Northvolt and Morrow have both filed for bankruptcy, and Europe’s battery boosters are already talking about the continent missing another technology shift. The numbers are ugly, the mood is nervous, and the usual chorus about competitiveness is doing its best to sound like strategy.
Batteries matter because transport and industry are switching from fossil fuels to electricity. That much is clear. But the article’s own cast of investors, analysts and founders keeps circling the same problem: long development times, brutal competition from China, and a business model built on risk, patents and supply-chain leverage rather than any democratic control over what gets made or who benefits.
Small Tech, Big Capital
Christian Rood, chief executive of Dutch tech firm LeydenJar, says: "If you can make this work, it touches so many industries [but] it's a risky business." LeydenJar uses plasma deposition to make a lighter, more efficient anode, an essential component of all batteries. The company says its ultra-thin pure silicon foil can resist cracking, allowing a significant increase in battery life, charging speed and energy density, up to 50%. Rood called it "a very wonderful invention" and said: "We address the bottleneck in the battery."
Commercial-scale production will start at the end of 2026, but it has taken 10 years to get there. Ten years. That’s a long slog for a technology that is supposed to be the future, and a neat reminder that the future under capitalism arrives only after a decade of funding rounds, factory plans and intellectual-property games.
LeydenJar’s factory is in Eindhoven, home to ASML and other important players in the computer chip industry. Rood said: "A lot of people talk theoretically about ecosystems; I can tell you this is one of our sources of competitive advantage." He added: "It's really the crossover from semiconductors to batteries that makes us different - once you've demonstrated the principle in the lab, industrialization requires you to work with the semiconductor technology and suppliers." He also said that means a lot of risk, but also a lot of opportunity in terms of patenting and securing intellectual property, and that is much more difficult to do in the US or in China.
Powall, a start-up in Delft, is taking a different route. It is developing commercial-scale equipment for nanocoating the powders that are the raw materials of today's batteries. The powders are measured in micrometres, the coatings in nanometres, and the process uses atomic layer deposition. Roderik Colen, Powall’s CEO, said the system can slow the degrading or aging of batteries after repeated use. He said: "Your battery works less well than before after using it thousands of times - that degrading or aging can be slowed down when you're using a nanocoating." He added: "You can have an exciting new material with a higher capacity or fast charging, all these novel developments. They typically have one element which is very good, but they suffer on the durability side." His answer is a protective coating. Another layer. Another fix for a system that keeps demanding more performance from the same materials.
Europe’s Supply-Chain Fantasy
Neither LeydenJar nor Powall is trying to build an entire battery, and both have commercial relationships with customers in Asia. That matters. Their ambition is not self-sufficiency in any meaningful public sense, but a strategic position inside a global contest. Rood said companies like his can fortify Europe’s position in what has become a global contest. He compared LeydenJar’s role to ASML, saying: "The easy comparison is with semiconductors, where there's really a race for the best chip technology. [Dutch tech giant] ASML is not producing chips; it focuses on a critical step in the production of chips, and in that way, has a seat at the table when it comes to the whole semiconductor battle. This is our ambition as well – to have a position where our battery anode is so unique that we have an important position in the supply chain."
Alexander Brown, a senior analyst at the Berlin-based independent think-tank the Mercator Institute for China Studies, said: "I think having one part of the supply chain based in Europe is great and if that can be a very advanced technological part, which offers the opportunity for high margins, that's fantastic." He also warned that China will keep trying to reduce dependence on other regions. Brown said: "China is working very hard to develop local alternatives for technologies, including these niche technologies. It's no secret that China would love to replace ASML - they're working very hard to do that, and it's not unforeseeable that they will achieve that goal eventually." He said Europe has traditional strengths in developing "very exquisite high-quality products" that can find markets all over the world, but added that it is important for that not to be the only strategy from the continent's policy makers.
That’s the language of the boardroom and the policy shop: supply chains, margins, seats at the table. Ordinary people get electricity, prices and industrial restructuring. The people making the decisions get leverage.
Funding, Conditions, and the EU Machine
LeydenJar has already reached commercial scale, but Rood said raising funds within Europe is not always easy. He said: "There is sufficient financing in Europe, but the risk attitude is quite different than in Asia and in the US." To keep moving, he said the company has to work with different sources of funding at the same time: government grants, debt financing, help from the European Investment Bank and investors willing to buy a share of the business. He said: "They set a lot of challenging conditions, and they all want to do their own due diligence. It's hard work."
That’s the machinery in plain sight. Public money, private money, bank money, all tied together with conditions, scrutiny and ownership claims. The European Investment Bank appears here not as a public answer to public need, but as one more gatekeeper in a system where access to capital decides which technologies survive.
Colen said Europe, and the Netherlands in particular, is an "innovation powerhouse", and battery technology offers a chance for the continent to make an impact, if the appetite for the risk is there. He said: "It's a relatively young industry where factories are being built left, right and centre. They're searching for the right tech. So that's where you can play a big role, because the volumes are huge." Colen said Europe’s place in that business may lie not in building huge battery gigafactories, but at the other end of the scale altogether. As Colen put it, "small changes make big differences."
Small changes, big margins. That’s the pitch. Europe’s battery future, as described here, is not a public project but a contest over who gets to own the critical steps, who gets the patents, and who gets a seat at the table while the rest are told to call it innovation.