Peter Carlsson, MD of the Northvolt group runs the nine kilometres between Stadsparken and Northvolt Ett in a running race in connection with the factory being opened.
It is September 2022. Voices echo over the large outdoor space in Borlänge, they repeat something over and over like a chant. There are tents and sleeping bags everywhere, there are stages, dance floors, gaming rooms – and alcohol. It looks more like a festival than a kick-off, staff will later say. It is a party and more than 2,000 employees have gathered for “Voltchella”, possibly an electrified version of the Coachella festival in California.
It is five in the afternoon and Peter Carlsson is standing on stage. He is leisurely dressed in black and holding out his long arms. The festival is about to start and he is holding the opening address. The crowd is listening, they look happy and hopeful. Peter Carlsson divides the audience in two sections and they get to stand on each side of a thick yellow line.
– The left side screams “focus”, the right responds “close”, OK?
He raises his arms again, then points to the left. The audience responds. Then to the right, the same thing again.
– Focus, close, focus, close, focus, close … People did it, they stood there screaming like we were a sect, it was crazy, Jessica says.
Jessica, who at this time is relatively newly recruited to the head office in Stockholm, experiences the situation as odd compared to what she is used to. In the culture she has worked in you do not mix work with private life and she feels that she does not really fit into the social expectations at work. There are kick-offs, after work drinks and people like to hang out with each other in their spare time.
The border between work and spare time is blurred. But she can understand why.
– People came from all over the world and moved their lives here. Many had no one to hang out with so it became natural for many to find friends at work, she says.
Peter Carlsson, the company's founder and MD up until November 2024 remembers the scene that Jessica describes. During this time they were doing a lot of work to manage all the different cultures and expectations of how an organisation is to work, he says. They tried to create a Northvolt culture with a flat organisation and a large focus on own responsibility.
– What I was talking about then was the purpose of what we are doing, that we are building a critical industry for transition. It’s important to remember, especially when it feels really bloody difficult. And not to try to solve ten problems at the same time. Solve the problem ahead of you, close it and move on to the next.
Jessica says that she did not take part of the social events outside work so much, she brought the family to Sweden and does not have the same needs. Also there is a lot to do at work. The work days are long.
She travels a lot at work, stays in hotels and drives a rental car but there does not seem to be a budget or a travel policy. If you want to drive a Mercedes-Benz E-Class even though that is the most expensive choice then that is fine. If you want to stay at a Marriott instead of a mid-range hotel that is also fine. Jessica is not used to work trips almost without any work where the purpose seems to be to socialise or show your face. Relationships seem to be important at this company, she says. At least for relationships within the company.
When it comes to customer relationships it is different, at least sometimes, she says. There is such pressure in the production and so many issues that they cannot always deliver on time. She talks about the time they were far behind schedule and knew that they could not deliver.
– We already knew this on the Thursday and the delivery was scheduled for Tuesday. But at the meeting with the customer that same day the manager said that everything is going according to plan. Then we had to call them the day prior to delivery and make up an excuse. But the customer didn’t believe us. ”Not a chance you didn’t know this last week”, they said. After that we had to report to them every other day instead of once a week.
Peter Carlsson at the office in Stockholm.
As we have mentioned earlier, at this time Peter Carlsson had other issues with the customers. Production in Skellefteå is going slowly and the big car customers want to send their own teams to the factory to evaluate the work and progress made. This takes time away from the production upscaling. But at the same time some customers are also partners which makes it more difficult to say no.
– The problem was to say no when we were delayed which meant that they obviously put more and more pressure on us. It became an additional complexity to manage the teams in Skellefteå at the same time as installation and ramping up was ongoing, he says.
Jessica has now left Northvolt. She says that a lot of the work at the company was fun as well, not least that they were working on something new for the future. But it felt unorganised and sometimes it seemed to be more about upholding a front, saying that everything was going well, than actually making what we were working on function. It was a constant time pressure that led to negligence. When she complained to her bosses she felt dismissed.
