An American company buying (one of?) the biggest European gridscale battery manufacturer.
And all the public funding received… Disgusting.
Yeah. The Swedish government should have just bought the company (the current one would never do it, though) ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Sweden didn’t put in that much money in it. At least not directly, I don’t know how much Sweden and Skellefteå spent to build up the city due to Northvolt.
I think it is better to have an American company that owns a couple of battery factories in Europe than importing all batteries from China. With these factories the know-how in Europe will increase and it will be easier for an European company to be successful.
Sweden’s too busy giving land to Microsoft for free so they can build datacentres.
Agree that it is crazy to give land and cheap power to the data centers that doesn’t create any jobs.
Northvolt receive 1B€ from the European investment Bank (eib). Part of it was for the German plant, but still.
And 1B€ is kind of nothing for a country and even less for EIB. That would be equivalent of a normal person investing less than 1000€ into a business (didn’t do the math but the exact numbers don’t really matter). Of course I don’t think the EIB and governments should spend huge amounts of money into crazy ideas but some projects are too big and takes too long time for any company to invest in it. ITER (fusion power) is one example and nuclear power was probably equally risky in the 1950s. It is still better to invest some money into things that can be beneficial for us in the future than never dare to do anything, if you ask me.
Soooo… Of 1B€ is nothing, will the new owner pay it back?
Every European country is rolling back social progresses from the last 60y. Reducing support to existing companies.
So, while 1B€ is “nothing”, it should not happen.
What could go wrong.
