US battery manufacturing output continues to break records | Hacker News Reader

US battery manufacturing output continues to break records

fred.stlouisfed.org

230 pointsepistasis196 comments

In numbers (cell production capacity, 2025):

    [1] USA         70 GWh
    [2] China     1755 GWh
    [3] Europe     252 GWh

That's excluding small battery production for electronics etc.

[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...

Okay then makes me wonder if this recent trend is just one particularly large manufacturer ramping up production? Tesla?

Ford in partnership with LG is one example. Stationary storage replacing EV demand that did not materialize. Gigafactories intended for EV batteries are now for stationary storage.

U.S. battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid EV bust - https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0303 - March 3rd, 2026

According to IEA[1] most capacity in Europe is from South Korean companies.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-manu...

Still physically in Europe. That’s mostly what counts.

Not exactly. Most of the people who work on site at semi conductor fabs actually work in the office building next door. Batteries are similar.

That doesn’t change that the fab is physically in Europe. Not Korea. That’s what matters. Not whose name is on the paperwork.

Not really? The questin is, if South Korea stops all cooperation with the EU tomorrow, will that fab continue to be operational? If the answer is "no", then it matters. It matters a lot

You walk in, as the EU, and assume control of the facility, by force if needed. The value is that the capacity exists within the bounds of your nation state control.

China knows this, developed countries that lost their manufacturing capacity are relearning this.

...errrr....

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.

The UK did just recently do that for a Chinese-owned steel mill.

There are ~500 steel mills in Europe. 6 in the UK alone.

That doesnt make the action any less meaningful, and perhaps suggest it was done with caution, prudence and forethought.

I should have made my point more 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 walk in and realize that there is nothing worthwile inside. The knowledge is gone or was never even there, all the inputs are gone, the process is in shambles, all you have is four walls and some bricked machinery. What now?

You start with something instead of nothing.

Got it backwards.

You had something: production. Now you have nothing.

Great Britain used to have something but now they have nothing industrial wise in comparison to the past and to get it back you have to completely change your current attitude at all levels, which will take decades for there is no shortcut and the same basically applies to America, which has been decommissioning industry and offloading it overseas since the early 1960s.

LOL, EU and the Dutch tried to pull this shit with Nexperia, it failed miserably and they reversed course fast.

These aren't comparable situations.

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.

A reversal can be done. It’s just that it takes long range planning capital and continued hard work.

The value is not in the literal buildings, the value is in the people, the managers,engineers,etc and the owners who know how to run it.

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 value is not in the literal buildings, the value is in the people, the managers,engineers,etc and the owners who know how to run it.

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.

> The value is not in the literal buildings, the value is in the people

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.

How will they ensure they continue working or train replacements if their parent company no longer employs or pays them? What's to stop them leaving the country?

The thing people are worried about is "Seoul is a pile of rubble and so are all the factories". The people in Europe are probably going to stay for a little bit.

The EU can pay them. Whos to say all these people are koreans. There might be alot of native europeans who would stay

> This is litterlly the logic that collapsed venezuela's oil industry after it was seized by the state.

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.

If it does go both ways (say "EU stops all cooperation") and the effects are the same, and no one wants the factory to actually shut down, does something start to matter more/less then?

> if South Korea stops all cooperation with the EU tomorrow

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.

It does introduce a dependency on South Korea's ability to defend its democracy, though.

The plant will keep running regardless of events on the other side of Eurasia - during a war South Korea would want the revenue, especially from a locale safe from attack. If SK lost - an awful outcome - it wouldn't be sudden.

It was very funny watching the South Korean legislators holding off the Korean seals by barricading the doors with chairs.

But by that argument the EU holds all the cards because nobody can do what ASML can do. So everyone is dependent on the EU.

> "except one recently"

russia and {ukraine, georgia, etc}?

