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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

The more the western boomers fight about "clean energy" products, the more China will eat our lunch

At the same time we saw Northvolt going to Ch 11 due to costs and lack of expertise.

A lot of what comes from China might be low quality (especially for internal consumption) but it's cheap and they're specializing

> Sodium-ion cells are however much less energy dense, as illustrated by BYD’s new product only packing 2.3MWh per 20-foot container, much less than the 5MWh and more than is now standard in the lithium-ion BESS space.

Which really doesn't matter if you're on a stationary application, especially if the cost/longevity is competitive.

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> A lot of what comes from China might be low quality (especially for internal consumption) but it's cheap and they're specializing

In the batteries CATL and BYD are leaders in terms of cost, quality and innovation.

Who cares? Fossil energy i is turning out to just be significantly more expensive. The weird political aversion to things will be easily defeated by greed. Even with various market manipulations absent or present solar + storage is just really cheap and getting progressively cheaper.

> A lot of what comes from China might be low quality

This is also Western boomer mentality and it's alarming that people haven't realized it.

I work in manufacturing in NA and America is rapidly falling behind China on the ability to manufacture quality high-tech goods. It's not something that's on the horizon, it's something that's already happened. We still have an edge in semiconductors but even that is eroding (just look at the hollowing out of Intel in the last half decade).

Seriously, as an European who’s lived in the US for many years: older or more traditional US products might be of higher quality than anything from China — think Milwaukee tools or KitchenAid mixers. But anything new tech or electronic? Are you kidding me? China has long managed to change people’s opinion on that. Made in China is OK by now, just like Made in Japan got in the 80s and Made in Korea in 2000s.

This. I have seen Western companies trying to "just copy" chinese hardware and realise it's a lot easier said than done.

Most people I talk to have this mentality of "China is making cheap copies of stuff", but in what I see (e.g. drones) China is way ahead and we don't manage to "just copy".

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