[1] USA 70 GWh
[2] China 1755 GWh
[3] Europe 252 GWh
[1] https://reasonstobecheerful.world/us-grid-battery-storage/
[2] https://english.news18a.com/news/english_224842.html
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-swelling-wav...
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufactur...
> As for the underlying cells, it’s a similar story with a slight delay. By the end of 2025, 20 gigawatt-hours of dedicated storage cell lines had opened, and the industry is on pace to hit 96 gigawatt-hours by the end of this year.
Not sure where you're getting 300 GWh from?
Your 300GWh is likely production capacity but the number doesn't come from your article (which is excellent).
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-manu...
China knows this, developed countries that lost their manufacturing capacity are relearning this.
The people who are hired and organized by the korean comapny. This is litterlly the logic that collapsed venezuela's oil industry after it was seized by the state.
The people are physically in Europe, too. (Adding limits on remote management for national-security reasons might make sense.)
If Korea and Europe get in a war, or, more likely, China pressures them to straight up ditch that capital investment, that lets the EU hold those folks until knowledge transfer can be conducted. Again, this is a strategically different place of leverage from those assets being overseas.
Wasn't it sanctions? The state seizing ownership should not have meant the loss of:
> the people, the managers,engineers,etc
Ownership of companies change every day across the world without collapse.
Holy shit, finally someone who understands this, this comments needs to be to the top.
Same thing happened in my ex-commie country when the communists kicked out the capitalists, shipped them to UK, US, Switzerland, and took over their factories. Over years and decades, those factories became inefficient and went bust under state control, while those capitalists who got kicked out flourished by making new business in their new homes that were business-friendly countries.
Just because you seize factories doesn't mean anything if you don't know what to do, they're just commodity equipment anyone else can buy within walls and a roof. The people with the secret-sauce know-how and IP are just as if not more valuable.
That's why US had operation Paperclip.
If you go to a TSMC factory, you'll find the same ASML EUV machines every other country and and company on the planet (minus China) has access to buy, but yet only TSMC can extract the smallest nodes and highest yields because only they managed to perfect the entire process.
I think the EU performing such an action is outside the Overton window, at least for now...
China does know that but they knew how to make the deal palatable enough for auto manufacturers (other companies too, but this one IMO is a big factor in the grand scheme[0]) to all sell out one way or another for a stake in the pie, be it cheaper manufacturing or accessing that market.
Developed countries are re-learning it but are struggling with paying the piper. By that I mean, a lot of manufacturing, especially technology based, can be dirty as heck. Doing certain widgets results in environmental costs that have to be managed or externalized[1].
[0] - I posit, that Auto manufacturers probably keep a lot of documentation around, but also have a lot of history of 'good ideas' being killed by business politics one way or another. You can glean a -lot- of manufacturing tribal knowledge being able to access any existing or new incoming data on that set of signals.
[1] - No, we should not externalize, to be clear.
There's an established base of steel mills in Europe. Take one over, and your local talent pool can probably keep it running. There's less risk.
You had something: production. Now you have nothing.
For one it's a peace-time situation where strong-arming interventions are met with consequences, in this case China can stop supply of critical products to punish the Dutch. In a wartime situation such supply would've been stopped anyway, so there is nothing further to lose and everything to gain from an intervention, but such an intervention is only possible if the factory is on your soil.
Second, Nexperia is a legitimate Dutch company with Dutch expertise. The Chinese bought it. The Dutch don't need Chinese expertise to operate the local factory they built and sold to the Chinese.
Third, China is a global hegemon, South Korea isn't by comparison, and South Korea is a neighbour of China, the Netherlands isn't. China could pressure a battery factory in South Korea during a military conflict by military force, but in Western Europe that's a different story.
That doesn't happen between democracies and hasn't for generations, except for one democracy recently. I don't know that it happens between any significant economies, outside of wars (when and where has it happened?), except one recently. Trade is reliable, despite the nationalist attempt to use FUD. That's how countries get access to the best products and sell their best products.