– Don’t focus on the problems, they said. We’ll fix that later, don’t be so fixated on details. But the devil is in the details and if you do not solve it now, you will have problems later, she says.
However, on the whole it was a fun job, Jessica says. Meaningful, as long as it lasted.
– We were part of something bigger, that’s how everyone thought about it. We thought that we would contribute to a better world and I felt that it was the first time I would get to use my skills to make a real difference.
The failed muffin bake
It is time to take Upstream in Northvolt Ett into operation. It is the part of the factory that will produce cathode materials for the batteries. Mikael Stenmark has been in the industry for many years and has gone through six bankruptcies but he has never experienced a workplace like Northvolt Ett.
He eventually becomes the senior safety representative and makes statements in the media when the work environment problems come to light but in spring of 2022 he has just started working on logistics, with materials handling in Downstream where the batteries are assembled. He has also been elected as a regular safety representative. Suddenly there is frantic activities in the factory area, sections are built and put into operation and many people are hired in a short space of time.
– When I started in February there were lots of people who had nothing else to do than to read documentation and work descriptions to get up to speed. There was not a lot of production but in April it started to swing into action properly.
Mikael Stenmark worked at Northvolt and later became the senior safety representative. In that roll he had contact with many different parts of the factory regarding work environment issues.
Rumours say that Northvolt are keen to put Upstream into operation and start manufacturing cathode materials as early as summer. There is some doubts among Mikael’s colleagues. There are many questions regarding how dangerous it could get and no one knows yet how it is to fully function, he explains. It is a fact that they are to handle toxic material to and from the Upstream building.
– They had not thought about the whole chain of material flow from Upstream to Downstream. I confronted two managers and asked them how they had planned to transport things. But no one makes a decision, it runs into the sand.
It also becomes evident that parts of Upstream has been planned in a way so that unhealthy temperature levels arise, Mikael Stenmark says. At its worst temperatures between 45 and 48 degrees Celsius were reached in the premises, up on the ceiling. On the floor it was around 34 degrees. Additionally Upstream is so “dirty”, that is so full of particles when it is operative that it is impossible to open gates without contaminating the outside environment and there are no airlocks in the building.
– It is here somewhere that Upstream’s chaos begins, in terms of logistics. The area has to be blown clean manually. Provisional airlocks are built. Dust and particles in a premises will land somewhere and when you transport material back and forth it will eventually also land on other material and contaminate it. We were struggling with that issue until we went bust.
The exterior of the Upstream building.
Things were not made easier by the lack of a clear organisational structure at this time, Mikael Stenmark says.
– It was completely impossible to find out who is responsible for an issue. More clarity regarding who was responsible for what was found as late as 2024. The manager had a fancy title but it was difficult to see the connection between the title and the work tasks.
Peter Carlsson, the MD at the time, says that organisations look different depending on whether the production is up and running or if you are in a project phase.
– There was always both a hierarchical organisation and project organisations and it may, particularly when you are recruiting lots of people, feel unstructured in such a setup, he says.
Eventually the production is up and running but succeeding in making cathode materials in Skellefteå will turn out to be significantly more difficult than the company had estimated.
Inside Upstream on a completely normal night in 2023, "Johan” is working. He has worked here for almost a year and most shifts follow the same pattern; an issue will turn up somewhere. He sighs to himself. Upstream was started over a year ago but so far they have not made it work. In Johan’s department they get impurities in the material all the time which means that it cannot be used but instead must be sent off as waste. No one knows for sure why.
– The problem arises somewhere along the line. If it's coming from the machine, a pipe or valve or whatever it is. But no one wants to go back in the production and find out where the problem stems from, instead we keep going and the same fault occurs all the time, he says.
