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.
The post After another battery startup bankruptcy, can Europe ever cut reliance on China? appeared first on Climate Home News.
After another battery startup bankruptcy, can Europe ever cut reliance on China?
Climate Change
After a week of plenty of activity and drama for Greenpeace at sea, I felt like writing to you on a much quieter theme…
Do you have a favourite book, poem or story about the ocean?
When I was very small, it was the TimeLife book of The Fishes, by F. D. Ommanney, which I remember endlessly poring over, my child’s mind gripped, in total fascination. The cover illustration showed a shoal of barracuda, mid-water and heading upwards, lit up as an iridescent blue by a column of sunlight. Oddly, it is only the cover and the illustrations of the deep sea creatures which I now remember—but I loved that book, as the weakened spine, blunted pages and dog-eared corners attested.
The Fishes has been on my mind recently, because I’ve been working with some dear friends on our own illustrated oceans book, to be published by Upswell Publishing. The book is called Scott Reef: Like Nowhere Else on Earth, and I want to share with you a bit of the story behind its creation.
Scott Reef is absolutely magnificent: Australia’s largest freestanding oceanic reef, brimming with life, including rare and threatened species such as a genetically distinct population of green sea turtles, pygmy blue whales and the wonderfully elegant dusky sea snake. But Scott Reef isn’t near our capital cities; it is way off the north-west coast of WA. And it is threatened with devastation by Woodside, which wants to drill up to 57 toxic wells at the Reef for its vast, dirty Browse gas project.
One of the main challenges in the fight to save Scott Reef from being turned into an industrialised gas zone by Woodside is bringing this incredible location to life for people who haven’t actually experienced it first hand. Because despite its ecological significance and dazzling beauty, ‘Scott Reef’ is also—at least not yet—exactly a household name.
To help get over this barrier, Greenpeace has enabled a number of photographers to travel to Scott Reef by boat (including the Rainbow Warrior) to document its astonishing diversity of colour and life. We then brought these images together in a remarkable photobook, produced by our talented in-house team, which we’ve been putting into the hands of as many leaders as possible—including the MPs whose decisions can determine the Reef’s future.
Back in June this year, I was sharing a copy of our in-house book at a business gathering in Perth when someone pulled me aside. Had we thought about publishing the book commercially? Apart from anything else, he wanted to buy a copy himself! He had a point. We were proud of what we’d created, but a commercially published version could reach a much wider audience and have even greater campaign impact. I immediately turned to my dear friend, Terri-ann White, who runs Upswell Publishing in WA, for advice.
Terri-ann has a huge heart and terrific vision. So many wonderful things in WA owe their existence to her doings, and, true to form, she was immediately encouraging and enthusiastic. “But,” she said, “it would add a whole new dimension if we had some words to accompany the incredible pictures.”
Fair enough, I thought. I could ask a few authors.
“And when would you like it published?” she asked.
“Ideally November,” I answered sheepishly.
Now, in publishing terms, nobody goes from idea to finished work, beautifully produced by a commercial publisher, in just four months. It. Just. Doesn’t. Happen. A book of this scale would ordinarily take nine months, I was told. But Terri-ann was undeterred. “If you can get a rapid turnaround on the writing, I will give it a shot.”
Over the following few days, I sent out 24 emails to prospective writers. To my joy and surprise 23 of them responded almost immediately with an enthusiastic yes!
Terri-ann was somewhat alarmed and perplexed when I told her the good news… we’d discussed a few authors, not more than twenty! “Impossible,” she texted. “Editing is important and you are talking about thousands of words!” But I also know Terri-ann. She does the impossible. And so, here we are… Terri-ann is going to hit that improbable deadline. Scott Reef: Like Nowhere Else on Earth will be on shelves in November.
The contributors are a wonderfully diverse bunch, united by their enthusiasm for Scott Reef — and their extraordinary speed!
It’s a brilliant mix. The book brings together national icons like Peter Garrett, Tim Winton, Mick Dodson, Janet Holmes à Court and Fiona Stanley; the intellectual heft of professors Frank Bongiorno, Jessica Meeuwig, Rick Steiner and Samantha Hepburn; the poetic vision of Prema Arasu, Berndt Sellheim and Saadiah Freeman; the field expertise and passionate first hand witnessing of Imogen Zethoven, Tooni Mahto, Ben Fitzpatrick, Geoff Bice, Olaf Meynecke, Paul Gamblin, Sarah Gittoes and Hayley Baillie; and the determination of emerging activist voices Jackson Reid and Emma Sangalli.
Their elegant words wrap themselves around the sheer wonder of the underwater world, brought to life by the work of the photographers — of whom one, Wendy Mitchell, has also contributed a wonderful essay.
