So There wasn't much going on in Heide for a long time. On Monday the Chancellor is coming to the small town in Schleswig-Holstein. Olaf Scholz is bringing his Economics Minister Robert Habeck with him, Prime Minister Daniel Günther is there anyway. All because of Northvolt.
The company is Europe's great hope for domestic production of battery cells for the many millions of electric cars that will be on the roads in the future. So far, high-tech electricity storage devices have come almost exclusively from Asia, especially from China – a dependency on a key product that is increasingly perceived as dangerous.
Northvolt is the first battery cell manufacturer from Europe, founded in 2016, and its largest shareholder is now Volkswagen. And now Northvolt boss Peter Carlsson is building a factory on the edge of Heide for a mere 4.5 billion euros. Reason enough for political celebrities to come to Heide for the start of construction. Northvolt wants to produce batteries for up to a million cars a year in its “Gigafactory”.
But two men will be missing. Of all people, the two who came up with the daring idea of battery cells “made in Europe”. Harald Mix and Carl-Erik Lagercrantz, without whom Northvolt would not exist, remain at home in Sweden. First of all, they don't like being in the spotlight. And secondly, Northvolt is their best-known, but by no means only, major project.
The two Swedes are turning some pretty big wheels when it comes to restructuring Europe's industry for climate protection. Together with their investment company, they have mobilized double-digit billions of dollars for green industrial projects over the past ten years, from battery cell factories to climate-friendly steelworks.
In conversation with the FAS, they chat in a good mood about their favorite leisure activities. Mix is a passionate cross-country skier, Lagercrantz is a bookworm. They named their investment company Vargas after his favorite author Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner. But no one should be fooled by small talk. The two nice older gentlemen have founded an amazing series of companies.
“Sometimes it’s easier to start with a blank sheet of paper”
They started in 2015 with a company called Polarium, which produces stationary power storage devices for industry, telecommunications companies and private households. The duo had been friends for a long time. Lagercrantz had spent most of his professional life in the telecommunications industry. Mix, in turn, had made a fortune in the private equity business in New York and London and got to know many different industries. Both were influenced by the Paris Climate Agreement and wanted to do something to reduce CO2 emissions in industry. So they went among the founders. “Sometimes it’s easier to start with a blank sheet of paper than to transform an existing company,” says Mix.
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