Johan worked in the processing industry for many years before he started at Northvolt, he is used to structure and clarity. Here it feels like they are mostly putting out fires. He is thinking about quitting. It is impossible to work this way, he feels. It is too frustrating.
He gazes over to another part of the premises, where the team that sends material to his department works. It is not easier for them. Over there they are working with a facility that is undersized and that, on top of that, keeps breaking down. They cannot keep up with the speed of the production and never manage to achieve more than twenty per cent of the capacity.
– If you are baking muffins and the result is bad you have to change something, either the recipe or how you are baking them. But that’s not what they do here, here we just keep going, Johan says.
He emails his boss about the need for them to get to the bottom of where the impurities are coming from. First one email, then another one – and finally one directly to Peter Carlsson. But he receives no answer to his questions about why they should keep feeding a sinkhole with expensive material for borrowed money instead of trying to find the faults and do something about them. He thinks that large amounts of money is disappearing.
– I said once that perhaps we should take the good, super expensive material and drive straight over to Stena [waste management] instead because that would have been easier.
Oscar, an engineer, is working in another part of Upstream. Just like Johan he has also been here a year now but is also thinking about resigning. It is obvious to him that the process must be switched or at least change if it is to work but no one is listening. Sometimes he regrets coming to Sweden.
– But it was an old dream for me to work with something that makes a difference so I came here, excited and full of passion, he says.
Once in the factory he is surprised about how young everyone is. Many had Northvolt as their first job after university, he says. That is not wrong in itself but it can be difficult to troubleshoot for those who have no experience at all from the industry. At his previous workplaces management used to solve these things by placing rookies in the same team as the experienced people in order for knowledge to spread. Here the managers were barely visible on the floor.
– I heard how some operators called the supervisors PowerPoint engineer because they walked around with their computers and talked about the problems instead of solving them, he says.
They struggle with powder leaks, faulty recipes and clogged up pipes over and over again. After the fact Oscar thinks about how Upstream never managed to go from initial starting to production the entire time he was there. It would not have been that way if the design had worked, he says.
– If I was top management I’d say that everything takes too long. But the experienced people had quit, the supervisors didn't know anything. At the same time there was a lot of money and the management was forgiving. It was like a university lab where everyone can fail a countless number of times without any consequences, he says.
Oscar eventually resigned. He had got fed up with banging his head against the wall, trying to get the managers to understand that things have to change if any cathode materials were ever to come out of Upstream. He has contacted Peter Carlsson as well but that has not led anywhere either. Oscar’s perception is that the top management has had no idea about what it actually has been like on the floor.
– It’s like they were living in some kind of bloody Barbie Wonderland where everything was shiny and lovely. They said ”we’re so close” all the time but all they did was to push the timeframe forward.
Peter Carlsson visiting Northvolt Ett in December 2022.
The MD Peter Carlsson is regularly out on the production floor to make his own perception, he says. He usually goes with the production management or leaders of the processing engineers.
– I have to trust management but I also want to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t on the factory floor.
He cannot say for sure whether all information has reached him. ”In some parts, in others perhaps not”, as he expresses it. But he still feels that he has had a fairly good understanding of what has not worked. In part that there were great problems with bottlenecks in the processes that took a long time to solve. But also that the actual problem solving did not work optimally.
– It was about how Västerås and Skellefteå collaborated in order to problem-solve together. I was worried because I didn’t think that it was properly melded together.
At out office we have had information stating that Upstream only in the summer of 2024 managed to produce one batch of cathode material. Now there is new information coming from inside the factory. In total it is said to have been two or three batches that could be used for batteries. For the other cells imported cathode material was used.
The employees view of Upstream not working is not shared by Peter Carlsson.
– It's not true, he says.
They did tests where the production was run continuously for both one and two months and it worked then, Peter Carlsson says. The material produced then was used for cells but the cells needed to be validated for a longer time than Northvolt had estimated and finances were very strained. In the end it became untenable.
