That's why they promised to expand to so many places, each government subsidized them separately.
Of course, that particular question seems to have been rendered irrelevant by Boeing’s quality crisis.
... In the end, they are just in a situation that is almost impossible to save. You have a factory full of machines that are substandard in quality, reliability and documentation. A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB. ...
... A gigantic factory full of mediocre Chinese equipment, what can you do with that? They are not standard things, they are things custom made for Northvolt but unfortunately with incomplete specifications. ...
...The whole market is not doing well in Europe. We don't really have the raw materials here (Northvolt's came mostly from China), we don't have the knowledge (that's in Asia) and we don't have the machinery for production. ...
[1] https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/sweden/comments/1g1x...
[2] https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/228816/faillissem...
This might be a culture thing. At least next door here in Norway, a decent supplier will definitely ask when needed, offer suggestions and even resist if you try to order something stupid.
There is also a possibility of cultural differences and who knows what the Chinese thought the Europeans wanted when they did not send complete specs for the equipment. In some countries it is not customary to challenge the client - but I do not know if it applies to China as well.
I've seen how they build stuff in China, and most likely Nothvolt thought it could do some things on their own without understanding what those things would entail. Maybe if they would have asked the supplier to come in and setup the factory and also run the first batches of finished batteries the situation would have been different.
Somehow I think now they're trying to find a scapegoat for the whole debacle and blame on the usual suspects.
> Helaas is het probleem bij Northvolt echt gewoon te herleiden naar slecht management (ex-Tesla), en bijgevolg een slechte keuze van leverancier van productiemachines (Wuxi Lead).
Oh, well, that explains everything! Great insight... /s
> In theory it's microservices, but the reality is that there are so many circular dependencies that it works like a monolith
But lambda/go/dynamodb does not force this situation.
If all your life you coded monoliths, you can code monoliths using Lambda functions too, there's nothing magic that will stop you from doing it.
Nor be surprised if your interests don’t align with a chineese actor you’re trying to replace.
The industry as a whole is nowhere near paying for its true health and environmental damage.
So the only way to start fresh here is to raise billions in capital. Unless you're Volkswagen or something, when you could invest billions in an enterprise like this one.
Regarding Germany: I still do not understand how you want to electrify everything, reduce CO2 emissions, and then shut down fully working nuclear power plants in the middle of an energy supply crisis. This is completely beyond me. I know there are people defending this decision, but I can only attribute this to malice or idiocy.
Renewables? + some batteries + gas peaker as winter backup
The nuclear plants weren't fully working anymore but taken into planned shutdown 10 years after the decision was made to shut them down. That people think Nuclear is a power technology where you can just nilly-willy decide to continue running is the real idiocy.
Energy prices are now lower than before the run-up to the Russian war of aggression.
Yes it is a stupid decision, but your timeline is out a little - 2011 is when they decided to shut down the power plants, the energy crisis was 2022. The amount of work that doesnt get done when you are 2/3/4 years from end of life makes reversing the decision on the day of shutdown not as easy on the ground as it is from an armchair.
Import energy from abroad, you get to claim that you're all so Clean and Ecological[0], while all you've done is shift the dirty coal plants to some other countries that don't care and will happily take all the blame in the global statistics, as long as you keep paying them.
See also: manufacturing, another case where western nations outsource the dirty and energy-intensive parts, import finished products, and get lauded for "reducing" their footprints.
Accounting trickery, is all.
--
[0] - A claim that's belied by opposition to nuclear energy alone.
Note "Britishvolt" suffered the same fate 12-18 months earlier and the story reads pretty much the same.
For those looking for another similar example of European subsidized tech failure check the ST-Ericsson story.
I never made a blanket statement that all state subsidized are bad, I just pointed out some cases of major EU failures which you took as a blanket statement.
That hasn't helped. Subsidized competitors are hard to compete against.
The German factory have indeed received some government subsidies. But that is not the factory with problems (at least not yet).
But this happens all the time in the USA, it's quite funny to read comments on HN about how Europe is losing to USA's "innovation" but when one company does follow the USA model (huge injection of capital, unreliable/inexperienced leadership, failure to execute/pivot) then it's an apocalyptic sign. It's risky, and in this case it failed spectacularly.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42210855 Sweden's Northvolt files for bankruptcy, in blow to Europe's EV ambitions
There used to be a technological edge European countries (especially in the west) could rely on, which made them more suitable for some business. But now it's gone, almost everywhere. Exception is couple of important, but niche industries, which are seen as being of strategic interest (Airbus, ASML, Arianne). But they too feel the pinch now, as the supply chains get more fragile, new talent leaves, or doesn't even show up, and foreign powers prop up their own alternatives.
Add incapable, or shortsighted, political leadership, aging population, hostile, or at least unfriendly, neighbors and rising political extremism, and you get a particularly deadly mix.
Unfortunately, the top institutions have shown almost zero acceptance of the fact. In that sort of situation the only "hope" is that the collapse will be relatively quick, allowing for some rebuilding to start before the next decade ends. If we are lucky.
- Russian influence will rise and dominate at least major parts of Eastern Europe
- China will expand its footprint in Africa and increase its ambition in Asia
- US and Japan will become more isolated than ever
Russia can't even beat a country one third its own size despite petrol dollars and legacy military stock.
Their hybrid warfare has created massive social rifts and political instability across all major Western Democracies.
Unfortunately you do not need a lot of money to do evil, when the devil's whispers are enough to turn citizens of a nation against each other.
Europe has effectively ceded it's position in Africa to others some time ago.
Aid based approach has led to little tangible benefit for locals, and even less for Europeans. Furthermore, conditions the recipient needed to fulfill were, and still are, often hard to accept for cultural and historical reasons. Add to it the lack of actual power projection and all you have is contempt.
It's pretty visible during any UN vote.
Simply put, investment beats aid, every single time.
The silver lining is that Russia is having it's own issues, not entirely different but similarly horrible. Namely demographic crisis, exacerbated by war and poor public health. There is also demographic crisis in China, however their government has been wise enough to not go to all out war.
I don't think Arianne is successful as it relies on traditional technology to launch things into space and they can't be competitive with SpaceX.
The EU is the laughing stock of the world: AI regulation is in force, but no single AI company in Europe :)) - just to name one example.
I hope they will.
Classic rogue state hybrid warfare, just as cut cables in baltic, also by Chinese. Plausible deniability all the way.
What is the difference then? Willingness to work for lower wages? Greater determination? State subsidies? It's not like Chinese universities have a great reputation en masse. It's also clearly not IP theft (alone) since they are the leader - who would they steal from?
If it's subsidies, then China must be taking the subsidy money from somewhere. It's not, as I understand, a non-social, cutthroat capitalist country. Retirement age is something like 55. Is Chinese hegemony in battery production effectively subsidised by underpaid peasants? But surely the image of guys in sloping hats rolling rice paddies desperately outdated; I don't expect Chinese farming to be behind European in terms of technology.
So if it's subsidies, then where is the money coming from, that European governments clearly don't have?