Hacker News Reader

Comment by danny_codes | Hacker News Reader

IMO this is a classic case of underestimating how far manufacturing improvements can get you on the cost scale. You see a promising technology in the lab and it’s hard to imagine a 1 million x reduction in price, yet we see that time and time again as tech gets scaled out.

What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself

View on HN

Easy: the GOP doesn't care about future competitiveness.

They are currently getting lobbied by oil executives, who are trying to maximize short-term profit while they still can. The wider industry doesn't have the long-term vision to preemptively outlobby them, so the GOP is doing what oil wants.

Dealing with competition in a post-oil world is a problem left for the next generation: the current GOP will be long-dead by then and will have enjoyed the fruits of accepting decades of oil bribes.

Not true, energy is cheap in the US. Politicians rise and fall with energy prices, fossils fuels are still cheaper. America (outside of California which is not governed by the GOP) has some of the cheapest energy costs of competitive countries.

And the Grand Old Pedophile party will ensure that fossil fuels remain the cheapest by killing all alternatives before they reach scale.

> ow the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper

By forcing oil prices to get 10x cheaper, at the barrel of a gun. See: Venezuela and Iran. Will it work? I would not bet on it.

Seems unlikely that we'll be selling oil for $5, unless fossil fuels are completely replaced and it becomes a side-of-the-road novelty.

Then it loses economies of scale and capital wasted so price won’t go down

At that point, who really cares? As scale goes down and economies of scale go away, it just becomes an irrelevant novelty. But the actual question is: how much will industrial applications matter.

>What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper than we can is a wonder in itself

I almost paid < $1USD/gal gas a couple months ago ($1.20 89 octane). My electric is ~ $.12USD/kwh. Gas is just as inexpensive.

Where in the EU can I get energy for 10x cheaper?

I mean where are all the factories making batteries in Europe? It’s not like the US is purposefully preventing battery tech. It’s why all of the government-funded solar companies imploded as well. The manufacturers do not compete

They're in Europe and they produce a lot of batteries. The caveat is that 80% of the investment money came from LG, a South Korean company.

https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/europe-has-solid-basis-batt...

There’s the former darling Northvolt. Took a lot of state money and then imploded https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/ev-battery-...

The comments on Reddit from folks who claim to have worked for Northvolt are pretty wild. I would take them with a grain of salt, but they're interesting to read. https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1fl8d4y/c...

Some people like to say they did, but when you look at the money it was almost all private capital, from big banks and large infrastructure and private pension funds.

That does not make the investment any better. Private capital can be misallocated too.

US has Gigafactory Texas and Lithium Refinery now too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com