lab.
Mossburg had previously worked with Peter Carlsson at Tesla, and when Northvolt was starting, Carlsson tried to recruit him. He initially declined. However, his curiosity eventually got the better of him, and he moved his entire family to Stockholm. We arranged a Teams interview with him from across the Atlantic.
Landon Mossburg had different roles at Northvolt including head of automatisation.
He recalls that during his two years at the lab, there were no 40-hour weeks. Night shifts were plagued with problems, bringing everything to a halt. As soon as one issue was resolved, three more emerged. To tackle them, a group of people even slept at the pilot factory.
– Everyone got sleeping bags. We called it Camp Labs and thought that we would need to be there one or maybe two weeks and thought that it could be a team-building thing.
Many had experience with advanced manufacturing, but battery manufacturing proved more challenging than anticipated. The competition was brutal. The Chinese were already far ahead and commanded a large share of the market.
– You have to give it all you've got, and we did. I didn’t think it would be so difficult.
Northvolt Labs outside Västerås. Archive photo.
After weeks of sleeping in a conference room, they switched to checking into a hotel for a few hours of sleep each day. This wasn't a setup Mossburg enjoyed, but the adrenaline rush from solving each problem made it worthwhile. Ultimately, they did manage to get the pilot line working reasonably well.
– When we came in, we were lucky if we made 80 cells per shift. When we left, we made ten times that.
Beyond the lab's challenges and Northvolt's growing interest in various side projects, a fundamental shift occurred. The initial business idea was to manufacture cylindrical cells, according to Mossburg. At the time, this technology was well-established and fully industrialised for laptops. However, customers now wanted something else: prismatic batteries. This meant starting over and developing a new cell design.
– It was very good on paper and the customers really liked it, but it was very, very difficult to make. One of the most difficult things to do is not to design a cell that works, but one that is also possible to manufacture.
Parts of the machinery at Northvolt Labs.
The trick, he explains, is getting everything to sync and work together: the people, the machines, the product - and the process connecting them all.
– Here, almost all parts were unsynced.
This led to ineffective work. Additionally, customers had high demands on both delivery and product design. It wasn't just one type of cell to be produced, but various kinds. Each change in the cells presented a significant challenge, he states.
The cylindrical battery projects ultimately failed, resulting in a pure financial loss while simultaneously diverting resources from other critical areas.
The staff worked on getting the machines to work at Labs in Västerås for many months.
During the spring of 2025, Norran intensified its efforts to secure interviews with Northvolt's founder and former CEO, Peter Carlsson, and other managers closer to the company's operations. We sought their perspectives on everything that had transpired, but progress was slow.
In May 2025, two months after Northvolt's bankruptcy, we finally sat down with Carlsson at an office in Stockholm. The interview lasted two hours - far too short to get all the answers, but we did our best to focus on the most crucial questions from our investigation.
Carlsson explained that when working with customers, one must be prepared to adjust the initial hypothesis.
– When we were working with the industrialisation and the construction, we made the decision to stop the cylindrical line that was planned in Skellefteå in order to keep focus and stick to the timeframe.
Customer input played a significant role.
– Yes, of course. Big auto customers are perhaps the toughest customers because they have great resources that enables them to go into details with the subcontractor. When the timeframe was delayed, they wanted to send more resources to Skellefteå, and that in turn required greater resources from our side.
In May 2025 Norran met Peter Carlsson in Stockholm where he is working on new business ideas.
Carlsson admits that their arrangement with customers was a double-edged sword.
– Of course, they wanted it to work, but the deeper they were digging, the more resources were taken from us that could otherwise have been used efficiently to scale up.
While Northvolt was fighting fires in Labs, they also had to appease customers and deliver samples. They couldn't slow the pace; they had to produce according to their promises. Customers weren't willing to meet Northvolt halfway and reduce volumes, according to information from inside the factory. The ongoing delays also made it difficult to refuse. Instead, customers pushed even more aggressively for deliveries.
During this time, a significant amount of focus was on getting the pilot line in Västerås operational, as per Landon Mossburg. Consequently, the first line being built in the main factory didn't receive as much attention from the engineers.
A person with deep insight into the factory described its arrival as "a trainwreck." It was nowhere near as well-designed as it should have been.
– It was so far away from what should be done. I think we should have slowed the company down, but I was pretty much on my own with that perspective at that time, they say.
The team at Labs battled to get the design working, and in the meantime, new capital flowed in: €350 million from the European Investment Bank. Northvolt secured an environmental permit for the large factory, and more investors poured money into the company. In the autumn of 2019, construction of Northvolt Ett began in Skellefteå.