> Trade is reliable
"reliable except when it isn't" is just a convoluted way of saying "unreliable"
Neoliberalism and globalization is what guaranteed this. That is, Pax Americana. The US thought it was a great idea to become the reserve currency of the world, and became a net importer to spread the dollar. The dollar hegemony gave the US great influence and it defended it with its military. Becoming a net importer hollowed out the US industrial base as it moved overseas, which was fine until China speedran owning large parts of the industrial production and exportation. They also very quickly moved up the ranks of economic and geopolitical sway.
Now the US is ditching globalization for more mercantilist policies. That means the US will be less influential in a multi-polar world, as it can no longer strongarm so easily through the dollar. Trade will become more closed off as other countries rush to do the same now that they are less supported by the US military and economic influence and need to defend themselves more.
Thus, I wouldn’t discount the possibility that the EU stops cooperating as much with SK in the future
In response to US's changes, the 'middle powers' (e.g., Canada, Japan, etc.) are working to promote the rules-based international order, including trade. But I agree risk is higher than before.
> Becoming a net importer hollowed out the US industrial base as it moved overseas, which was fine until China speedran owning large parts of the industrial production and exportation. They also very quickly moved up the ranks of economic and geopolitical sway.
> Now the US is ditching globalization for more mercantilist policies.
Rationalizing the policy is a serious error, I think. It's a political move by a group that has more power in conditions of nationalism, economic and otherwise. For example, the US is also 'ditching' military relationships, including NATO, for which there is no policy rationlization. Some believe in these things ideologically; most are acting politically, I think. Claiming policy reasons is dishonest. As another example, many countries in very different positions, with very different policy needs than the US, are behaving similarly.
russia and {ukraine, georgia, etc}?
That being said, extremely disappointing that the world's most populous country can't be arsed to maximize battery output. They don't seem to be anywhere in the rankings.
Let's look at electricity yearly production (2025 data)
USA 4519790 GWh
China 10583360 GWh
Europe 4626240 GWh
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
Average 12h consumption:
USA 6187 GWh
China 14487 GWh
Europe 6332 GWh
How many years of cell production capacity would be needed to cover 12h electric energy consumption on average for each of this regions?
USA 88 years
China 8 years
Europe 25 years
Currently electricity is only about 19.8% of primary energy consumption.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-as-a-share-of...
Storage production capacity is still rising much faster than energy consumption in all those nations, and the situation is probably quite similar with other pieces of infrastructure that last for decades; replacing all big electric transformers would similarly need many years of production.
Primary energy considerations are also somewhat iffy if the first step involved is often a ~40% efficient conversion into a form similarly "valuable" to electricity (like gasoline => motion).
"640k ought to be enough for anybody" :) I'm sure with more electricity available, prices would drop, meaning people will use more electricity and so on. Just like desktop applications and available system RAM, I guess some things just consume what becomes available.
The other thing that prevents an individual from using more is that electricity usage creates heat.
U.S. battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid EV bust - https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0303 - March 3rd, 2026
1 GWh/year = (10 ** 9) / 24 / 365.25 / (10 ** 6) MW = 0.11 MW
70 GWh/year = 8 MW
1755 GWh/year = 200 MW
252 GWh/year = 29 MWvolt-amperes are joules
Grid batteries are discharged on average 80% per day, if not more. EV batteries... well, probably about 5%-10% per day at most.
Renewable energy has a nearly 30 year history of exponential price improvements and efficiencies of scale hadn’t even kicked in at that point.
But storage was inevitable as well. Not because of the energy industry, but because of the cellphone industry. The iPhone changed the game.
It brought so many billions of dollars into research into the cutting edge of achieving inexpensive storage density, which meant that non cutting edge storage would only get better/cheaper.
The financial pull of the smartphone industry was so strong, that even TSLA, famously prone to over exaggeration, underestimated how quickly storage prices would drop (not immediately for them as much though…they decided to take their storage needs in house instead of riding the overall industry advances, until they abandoned the in house solution).
