Norran's journalists after a long work shift 12 March 2025, the day when Northvolt went bust.
It is 13 March, the day after the disaster was announced. Northvolt has gone bankrupt. The journalists at Norran are sitting in the conference room, hollow-eyed after yesterday's intense news day. It almost feels like a hangover after a way too late night out.
We absentmindedly listen to the job plan for today while our minds wander. Many of us are probably wondering what the future will be like; for the factory, the jobs and for all the people who have livened up our town. We are also thinking about 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 now is generally well-known is that there were problems with the production. As early as August of last year we revealed that the factory does not produce its own cathode materials – which is a key part of the battery cell – but instead imports this from China. However, no signals about the situation being as bad as it actually was ever made it out. On the contrary, the company said that it produced more cells than ever. Was the cathode production the only problem 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 mentioned that the pandemic and logistics problems have caused issues. They have postponed the timeline and have “not been able to ramp up fast enough”, as they usually say. Should we have seen this coming earlier?
We realise that Skellefteå residents will demand an explanation and that we as a local newspaper are expected to give them one. But how are we to manage that? Getting to talk to the different Northvolt managers have been near impossible in the period after the bankruptcy and among the staff loyalty towards the company has been very strong. It is difficult to gain insight into the finances.
However, ever since the first redundancy we have noticed somewhat of a change. As Northvolt’s problems have mounted, tipoffs have slowly started dropping into our inbox about what is really happening inside the factory gates. The employees have become more accessible even though non-disclosure agreements and orders not to talk to the media scare away some from speaking 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 eventually count all the tipoffs they are plentiful. We start making contact and it turns out that many are both frustrated and disappointed even though they also have been proud about their workplace. They are keen to talk. Eventually the founder and previous MD Peter Carlsson also tells his story. Some of what he then says explains things in this series of articles.
In order to understand what happened when Sweden's largest industrial project went bust we have to step back in time and start from the beginning. We start in November 2017 just after Northvolt announced that the battery factory was to be situated in Skellefteå.
The company then had no big amounts of money for this type of projects. “Only” SEK 120 million from the initial investors. A project office is started in Stockholm and Peter Carlsson travels around together with the co-founder Paolo Cerruti in order to try to attract more money for the factory.
Paolo Cerruti was one of the key people when Northvolt was taking shape.
Things move slowly. In addition to a collaboration with ABB they receive SEK 100 million from Vestas for a joint project around a battery platform. However they still do not have a single penny for Skellefteå.
The year after things are starting to look up when Scania invests SEK 100 million, as does Siemens and Northvolt receives a smaller bank loan from the European Investment Bank. The first customers place their orders.
But it is also now that Northvolt’s original plans start to change and the side projects start rolling in. First the plans for a factory in Poland and later a lithium refinery in Portugal.
The pilot line is about to start up in Västerås 2019.
At the same time they work to start up a pilot line project at Northvolt Labs which has been built in Västerås. The plan is for a similar project to later on be scaled up in Skellefteå.
In the hunt for answers about the initial phase we come across a podcast where Landon Mossburg is interviewed about Northvolt. He is one of the people who come on-board early and work intensively to make everything work at the lab. He previously worked with Peter Carlsson at Tesla and when Northvolt started up the Swede tried to recruit him. He declined. However, his curiosity got the better of him and he moved his whole family over to Stockholm. We set a time with him for an interview over Teams from across the Atlantic.
Landon Mossburg had different roles at Northvolt including head of automatisation.
He says that there are no 40-hour weeks at the lab during the two years he is working there. The night shifts have problems, everything comes to a halt. When they have solved one problems three more pops up. In order to solve them a group of people sleep 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 worked with advanced manufacturing before but battery manufacturing turned out to be more difficult than expected. The competition was killer. The Chinese are already far ahead and have a large share of the market.
– You have to give it all you've got. We did it. I didn’t think it would be so difficult.
Northvolt Labs outside Västerås. Archive photo.
After having slept in a conference room for a few weeks they instead check into a hotel a couple of hours every day to sleep. This setup is not something he finds enjoyment in but the rush of adrenaline he gets everytime he solves a problem outweighs it. And in the end they still manage to get the pilot line to work reasonably well.