Assuming we're talking about all countries, not only democracies: I qualified it with, 'short of war', which excludes Russia. That leaves only one that I know of.

you implying US? What agreements has the us left aside from the iran one and the paris accords (ironically the US is the country on track to meeting paris accord requirements)

Hell, the US still hands tons of intelligence to ukraine, even though the trump makes big noise about cozying up to putin

> That doesn't happen between democracies and hasn't for generations, except for one democracy recently.

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

A good point, imho.

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.

> 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.

I think both are true and feed on each other to gain populist momentum

> As another example, many countries in very different positions, with very different policy needs than the US, are behaving similarly.

This may be influenced by the wave of populist nationalism but it again may also be a reaction to the reality that there isn't just one hegemony pulling the strings anymore (the US, or the west in general). Especially if said hegemony is acting unpredictable and other countries are now acting belligerent. That seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. I'm sure there's more reasons beyond these

> except one recently

> Trade is reliable

"reliable except when it isn't" is just a convoluted way of saying "unreliable"

This is fan fiction. The reason it matters is as a proof point that the farrago of EU regulation, labor markets, supply chains, trade policy, … is adequate to support battery production at scale.

great many things from the past 10 years would've been fan fiction, conspiracy theories, and slippery slope fallacies 20 years ago. for better or worse, this boring dystopia is not yet the end of history.

Doesn't matter if it's humans or robots, as long as they're producing batteries within reasonably stringent environmental constraints.

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.

Unless by next door you mean a different continent I think they'd still be in Europe. Although there are edge cases, such as if the fab is turkey but the office managing it is in a neighboring central Asian country.

I disagree. If the majority of workers aren’t European and the supply chain comes directly from Asia then the local ecosystem is not developed and if the Asian company pulls out there is no way to keep doing it locally.

Source?

According to projections this year will hit 300 GWh in the US

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufactur...

Not according to this article.

That article claims:

> 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?

Production and production capacity are getting swapped a lot in this thread. The top level numbers above, US 70 GWh, are straight production.

Your 300GWh is likely production capacity but the number doesn't come from your article (which is excellent).

Cool way to think about GWh/year:

  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 MW

Haha. Reminds me of how volt-amperes are technically the same unit as watts, but if you see VA in an electrical specification you know it means a different thing than it would if you saw W.

> volt-amperes are technically the same unit as watts

volt-amperes are joules

Volt-amperes are watts... watts/second are joules

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt

You got it backwards, Watts are Joules/second (or joules are Watt•second).

Watts * seconds are joules. Joules is a unit of energy. Watts are power.

Oh, yes, you are right about watts. My bad

But not a very relevant for batteries, unless talking about discharge only once a year.

Grid batteries are discharged on average 80% per day, if not more. EV batteries... well, probably about 5%-10% per day at most.

The US is the bronze medalist meme

I mean, I'd be more than happy to be in the top three. The issue is before we were even lower.

How much battery storage would you need to cover 12h electric energy consumption on average for each of this regions?

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...

Electricity consumption isn't linear (people use far less when they are sleeping), and production isn't zero at night (wind and hydro exist). Covering 12 hours is almost certainly overkill.

> Covering 12 hours is almost certainly overkill

"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.

Maybe a business, certainly not the average person. And whether or not they use it will be determined by price more than anything. If the added batteries and renewables don't translate to appreciable decreases in energy prices then I don't see people using more electricity just because it's available.

The other thing that prevents an individual from using more is that electricity usage creates heat.

Of course. It just means the estimation of "years of battery production" (and its implicit "we can't possibly produce that much so the transition is doomed to fail") isn't as big of a deal as it might seem at first glance.

Those numbers sound worse than they are.

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).

The numbers are as they are now.

For future energy consumption I would look to India, which is on the same energy growth path as China 20 years ago. And there are many countries with low per capita energy consumption but high potential. Like Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt,..

