After another bankruptcy, will Europe stay reliant on Chinese batteries?

Just one year ago, Lars Christian Bacher said his career embodied the energy transition – moving from CFO of Norway’s state-controlled oil company Equinor to leading one of Europe’s few home-grown battery makers.

Morrow Batteries was on a mission to compete alongside the industry’s dominant Asian, mainly Chinese, battery producers as Europe sought to reduce its reliance on imports, Bacher told a group of foreign journalists on a sunny day in Oslo last May.

But seven months later, Bacher stepped down as CEO, and earlier this month, Morrow Batteries said it had filed for bankruptcy after its financial situation “deteriorated”.

Coming a year after Swedish battery maker Northvolt filed for bankruptcy, industry analysts said Morrow’s descent into financial difficulties would likely deal a fresh blow to investor confidence in European battery manufacturers – potentially keeping Europe dependent on Chinese energy transition technology for longer.

Just one year ago, Lars Christian Bacher said his career embodied the energy transition – moving from CFO of Norway’s state-controlled oil company Equinor to leading one of Europe’s few home-grown battery makers.

Morrow Batteries was on a mission to compete alongside the industry’s dominant Asian, mainly Chinese, battery producers as Europe sought to reduce its reliance on imports, Bacher told a group of foreign journalists on a sunny day in Oslo last May.

But seven months later, Bacher stepped down as CEO, and earlier this month, Morrow Batteries said it had filed for bankruptcy after its financial situation “deteriorated”.

Coming a year after Swedish battery maker Northvolt filed for bankruptcy, industry analysts said Morrow’s descent into financial difficulties would likely deal a fresh blow to investor confidence in European battery manufacturers – potentially keeping Europe dependent on Chinese energy transition technology for longer.

While bigger European battery makers such as ACC, Verkor and PowerCo – linked to car-makers Stellantis, Renault and Volkswagen, respectively – are still in business, Europe needs to reduce its reliance on China, experts say.

“It’s just such a critical technology that you cannot rely on somebody else,” said Julia Poliscanova, batteries lead at the Brussels-based advocacy group Transport & Environment.

State-backed eco-batteries

Established in 2020, Morrow Batteries expanded its workforce to more than 200 and has the ability to produce three million batteries a year at its factory in the forest outside the coastal city of Arendal, on Norway’s picturesque southern tip. 

Investors in the startup included industrial engineering companies Siemens and ABB, and it received a 550 million krone ($59 million) loan from state development agency Innovation Norway. State-owned energy and investment companies were also among its shareholders.

Morrow has promoted its batteries as particularly sustainable, with solar and hydropower supplying energy to the factory. Its lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries do not contain nickel or cobalt, distancing them from the environmental and social problems often linked to critical minerals mining.

“From a sustainability point of view, this is as good as it gets,” Bacher said last May.

He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the company’s decision to file for bankruptcy proceedings.

It aimed to sell these batteries for energy storage, increasingly important as variable solar and wind power comes to dominate European grids, and for off-road and commercial vehicles. Those sectors, rather than electric cars and motorbikes, were being targeted because they were subject to less ferocious competition from Asia, Bacher said.

Industry experts say Morrow started smaller and slower than Northvolt, was selective about its target customers and secured deals with Finnish environmental technology company Proventia Oy and an unnamed German defence company.

But it still ran into financial trouble.

Cash crunch proves costly

In a statement announcing the bankruptcy, Morrow’s board said it had been trying to secure a new industrial investor and finance, and that “several of the ongoing efforts had reached an advanced stage”.

But these talks “could not be concluded within the constraints imposed by the group’s liquidity situation”, it said, blaming the failure on “the capital requirements inherent in an early industrialisation phase” combined with “increased capital costs, delays in the industrialisation process and a more restrained investment market”. 

Northvolt’s bankruptcy may have also damaged Morrow’s attempts to raise money. Last May, Bacher himself acknowledged that it “didn’t help”. 

