Sustainability Strategy and Governance
FREYR's material sustainability issues, our sustainability goals, roadmaps, and Governance of sustainability
In 2022, FREYR Battery conducted a materiality analysis of our environmental and social issues. You can find our materiality analysis here, and an overview of the stakeholders we engaged with here.
The most important sustainability contribution FREYR can make is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through the use of our batteries. By delivering battery power storage to solar and wind farms we expect to help scale renewable energy in the power delivered to businesses and households. This is expected to replace some of the power in the grid generated from fossil fuels and reduce the CO2 emissions of internal combustion vehicles in the transportation system.
In addition to driving the energy transition through the production of batteries for storage and transportation, we are also focused on mitigating the impacts of our own business, throughout our value chain, including the carbon emissions created in producing the batteries. We are working with our global supply chain partners to deliver environmental and social performance to international standards.
As we build our giga factories, we are focused on the social impact of our business. We plan to provide thousands of highly skilled jobs and support our local communities to harvest the value of local employment growth, while also managing the potential challenges of population- and business growth. A third-party report on our social impact assessment of Giga Arctic can be found here. Throughout all of this, our employees’ well-being and competence development are important for us to succeed. See a separate discussion on our webpages about Our employees.
Our sustainability goals and roadmaps
There are seven pillars of our environmental, social and governance efforts, where we have set 2030 ambition levels and which support and align with some of the global UN Sustainable Development Goals. See a graphical overview here.
Market: Our ambition is to support decarbonization of the global transportation and power sector with the abatement of CO2 per GWh storage capacity in our batteries over the lifetime of those batteries. Our ambition is in the year 2030 to produce and sell batteries that over their lifetime may abate 345 mtons of CO2. This equals the annual emissions of 130 million gasoline cars. See here for more about our abatement ambition and the calculations behind. See here for the importance of batteries for global decarbonization.
Cell production: FREYR aims to deliver battery cells with ~zero CO2 emissions from our cell manufacturing process. See here for more details on our roadmap to cut emissions in our cell production.
Suppliers: Our 2030 ambition is to have a supply chain that delivers a CO2 footprint for our batteries of 15 kg CO2 per KWh battery capacity we produce. This is significantly less than global average today of around 80-100 kg CO2 per KWH. See here for details about our CO2 footprint and our roadmap to 15 and net-zero.
We are furthermore working with our suppliers at large to establish transparency and continuous improvement of our joint environmental and social performance. See here for our Supplier Code of Conduct.
Product: Our semi solid battery cells are produced using 24M technology from the US. Compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries the 24M manufacturing process has the potential to use less energy, less land, more automation per kWh produced and potential to be easier to recycle than conventionally produced batteries.
Giga Communities: We will drive development and jobs in our communities and work together with local stakeholders to reap the benefits and manage the challenges. Our ambition is to receive more than 75% positive feedback from our community stakeholders in 2030. A baseline and definition will be developed over the next years. See here for how we work with the municipality in Mo i Rana.
Factories: We aim to design and build highly digital and efficient giga factories for manufacturing of battery cells, modules and pack, and potentially also upstream active material production. We aim for all our construction projects to certify through BREEAM, LEED or a similar standard and to be aligned with the EU taxonomy standards for environmentally sustainable buildings. See our Environmental Policy here.
Employees: We aim to recruit and retain ambitious and inspired team members from around the world to grow and thrive in an environment marked by our values innovation, respect, collaboration and empowerment. Our ambition is to be certified as a Great Place to Work™ by 2030.
Governance of sustainability
FREYR’s Board of Directors oversees senior management in the competent and ethical operation of the business both through the action of the Board of Directors as a whole and through specific committees. See BoD mandate here. Board-approved corporate policies here. The Audit and Risk Committee (“ARC”) has the duty and responsibility to support the Board of Directors in its oversight of the Company’s policies and strategies related to ESG matters and review and oversee the preparation of the Company’s reporting on ESG matters. See ARC mandate here.
FREYR’s senior management team has an Executive Sustainability Committee that meets four or more times per year to discuss sustainability strategy, policies and objectives for the business units. In addition, there is an Operational Management Team which discusses sustainability issues on a more ongoing operational perspective mainly focusing on implementing the BoD and Executive Sustainability Committee’s ESG strategies. The Operational Management Team is supported by a cross functional and cross-divisional Sustainability Working Group that meets monthly. The Working Group apply knowledge from the various business units and help coordinate the implementation of FREYR’s ESG ambitions on a practical level. Some of the actions taken by the Working Group is workshops in their business units to discuss ESG risks, mitigating actions as well as improvement proposals to the company policies or processes based on experience from the implementation.
Environmental, social and governance risks and opportunities are included in the Enterprise Risk Management process, and regularly overseen by the ARC. See discussion of our corporate risks here.