– When we came in we were lucky if we made 80 cells per shift. When we left we made ten times that.
In addition to the problems in the lab and different side projects that Northvolt then had become interested in, a foundational shift happens. The business idea was first to manufacture cylindrical cells, Landon Mossburg says. At this time they were fully industrialised for laptops and the technology was well-known according to Landon Mossburg. But the customers now want something else, prismatic batteries. They have to start again and develop 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 is to get everything to sync and work together; people who work, the machines, the product – and between them is the process.
– Here almost all parts were unsynced.
The work becomes ineffective. In addition the customers have high demands both on delivery and on the design of the products. It is not just one cell that is to be produced but different varieties. Each change in the cells constitute a great challenge, he says.
The cylindrical battery projects turned out not to work and therefore became a pure loss financially at the same time as it took resources away from other areas.
The staff worked on getting the machines to work at Labs in Västerås for many months.
During spring of 2025 Norran is urging the Northvolt founder and previous MD Peter Carlsson and other managers closer to the operations in order to get interviews. We want them to also give their accounts of everything that has happened but things move slowly.
In May 2025, two months after Northvolt’s bankruptcy we finally get to talk to Peter Carlsson at an office in Stockholm. It is a two hour long interview. Much too short to get all the answers but we try as best we can to pick out the most important questions in our investigation.
Peter Carlsson explains that when you work with customers you have to be prepared to change the hypothesis you started with.
– 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.
What the customers said played a big part.
– 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.
Peter Carlsson admits that the setup they had with the customers was both good and bad.
– 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.
At the same time as Northvolt it putting out fires in Labs they must also appease the customers and deliver samples to them. They cannot slow down the pace and they must produce according to plan since they have promised to do so. The customers do not want to meet Northvolt halfway and reduce the volumes according to information from inside the factory. The delays also makes it difficult to say no. Instead the customers push even more intensively for deliveries.
At this time a lot of focus is on getting the pilot line in Västerås moving, according to Landon Mossburg. When the first line in the big factory is built it does not get as much attention from the engineers.
A person with good insight into the factory describes that it was “a trainwreck” when it arrived. Nothing close to as well-designed as it should be.
– It is 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 is fighting to get the design to work and in the meantime new money roll in: EUR 350 million from the European Investment Bank. Northvolt gets an environmental permit for the large factory and more investors put money into the company. In the autumn of 2019 the construction of Northvolt Ett begins 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 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 realises that there is almost no one in Sweden who has built very large factories for a very long time. Northvolt will need to recruit people from all over the world in order to manage it – create an international team.
While Northvolt Ett is under construction Northvolt is also initiating new collaborations. They are working on energy systems together with Mälarenergi, Vattenfall and Epiroc at the same time as they are presenting plans for the recycling factory Revolt. In connection with that they also start a collaboration with Norwegian Hydro.
The machines used in Northvolt Labs and that are to be installed in Skellefteå come from the Chinese company Wuxi Lead. In the beginning everything seems fine. It is true that Wuxi Lead has not made a cell like Northvolt’s previously but they say yes to everything so the collaboration has looked good on paper. But just as Northvolt signs a contract with them the world’s largest maker of car batteries, the Chinese CATL, comes in with a large investment and they also take 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 does not think that they seem to send the most knowledgeable engineers to help out but instead it seems difficult to send people from China during the pandemic. It is easier to send them to domestic facilities. Particularly when their biggest customer, who is now on the board of Wuxi Lead, was building faster than ever in China.
All the machines are very automated and controlled via code but Wuxi Lead are not willing to open the code for the team at Northvolt when there are issues. That’s OK, Landon says, normally you do not want to touch 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 says they chose the supplier as 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 were unanimous in their decision to go for the Chinese machines. However, that decision would later lead to internal conflict regarding whether they had made the right choice. They learned from mistakes made and improved later orders. But with the wisdom of hindsight they would have done things differently and not shipped the machines to Sweden before they had passed all the tests.
Several other people we have talked to describe frustration about the whole situation. One of them describes how they felt like the boy who cried wolf.
– That I was a bit crazy who 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.
