Freyr, a publicly traded company with Norwegian roots, is set to build a nearly $2.6 billion battery plant in Newnan to meet an anticipated spike in demand for energy-storage systems in North America.
The company plans to spend $1.7 billion on the first phase of its so-called “Giga America” factory, with later expansions that could include solar parks with storage modules and materials processing bringing the total to $2.57 billion.
The factory will focus first on battery energy storage solutions, which are seen as key to the growth of wind and solar energy in the United States, but executives say Freyr is also receiving consistent inquiries from electric vehicle manufacturers.
Freyr has committed to hiring 723 people in Coweta County, as Georgia continues to notch wins in the ascendant new-energy and electric-vehicle sector. Freyr’s announcement comes on the heels of the Hyundai EV and battery plant groundbreaking near Savannah, as well as the success of SK Battery in Commerce and a planned Rivian truck and SUV facility in Covington.
The company touted “robust incentives” from the state and Coweta County on the deal, without outlining details in its news release. Speaking to a local audience at a launch event Friday, Freyr CEO Tom Jensen said its most vital resource would be people. He invited local firms to partner with Freyr as it moves into the engineering phase for the plant.
“We are a partnership-based company,” Mr. Jensen said in a livestream of the event. “We believe in strong connections. We believe in local connections. We believe in enabling the local community and hiring the local community and contractors. This makes good business sense, but it’s also something that will strengthen the core of what we are doing.”
That mentality is giving local leaders confidence that the project will be transformative for the community.
“They are a perfect example on the leading edge of technology, innovation and caring about their people,” said John Daviston, chair of the Coweta County Industrial Development Authority.
After weeding out contenders from an initial pool of more than 150 locations, Freyr picked Coweta County from five finalist sites in the U.S., waiting to announce the location until the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal energy and health spending package under which it plans to qualify for production tax credits.
Freyr will also apply for U.S. Department of Energy funds including grants or loan assistance, perhaps under the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which has already underwritten other battery-related projects in Georgia.
A 368-acre site in Newnan’s Bridgeport Industrial Park has been purchased for the 34 gigawatt-hour plant. This is one node in a broader global plan to build 200 gigawatt hours of capacity by 2030 as Freyr seeks to fulfill its mission of “accelerating the decarbonization of global transportation and energy storage systems.”
Freyr’s U.S. plans are to be carried out through a $70 million joint venture with Koch Strategic Platforms, in which the venture arm of the Koch conglomerate has invested $50 million, with Freyr kicking in $20 million.
Traded on the New York Stock Exchange, Freyr is a young company founded in 2019 after Swedish battery company Northvolt showed that building massive factories close to the clean energy sources of Scandinavia could be commercially viable, Mr. Jensen said.
“As good Norwegians, we tend to think that if the Swedes can do it, then we can do it better,” he said.
The company tapped into Norway’s deep pool of energy-industry expertise and recruited the top minds across the world in the battery sector; its staff now hails from 30 countries.
Now, Freyr is technically domiciled in Luxembourg but with most of its intellectual capital based in Norway, where it is building its initial Giga Arctic factory in the northern city of Mo i Rana with strong government support.
A single test production line called the Customer Qualification Plant will go into operation just after Christmas this year. Processes refined there will be replicated on the eight production lines planned for Giga Arctic, which will serve as a model for the Georgia facility with a similar size and design.
Freyr isn’t yet generating sales, posting only a paper gain of $4.7 million in the second quarter after a loss of more than $33 million in the first quarter of this year. But it is well-financed, with $488 million of cash on hand and a $1.6 billion market capitalization after going public via a merger with a SPAC called Alussa Energy in 2021.
By 2028, with both planned gigafactories built, Freyr says it will generate $1.6 billion in free cash flow annually on $5.4 billion in revenues. See their investor deck here
Perhaps more importantly, Freyr has nailed down an array of agreements with massive global companies to secure financing, raw materials and eventual purchase orders that could lead to rapid growth when its industrial-scale battery plants come online. Taiwan-based Aleees, as one example, is planning to build a lithium-iron phosphate plant in the Nordic region, from which Freyr will purchase supplies and license technology.
Freyr’s operating premise is that conventional lithium-ion batteries and renewable energy technologies don’t do enough — or aren’t building quickly enough — to solve the climate crisis.
In the realm of vehicles, taking into account emissions from the (often) fossil-fuel-based production processes for EV batteries, it can take years for new cars to reach a net reduction in CO2 versus internal combustion engines. Some critics argue that renewables and batteries simply move emissions “from the tail pipe to the smoke stack,” an idea Mr. Jensen alluded to in explaining the basis for Freyr’s technology:
“If the battery is being charged with non-renewable energy and/or if you’re producing the battery with non-renewable energy, you’re kind of just moving the point of emission,” he said.
When it comes to renewables themselves, a potential Achilles heel is that without ample storage, the intermittent nature of solar and wind power production can waste energy and create mismatches between supply and demand.
Mr. Jensen said that to stay “largely on track” with climate commitments by 2030, including plans to electrify the transportation sector, the U.S. and Europe need to see a 34-fold increase in energy storage capacity.
“The opportunity is enormous, and that’s why we wanted to come to the United States,” he said. “When the U.S. wakes up to this energy transition, which it is already well advanced in doing, this this will take off in a very material way.”
Back home, Freyr uses what it calls “the Norway advantage” to offset the potential shortcomings of renewables. Ironically for an economy that has been fueled by exports of oil and gas since the discovery of huge offshore deposits in the 1960s, nearly all of the Scandinavian country’s energy is produced by clean, cheap hydro power, and it’s still making huge investments in offshore wind energy.
Freyr argues that this positions the company to make battery cells cleanly — and at a scale that makes them economically viable. It has established a technology office in Boston, where the 24M semi-solid battery tech it’s licensing and scaling was developed within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tom Rosseland, the honorary consul for both Sweden and Norway in Atlanta, welcomed the announcement and praised Norway’s strides in electric mobility and in the market for energy storage systems.
“Norway is a leader in the electrification of its passenger transportation infrastructure, and it is expanding that knowhow to its port operations and other sectors of its economy at home and abroad,” Mr. Rosseland told Global Atlanta in an emailed statement. “I look forward to seeing Georgia and FREYR expand and further develop the ESS as well as the EV markets for both Georgia and North America, and to the joint pursuit of additional opportunities that will inevitably arise.”
Mr. Jensen noted that the Inflation Reduction Act was so named because in addition to cleaning up the grid, it should make energy cheaper for all by running on the “free feedstocks” of wind and sun.
He explained that Freyr is named after a Norse god representing prosperity, sunshine, peace and virility.
“Here we are giving birth to our first gigafactory in the United States,” Mr. Jensen said to the second round of applause and laughter during his speech.
The first came when he worked a Norwegian-tinged “y’all” into one of his early sentences.
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