In numbers (cell production capacity, 2025):<p><pre><code> [1] USA 70 GWh
[2] China 1755 GWh
[3] Europe 252 GWh
</code></pre>
That's excluding small battery production for electronics etc.<p>[1] <a href="https://reasonstobecheerful.world/us-grid-battery-storage/" rel="nofollow">https://reasonstobecheerful.world/us-grid-battery-storage/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://english.news18a.com/news/english_224842.html" rel="nofollow">https://english.news18a.com/news/english_224842.html</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-swelling-wave-battery-installations-set-hit-barriers--reeii-2026-02-26/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-swelling-wav...</a>
According to projections this year will hit 300 GWh in the US<p><a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufacturing/us-capacity-storage-cell-factories" rel="nofollow">https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufactur...</a>
That article claims:<p>> As for the underlying cells, it’s a similar story with a slight delay. By the end of 2025, 20 gigawatt-hours of dedicated storage cell lines had opened, and the industry is on pace to hit 96 gigawatt-hours by the end of this year.<p>Not sure where you're getting 300 GWh from?
Not according to this article.
According to IEA[1] most capacity in Europe is from South Korean companies.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-manufacturing-capacity-by-battery-producers-domicile-2024-2030" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-manu...</a>
Okay then makes me wonder if this recent trend is just one particularly large manufacturer ramping up production? Tesla?
Ford in partnership with LG is one example. Stationary storage replacing EV demand that did not materialize. Gigafactories intended for EV batteries are now for stationary storage.<p><i>U.S. battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid EV bust</i> - <a href="https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0303" rel="nofollow">https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0303</a> - March 3rd, 2026
The US is the bronze medalist meme
Cool way to think about GWh/year:<p><pre><code> 1 GWh/year = (10 ** 9) / 24 / 365.25 / (10 ** 6) MW = 0.11 MW
70 GWh/year = 8 MW
1755 GWh/year = 200 MW
252 GWh/year = 29 MW</code></pre>
Haha. Reminds me of how volt-amperes are technically the same unit as watts, but if you see VA in an electrical specification you know it means a different thing than it would if you saw W.
But not a very relevant for batteries, unless talking about discharge only once a year.<p>Grid batteries are discharged on average 80% per day, if not more. EV batteries... well, probably about 5%-10% per day <i>at most</i>.
Source?
This is great news, but damn to we have some catch-up to do in the US and EU.<p>Have you all seen the specs of the new BYD Blade 2.0?<p><a href="https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-battery/byd-blade-battery-2" rel="nofollow">https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-battery/byd-blade-ba...</a>
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide" rel="nofollow">https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide</a>
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?
> What did they do differently?<p>The Chinese government established and committed itself to a long-term renewable energy strategy in 1992.
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.
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.<p>Biden's IRA changed this massively for the US, and beyond just meeting our own needs for battery production, we <i>were</i> on track to being highly competitive.
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.
They have the culture and infrastructure to support manufacturing and research. Just so much stuff in one place.
A near monopoly on rare earth mineral mining and refining certainly must play a part.
It's a "near monopoly" because a bunch of engineers made a plan, stuck to it, and now have vertical integration.<p>There's nothing preventing others from also processing concentrates (the post physical mining product).<p>The mining aspect is hardly monopolised either - much is sourced from Australia, South America, etc.<p>Put in an order, buy a 49% share of a resource company and now you're part of the action.
How are rare earths used in batteries?
They have a centrally planned economy. It's almost like the Chinese communist party is indeed made up of communists.
> They have a centrally planned economy.<p>Pre-1978, not now.
No, most investment is still done by banks controlled by the Party whose priorities are set by Beijing.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China</a><p>Have a chat with deep seek about the goals of the CCP. When you run local models you run socialism.
This attitude of denial and stuck in the past beliefs is <i>exactly</i> why the USA isn't competitive. Y'all, and your politicians leading the country, just keep telling yourselves these things and then wonder why you're getting lapped by a bunch of cut-throat capitalists.
Cheaper labor, for sure
Everything and anything that China does better than the west: It must be cheap labor.
Most of the cost of batteries is in labor? So why not outsource them out of China where labor is quite expensive vs developing countries?
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<p>That basically means US batteries aren’t going in anything useful to the EV boom, otherwise there would be proportional increases
Good. Even without the COVID dip, the increase is substantial, percentage wise, and is a good sign for national security
I don't have any idea of what this graph means.<p>It seems to be about percentage of the 2017 production. But does it measure value or volume?<p>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.
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!<p>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).<p>To truly understand what's going on, there are two other series needed which are linked in the related series:<p>- Producers' price index, how much the manufacturers are charging per unit of batteries <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU335911335911" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU335911335911</a><p>- Value (in $) of shipped batteries (roughly price * volume): <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS</a> (thanks for the correction, laser!)<p>Also note that the time scale for all three are different, as they apparently started recording these at different times.<p>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!