The large buildings start to take shape.
The ground at the large industrial area has been prepared, the steel skeleton is starting to be erected. Peter Carlsson walks around the site in Hedensbyn. He feels a sense of delight mixed with horror when he thinks about the scale of the construction.
– One became very humble regarding this task and realised how important it was to find the best people to lead this project.
Peter Carlsson visits the site when the company got the environmental permission for Northvolt Ett.
He soon realised that very few people in Sweden had experience building exceptionally large factories in recent times. Northvolt would need to recruit talent from all over the world to manage this undertaking - to build a truly international team.
While Northvolt Ett was under construction, Northvolt was also initiating new collaborations. They were working on energy systems alongside Mälarenergi, Vattenfall, and Epiroc, simultaneously unveiling plans for the Revolt recycling factory. In connection with that, they also began a partnership with Norwegian Hydro.
The machines destined for Northvolt Labs and later for installation in Skellefteå came from the Chinese company Wuxi Lead. Initially, everything appeared to be in order.
Although Wuxi Lead hadn't previously manufactured a cell precisely like Northvolt's, they readily agreed to all terms, making the collaboration seem promising on paper. However, just as Northvolt finalised its contract with them, CATL, the world's largest maker of car batteries, made a significant investment and secured seats on Wuxi's board.
– That made me nervous, Landon Mossburg says.
Press photo from the inside of Northvolt Ett showing parts of the cell production.
He believes Wuxi Lead wasn't sending their most knowledgeable engineers to help, likely due to the pandemic's travel restrictions making it difficult to dispatch personnel from China, especially when their biggest customer, now on Wuxi Lead's board, was ramping up production faster than ever domestically.
All the machines are highly automated and code-controlled, but Wuxi Lead was unwilling to provide Northvolt's team access to the code when issues arose. That's usually fine, Landon explains; normally, you wouldn't want to tamper with the code.
– But the situation was either you send people here who can fix the equipment, so it works well, or you have to let us fix it. There were nightly conversations with China for weeks.
Peter Carlsson states they chose the supplier because they were "purveyor to the royals" – CATL.
– They had clearly proven that they managed to build several lines in parallel and ship them. They had a capacity that no one else had. Price and delivery time was very important, but only under the condition that they could deliver in accordance with the product and process design that we needed. And they were well-suited to our needs.
Peter Carlsson says that the Chinese supplier was considered the best choice.
The management was unanimous in their decision to opt for the Chinese machines. However, that choice would later spark internal conflict over whether it was the right one. They learned from their errors and improved subsequent orders. But with the wisdom of hindsight, they would have done things differently, not shipping the machines to Sweden before they had passed all tests.
Several other individuals we spoke with described profound frustration with the entire situation. One likened their experience to the boy who cried wolf.
– I was made to feel a bit crazy because I said that this will be the end of us. We have to slow down. But others in the team were very clever and hard-working people. They didn’t see what I saw, and I felt that perhaps I was in the wrong. I almost became depressed.
While they sounded the alarm internally, investors clearly maintained faith in the projects, injecting billions.
– It was very odd, they say. So strange that they decided to quit Northvolt.
The years spent battling the battery debacle took their toll, leading to self-doubt.
– Up until that point in my career, I had thrown myself into all problems that arose in my job. And I was always pretty good at my job. I had not been confronted with any goal in my career that I could not achieve. This was the first time, and I was not prepared for it.
Back to the factory construction and the production line at Northvolt Ett in Skellefteå: time was running out. In 2021, the first line was slated to go into operation in Skellefteå. The unresolved problems from the pilot line would inevitably persist when production began in Skellefteå. However, it turned out that machinery issues were not the only concerns.
In England, a structural engineer was tearing out his hair as he watched the construction from afar. It was the height of the pandemic, and Allen, as we've chosen to call him, had not yet been able to come to Sweden to inspect the construction site. Yet, what he had seen so far deeply worried him.
– It was very disorganised; the planning wasn't finished, yet they started building at the same time they were still planning. That meant a lot had to be redone, causing unnecessary costs.
The coordination was dysfunctional, Allen explains. One day, someone would order a machine; the next, it wasn't needed, even though it had already been paid for.
– They made many unnecessary and expensive mistakes in the construction process. It could have become something really good, but they wasted the chance when they started so many things without having the resources in place. You must have skilled staff, not just a certain number of bodies.
In 2021, Northvolt was operating under extreme time pressure to produce batteries in Skellefteå. They had tried to persuade customers to delay the timeline but were refused. They had promised to deliver, so even though they perhaps should have paused to stabilise cell production, they were now in a bind.
