The Britishvolt startup at the end of its run. What will happen to the Italvolt gigafactory?
The gigafactory worth 3.8 billion euros and 3,000 workers to be built in the north of England, in Blyth, in collaboration with Pininfarina, Siemens, Aston Martin and Lotus, has not found capital and ended up in controlled administration. And now the concern is mounting that after Britishvolt it could be the turn of the Piedmontese twin Italvolt
Britishvolt, the twin startup of that Italvolt which should open a gigafactory in Scarmagno, in Piedmont, in the former Olivetti industrial site in Ivrea, has already reached the end of the line. Almost. The company founded by Lars Carlstrom , the Swedish entrepreneur who wanted to become the European king of electric batteries, has filed for receivership, dismissing 300 employees.
A PROJECT TOO AMBITIOUS?
The substantial project worth 3.8 billion euros and 3,000 workers which envisaged the construction of a battery pole in the north of England, in Blyth, in collaboration with Pininfarina, Siemens, Aston Martin and Lotus, collided at full speed with the impossibility of finding capital and investors.
The rounds of about 200 million pounds were of no use, half of which came from the public and were put on the table by the British government (which, like many others, subsidizes one of the strategic assets of the ongoing ecological and energy transition with huge amounts of money).
That things were not going too smoothly in the parts of Britishvolt had been guessed since December 2020 when Lars Carlstrom was forced to resign following the controversy over a conviction for tax evasion which in the nineties had cost him a 10 thousand euro fine and 60 hours of social work 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 soiled in this way. However, even without Carlstrom at the helm, that capital to build the UK gigafactory never came.
THE MAN WHO WANTED TO LIFT SAAB
Lars-Eyvind Carlstrom , born in 1965, born in Lulea, the second largest city in Sweden by population (just over 50 thousand), on the outskirts of Lapland, once known above all for its mining activities, while today, in the era of the dematerialisation of assets , to host the first Facebook data center built outside the United States, has always had a passion for the automotive sector.
For years he tried unsuccessfully to acquire Saab, the now abandoned Trollhättan brand that lovers of the genre remember for having put the safest cars on the market in the world (the same engineers as the jets worked there), which then translated into most expensive cars in the world to manufacture, with heavy expenditure for the factory, in fact, which after various financial ups and downs, in 2016 definitively closed the hangars, sorry , the garages.
AFTER BRITISHVOLT SHAKES ITALVOLT?
And now there is fear that the contagion will also spread to Italvolt, the Mediterranean twin of Britishvolt. Even the Piedmontese gigafactory is bogged down, having suffered a few too many slowdowns that the same reality attributed to the sudden turnover at Palazzo Chigi last summer.
And at the moment it is giving signs of life by signing agreements. The latest agreement provides, in particular, for the Israeli startup StoreDot to license to Italvolt its ultra-fast and high energy density charging technology and intellectual property rights for the production of XFC lithium-ion batteries in the gigafactory under construction in Scarmagno. Furthermore, the parties have announced, the newly signed agreement includes a contract for the supply to StoreDot itself, at predefined prices and for a certain period of years, of accumulators which will be produced in Italy.
In the middle of summer Italvolt had instead signed a partnership with the Milan Polytechnic "to create a closed-cycle circular economy for the development of batteries for electric mobility". As part of the partnership, the recently established interdepartmental laboratory of the Politecnico, CIRC-eV, Circular Factory for the Electrified Vehicles of the Future, will identify the sources of primary supply of raw materials and analyze the possibilities of recovery of key materials from secondary sources recycled, such as used batteries.
Within the partnership, the Politecnico di Milano will map the supply chains to help Italvolt obtain raw materials from primary sources for the construction of the Scarmagno gigafactory, with a fully operational production capacity of 45 GWh. The University will assess the quality of materials sourced from primary suppliers to ensure the highest quality and sustainable lithium-ion batteries are produced. In addition to the primary procurement sources, the Polytechnic will analyze the flows relating to production waste to feed the supply also through secondary sources. The University will evaluate the entire production chain to allow Italvolt to recover key material present in spent batteries.
THE PREVIOUS THAT IS SCARY
But now, with Britishvolt in controlled administration, there are fears of the fleeing of shareholders from Italvolt as well. After all, when it comes to foreign gigafactories in Italy there is a precedent that nobody wants to mention and everyone fears: the project by Silk-Faw , a Sino-American joint venture that intended to move to Emilia to produce fully electric hypercars.
A 1 billion euro project that was supposed to create between 1,500 and 3,000 jobs, welcomed with open arms by politics, at all levels, at least until doubts arose about the real intentions of realizing it by the jv , who started making melina.
In recent weeks, the Italian justice has also begun to move: the court of Reggio has issued the first injunctions to oblige Silk Faw to pay back wages to 15 employees, most of whom have all resigned, who at the end of August had requested the formal notice of the company complaining of non-payments since June for an amount of around 200 thousand euros.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/la-startup-britishvolt-a-fine-corsa-che-ne-sara-della-gigafactory-di-italvolt/ on Fri, 20 Jan 2023 06:11:18 +0000.