I think you swapped some links the Value (in $) you linked here is the same as the top post (which is a real-output index), but you probably meant: <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS</a>
> <i>But does it measure value or volume?</i><p>Value, 100 equals 2017 production. Actual figures [1].<p>> <i>Does it include lithium-based batteries?</i><p>Yes [2]. Chemistry agnostic.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/Current/ipdisk/g17sup_tab1.txt" rel="nofollow">https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/Current/ipdisk/g...</a><p>[2]<p>[x] <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/revisions/Current/DefaultRev.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/revisions/Curren...</a>
its an index. Just shows rate of change more than units
"Editorialized" headline. Or rather, the linked page is just data, captioned "Industrial Production: Manufacturing: Durable Goods: Battery."<p>Yes, yes, line go up. This is probably good. But the headline only exists on HN.
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.<p>The graph is showing all types of batteries I believe, and that baseline is largely small batteries.
It would be totally fine to put one of those articles as the associated URL with this headline, just not the St Louis Fed chart. The HN guidelines call for HN headlines to use the same headline as the linked article, not one made up out of whole cloth. An article using this headline would likely provide additional context and detail that a simple chart does not.
seems disingenuous. Battery product seems between 1990 and 2020 about the same with ups and downs. Post COVID its 2.4x the baseline average
how about this
- allow chinese firm build plant in the us
- cite security concerns and kinda nationalize it<p>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.<p>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.
What is significant is production of batteries for grid storage. In 2020 and earlier domestic production in the US was under 10 GWh per year.<p>Incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act let to a big increase in that. By 2025 it was 70 GWh per year. It will be more than twice that in 2026, and will continue growing.<p>Of particular significance is that it now above the level needed to satisfy all of the US grid storage battery needs from domestic production.<p>Similar growth (again largely due to the Inflation Reduction Act) is happening with EV battery production.
Any idea how that compares to Europe?
This FRED series isn't directly convertible into GWh easily, but has the advantage of being having monthly numbers. Actual real world wide numbers are usually behind paywalls. As far as open sources: this March 2025 publication has these capacity numbers (presumably for 2024):<p>- US: 200 GWh/year cell production capacity, 750 GWh/year planned additions [1]<p>- EU: 200GWh/year cell production capacity, 350 GWh/year planned additions [1]<p>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.<p>Actual production is at about 30% of total capacity, worldwide, apparently.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/transatlantic-clean-investment-monitor-3-battery-manufacturing" rel="nofollow">https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/transatlantic-clean-investm...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-vehicle-batteries" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...</a>
“Actual production is at about 30% of total capacity, worldwide, apparently.”<p>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
I think typical factory production rarely gets above 50% of capacity, IIRC. Nonetheless, factories are being built at breakneck speed in the US and other places.
The same IEA report that cited 1TWh/year in 2024 expects that number to be 3TWh/year in 2030. And given the IEA's tendency to underpredict, I'd expect 3TWh/year in 2027 at the very latest, if we're not already there.
No Korea and Japan? Aren't most of the big non-Chinese battery companies Korean and Japanese?
The Sankey chart from my IEA link above shows "Other Asia" is roughly half the size of the Europe and US blobs, so roughly a 100 GWh/year estimate, making the total sum to 3TWh/year.<p>Asia outside of China does provide a lot of anode and cathode material to battery manufacturers.
Or China?
Now if only we could make RAM chips too.
It’s crazy how production tanks as the first Trump presidency kicks off, before COVID.<p>Coincidentally, I started doing pushups yesterday, today is the second day in a row I break my high mark<p>Yesterday= 1<p>Today= 2 (+100%!!!)
[flagged]
And completely irrelevant since the core materials in them are mined overseas.
Since batteries are highly recyclable, a core material imported once means we never need to import it again.<p>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.<p>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.
Large lithium mine under construction in northwest Nevada at Thacker Pass, joint venture with GM. <a href="https://lithiumamericas.com/thacker-pass/overview/default.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://lithiumamericas.com/thacker-pass/overview/default.as...</a>
Nearshoring as we speak..Venezuela will probably be contributing to that soon, I expect.
Well, they've been trying to build a lithium mine in the desert in Nevada, but environmental groups have stalled it for years with lawsuits and protests.<p>This is why you can't build anything in America anymore.
Nope. This is a misconception.<p>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.<p>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.
> artisanal mines in africa<p>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”.
> Rather, cobalt has basically no industrial applications outside of battery production.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Applications" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Applications</a>
Also in high performance magnetic steel, as well as SmCo magnets.
I missed this the last time I looked. I'm guessing it doesn't get pulled as much for steel because of recycling?
You don't need that much of foreign mined materials. The continental US has a bunch of really large lithium reserves, with Thacker Pass being supposed to be able to deliver 25% of the world's output in the end [1], and new sodium based chemistries? All they need is table salt, available for effectively free from the brine of California's desalination plants.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine</a>
People are waaaaaay overimagining the exotic metal content of batteries.