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/indonesia

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/malaysia

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/egypt

I agree that efficiency of electric motor + battery is much higher that ICE. ICE cars are now slowly replaced with EV cars. About 42% of oil is refined to gasoline, but much of oil is refined to diesel, jet fuel and used in transportation which is harder to convert to EV, like long-haul trucking, or much harder to convert to EV, like international shipping, air transport.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

" efficiencies of up to 43% for passenger car engines, up to 45% for large truck and bus engines, and up to 55% for large two-stroke marine engines"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine#Efficiency

"By generating power from multiple streams of work, the overall efficiency can be increased by about 50–60%. That is, from an overall efficiency of say 43% for a simple cycle with the turbine alone running, to as much as 64% net with the full combined cycle running"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant

You mean we've barely begun building battery plants and China can already build more than enough batteries for themselves in less than a decade? Holy crap that's amazing news!

As you are predicting increase in the production capacity of future battery plants, I'm predicting increase in the future electric energy consumption - especially China. It will interesting to see how the fraction battery production to electric consumption, will evolve in the future.

No doubt. At least until now battery production capacity has by far outstripped growth in electricity consumption.

This is great news, but damn to we have some catch-up to do in the US and EU.

Have you all seen the specs of the new BYD Blade 2.0?

https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-battery/byd-blade-ba...

Small steps taken many times gets you far. At some point the scaling will kick in and ramp up even more.

This is true, but it also assumes continued investment and steady progress.

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.

That's wild that they are doing direct refrigerant cooling instead of liquid and liquid-refrigerant heat exchangers, unless I misread what "direct refrigerant" means.

I've been hearing about some recent sodium ion developments from CATL and BYD. If price estimates are to be believed, things could get interesting.

GM is getting into the game too.

https://news.gm.com/home.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2026/j...

For 15 years I’ve been arguing with people who kept denying the feasibility, and even inevitability, of renewable + storage.

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).

Renewables have unfortunately been heavily politicized by the fossil fuel industry, and millions of Americans are against them because they are "woke". Progress will continue but it will be swimming upstream until that chasm is closed.

I don't have any idea of what this graph means.

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.

> But does it measure value or volume?

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...

Are you sure that's the data set being used in this graph? Taking 2022's value over 2017's anchored value seems to come out to a ratio far higher than any part of this graph shows for 2022. The description text also says it measures indexed real output and other graphs don't beat around the bush about being value based https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS

No, those are weights. One sec.

I didn't expect this post to attract interest, as my HN submissions are one of my personal bookmarking tools (and in fact the only one that I've used for more than a few months without forgetting about it). Apologies for the obscurity!

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!

I think you swapped some links the Value (in $) you linked here is the same as the top post (which is a real-output index), but you probably meant: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS

its an index. Just shows rate of change more than units

Related - "The Electric Slide" [0] from NotBoring (a techno-optimist news letter) talks about production of batteries and other parts of the "Electric Stack", and explains where the US/China are relative to each other and the rest of the world, and why China has such a big lead.

[0] https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide

Those numbers include primary batteries, even though it says "durable goods". Energizer, which owns most of the US primary battery industry (Ray-O-Vac, Eveready, etc.) may account for much of that. All those AA cells add up.

Just looked up Chinese production capacity (~1700 GWh). That's orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the world. What did they do differently?

Something like the IRA but started years ago. They invest and subsidise and tax-incentivise in their own industry but do use competition within their own market to weed out losers.

They also accept higher environmental impacts such as anthropogenic lakes of battery waste.

Which they might very well look to neutralise in the future - humans globally need to get much much better at addressing the externalities of their consumption.

Cheaper labor, for sure

Most of the cost of batteries is in labor? So why not outsource them out of China where labor is quite expensive vs developing countries?

Labor is expensive in China?

now yes, it's no longer 2005

Compared to their neighbors is SEA yes labor is very expensive

Because no one in their right mind will work the Chinese 996-esque schedule in the 21st century, except the Chinese?

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_...

