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The green dreamers had a rude awakening when their bubble suddenly popped. Northvolt, the propped-up Swedish would-be manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries, was intended to provide the Western electric vehicle industry with home-built materials, in order to avoid dependence on China. It was also intended to spearhead the development of green battery manufacturing and recycling.
On Wednesday the 12th of March the company finally announced its bankruptcy and liquidation under Swedish corporate law.
In the end, the entire multi-billion euro project may end up in Chinese hands, while thousands of tons of unsuccessfully refined metals that risk polluting the environment are in limbo at the factory site.
The green joyride
The Northvolt saga up until the most recent developments have previously been outlined on The Conservative in an earlier article, but will for the sake of brevity in this article be summarised as a perfect example of how the green plan economy of the EU and its member states harms real economic values and entrepreneurship.
Northvolt, carried by billions of euros in loans, guarantees, and public investments, long evaded negative publicity due to the media’s rose-tinted glasses about certain topics. It was a cross-pollination of the media class’ obsession with the so-called green transition and the fight against climate change, and the political class’ penchant for large-scale public prestige projects. What happened between Northvolt’s rise to prominence in 2017 and until 2024, when the company’s severe mismanagement and impossible business model became too much to bear, was a nearly non-stop promotional campaign.
Service providers from both the public and private sector contributed to Northvolt’s build-up in the town of Skellefteå. Housing, infrastructure, schools, and other public facilities were invested in. The company, hailed as the saviour of the local economy, the global climate, and the national pride of Sweden, seemed too big to fail.
But in 2024, the much too overly optimistic economic forecasts were beginning to take their toll on Northvolt’s investors. Bills and wages couldn’t be paid. Manpower had to be laid off. Despite seven years of development, the mega-factory in Skellefteå had ostensibly not produced a single battery.
Testimonies from inside the factory
Many of the shortcomings inside the factory were revealed by public service broadcaster SVT in February. Through interviews with employees at the supposed battery factory, it became known that Northvolt had failed to produce its own cathodes, a critical component. The advanced production process, which involves so-called NMC, or Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides, had only yielded tons of metallic residue. The factory floor was filled up with sacks of material due to be disposed of.
Formally, residue from the main production lines at the factory were supposed to be recycled into lower-quality batteries at a different facility, called Northvolt Revolt. This implementation of a circular economy was part of Northvolt’s business model and market appeal, but like the rest of the project, never delivered on what was promised.
The waste has also been revealed, this time by media outlet Riks, to be a potential ticking environmental time bomb. Not knowing what to do with hundreds of tons of NMC and sub-standard battery products, Northvolt has left the residue sitting in hundreds of freight containers on the factory lot. With the activities at the site all but suspended due to the bankruptcy, there is today no certainty by whom or when the dangerous material will be properly removed. Will the sanitation process be a part of the company’s dismantling, and thus be paid from the sale of Northvolt assets, or will the responsibility fall on the local authorities, ultimately footing the bill to the taxpayers?
Not only failing its environmental ambitions, Northvolt opted to import Chinese-made material to make up for what they could not produce on their own, according to witnesses speaking to SVT. Since the autumn of 2024 it had been known that the Skellefteå factory was dependent on Chinese machines, which in turn had to be operated by Chinese subcontractors. Over 500 Chinese subcontractors were known to have worked the factory, and according to business magazine Affärsvärlden they often had strong ties to the Chinese government. In their absence, factory employees had to use Google Translate to understand the instruction manuals, claimed one former engineer at the factory.
Unsurprisingly, Northvolt has been the site of at least two deadly machine accidents, both of which occurred in 2023. That same year alarms were also raised by trade unions about “slave-like” conditions for some of the workers at the factory.
Northvolt’s general overreliance on foreign labour has also been well-documented. According to the Swedish migration authority, between 2020 and 2024 over 6 000 people from all over the world were granted work visas tied to their employment at any of Northvolt’s facilities in Sweden. This number excludes worker migrants from the EU, who require no such visas. In the media, the large-scale worker migration to the company has been explained as an import of experts and engineers, but considering the wages of the employees, this has been put into question.
Northvolt has been critical of the Swedish government raising the income threshold for migrant worker visas to 80 percent of the national median income. What sort of exclusive competence does a supposed engineer have, if he belongs to the lower half of the working population measured by income?
This background helps explain the dodgy safety, and may well be a large part of why Northvolt failed. The mixed nationalities of the work force no doubt created a dissonance at the factory, which appears to have been modelled on the presumption that throwing a bunch of engineers (assuming they really were) together in a room leads to results, and that culture, language, belonging, and community does not matter.
However, the testimonies on how the pampered company cut corners at every turn arrived far too late to have halted the disaster that Northvolt turned out to be.
The fallout
On Northvolt’s path to insolvency a number of moral failures were exposed. The members of the company’s board of executives had enriched themselves by selling off stocks just before the economic troubles of Northvolt became public knowledge. The co-founder and former CEO Peter Carlsson managed to score 200 million SEK (20 million euros), as revealed by the newspaper Aftonbladet. Carlsson fell further into disrepute when he rejected a question about his profiteering as “incredibly stupid” at the press conference on the 12th of March, when the Northvolt bankruptcy was announced.
Economic reporters have speculated that the Northvolt collapse may prompt an investigation by the Economic Crime Authority, as the indications of white-collar crimes and corruption are strong enough. The liquidation process is predicted to take at least a decade, and a lot of dirty details are likely to surface over the coming years.
One of the most ironic twists was when the liquidation manager, knowing that all pretence had fallen. did not rule out selling the husk of the company to Chinese investors, when he was asked about the risk of the Chinese taking over.
As it stands, Northvolt and its subsidiaries are nearly 70 billion SEK (7 billion euro) in the red. It is not known yet to what extent those who have been hurt the most by the company’s failure will be compensated. This includes the Swedish companies that were contracted by Northvolt to deliver certain services, tools, and materials, and who have still not been paid. Earlier in 2025, Northvolt made headlines in Sweden when the company used an American law firm to threaten its creditors with litigation if they continued claiming what they were owed.
It remains to see what values that Northvolt ultimately will take with it down the drain. Its fiasco has caused active harm to honest Swedish enterprises, and has left an entire town in northern Sweden indebted for perhaps generations, with useless infrastructure investments. The greatest harm may have been done to the spirit of real entrepreneurship, which Northvolt hijacked by playing the politicians and the media like a fiddle.