Northvolt assembles first battery cell at Swedish gigafactory

The company claims that the cell is the first to have been fully designed, developed and assembled at a gigafactory by a homegrown European battery company. Not only that, the cell also represents a milestone which Northvolt has been working towards since the gigafactory was first announced in 2017. The cell is of a prismatic cell format and came off the cell assembly line on the 28th of December. Commissioning and upscaling of the factory will continue through into 2022, when the first commercial customer deliveries will be made. “Today is a great milestone for Northvolt which the team has worked very hard to achieve. Of course, this first cell is only the beginning. Over the course of the coming years, we look forward to Northvolt Ett expanding its production capacity greatly to enable the European transition to clean energy,” says Peter Carlsson, CEO and Co-Founder of Northvolt, in the press release. The battery cell was developed at Northvolt Labs, Northvolt’s industrialisation factory in Västerås, Sweden, which has been in production since early 2020. In the coming years, production capacity at Northvolt Ett will increase towards 60 GWh per year to fulfill over USD 30 billion worth of contracts which the company has secured from key customers, including BMW, Fluence, Scania, Volkswagen, Volvo Cars and Polestar.