Have you all seen the specs of the new BYD Blade 2.0?
https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-battery/byd-blade-ba...
https://news.gm.com/home.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2026/j...
We had been making some headway in terms of clean energy before the current administration started undoing a lot of that progress. And there is no telling what the next administration will do.
The Chinese government established and committed itself to a long-term renewable energy strategy in 1992.
Says a lot about the future we should be expecting and strategising for.
Biden's IRA changed this massively for the US, and beyond just meeting our own needs for battery production, we were on track to being highly competitive.
Gosh, I'm sure there was a very good, some might say even the best, reason why that is no longer the case.
The US was on course to invest more as well (I guess the reason Musk saw the opportunity in Tesla), but then fracking happened and the US became energy independent with fossil.
Add the energy industry lobbying to kill clean tech and two Trump terms.
There's nothing preventing others from also processing concentrates (the post physical mining product).
The mining aspect is hardly monopolised either - much is sourced from Australia, South America, etc.
Put in an order, buy a 49% share of a resource company and now you're part of the action.
Pre-1978, not now.
Have a chat with deep seek about the goals of the CCP. When you run local models you run socialism.
Indeed, the American proletariat need not seize the means of production through local AI. Instead, full control of AI ought to be left in the benevolent hands of the billionaire capitalist class, and the benefits will trickle down, perhaps some time after after the 100th sponsored study into UBI (which very different from socialism)
What's interesting is that, however you want to characterize their system, they're actually investing in a more diverse set of things than we are. Yes, AI is on the five-year plans but so are lots of other things. The US elite investors are pretty much only AI, all the time right now.
There's also that thing that made China what it is today - the USofA using China for cheap labour and a place to outsource all the dirty parts of high consumption.
China's moved on, US perceptions haven't.
Very highly automated production lines (cars) have similarly moved along the labor-price gradient in Europe (~east) during the last decades, despite language barriers: You need some engineers, electricians, constructions workers, janitors, etc regardless, and those still scale with general labor costs, even if there's no human hands in the assembly line.
Those dark EV plants were designed and built by engineers and technicians working 996 for cheap on an hourly basis.
China is capable of it due to the absolutely brutal grinding work culture. They're not superhuman, it's not Tony Stark building the Iron Man suit in an evening, they're smart and work extremely hard.
They are actually importing Chinese workers to their Brazil factory, leading to the slave labor expose by Brazilian authorities [0]. They have the same trouble recruiting in Thailand, where workers have functioning unions and enjoy modern working rights, instead of 19th-early 20th century Industrial Revolution type stuff.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Brazil_working_conditions_...
That basically means US batteries aren’t going in anything useful to the EV boom, otherwise there would be proportional increases
It seems to be about percentage of the 2017 production. But does it measure value or volume?
Does it include lithium-based batteries? I believe they were only introduced to the market in the 1990s, but the graph goes back to 1975. Also, how many of these batteries are lead-acid based car batteries, disposable batteries for electronics, rechargeable or not, etc.
This is the physical quantity of battery output, in terms of kWh or number of batteries, probably with some weighting to correlate lithium ion to, say, lead acid batteries (though these days this output is nearly only lithium ion, I would guess).
To truly understand what's going on, there are two other series needed which are linked in the related series:
- Producers' price index, how much the manufacturers are charging per unit of batteries https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU335911335911
- Value (in $) of shipped batteries (roughly price * volume): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS (thanks for the correction, laser!)
Also note that the time scale for all three are different, as they apparently started recording these at different times.
FRED data is super useful for a high level view of what's going on in various industries, I highly recommend playing with it if you're ever looking at investing or other spaces to work in!
Value, 100 equals 2017 production. Actual figures [1].
> Does it include lithium-based batteries?
Yes [2]. Chemistry agnostic.
