logoalt Hacker News

US battery manufacturing output continues to break records

170 pointsby epistasisyesterday at 8:28 PM138 commentsview on HN

Comments

ricardobeatyesterday at 9:13 PM

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...

show 6 replies
consumer451yesterday at 10:27 PM

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...

show 1 reply
fordtoday at 2:09 AM

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

aetherspawnyesterday at 11:43 PM

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

show 1 reply
Animatstoday at 1:01 AM

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.

SubiculumCodeyesterday at 9:46 PM

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

MinimalActionyesterday at 11:04 PM

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?

show 8 replies
loegyesterday at 8:51 PM

"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.

show 2 replies
diego_moitayesterday at 8:56 PM

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.

show 3 replies
saggonyesterday at 10:39 PM

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

NoLinkToMeyesterday at 10:41 PM

'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.

show 1 reply
joe_mambayesterday at 8:49 PM

Any idea how that compares to Europe?

show 2 replies
lisperyesterday at 10:26 PM

Now if only we could make RAM chips too.

show 1 reply
dlev_pikayesterday at 10:35 PM

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%!!!)

throe939449yesterday at 9:35 PM

[flagged]

skilningyesterday at 9:44 PM

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

show 7 replies