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  • Hacker News
  • related: Electrostates, Petrostates, and the New Cold War

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

    by verdverm
  • "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.

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

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

    by aetherspawn
  • Only millionaires were driving Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts?
    by standeven
  • 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
  • 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.

    by phatfish
  • we publish the 5 year plan and finished it... basically every time.
    by yanhangyhy
  • 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.
    by jandrese
  • A near monopoly on rare earth mineral mining and refining certainly must play a part.
    by eggplantemoji69
  • They have the culture and infrastructure to support manufacturing and research. Just so much stuff in one place.
    by incompatible
  • 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.

    by epistasis
  • 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.
    by jahnu
  • > What did they do differently?

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

    by overfeed
  • 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
  • its an index. Just shows rate of change more than units
    by schlap
  • > 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...

    by JumpCrisscross
  • 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!

    by epistasis
  • 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
  • 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.
    by pstuart
  • 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
  • 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.
    by CabSauce
  • 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.
    by KennyBlanken
  • Small steps taken many times gets you far. At some point the scaling will kick in and ramp up even more.
    by pertymcpert
  • 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