Norwegian lithium-ion gigafactory firm FREYR has raised over a quarter of a billion dollars and completed the previously-announced JV with Nidec Corporation to develop energy storage solutions.
New York-listed FREYR closed a public offering of 23,000,000 ordinary shares at US$11.50 each, resulting in gross proceeds of US$264,500,000, on Monday (5 December). The offering was initially going to be for 13,500,000 shares before being upsized to 20,000,000 plus a 3,000,000 greenshoe option for underwriters, which was fully exercised.
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The money will go towards the continued construction of its lithium-ion battery gigafactories in the Nordics (Giga Arctic), development expenditure for the Georgia, US facility, as well as general corporate purposes.
The company is building gigafactories using semi-solid electrode technology developed by US company 24M and is targeting 50GWh annual production by 2024 and 200GWh by 2030. CEO Tom Jensen told Energy-Storage.news earlier this year that as much as half of its capacity could go to energy storage.
The share issue comes a few weeks after media reports said that it was in talks to raise double that amount from private equity firm KKR, which FREYR declined to comment on at the time.
FREYR has also completed the formation of its previously-announced downstream joint venture (JV) with Nidec Corporation. The new entity, Nidec Energy, will build and sell battery energy storage system (BESS) solutions and is targeting 8GWh of production by 2025 and 12GWh by 2030. The module production will be integrated into FREYR’s Giga Arctic operations.
It also has an offtake agreement with Nidec’s existing energy storage system integrator division Nidec ASI, which it increased to 50GWh when it announced the JV agreement in August.
Laurent Demortier, president of Nidec’s Energy & Infrastructure Division, said: “For us, FREYR is a natural partner with clean energy and sustainability ambitions. They also bring expertise and resources related to battery cell design and manufacturing, which includes the market-leading 24M SemiSolid lithium-ion battery cell technology.”
At the time of the KKR reports, FREYR announced it had chosen and purchased a site in Coweta County, Georgia, for its US gigafactory, and that it was accelerating its plans in the US in light of benefits provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The facility will open with an initial 34GWh annual production capacity requiring US$1.7 billion of investment, although didn’t give a year of commercial operations, only saying a second phase would increase total investment to US$2.6 billion.
Read all previous Energy-Storage.news coverage of developments at FREYR here.
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