The management of Sunlight, a member of the Olympia group, has put an end to its plans for the construction of a factory (Gigafactory) for energy storage batteries of lithium cells in Western Macedonia, totaling 1.4 billion euros.
The Greek company’s plan was ambitious and very well designed. Sunlight executives had also been in advanced discussions in Europe with the prospect of creating the Gigafactory on French soil, but the group’s stable goal was to implement its investment in Greece. As the management emphasized two years ago, “this effort for Sunlight is not limited to a corporate level, but we are treating it as a national project that will put Greece, for the first time, in a closed club of producers of this kind of high technology worldwide. It will create a total of over 2,000 highly specialized jobs.
The Gigafactory, with an annual production potential of 20GWh, would be the first in the Western world to focus on off-road applications, with its main activity being the production of lithium-ion cells for applications in the intra-supply chain and energy storage from RES.”
According to company sources, Sunlight made the decision to cancel the investment not because of its own inability to fulfill it but because of the inability of Greece and Europe to support the sustainability of large investments in the crucial energy sector and in particular in the highly competitive area of energy storage, a fact that confirms the upheavals that now dominate the business environment in combination with Europe’s inability to rise to the occasion and adequately respond to what it has planned on paper. The lack of a clear strategy and goals to limit Europe’s energy dependence on third parties as well as the intensifying competition from Asia and especially China led to the cancellation of the creation of Sunlight’s Gigafactory on Greek and European soil, increasing the number of cancellations of large European energy investments.
As executives in the sector emphasized to “N”, over 60% of planned investments by European industries are being canceled. The recent bankruptcy of the Swedish battery company Northvolt, which was the great hope in Europe’s efforts to create an independent supply chain for electric vehicles, accelerated the domino effect of investment cancellations on the part of European companies in the sector.
