Catalyst with Shayle Kann12 Joulu 2024

What went wrong at Northvolt?

Northvolt’s ambition was to become a European batterymaker to rival Chinese battery behemoths like CATL and BYD. They wanted to offer a homegrown supply chain to western automakers. But in November, the company announced its bankruptcy. So what went wrong? In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, principal at 1019 Technologies. They walk through Northvolt’s timeline from founding to bankruptcy, including the loss of a $2B deal with BMW. They discuss lessons learned and cover topics like: What went well — from fundraising billions of dollars to securing major off-takers What didn’t go well — like trying to build multiple types of batteries, in multiple factories, on multiple continents How venture capital investors may have pushed the company to be too ambitious The tradeoffs of choosing NMC over LFP Challenges with their equipment supplier Wuxi LEAD The upside: Sam’s belief that Northvolt’s factory will ultimately make batteries Recommended resources Latitude Media: What Northvolt's bankruptcy means for Europe's battery ambitions Intercalation: Battery production is genuinely difficult Bloomberg: Northvolt Has Major Obstacles Ahead Even With Bailout In Reach Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(269)

Is now the time for DERs to scale? [re-published]

A decade ago, DERs were hot. The hype was that things like batteries, smart devices, and other distributed energy technologies would offset the need for expanding traditional grid infrastructure. But...

13 Elo 42min

Critical Capital: Senator Tillis' case for "all-of-the-above" energy

This week, we’re presenting an episode of Critical Capital, a new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Energy policy has become increasingly polarized just as the U.S. faces record electricity dem...

11 Elo 31min

The electrician shortage slowing the AI boom

The race to build AI infrastructure is often framed around the availability of power, chips, and capital. But another critical constraint is becoming impossible to ignore: skilled labor. In this epis...

6 Elo 34min

The commercial battery comeback

Commercial and industrial (C&I) battery storage has long been the missing middle of the energy storage market. It’s been too complex and expensive to scale like residential systems, but too small to ...

30 Heinä 44min

The multi-billion dollar promise of vehicle-to-grid integration

Most electric vehicles spend nearly all of their lives parked, doing nothing. But under the hood of those idle cars, a massive store of energy sits untapped. The Kia EV9, for instance, holds a 100-kil...

23 Heinä 34min

When will quantum computing have its breakout moment?

Over the course of the past decade, quantum computing (or the concept thereof) has ridden hype cycles, just like AI or the internet writ large. In the past year, however, as governments across the g...

16 Heinä 40min

Inside the AI power wars

For those steeped in the world of AI development, the major differences between tech giants’ chip strategies are easy enough to see: the speed of Google’s TPUs, the affordability of Amazon’s Trainium,...

9 Heinä 43min

Inside the most sophisticated plan for solar geoengineering

One of the biggest challenges with technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions is that they require mass adoption. Solar radiation management (SRM) has the opposite problem. By Stardust Solutio...

1 Heinä 37min