US battery manufacturing output continues to break records(fred.stlouisfed.org) |
US battery manufacturing output continues to break records(fred.stlouisfed.org) |
[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...
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-manu...
U.S. battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid EV bust - https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0303 - March 3rd, 2026
Have you all seen the specs on the BYD Blade 2.0?
https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-battery/byd-blade-ba...
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.
honestly, this is somewhat of a proof it works, you can basically extend it to various sectors
Yes, yes, line go up. This is probably good. But the headline only exists on HN.
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.
- 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
Coincidentally, I started doing pushups yesterday, today is the second day in a row I break my high mark
Yesterday= 1
Today= 2 (+100%!!!)
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...
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.
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”.
Asia outside of China does provide a lot of anode and cathode material to battery manufacturers.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You had something: production. Now you have nothing.