March 30, 2023: Freyr Battery held an inaugural ceremony on March 29 for its battery cells customer qualification plant in the north of Norway.
The CQP in Mo i Rana hosts an industrial-scale demonstration battery cells production line based on 24M’s semi-solid lithium ion technology.
The ceremony came a day after Freyr announced plans to work with Glencore, Caterpillar, Siemens and the Nidec Corporation.
Freyr co-founder and CEO Tom Einar Jensen said potential areas of commercial collaboration for the partners included battery cell manufacturing, recycling, mining and refining and stationary battery storage for the power market.
The launch of the CQP (see photo) comes as Freyr pushes ahead with construction of its ‘Giga Arctic’ battery production plant at the same location.
Freyr plans to develop up to 43GWh of battery cell production capacity by 2025, with an ambition of up to 83GWh in total capacity by 2028.
The company announced last June that it had signed a battery materials deal for the CQP with China-based Changzhou Senior New Energy Materials and Senior Material (Europe), based in Sweden.
The firms have reserved unspecified supplies of separator material through 2028 and Freyr has an option to extend supplies until 2031.
Those deals followed the signing of nine other agreements with key battery material suppliers, for what Freyr said would be “more than 90%” of its raw material requirements for initial facilities, including the CQP.
Freyr has also bought a site in the US state of Georgia to build its ‘Giga America’ battery cells manufacturing plant.