– It was the lead times for the validation that had us make the decision to decrease the activities in Upstream and instead solve the cell production. But saying that we have not produced cathode material in Upstream is not true.
New material from old material
If Upstream was one leg of ”the world’s greenest battery”, then Revolt was the other. This is where old battery material is to be revived into almost virgin material for new batteries. This is where Kim is working in 2023. An experienced specialist engineer with very long experience of this specific type of work in the industry.
He was attracted by the promises of a flat hierarchy and exciting challenges in an industry with great future prospects. But it did not turn out the way he had imagined. There is an enormous difference between Northvolt’s ambitions and the design they are actually working with, as he sees it. In the marketing Northvolt says that half of the cathode material in Upstream is to come from recycled batteries by 2030. Kim gives up a little laugh.
– They say they’re recycling more than 90 per cent of the material from the batteries but that's ridiculous. Perhaps 65 to 70 per cent, that’s the average globally and that's reasonable.
Just like in Upstream, Revolt produces unclean material and the design Northvolt has chosen is expensive, ineffective and dangerous, Kim says. He is surprised about Northvolt’s choice of design for Revolt, that they in part use old methods that, according to him, has already been abandoned by large parts of the industry.
He explains that in one part of the process, copper is to be recycled from the black mass that the dead batteries have been ground into. But iron gets stuck to the copper which ends up unpure. It is a useless method according to Kim, as well as being old-fashioned. Then there are the safety risks. The process has worked in the facility in Västerås but there are no guarantees that it will work in Revolt, Kim explains.
– In an industrial scale this process can become dangerous and cause fires and explosions. When you scale up a process there are many things that can go wrong.
He feels that there is a lack of relevant industrial experience and knowledge about upscaling in the management.
Kim starts talking openly about the problems and proposes changes, first to his manager and then to the manager’s manager. But according to him he does not get any response. He then turns to the company’s whistle-blowing function. After all it is not just about extracting material as pure as possible at a reasonable cost, he says, but also about the safety risks in the premises, which he now considers to be unreasonably high.
Sounding the alarm has no effect. Then he gets fired. He is told that it is due to him not fitting in. Before he leaves he emails Peter Carlsson, but still does not know whether he read the email.
Emma Nehrenheim, head of Revolt and of environmental matters at Northvolt.
Emma Nehrenheim was the head of Revolt and we are sent her responses via email. She says that they got the recycling process to work at both Labs and at the Revolt factory in Skellefteå. They were to have achieved a product that met the requirements for battery quality and that matched the quality in materials of virgin battery quality. And this material was to have been produced at Revolt Ett. According to her more than 150 tonnes of nickel, cobalt and manganese sulphates as well as 10 tonnes of lithium hydroxide was delivered. It is an interstage that must go through more processes in order to be used in the battery.
Norran has asked when the process worked without fault in Revolt Ett but we have not received a response. Neither have we got any clear answers to whether they really managed to recycle 90 per cent of the material. Only that they reached the expected level of recycling.
But Emma Nehrenheim calls the Revolt processes groundbreaking and that they achieved some of the best performance measurements in the industry.
– It has low chemical use, a very high degree of recycling and significantly fewer by-products compared to classic recycling methods, she says.
She admits at the same time that they had certain mixing problems in the tanks, which the engineers managed to remedy.
Emma Nehrenheim says that Northvolt did not manage complaints and whistle-blowing any different than other companies.
– Managers get information that regards their respective teams, they are then expected to report back on what actions they have taken, she writes.
According to her the facility was designed and evaluated carefully several times, internally and by experts, to assess the risk of explosion.
– All necessary safety measures and considerations were considered during the design and operation, she writes.
During the time that Johan, Oscar and Kim have focused on struggling with processes and machines, Northvolt has continued expanding and buildings pop up in the factory area. At the same time it was a long time since they got any new money coming in and the attempts to get production going is expensive. In Upstream they have to keep buying in complete cathode material from China in order to have anything at all to deliver to Downstream where the batteries are assembled.