Everything and anything that China does better than the west: It must be cheap labor.

It's not the only thing, but it's a big one

The "dark" EV plants making cars aren't using any labour, let alone cheap labour.

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.

The perception gap is the assumption that cheap means dumb or low-quality.

Those dark EV plants were designed and built by engineers and technicians working 996 for cheap on an hourly basis.

And this is why the US doesn't have fully automated parts in drive out EV factories?

The US doesn't have those because we're not even trying.

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 most certainly using cheap labor to design, plan, operate and maintain those "dark" plants.

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.

They have a centrally planned economy. It's almost like the Chinese communist party is indeed made up of communists.

> They have a centrally planned economy.

Pre-1978, not now.

No, most investment is still done by banks controlled by the Party whose priorities are set by Beijing.

Is that similar to the Fed system here in the US?

No. Beijing instructs Chinese banks what to invest in (e.g., AI, electrical generation infrastructure). The Fed has never done that. When there is an economic downturn, e.g., the Dot Com crash in 2001, the Fed makes it easier for US banks to borrow money. When there is a lot of investment, e.g., now with all the investment in AI, the Fed makes it harder for the banks to borrow money (because the money is not needed as much because the economy is being stimulated by all the spending by the recipients of the investments into AI). Beijing does that, too, no doubt, but again they also decide for the majority of the investment money, which parts of their economy get the investment.

It's still 1.4 billion people, 100 million party members, and a mostly capitalist economy where nobody stops you from starting a business. Decisions get made at all levels.

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.

I don't agree with "mostly capitalist" when (again) most investment is made by regional banks that are state-owned enterprises with strong guidelines set by Beijing about what sectors to invest in.

You don't find it interesting that this leads to more diverse investments with a larger number of stakeholders?

I dispute your assertion that Chinese investment is more diverse and your assertion that most US investment these days is going into AI.

Also, how are you defining stakeholder and what makes you think there are more of these stakeholders in China?

China has benefited greatly from investment by US investors. Their leadership knows that and are eager for a continuation of that flow of investment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China

Have a chat with deep seek about the goals of the CCP. When you run local models you run socialism.

> 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)

This attitude of denial and stuck in the past beliefs is exactly why the USA isn't competitive. Y'all, and your politicians leading the country, just keep telling yourselves these things and then wonder why you're getting lapped by a bunch of cut-throat capitalists.

Well, they have an industrial strategy. Not exclusive to communism, places like South Korea and Singapore managed it as well.

They have the culture and infrastructure to support manufacturing and research. Just so much stuff in one place.

A near monopoly on rare earth mineral mining and refining certainly must play a part.

It's a "near monopoly" because a bunch of engineers made a plan, stuck to it, and now have vertical integration.

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.

Well environmental regulations prevent companies from processing rare earths at economically competitive rates in many countries. Sure they could do it, but why would anyone pay 3x as much for “clean” rare earth when you can just get the Chinese stuff?

Sure, but if anybody can truck refuse and clean sewers but only one person will actually do it, that's not really a monopoly by Kenny the toilet cleaner*, that's more like a caste system with "the unclean" over there.

I'd also point out that the US has a large land area, mapped out by the USGS (below ground structures) and is capable of creating a large shallow lake area sealed off from deeper aquifers and able to be treated with neutralising agents.

On the scale of the market for global battery production the additional costs for doing it right are not punitive and arguably fall under the "national security" umbrella that see magnitude larger shovelfuls of money going to defence and traditional fossil fuel industries.

* https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/13140-kenny

How are rare earths used in batteries?

The Chinese Communist Party was willing to invest heavily to capture the solar and battery markets early on. Obama tried to counter them, but got roundly criticized for "picking favorites" and in the end the US gave away the entire industry to China.

I wish the Democrats wholeheartedly picked favorites look at what the POS in power are doing now

> What did they do differently?

The Chinese government established and committed itself to a long-term renewable energy strategy in 1992.

