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https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/energie/...terie-fiasko/29878330.html
https://www.wiwo.de/my/unternehmen/energie/...wachsen/29878330-2.html
WirtschaftsWoche July 4, 2024
The German battery fiasco
The weakening demand for electric cars is jeopardizing plans for new battery factories in Germany. There is also opposition from politicians. But the manufacturers are partly responsible for the current misery themselves.
The first excavators should actually have been rolling in Kaiserslautern in a few weeks. Nothing will come of it now: The German-French battery joint venture ACC, which is backed by the energy group Total and the car companies Mercedes and Stellantis (Opel, Jeep, Fiat, Peugeot, Citroen), has put its plans for the largest battery cell factory in Germany to date on hold. The group has also stopped work on a second factory in Termoli, Italy. Management now wants to consider by "the end of the year" whether the battery factory in the Palatinate should still be built. It was only at the beginning of 2024 that the partners Mercedes and Stellantis raised around 4.4 billion euros to build a total of four new cell factories in Europe.
Mercedes and Stellantis are not the only ones whose until recently ambitious battery plans have suffered a severe setback in recent weeks. It was recently announced that BMW had canceled a major order from the Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt. The company, founded just a few years ago by two former Tesla managers, also wants to build a battery cell factory for electric cars in Heide near Hamburg. The construction of the planned battery factory of the Chinese cell manufacturer Svolt in berherrn, Saarland, is also stalling, as is the construction of the Saarland cell factory of the US battery company Wolfspeed. Svolt has already completely abandoned its plans for another factory in Lusatia. Finally, the battery supplier BASF stopped the construction of a factory for battery precursors in Finland.
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Whether it is wise to abandon plans for your own battery factories at the first sign of resistance is another question, says Roland Berger partner Bernhart: "In the long term, there is still no way around the electric car if you are at all serious about climate protection in transport," he believes. "Due to the many withdrawals in Europe, the already far too great dependence on China in battery technology will continue to grow in the long term," Bernhart fears.
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Finally, Volkswagen wants to become self-sufficient in the long term. The group has bundled its battery activities in its subsidiary Powerco. (My comment: similar to Tesla!)
Page 2/2 Know-how gap with Asia threatens to grow
Without exception, all existing and planned battery factories in Germany produce the particularly powerful but still expensive nickel-manganese-cobalt cells (NMC). But: "The growth is currently coming primarily from the much cheaper lithium iron phosphate cell, LFP," observes industry analyst Bernhart from Roland Berger. "And the LFP value chain is practically nonexistent in Europe." Maximilian Fichtner confirms this. "The German car industry and its battery partners in Europe have long given LFP a wide berth for patent reasons," says Fichtner. "With a lot of research effort, they have only acquired their own patents in the higher-priced, more powerful nickel-manganese-cobalt chemistry." Of course, these are not worthless, but urgently need to be expanded to include know-how in other cheaper cell chemistries such as LFP, believes the battery researcher.
The gap in cheaper LFP cells is also not exactly easy to catch up, says Fichtner. "If you want to be competitive with the Asians in terms of e-car batteries, the reject rates in production must be reduced to a minimum, and you don't learn that in the laboratory, only in the factory," says Fichtner. Hesitation in building new factories will not help.
And the Germans have missed another technical trend that tends to make e-cars much cheaper, says Fichtner. Up until now, the relatively small battery cells were initially bundled in a module in a few dozen units; several modules then make up the battery. Chinese manufacturers such as BYD, but now also Tesla, have developed a different method: in the so-called cell-to-pack process, much larger cells are packed directly into the housing, without the intermediate module step.
According to Fichtner, this saves up to 45 percent of the parts required for a drive battery. But the cost advantages of the cell-to-pack process are crucial: By eliminating the module housing, the Chinese manufacturers save a lot of space and weight, which means there is more room for the battery cells themselves with the same external dimensions. Fichtner: "At the level of the entire vehicle, cell-to-pack can achieve equally good results with less powerful but much cheaper, more densely packed LFP cells as with more expensive NMC cells, for example in terms of range."
In Bernhart's opinion, there is only one solution from the point of view of German car manufacturers: "Even if the gap to the Chinese is large when it comes to the cheap LFP cell - there's no help for it, we have to get to work."
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