Reports about events and incidents are staring to pour into the Work Environment Authority but so far no one is talking openly about work environment problems in the media. Not until November 2023. That which cannot happen happens.
One late evening on the fourth of November a young man enters the Downstream building. He is 25 years old and has moved to Sweden from Greece in order to work at Northvolt. This evening he has taken an extra shift and is now about to clean filters in a machine that collects material and particles from the production. He is wearing protective clothing against chemicals.
What the man does not know is that it is a risk area. If the wrong equipment or work method is used an explosion may occur. He should be wearing other protective clothing that protects the wearer from fire. But he does not know this, and neither does anyone else as it is not included in the risk assessment.
– The machine was not correctly labelled. It also had an unfortunate construction that ground aluminium down into a powder and it was aluminium that exploded, says Mikael Stenmark, the senior safety representative at the time.
The tragic explosion on 4 November 2023 may still have consequences for the management of Northvolt.
The explosion turns the man's protective clothing into a death trap and he is taken to hospital with severe burns. On 15 December he dies from his injuries. The day before another fatal accident has occurred in the factory area. Two people working for a subcontractor get crushed by a crane rack when they are installing weather protection. One loses an arm, the other one dies immediately.
– We are now gathered in grief. The situation is crushing and we are now working, hour by hour to help each other through this, Peter Carlsson wrote to the media after the news came out.
But when journalists go to the factory to talk with the staff they are met by silence. Most people walk past the reporters or say that the company’s policy is to not talk to the media.
In the autumn and winter of 2023 they are meant to have production in full swing but delays keep occurring. The problems line up. At the same time the expansion continues.
This is what the factory area in German Heide looked like in June 2024.
In parallel with all the projects the company has previously started, the plans for the factory Drei in Heide in Germany continues. This is when the plans for another factory is announced, this time in Canada.
Where the factory in Canada was supposed to be it is barely visible that any groundwork has been done in June 2024.
While Northvolt is expanding and the headlines are all about the accidents in December 2023, the newspaper Dagens Industri has got hold of a secret interim financial report. The article with the heading ”Northvolt’s secret horrific figures”, show costs running out of hand, barely any income and a cripplingly low production pace.
But Peter Carlsson has a plan. He calls the company's terrible figures an ”expensive lesson”, in an interview with the paper. But he also says that the company does not risk a liquidity crisis in the coming year as the company is “on its way to sign another financing deal which will be communicated shortly”.
It will be a couple of weeks before it reaches the public but at the end of the year Peter Carlsson knows that Northvolt is about to secure ”the biggest green loan so far in Europe”. A total of 23 banks and institutions are to lend the company five billion dollars, almost 50 billion Swedish kronor. What he does not know is that the money will never be paid out. And that there are those who have started doubting the battery fairytale.
Mikael Stenmark has a lot to say about his time at Northvolt, both positive and negative. He could consider working there again.
At the end of 2023 Mikael Stenmark has worked at Northvolt for almost two years and have become the senior safety representative. He has another feeling about the future than the one Peter Carlsson expresses.
– There was a deadline in the autumn of 2023 when they have to be up and running. When that came and went you understood: it’s only a matter of time now.
In 2022 and 2023, Northvolt completed the first stage of its Skellefteå factory and began expanding it. The company has ambitious plans for new facilities in both Europe and North America, and a $50 billion order book. But major problems remain.
At the Revolt facility, they are struggling to recycle pure battery materials. They have also failed to produce their own cathode material — meaning they are not delivering on key promises. Employees describe machines and processes that don’t work, and a sense of chaos on the ground.
The numbers are dire. By the end of the year, just two billion kronor remain to address production issues at the Skellefteå factory — and the situation is about to get much worse.
Next part: The path towards downfall and catastrophic headlines
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. Plant manager 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.