And the US voted for "drill, baby, drill" in 2024.

Says a lot about the future we should be expecting and strategising for.

We've got clean, beautiful coal, though.

Well, a single order of magnitude... They actually prioritized strategic industries that would be useful in the future, rather than prioritizing last-generation's industries like the US did with oil and fossil fuels, which receive massive tax subsidies.

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.

> 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.

we publish the 5 year plan and finished it... basically every time.

They were forced to invest in new energy technology because of lack of oil/gas reserves.

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.

Good. Even without the COVID dip, the increase is substantial, percentage wise, and is a good sign for national security

The time scale here is a joke. In 2016 nobody with less than a million dollars drove EVs and the production has barely doubled since then, despite EV uptake increasing probably 100x

That basically means US batteries aren’t going in anything useful to the EV boom, otherwise there would be proportional increases

Only millionaires were driving Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts?

Tesla Model S was apparently the best selling electric car then.

That was the first year it overtook the Nissan Leaf.

10% of the us population are millionaires. That’s 33 million people. Mostly boomers.

I would hope so! Considering we're heading towards the age of ai automation! and reducing our reliance on external forces.

"Editorialized" headline. Or rather, the linked page is just data, captioned "Industrial Production: Manufacturing: Durable Goods: Battery."

Yes, yes, line go up. This is probably good. But the headline only exists on HN.

seems disingenuous. Battery product seems between 1990 and 2020 about the same with ups and downs. Post COVID its 2.4x the baseline average

If you Google you will find that in fact similar headlines exist all over the place. The only problem with the HN headline is that it should have mentioned that the breaking records is for large scale batteries like grid storage and for EV batteries. Most of the many stories about this make it clearer that they are talking about the big batteries.

The graph is showing all types of batteries I believe, and that baseline is largely small batteries.

It would be totally fine to put one of those articles as the associated URL with this headline, just not the St Louis Fed chart. The HN guidelines call for HN headlines to use the same headline as the linked article, not one made up out of whole cloth. An article using this headline would likely provide additional context and detail that a simple chart does not.

related: Electrostates, Petrostates, and the New Cold War

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLnxzkiB-GI

how about this - allow chinese firm build plant in the us - cite security concerns and kinda nationalize it

honestly, this is somewhat of a proof it works, you can basically extend it to various sectors

Any idea how that compares to Europe?

Or China?

This FRED series isn't directly convertible into GWh easily, but has the advantage of being having monthly numbers. Actual real world wide numbers are usually behind paywalls. As far as open sources: this March 2025 publication has these capacity numbers (presumably for 2024):

- 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-...

“Actual production is at about 30% of total capacity, worldwide, apparently.”

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

I think typical factory production rarely gets above 50% of capacity, IIRC. Nonetheless, factories are being built at breakneck speed in the US and other places. The same IEA report that cited 1TWh/year in 2024 expects that number to be 3TWh/year in 2030. And given the IEA's tendency to underpredict, I'd expect 3TWh/year in 2027 at the very latest, if we're not already there.

No Korea and Japan? Aren't most of the big non-Chinese battery companies Korean and Japanese?

The Sankey chart from my IEA link above shows "Other Asia" is roughly half the size of the Europe and US blobs, so roughly a 100 GWh/year estimate, making the total sum to 3TWh/year.

Asia outside of China does provide a lot of anode and cathode material to battery manufacturers.

'breaking records' implies a lot more than it is. The amount of breaths anyone takes in their life also continues to break their own personal record, but it's not as impressive as it sounds.

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.

What is significant is production of batteries for grid storage. In 2020 and earlier domestic production in the US was under 10 GWh per year.

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.

Now if only we could make RAM chips too.

You want expensive memory and chips?

I want a robust field of competitors that allows supply to rise to meet demand, and I would like the USA to be one of the competitors. I would like the people who do the work to earn a living wage. I do not want to benefit from overseas slave labor. If that means I have to pay more, so be it.