At the same time as they sound the alarm internally, the investors clearly believe in the projects as they inject billions.
– It was very strange, they say and finally decides to leave.
The years with the battery debacle takes its toll and makes them question themselves.
– 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 line at Northvolt Ett in Skellefteå. Time is about to run out. In 2021 the first line is supposed to go into operation in Skellefteå. The problems in the pilot line that have not been solved will inevitably remain when production starts in Skellefteå. However, it turns out that machinery problems are not the only issues.
In England a structural engineer is tearing out his hair while he observes the construction from afar. It is in the middle of the pandemic and Allen, as we have chosen to call him, has not yet been able to come to Sweden to inspect the construction site. But what he has seen so far worries him.
– It was very unorganised, the planning was not finished but instead they started building at the same time as they were planning. That means that lots had to be redone and it caused unnecessary costs.
The coordination didn’t work, Allen says, one day someone orders a machine – the next day it isn’t needed even though it’s already been paid.
– 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 hands and feet.
In 2021 Northvolt is working under extreme time pressure to make batteries in Skellefteå. They have tried to get the customers to delay the timescale but have been rejected. They have promised to deliver so even though they should perhaps pause and stabilise the cell production they are 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 28 December 2021 Northvolt presents the first battery cell that has been produced in Skellefteå. No one outside the factory gets to see more than a photo of it but according to the MD at the time, Fredrik Hedlund there is loud cheering in the factory when it comes out of 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 the production is officially started and the workforce rapidly increases in numbers. People from all over the world tries to find somewhere to live in Skellefteå which has not had time to build fast enough to house all the new residents. The town grows, as does Northvolt.
The company’s management seems optimistic and is not afraid to juggle many projects at the same time. There is also work ongoing to build a factory in Gdansk. The company decides to expand further in the Polish city.
They also purchase a US battery start-up, Cuberg, which will be a technology centre in Silicon Valley. Northvolt starts collaborating with Volvo Cars and makes batteries for electric scooter companies. At the same time they bring in a multi-billion investment to expand the Skellefteå factory to an annual production of 60 gigawatt hours.
In addition the company plans a new battery factory in Gothenburg together with Volvo and an expansion of Labs. In the spring of 2022 they decide to start 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 stages are adhered to but they are starting to back up. There is a risk of it 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.
Peter Carlsson explains that when they needed to make changes to the construction the project financing required the change to be approved by a banking syndicate and the process could take several months in order for them to be able to make a decision.
We are sitting in the Norran offices summarising the first years. We see a project where many people struggle to make it work but where obstacles pop up and things take time at the same time as more projects are added to the operations. Money and plans grow. Customers are pushing to move things on. No one is pulling the break. Perhaps this is where it starts going wrong?
Landon Mossburg, who moved his family to Sweden for the job at Northvolt, 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 returns to the US after a couple of years and starts his own battery project.
In Skellefteå the factory is hitting bumps but even though they are way behind schedule this is not visible outside the factory yet. The industrial area in Skellefteå is growing, as is the faith in a bright future. At Norran we report on the advances made. No employee has so far spoken out about work environment or production problems. But what is really happening on the factory floor in Skellefteå? In the next part we follow several former Northvolt employees into the factory – where in some parts chaos reigns.
Next part: Chaos Inc. Barbie Wonderland and a production out of sync
The reporting
With the aid of about 20 sources with good insight into Northvolt, several of which want to be anonymous in fear of not finding work in the future, as well as documentation – a picture of what really happened at the Skellefteå factory grows clearer. We have conducted long interviews with several of the sources and kept repeated contact with them. The information in the articles has been confirmed by several people and indicates different patterns we have attempted to depict.
For this series of stories we have also reached out to some of the former managers for Northvolt Ett for comments. Plant manager Fredrik Hedlund has declined to participate. Plant manager Mark Duchesne has made himself unavailable after a request. We have also emailed questions to Maria Åstrand, head of Upstream, but have not received a response. Emma Nehrenheim, head of Revolt and of environmental matters, has answered some questions but we are still waiting for some answers. For many of these questions it would have been better to get a response from these people who have been working at the heart of the company.