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  • Hacker News
  • Good. Even without the COVID dip, the increase is substantial, percentage wise, and is a good sign for national security
    by SubiculumCode
  • 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?
    by MinimalAction
  • 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.
    by Animats
  • 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

    by ford
  • 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.

    by diego_moita
  • 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).

    by adjejmxbdjdn
  • 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...

    by consumer451
  • 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...

    by ricardobeat

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