CCDA gets progress report from Freyr | News

Jason Peace, Freyr’s senior vice president of business development, said the company now has an office on Newnan’s square and 25 employees with two jobs posted.

“We brought basically our entire leadership team a couple of weeks ago and they were wowed by not only the office but the community,” Peace said. “So we continue to get super positive support from everyone that comes over from literally all over the world.”

The company is focusing on increasing its presence in the U.S., possibly to the detriment of its facilities in other countries, he said.

“Ironically, we actually have a million-square-foot building sitting in Norway that is empty and will probably never be filled,” Peace said. “Because the incentives the federal government has for building batteries … basically motivates you financially to build in the U.S.”

The company is planning to move fast and is trying to find the best technology to put in place in the Coweta County lithium iron phosphate, called LFP, battery plant.

The LFP batteries are safer than the nickel manganese cobalt batteries that Tesla used when it launched its electric cars, Peace said.

“You can charge and discharge them really fast which is important because no one wants to sit at a charging station for two hours,” he said.

But he said the LFP battery is where the market is headed because of its lower risk of thermal runaway, which can render a battery useless.

“China has 97 percent of that market, both in the battery manufacturing and in raw materials,” Peace said. “Hence the federal government kind of getting behind…