US should do something very advanced domestically. Not sure if the US can compete on RAM and Chips within the current state of affairs.

They're already expensive. Increasing production capacity tends to bring down prices, not raise them.

Could the down-voters explain their votes? In what does the observation of increased production capacity leading to lower prices insult their sensitivities that they felt the need to press that down-vote arrow? Surely you realise that the market works by balancing supply versus demand until some equilibrium is achieved? That demand partly - but not wholly - depends on price? Is it just that you (plural or singular in case of one person controlling more than one down-voting account) can't imagine a domestically-produced good to lead to lower market prices? If not, what else is it that makes my comment so irksome that it needs to be greyed out?

It’s crazy how production tanks as the first Trump presidency kicks off, before COVID.

Coincidentally, I started doing pushups yesterday, today is the second day in a row I break my high mark

Yesterday= 1

Today= 2 (+100%!!!)

And completely irrelevant since the core materials in them are mined overseas.

Nearshoring as we speak..Venezuela will probably be contributing to that soon, I expect.

Good old colonialism, sweet

i promise that venezuelan business leaders are more than happy to take USD

No that's called trade you clown

Invading a country, changing its government and forcing favorable trade deals under a threat of a military intervention is "trade"? What is colonialism then?

Ok so all trade between US and Venezuela is colonialism? Clown

Eh, at this point that means nothing, let's see:

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?

Just because it's easy to post doesn't mean you have to press submit on every thought that comes to your head. It's okay to admit you're working off of a very "self-taught" understanding.

How does this comment contribute to the discussion?

> 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?

I think just accepting that is more than enough, the US, and Western countries have been target of foreign propaganda and internal self flagellation for old and new imperialism, to the point where some former colonies are getting annoyed because it implies they don't have agency because they were former colonies!

I think the first step is to start to expose the colonists and imperialists in disguise and start to address them for what they are.

I don't know about colonialism. I do not think that the mining companies changed. It's just that previously China exerted a lot of influence on where those minerals got processed, circumventing American markets, and enabling Chinese threats to restrict strategic minerals.in the ongoing trade disputes, etc. Generally, America should have been much more proactive and supporting of South America. Allowing Russia, Iran, and China to have inordinate influence there was a bad idea IMO.

Well, they've been trying to build a lithium mine in the desert in Nevada, but environmental groups have stalled it for years with lawsuits and protests.

This is why you can't build anything in America anymore.

Since batteries are highly recyclable, a core material imported once means we never need to import it again.

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.

How long, in years, until we are mining landfills for lithium?

zero, it seems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSSgAPylz60

we are closer to watering our farms with gatorade than mining landfills for lithium.

well we already had a UFC match at the WH so counting the days until the brawndo revolution

Shit, we're already mining landfills for lithium, does that mean most farmers have switched to gatorade already?

I'm not following, why would there be lithium in landfills?

Nope. This is a misconception.

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.

> artisanal mines in africa

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”.

That's literally what they are called.

Because "death traps for children" might be perceived negatively by some

> Rather, cobalt has basically no industrial applications outside of battery production.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Applications

I missed this the last time I looked. I'm guessing it doesn't get pulled as much for steel because of recycling?

Also in high performance magnetic steel, as well as SmCo magnets.

Large lithium mine under construction in northwest Nevada at Thacker Pass, joint venture with GM. https://lithiumamericas.com/thacker-pass/overview/default.as...

You don't need that much of foreign mined materials. The continental US has a bunch of really large lithium reserves, with Thacker Pass being supposed to be able to deliver 25% of the world's output in the end [1], and new sodium based chemistries? All they need is table salt, available for effectively free from the brine of California's desalination plants.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine

California desalination is almost not practiced at all. Are you sure it's a significant source of sodium for industry?

> Are you sure it's a significant source of sodium for industry?

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.

People are waaaaaay overimagining the exotic metal content of batteries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com