I spent two years at Revolt Ett, Northvolt's battery recycling gigafactory in Skelleftea, just south of the Arctic Circle. When I joined in August 2021, it was a blueprint with roughly 300 million euros behind it and no reference plant at this scale anywhere in Europe - every system had to be engineered from first principles.
I arrived as Technical Project Manager for the wastewater and utilities infrastructure: designing, procuring, and commissioning the wastewater treatment, compressed air, steam, water supply, and HVAC systems for a 23,000 m2 battery recycling plant. The wastewater plant runs 4,500 m3 a day across physical, chemical and biological stages, with a closed-loop recovery system designed to reclaim more than 90 percent of process water.
In April 2022 came the commissioning sprint: 137 individual system start-up procedures, executed sequentially and in parallel, under winter protocols for pumps, tanks and instrumentation. Zero lost-time incidents across all of them.
In June 2022, the role expanded to EIA Manager, taking ownership of the entire electrical, instrumentation, and automation scope. The brief was to wire the plant's digital nervous system: more than 8,500 IoT sensors, a Siemens SIMATIC PLC network, an AI-driven predictive analytics layer, a self-learning building management system, and the control systems for automated material handling across the full gigafactory footprint.
The integration load was the hard number - over 10,000 data points per second, which exceeded any previous European industrial automation project I am aware of. The analytics layer sitting on top of the PLC network makes real-time decisions roughly 200 times faster than a human operator, and it adapts rather than following fixed rules.
The Arctic environment shaped everything else. Design conditions down to -40 C meant specialised insulation, heat management and cold-weather material handling protocols throughout. Waste heat recovery loops and closed thermal systems return about 40 percent of the facility's power from its own process heat. Lithium-ion battery materials also carry chemical and thermal hazards, so handling protocols were developed and tested in parallel with construction rather than after it.
The hydrometallurgical line takes 25 tonnes an hour of black mass and recovers 92 percent of the lithium, cobalt, nickel and manganese in it. Full capacity and handover came in June 2023. It is not recycling so much as mining - every battery arriving carries thousands of euros of material asking to be used again, and the plant exists to get it back.
Revolt Ett, Sweden - Project Summary and Related Work
PROJECT SUMMARY