Northvolt, the start-up aiming to manufacture lithium-ion batteries on a massive scale in Europe sustainably, has signed a contract to deliver its own first commercial energy storage system (ESS) project and revealed news on a second planned 'gigafactory' in Germany.

The company emailed Energy-Storage.news to draw attention to the fact that, while there has been much discussion of Northvolt's Masterplan, which includes the capacity to make 32GWh of battery packs each year including cells in Sweden, it's perhaps less well known that the company intends to use those battery cells and racks to assemble systems.

“Many people imagine Northvolt simply to be a cell manufacturer, but with an in-house battery system [of our own], we're actually positioning to deliver complete solutions,” Northvolt's president for energy solutions, Emad Zand, told Energy-Storage.news.

A contract has been signed to deliver an ESS which will “support peak shaving at an EV charging station,” Zand said, in the city of Vasteras, Sweden, for Mälarenergi, a municipally-owned electricity and heating company. The system initially deployed will be relatively small, at 220kW peak power output and 320kWh of storage capacity. It will use Northvolt's branded battery rack, called Voltrack.

A company press release said the system will reduce the charging solution's draw from the grid at peak times – the most expensive and often most polluting energy on the grid – by as much as 80%, lessening the impact of EV charging on the local grid. The project is expected to go into operation in summer 2020.