US battery manufacturing output continues to break records (fred.stlouisfed.org)

Any idea how that compares to Europe?

"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.

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.

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...

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

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

Now if only we could make RAM chips too.

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...

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%!!!)

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

'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.

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?

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

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.

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

related: Electrostates, Petrostates, and the New Cold War

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

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

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).