Former Tesla employees have built the biggest european battery factory in Skelleftea in the north of Sweden, a report by french newspaper Le Monde:
A decade ago, the future looked bleak in Skelleftea. In the town of 71,500 inhabitants, the size of Corsica, 800 kilometers north of the capital, Stockholm, most mines had closed. Those that still produced minerals had replaced men with machines. In search of a brighter future, the young people headed south. In a burst, in 2015, the municipality set itself the goal of reaching 80,000 inhabitants by 2030. "But we knew it would be very hard," admits today the director of municipal services, Kristina Sundin Jonsson.
This was without counting the miracle that occurred in the fall of 2017, when the company Northvolt, created two years earlier in Stockholm, chose Skelleftea, among 40 Swedish municipalities, to set up its “gigafactory” of electric batteries. At first, the locals only half believed it. The hill above the construction site in the east of the city has been renamed "the hill of the skeptics". Locals have gotten into the habit of climbing up to follow the progress of the work. First, we had to cut down trees over an area the size of 280 football pitches, then level the pitch with explosives. On October 15, 2019, construction of the buildings could finally begin.