Note, however, that in 2017 “storage battery manufacturing (NAICS 335911) and primary battery manufacturing (NAICS 335912), were combined into a single 2022 NAICS category: battery manufacturing (NAICS 335910).” So comparing across that isn’t straightforward.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/Current/ipdisk/g...
[2]
[x] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/revisions/Curren...
Yes, yes, line go up. This is probably good. But the headline only exists on HN.
The graph is showing all types of batteries I believe, and that baseline is largely small batteries.
honestly, this is somewhat of a proof it works, you can basically extend it to various sectors
Output today is 2x what it was 10 or 20 years ago. Nice but 'record breaking', meh. Especially in global context, it's quite tiny.
Incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act let to a big increase in that. By 2025 it was 70 GWh per year. It will be more than twice that in 2026, and will continue growing.
Of particular significance is that it now above the level needed to satisfy all of the US grid storage battery needs from domestic production.
Similar growth (again largely due to the Inflation Reduction Act) is happening with EV battery production.
- US: 200 GWh/year cell production capacity, 750 GWh/year planned additions [1]
- EU: 200GWh/year cell production capacity, 350 GWh/year planned additions [1]
IEA estimates 3TWh/year total world cell capacity in 2024 (not production, but capacity). So let's guess that China had ~2.5 TWh/year back in 2024.
Actual production is at about 30% of total capacity, worldwide, apparently.
[1] https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/transatlantic-clean-investm...
[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...
I see this as great news for the future as ramping up production to hopefully meet rising demand should be fairly easy. That is of course assuming demand gets to where it needs to be. Another year or two and the economics should simply provide that boost to demand
Asia outside of China does provide a lot of anode and cathode material to battery manufacturers.
Coincidentally, I started doing pushups yesterday, today is the second day in a row I break my high mark
Yesterday= 1
Today= 2 (+100%!!!)
Recycling is so effective that with the little that we're currently doing (not enough batteries to recycle yet), we get more battery out of the recycling process than what went in. Because the battery manufacturing is improving and getting more kWh out of the same input materials than when the battery was originally made, and the difference is bigger than anything lost to the recycling process.
Batteries and renewable energy generation are not like building an economy on fossil fuels, which is a very fragile economy vulnerable to massive spikes in input costs. Batteries and renewable energy are fundamentally anti-inflation devices.
If it's Russia, the biggest colonialist country in the world, using Neo Nazi "PMC", or trying to annex neighboring countries, it's not colonialism, it's "liberation from colonialists".
If it's China doing mass acquisitions of state and private assets, it's not colonialism, it's "development".
If it's a western country doing what ever, it's colonialism lol it's such a dumb propaganda trope.
So the conclusion is that the new western colonialism is actually looking like a pretty good option, and shouldn't have such a bad connotation, perhaps it should be embraced in this new world order no?
Or how about we finally go and accept that both Russia and China are imperialist projects too, just like the US are, and oppose all three?
This is why you can't build anything in America anymore.
Batteries don't have rare-earth materials in them. Lithium, nickel, and iron are very plentiful in the US. The "rarest" of materials that might be mined is Cobalt. That, however isn't because it's a hard to find. Rather, cobalt has basically no industrial applications outside of battery production. And, importantly, not all battery chemistries require cobalt, just the nickel manganese cobalt batteries.
Idaho has a cobalt mine that's not currently in operation. The reason is because demand is super low and the artisanal mines in africa are cheaper than spinning up a full industrial mine.
Cobalt is a part of high speed steel and all kinds of metal alloys that have specialized applications, almost 40% of cobalt is used for metallurgical purposes.
Just want to say this is an entertaining euphemism. It isn’t that labor conditions are poor and work is done by hand, it’s “artisanal mining”.
There is not much demand for battery sodium at the moment, the technology is still under development. My point just was that the US is self-sufficient when it comes to sodium, even if the regular rock salt mines go out of order for whatever reason, the ocean offers an effectively endless supply of sodium - and the brine is also pretty toxic to local aquatic life, so desalination providers would be happy if you can help them to get rid of the waste.