Morrow also cited oversupply in the global battery market, and the resulting downward “price pressure”. The price of LFP batteries fell by nearly half between 2022 and 2025, eating into producers’ profit margins, according to the International Energy Agency.

The hefty state investment in Morrow has generated controversy in Norway following its bankruptcy. The leader of the right-wing Progress Party (FrP), Sylvi Listhaug, has said Norwegian taxpayers’ money was wasted on an unviable business. 

But others, like Poliscanova and the head of the European Battery Alliance trade association Emma Nehrenheim, told Climate Home News that if Europe wants a battery industry, it will need to back home-grown manufacturers whole-heartedly.

“Valley of death” kills startups

As European battery manufacturers work to perfect and scale up their technology and processes, they face “a valley of death” with severe competition and little patience from investors or battery customers who “can easily buy them from China”, Poliscanova said.

Startups like Morrow typically raise project financing to get them off the ground, according to Nehrenheim. In the period between that finance ending and reaching profitability, they have to rely on money they set aside as a project reserve. 

If they underestimate this reserve, which she said is easy to do when setting up a new factory making a new product, they need more money to bridge the gap. This can come from specialised bridging investors, from customers or from governments.

For Morrow, however, the money did not arrive in time.

Nehrenheim – who was previously Northvolt’s chief environmental officer – said it was a characteristically European failure from investors.

“We’re not good at this,” she said. “We’re not bold enough to compete with Silicon Valley or the Asian (countries), who have been scaling industry now for decades.”

Clean energy sovereignty vs price

Since Northvolt’s bankruptcy filing, the European Union has announced policies to support European battery makers.

It is introducing a €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) “battery booster“, providing interest-free loans to battery manufacturers. It is considering putting tariffs on imported batteries, subsidising European battery makers and tying electric car incentives to locally made batteries through the Industrial Accelerator Act. None of these policies are yet in place.

With trade disputes rising up the agenda of UN climate talks, Poliscanova conceded that such moves are protectionist, although she said she prefers to call them industrial policy.

“Honestly,” she said, “the EU and the UK are the two large global blocks left that don’t have such industrial protectionist policies. India has it, Brazil has it, China has it, the US has it – we’re literally the last fool standing thinking that [the World Trade Organization] is the way to go.”

Li Shuo, China Climate Hub director at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said that the trade-offs between cheap foreign batteries and more expensive European ones “need to be discussed honestly”.

“How much higher are Europeans willing to pay?” he said. “How much delay in climate deployment is acceptable? Can we really decarbonise and de-risk at the same time? How long can politicians condemn cheap Chinese imports while consumers simultaneously demand affordability?”

While European policymakers want to fight China, the average European just wants a cheap battery, he added.

Closing the cost gap

But once European battery makers scale up, the price gap with Chinese batteries will shrink, Poliscanova said.

While German LFP battery cells are 90% more expensive than those made in China, scale-up could close this gap to a “sovereignty premium” of just 25% by 2030, Transport & Environment estimates.

Nehrenheim acknowledged that most of Europe’s batteries will continue to come from Asia or the United States. “I’m very happy for that because they’re scaling fast and they get great support subsidies in their respective countries to supply us to help us in the [energy] transition,” she said.

But European-headquartered companies must make at least a quarter of the region’s batteries, she said, otherwise if supply is disrupted – whether by geopolitical factors, a pandemic or natural disaster – the industry will have nothing to scale up from.

Nehrenheim said she was almost 100% confident that Morrow’s factory will continue to produce batteries. The company said it expected a court-appointed bankruptcy administrator to assume control over the company’s assets and operations.

Citing investors’ €1.4 billion ($1.62 billion) reprieve of Swedish green steelmaker Stegra in April, Nehrenheim said there were reasons to be hopeful about Morrow’s survival as Europe demands batteries for diverse uses beyond cars – from energy storage to drones and forklift trucks.

“Somebody will pick this up,” she said.