– In hindsight, the timescale was too ambitious, Peter Carlsson admits.
– But there were also a number of things we had not anticipated when building the factory. That there would be a covid pandemic with all its challenges - with a global logistics crisis where it was really difficult to get materials and components to Europe. And also challenges to get the subcontractors to complete installations and software configurations on-site.
On December 28, 2021, Northvolt unveiled the first battery cell produced in Skellefteå. No one outside the factory saw more than a photo of it, but according to the MD at the time, Fredrik Hedlund, there was loud cheering in the factory when it came off the line.
Fredrik Hedlund was factory manager in Skellefteå the first years.
– Today is a great milestone for Northvolt that the team has worked very hard to achieve. Naturally this first cell is just the beginning. Over the coming years we look forward to Northvolt Ett forcefully expanding its production capacity in order to enable the European transition to clean energy, said MD Peter Carlsson in a press release.
Northvolt sends a photo of the first battery cell to the media.
Now, with production officially underway, the workforce rapidly increased. People from all over the world flocked to Skellefteå, a town that hadn't had time to build housing fast enough for all its new residents. Both the town and Northvolt were growing.
The company's management seemed optimistic and unafraid to juggle multiple projects simultaneously. Work was also ongoing to build a factory in Gdansk, and the company decided to expand further in the Polish city.
They also acquired a US battery start-up, Cuberg, which would serve as a technology centre in Silicon Valley. Northvolt began collaborating with Volvo Cars and producing batteries for electric scooter companies. Simultaneously, they secured a multi-billion kronor investment to expand the Skellefteå factory to an annual production of 60 gigawatt hours.
In addition, the company planned a new battery factory in Gothenburg with Volvo and an expansion of Labs. In the spring of 2022, they decided to establish even more factories.
Peter Carlsson when the company was still revered and everything seemed to be going well.
– There were quite a lot of projects, but there were also a lot of competent people within the company who worked on different projects in parallel. From our perspective, it was seen as a natural, gradual ramp-up of what we were building. There was sequential thinking. Then it’s fair to say that when the ramp-up was delayed, we should have pushed all other projects back, Peter Carlsson says.
In other words, the planned stages were adhered to, but the stages started backing up. There was a risk of the whole system becoming unstable.
– You could refer to it as being in a bind. There were big customer commitments we had to deal with, and there was project financing that wasn’t particularly flexible in dealing with changes.
Several years later Peter Carlsson reflects upon the situation they ended up in.
Carlsson explained that when they needed to make changes to the construction, the project financing required approval from a banking syndicate, and that process could take several months before they could even make a decision.
We're sitting in the Norran offices, reflecting on those early years. What emerges is a picture of a project where many people fought to make it work, but obstacles constantly arose and progress was painfully slow, even as more ventures were added to an already strained operation. Money flowed and plans expanded, customers demanded results, but no one was willing to hit the brakes. Perhaps this is where it all began to unravel?
Landon Mossburg, who moved his family to Sweden for the Northvolt job, is thinking along the same lines:
– We should have stopped doing so many different things. We could have been able to succeed then. I’m sorry we didn’t make it work.
He returned to the US after a couple of years and started his own battery project.
In Skellefteå, the factory was encountering serious problems, but despite being severely behind schedule, these issues remained hidden from the outside world. The industrial district continued to expand, as did confidence in a prosperous future. At Norran, we reported on the progress being made. No employee had yet spoken publicly about workplace conditions or production failures.
But what was actually happening on the factory floor in Skellefteå? In the next instalment, we follow several former Northvolt employees inside the factory – where, in some areas, chaos had taken hold.
Next part: Chaos Inc. Barbie Wonderland and a production out of sync
Investigation
With the help of around 20 well-informed sources — several of whom requested anonymity due to concerns about future job prospects — and access to extensive documentation, a clearer picture is emerging of what really happened at the Skellefteå factory. We have conducted in-depth interviews with many of these sources and remained in regular contact with them. The information published in this series has been verified by multiple individuals and reveals patterns we have tried to illustrate.
As part of our reporting, we also contacted several former senior managers at Northvolt Ett for comment. Plant manager Fredrik Hedlund declined to participate. Former Ett CEO, Mark Duchesne did not respond to our request. We sent questions to Maria Åstrand, head of Upstream, but have not received a reply. Emma Nehrenheim, head of Revolt and environmental affairs, has answered some of our questions, although others remain unanswered.
In many cases, it would have been preferable to hear directly from those who have worked at the heart of the company.