Terri-ann showed me the full physical proofs this week and they are breathtaking. This book contains some of my absolute favourite images of wildlife beneath the waves -– and believe me, after almost 20 years at Greenpeace, I’ve been privileged enough to see some remarkable shots! The essays bring a whole new depth and richness to the story of Scott Reef.
If I am being honest, and maybe a bit sentimental, I hope that a four or five-year-old child somewhere in Australia will spend part of their summer holidays turning the pages of this book, wide-eyed with curiosity and awe at the beauty and strangeness of the creatures that call our oceans home.
Our shared commitment is to make sure that, as those children grow up, the wonders of Scott Reef will exist not just in the pages of the book, but out there in the wild waters off north-western Australia—alive, thriving, and every bit as extraordinary as they are today; a living wonder beneath the waves.
Pre-orders of Scott Reef: Like Nowhere Else on Earth are available here.
Q & A
Sometimes you get asked a question so often that you decide to produce a report to answer it!
We know there is strong public opposition to voter opposition to gas drilling at Scott Reef and fracking in the Kimberley in Western Australia. But I am frequently asked whether, even if people don’t want it, more gas drilling is a necessary evil to sustain WA’s prosperity?
The short answer is an unequivocal ‘No’. The longer answer is our new report, From Gas to Green: Building Western Australia’s Future State, which makes the comprehensive case that Asia’s gas market is declining — while WA has an enormous untapped opportunity to become a global leader in green industries and exports, helping drive the region’s shift away from fossil fuels. The faster that WA embarks on a decisive shift away from gas—and that includes no fracking in the Kimberley, or drilling at Scott Reef — so much the better for the state’s people, ecology and economy.
For the first time, new-energy vehicles (NEVs) made up 67% of new car sales in China in September, according to the latest data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).
The figures show that NEVs, which include battery electric cars and plug-in hybrids, captured a record share of sales, even though fewer were sold than last year.
This is because sales of combustion-engine cars are falling steeply, a trend that the CPCA has attributed to rising petrol prices following the start of the Hormuz crisis.
Indeed, sales of fuel-only cars were down 31% year-on-year in the first nine months of 2026, with plug-in hybrid sales down 26% – whereas battery EV sales were only down 4%.
One analyst tells Carbon Brief that China’s rapidly growing EV fleet has offset demand for 143m barrels of oil since the start of the Hormuz crisis.
Another says that the crisis is “reinforcing China’s electrification of road transport”.
Meanwhile, amid slowing domestic sales, Chinese carmakers’ exports of NEVs more than doubled [in 2026 to date / in September] from a year earlier.
NEV record
A record two out of every three cars sold in September in China were NEVs, according to CPCA data, as shown in the figure below.
(NEVs predominantly include battery electric vehicles – BEVs – and plug-in hybrids – PHEVs. BEVs only run on electricity, whereas PHEVs also have a combustion engine.)
This marks a rapid rise for NEVs from just 6% of new car sales in 2020 up to 58% in 2026 to date – and a record 67% in the month of September.
This year, NEVs’ share of sales has also bounced back from a low of 39% in January, after the full purchase tax exemption that had been in place for more than a decade came to an end in December 2025.
The gain in NEV share in 2026 has come amid a slowdown across the wider domestic passenger-car market, which has hit sales of combustion-engine vehicles particularly hard.
This September, passenger-car retail sales across all categories declined, with overall sales volumes falling 28% year-on-year.
The contraction was led by combustion-engine vehicles, which saw sales fall 43% year-on-year in September and 31% in 2026 to date.
However, sales of PHEVs also fell by 36% year-on-year in September and by 26% in 2026 to date. By comparison, BEVs performed better, although sales still declined 8.5% from a year earlier in September and 4% in 2026 to date.
As a result, NEV sales overall fell by 17% in September and 13% in 2026 to date.
While the market changes in 2026 to date were particularly dramatic, they reflect a broad continuation of trends seen over the past decade.
Indeed, sales of combustion-engine cars in China peaked in 2017 and they have been declining ever since, shown in the figure below.
Impact of Hormuz
Part of the reason for the advance of NEVs in 2026, said Chinese technology news outlet OFweek, was petrol cars “giving up market share” as they were outperformed by electric alternatives.
Cui Dongshu, secretary-general of the CPCA, cited higher petrol prices as an explanation for September’s weak combustion-car sales, in comments to financial news outlet National Business Daily.
Imports of oil into China in January-September have fallen 15% compared to 2025, equivalent to 470m barrels, as ongoing conflict tightened supply and drove up prices.
China’s passenger-car NEV fleet has displaced 143m barrels of oil so far during the strait of Hormuz crisis, Euan Graham, senior energy analyst at thinktank Ember, tells Carbon Brief.
EVs “accounted for 12% of the d