Lyten, the domestic lithium-sulfur battery company, has officially expanded into the European market, announcing that it has acquired yet another shuttered Northvolt facility. Located in Gdansk, Poland, this acquisition represents a new direction for the company: Rather than producing battery cells — as Lyten’s other U.S.-based facilities will do — this 270,000 square foot plant is designed to produce complete battery energy storage systems for the grid. Currently, it’s the largest energy storage manufacturing facility in Europe, with enough equipment to ramp up to 6 gigawatt-hours of capacity. This gives Lyten the ability to become — practically immediately — a major player in energy storage.
“We were very convinced that we needed to be able to build our own battery energy storage systems, so the full system with electronics and switch gear and safety systems and everything for our batteries to go into,” Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability and marketing officer, told me. “So this opportunity became very, very well aligned with our strategy.”
The well-funded startup has been negotiating this transaction — which is expected to close in the third quarter — since Northvolt’s bankruptcy proceedings got underway at the end of last year. It marks the second time the company has snatched up an old Northvolt asset, the first being a Bay Area-based plant capable of producing 200 megawatt-hours of batteries that’s expected to begin operations late this year.
Lithium-sulfur batteries are an emerging technology yet to be deployed at scale. This chemistry — if perfected — has the potential to be much higher energy-density than lithium-ion, and doesn’t require costly critical minerals prone to supply chain volatility such as nickel, manganese, cobalt, and graphite. These are all key elements of lithium-ion batteries and are primarily refined in China, whereas sulfur — the key material in lithium-sulfur batteries — is cheap and abundant around the world. Right now, the Poland facility is set up to produce lithium-ion energy storage systems, but once it starts switching over production lines, it will become likely the first in the world to manufacture lithium-sulfur systems at scale.
Until now, Lyten has only owned assets in the U.S., touting that it sources “well over 80%” of its core battery components domestically. But according to Norman, the startup has always looked to Europe as another key market, as its focus revolves around building local supply chains, not just a U.S.-centric one. “We have a vision to be able to have both battery manufacturing and energy storage manufacturing in the U.S. and in Europe, so that we can localize both supply chains,” he explained to me.
In the short-term, however, the company will continue to build its battery capacity in the U.S., including a a gigafactory in Reno planned for 2027, while it focuses on energy storage in Europe. U.S.-made batteries will supply the Poland facility until Lyten’s hypothetical future Europe-based battery factories can ramp, Norman explained.
Immediately after the deal closes, Lyten will restart manufacturing in order to meet Northvolt’s preexisting contracts for lithium-ion systems. Then throughout this year and next, the startup will work to integrate its own lithium-sulfur production lines, ultimately offering customers both lithium-sulfur and lithium-ion energy storage options. The goal is to produce a gigawatt-hour of system capacity by sometime next year.
Offering two distinct energy storage systems reliant on different battery chemistries will work to Lyten’s advantage, Norman told me via email, giving the company “an incredible amount of flexibility to navigate market uncertainty, supply chain uncertainty, geopolitical uncertainty, and varied customer demands.”
The company’s eagerness to acquire shuttered facilities isn’t driven by turbulence in the current political climate, Norman said, but rather by “opportunistic” market circumstances. Yet I also can’t help but notice that this would be a promising way for Lyten to cost-effectively scale at a time when, Norman said, it’s still taking a “wait and see” approach to tariffs and other fluctuating policies that stand to impact the domestic buildout of energy infrastructure.
When I spoke with Norman back in April, right after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs came into effect, he expressed concern over how they could lead to spiraling construction costs. Levies on steel and aluminum, for example, now stand at 50%, while imports from China are still subject to cumulative tariffs of at least 54%. As Norman told me then, “the energy transition is a manufacturing transition,” and Lyten itself is “a hard tech company that needs to build a lot of infrastructure.”
So while the finances of the Poland factory acquisition aren’t public, it’s probably safe to assume that scooping up prebuilt infrastructure from a defunct business, taking over production of tried-and-true lithium-ion-based technologies, and expanding into international markets are all cheap and prudent options in this economy.
In terms of demand for energy storage, Norman also mentioned that the market is hotter in Europe right now than in the U.S., making it an optimal place to kick off its new product line. The company expects to sell storage systems from the Poland plant into a variety of other international markets, as well. In December of last year, Lyten announced that it had received letters of interest from the U.S. Export-Import Bank totalling $650 million in financing to deploy lithium-sulfur energy storage systems in the Caribbean and other developing economies.
As the company expands, it’s on the hunt for even more facilities to grab. “We continue to see assets becoming available or potential capital investments that have already been made in battery manufacturing assets that are potentially coming on the market,” Norman told me. He’s got his eyes on all of it. “That’s a real big priority for us.”
The 2030s crossroads.Rhodium Group