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scythe 3 days ago

>The deal with BMW was cancelled in June 2024 because of Northvolt not being able to deliver on time. [Wikipedia]

Certainly this is some kind of failure. But this is Hacker News. Surely we can appreciate that you can't just blame the core technology when a company fails. History is full of companies that failed. Japan and the USA have battery companies despite high wages. There is something to be learned here, but I don't have the determination to figure out exactly what it is.

belorn 2 days ago | parent [-]

We should definitively attribute some blame to the company and those who ran it. It is very similar to the nuclear projects in UK and Finland that went over budget and got delayed, except that those at least did finish and are predicted to create profit in the near future. Northvolt ended with nothing to show, and all the government subsidies it already received just went into the ether.

ViewTrick1002 2 days ago | parent [-]

Their only profit is coming from in the UKs case tax payers and French tax payers by shouldering the fixed price contract costs in the Finnish case.

The UK case is even looking like it won’t be making profit as per recent cost overruns. Not sure how else to interpret:

> The French government has unsuccessfully tried in recent years to convince the UK government to help finance the nuclear plant.

https://archive.is/g4mmt

And that is starting with an already unfathomably expensive CFD.