Italvolt won’t be done? After Silk Faw, the opportunity for another Italian gigafactory vanishes
In Piedmont, the investment in a gigafactory of batteries for electric cars on the land of the former Olivetti which should employ around 4-5 thousand people is at risk. After months of silence, the Swedish entrepreneur behind Italvolt speaks
We could call it “the curse of foreign gigafactories”. After seeing the Silk-Faw project , a Sino-American joint venture that intended to move to Emilia to produce fully electric hypercars, fade away, now it could be the turn of the Swedish Italvolt.
THE MANY NODES OF THE ITALVOLT PROJECT
It has been known for some time that the Piedmont gigafactory was bogged down, having suffered several slowdowns that the same reality had initially attributed to the sudden turnover at Palazzo Chigi last summer. But only now the entrepreneur behind the project, Lars-Eyvind Carlstrom , born in 1965, born in Lulea, Sweden's second largest city by population (just over 50 thousand), on the outskirts of Lapland, speaks openly about how things are.
NO ENERGY?
«In that area – the manager explained to Stampa – there is a big problem concerning the connection to the electricity grid of the plants. We need to make sure the site can accommodate the functionality we need, a factory like ours consumes an enormous amount of energy, we estimate up to 1% of all electricity available in Italy, so the infrastructure must be up to date. 'height. But we find ourselves in a situation in which the connection to the grid could take up to four years of work to be achieved: we do not have all this time because according to our plans, production must start in 2025. We are working to understand if it is Is it possible to speed things up and what can we do but we have not renewed the agreement with Prelios: consequently we no longer have exclusive rights on the site».
The company founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Lars Carlstrom with the aim of building one of the largest gigafactories in Europe in Piedmont, near Ivrea, did not in fact exercise the binding agreement with Prelios Sgr within the set time frame (12 months) , manager of the Monteverdi Fund, for the purchase of the one million square meter former Olivetti area. Of course, this does not mean that the project will not take place, but certainly that it is suffering major setbacks, as Carlstrom himself admitted after months of silence.
WILL ITALVOLT REMAIN IN PIEDMONT?
«To date – explains the manager to the main newspaper of the North West – we have already spent around 10 million euros on this site for various engineering works, appraisals and for the future set-up of the factory. Our will remains to conclude this process, also because at a bureaucratic level everything is ready but we cannot be caught unprepared or in the event of further unforeseen events".
"We have to protect ourselves in the event that it is not possible to restore the connection to the electricity grid because if it actually takes four years, it becomes a huge problem for us". If the gigafactory could not be built on the outskirts of Ivrea, other areas in Piedmont would take precedence, "which could be a valid alternative to Scarmagno if the situation does not resolve itself".
THE STUMPING OF BRITISHVOLT
In all of this, the proverbial elephant is represented by Britishvolt , the 3.8 billion euro and 3,000-worker twin that should have been built in the North of England, in Blyth, in collaboration with Pininfarina, Siemens, Aston Martin and Lotus. In recent weeks, however, it has been discovered that it has not found capital and has ended up in receivership.
To tell the truth, Carlstrom has little to do here given that two years ago he was forced to resign following the controversy over a conviction for tax evasion which in the 1990s had cost him a 10,000 euro fine and 60 hours of social services in Sweden.
Even if the debt to justice and the taxman had been paid, it was difficult to present wary British investors with a criminal record thus stained. However, even without Carlstrom at the helm, that capital to build the UK gigafactory never came.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/italvolt-non-si-fara-dopo-silk-faw-sfuma-lopportunita-di-unaltra-gigafactory-italiana/ on Wed, 25 Jan 2023 10:47:22 +0000.