Mastering the electric battery industry becomes essential for the survival of the European automotive industry. But the Union faces difficulties in mobilizing energies and, above all, coordinating initiatives.

On a vast area of ​​ocher gray earth, as big as 60 football fields, the backhoe and grader bustle. Nothing is still standing in the village of Skelleftea, in Swedish Lapland, except for the large conifers of the boreal forest bordering the site. Here, in less than five years, there should be a huge battery production plant belonging to the Northvolt European consortium. The Scandinavian gigafactory, capable of spitting its 32 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year of storage capacity, will compete with the Tesla plant in Nevada, the largest in the world to date.

This lost site on the borders of Europe is one of the theaters of operations of the great battery battle that is coming. A vast economic battle in progress, at the scale of continents, which could have as many consequences in the twenty-first century as the race for the oil supply had in the middle of the twentieth.

Behind this titanic struggle lies the question of the future of the automobile. The future of mobility will be electric, it is now a near certainty. In Europe, in Asia and, to a lesser extent, in North America, the climate emergency and, by domino effect, the pressures of the opinion and the governors through new regulations lead to a replacement of the internal combustion engine. the electric motor powered by a battery.