US battery manufacturing output continues to break records

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eepistasis about 3 hours ago 87 commentsRead Article on fred.stlouisfed.org

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ricardobeat•about 2 hours ago

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...

jweir•40 minutes ago

According to projections this year will hit 300 GWh in the US

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-manufactur...

paulmist•about 2 hours ago

According to IEA[1] most capacity in Europe is from South Korean companies.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-manu...

JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago

Still physically in Europe. That’s mostly what counts.

throwaway85825•about 2 hours ago

Not exactly. Most of the people who work on site at semi conductor fabs actually work in the office building next door. Batteries are similar.

dyauspitr•8 minutes ago

I disagree. If the majority of workers aren’t European and the supply chain comes directly from Asia then the local ecosystem is not developed and if the Asian company pulls out there is no way to keep doing it locally.

causal•about 2 hours ago

Okay then makes me wonder if this recent trend is just one particularly large manufacturer ramping up production? Tesla?

toomuchtodo•about 2 hours ago

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.

U.S. battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid EV bust - https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0303 - March 3rd, 2026

bogwog•about 2 hours ago

Source?

consumer451•about 1 hour ago

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 on the BYD Blade 2.0?

https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-battery/byd-blade-ba...

pertymcpert•7 minutes ago

Small steps taken many times gets you far. At some point the scaling will kick in and ramp up even more.

MinimalAction•22 minutes ago

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?

jahnu•17 minutes ago

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.

hnthrow0287345•9 minutes ago

Cheaper labor, for sure

pertymcpert•6 minutes ago

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?

SubiculumCode•about 2 hours ago

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

saggon•about 1 hour ago

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

loeg•about 3 hours ago

"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.

calvinmorrison•about 3 hours ago

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

NoLinkToMe•about 1 hour ago

'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.

diego_moita•about 3 hours ago

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.

epistasis•about 2 hours ago

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!

laser•about 2 hours ago

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: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS

JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago

> 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...

zamadatix•about 2 hours ago

Are you sure that's the data set being used in this graph? Taking 2022's value over 2017's anchored value seems to come out to a ratio far higher than any part of this graph shows for 2022. The description text also says it measures indexed real output and other graphs don't beat around the bush about being value based https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A35DVS

JumpCrisscross•about 2 hours ago

No, those are weights. One sec.

schlap•about 1 hour ago

its an index. Just shows rate of change more than units

joe_mamba•about 3 hours ago

Any idea how that compares to Europe?

epistasis•about 2 hours ago

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):

- US: 200 GWh/year cell production capacity, 750 GWh/year planned additions [1]

- EU: 200GWh/year cell production capacity, 350 GWh/year planned additions [1]

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.

Actual production is at about 30% of total capacity, worldwide, apparently.

[1] https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/transatlantic-clean-investm...

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2025/electric-...

Aboutplants•about 2 hours ago

“Actual production is at about 30% of total capacity, worldwide, apparently.”

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

epistasis•about 2 hours ago

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.

CorrectHorseBat•about 2 hours ago

No Korea and Japan? Aren't most of the big non-Chinese battery companies Korean and Japanese?

epistasis•about 2 hours ago

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.

Asia outside of China does provide a lot of anode and cathode material to battery manufacturers.

don_esteban•about 3 hours ago

Or China?

lisper•about 1 hour ago

Now if only we could make RAM chips too.

tartoran•about 1 hour ago

You want expensive memory and chips?

lisper•about 1 hour ago

I want a robust field of competitors that allows supply to rise to meet demand, and I would like the USA to be one of the competitors. I would like the people who do the work to earn a living wage. I do not want to benefit from overseas slave labor. If that means I have to pay more, so be it.

tartoran•30 minutes ago

US should do something very advanced domestically. Not sure if the US can compete on RAM and Chips within the current state of affairs.

hagbard_c•37 minutes ago

They're already expensive. Increasing production capacity tends to bring down prices, not raise them.

dlev_pika•about 1 hour ago

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%!!!)

skilning•about 2 hours ago

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

epistasis•about 1 hour ago

Since batteries are highly recyclable, a core material imported once means we never need to import it again.

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.

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.

skyyler•about 1 hour ago

How long, in years, until we are mining landfills for lithium?

jackdoe•about 1 hour ago

we are closer to watering our farms with gatorade than mining landfills for lithium.

WorldPeas•about 1 hour ago

zero, it seems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSSgAPylz60

while_true_•about 1 hour ago

Large lithium mine under construction in northwest Nevada at Thacker Pass, joint venture with GM. https://lithiumamericas.com/thacker-pass/overview/default.as...

Legend2440•about 1 hour ago

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.

This is why you can't build anything in America anymore.

cogman10•about 1 hour ago

Nope. This is a misconception.

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.

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.

pfannkuchen•about 1 hour ago

> artisanal mines in africa

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”.

WarmWash•about 1 hour ago

That's literally what they are called.

quickthrowman•about 1 hour ago

> Rather, cobalt has basically no industrial applications outside of battery production.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Applications

cogman10•about 1 hour ago

I missed this the last time I looked. I'm guessing it doesn't get pulled as much for steel because of recycling?

SubiculumCode•about 2 hours ago

Nearshoring as we speak..Venezuela will probably be contributing to that soon, I expect.

usrnm•about 2 hours ago

Good old colonialism, sweet

SubiculumCode•6 minutes ago

I don't know about colonialism. I do not think that the mining companies changed. It's just that previously China exerted a lot of influence on where those minerals got processed, circumventing American markets, and enabling Chinese threats to restrict strategic minerals.in the ongoing trade disputes, etc. Generally, America should have been much more proactive and supporting of South America. Allowing Russia, Iran, and China to have inordinate influence there was a bad idea IMO.

haaz•about 1 hour ago

No that's called trade you clown

schlap•about 1 hour ago

i promise that venezuelan business leaders are more than happy to take USD

libertine•about 1 hour ago

Eh, at this point that means nothing, let's see:

If it's Russia, the biggest colonialist country in the world, using Neo Nazi "PMC", or trying to annex neighboring countries, it's not colonialism, it's "liberation from colonialists".

If it's China doing mass acquisitions of state and private assets, it's not colonialism, it's "development".

If it's a western country doing what ever, it's colonialism lol it's such a dumb propaganda trope.

So the conclusion is that the new western colonialism is actually looking like a pretty good option, and shouldn't have such a bad connotation, perhaps it should be embraced in this new world order no?

mschuster91•about 1 hour ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine

jeffbee•19 minutes ago

California desalination is almost not practiced at all. Are you sure it's a significant source of sodium for industry?

jeffbee•29 minutes ago

People are waaaaaay overimagining the exotic metal content of batteries.