The Northvolt battery plant was supposed to cost around $7 billion, including $4.4 billion from the federal government and $2.9 billion from Quebec, with the idea of building a local battery industry capable of supporting the energy transition and creating a durable industrial base.
Part of that money has already been committed, immobilized, or written off, and the project collapsed before producing a single battery.
Today, Ottawa says the battery sector must be relaunched, with new funding to support the same industry that was already supposed to be supported by the billions committed to the previous project.
At the same time, after discussions led by Mark Carney around the transition and supply chains, several actors in the sector are openly talking about importing Chinese electric vehicles, produced at much lower costs, with their batteries already integrated.
These vehicles arrive complete, tested, amortized over volumes North America has never produced, and they arrive with the most expensive part of the vehicle already installed inside. The question then becomes very simple:
– Who are we going to sell locally produced batteries to, if the cars we plan to import already come with their own?
The minister talks about energy sovereignty, the deputy minister talks about adjustments, economic bodies talk about resilience, consultants talk about ecosystems, and programs follow one another to keep the sector alive.
Batteries keep arriving from abroad at half the price, and public billions are used to maintain a more expensive local production in the hope that one day it will find a customer.
In the meantime, another industry, a very real one, is running at full speed: the industry of programs, studies, committees, financing structures, and intermediaries who live off the transition, even when the factories themselves remain on paper.
And while batteries keep arriving from elsewhere, and subsidies keep circulating here, the question stays suspended in the middle of the sector: who is the real customer of this industry?
