US battery manufacturing output continues to break records

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPG33591S

by epistasis • 1 month ago

230 195 1 month ago

fred.stlouisfed.org

joe_mamba2• 1 month ago

Any idea how that compares to Europe?

don_esteban• 1 month ago

Or China?

epistasis9• 1 month 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• 1 month 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

CorrectHorseBat• 1 month ago

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

loeg2• 1 month 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• 1 month 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

tzs2• 1 month ago

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.

loeg2• 1 month ago

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.

diego_moita• 1 month 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.

JumpCrisscross5• 1 month 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• 1 month 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

epistasis9• 1 month 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• 1 month 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

schlap2• 1 month ago

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

ricardobeat• 1 month 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...

causal• 1 month ago

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

toomuchtodo3• 1 month 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

paulmist• 1 month 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...

JumpCrisscross5• 1 month ago

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

bogwog• 1 month ago

Source?

jweir• 1 month ago

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

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

lysace• 1 month ago

Not according to this article.

embedding-shape3• 1 month ago

That article claims:

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.

Not sure where you're getting 300 GWh from?

epistasis9• 1 month ago

Production and production capacity are getting swapped a lot in this thread. The top level numbers above, US 70 GWh, are straight production.

Your 300GWh is likely production capacity but the number doesn't come from your article (which is excellent).

om83• 1 month ago

Cool way to think about GWh/year:

  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

amalcon• 1 month ago

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.

epistasis9• 1 month ago

But not a very relevant for batteries, unless talking about discharge only once a year.

Grid batteries are discharged on average 80% per day, if not more. EV batteries... well, probably about 5%-10% per day at most.

vinajuliette• 1 month ago

The US is the bronze medalist meme

DaSHacka• 1 month ago

I mean, I'd be more than happy to be in the top three. The issue is before we were even lower.

leonidasrup3• 1 month ago

How much battery storage would you need to cover 12h electric energy consumption on average for each of this regions?

Let's look at electricity yearly production (2025 data)

USA 4519790 GWh

China 10583360 GWh

Europe 4626240 GWh

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

Average 12h consumption:

USA 6187 GWh

China 14487 GWh

Europe 6332 GWh

How many years of cell production capacity would be needed to cover 12h electric energy consumption on average for each of this regions?

USA 88 years

China 8 years

Europe 25 years

Currently electricity is only about 19.8% of primary energy consumption.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-as-a-share-of...

crote2• 1 month ago

Electricity consumption isn't linear (people use far less when they are sleeping), and production isn't zero at night (wind and hydro exist). Covering 12 hours is almost certainly overkill.

myrmidon2• 1 month ago

Those numbers sound worse than they are.

Storage production capacity is still rising much faster than energy consumption in all those nations, and the situation is probably quite similar with other pieces of infrastructure that last for decades; replacing all big electric transformers would similarly need many years of production.

Primary energy considerations are also somewhat iffy if the first step involved is often a ~40% efficient conversion into a form similarly "valuable" to electricity (like gasoline => motion).

triceratops3• 1 month ago

You mean we've barely begun building battery plants and China can already build more than enough batteries for themselves in less than a decade? Holy crap that's amazing news!

skilning• 1 month ago

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

SubiculumCode3• 1 month ago

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

usrnm4• 1 month ago

Good old colonialism, sweet

Legend2440• 1 month 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.

epistasis9• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

cogman103• 1 month 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• 1 month 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”.

quickthrowman• 1 month 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

while_true_• 1 month ago

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

mschuster913• 1 month 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

jeffbee2• 1 month ago

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

jeffbee2• 1 month ago

People are waaaaaay overimagining the exotic metal content of batteries.

SubiculumCode3• 1 month ago

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

lisper2• 1 month ago

Now if only we could make RAM chips too.

tartoran2• 1 month ago

You want expensive memory and chips?

lisper2• 1 month 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.

hagbard_c2• 1 month ago

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

consumer451• 1 month 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 of the new BYD Blade 2.0?

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

pertymcpert2• 1 month ago

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

giwook• 1 month ago

This is true, but it also assumes continued investment and steady progress.

We had been making some headway in terms of clean energy before the current administration started undoing a lot of that progress. And there is no telling what the next administration will do.

KennyBlanken• 1 month ago

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.

CabSauce• 1 month ago

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.

pstuart3• 1 month ago

GM is getting into the game too.

https://news.gm.com/home.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2026/j...

dlev_pika• 1 month 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%!!!)

saggon• 1 month 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

NoLinkToMe2• 1 month 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.

tzs2• 1 month ago

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.

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.

Of particular significance is that it now above the level needed to satisfy all of the US grid storage battery needs from domestic production.

Similar growth (again largely due to the Inflation Reduction Act) is happening with EV battery production.

MinimalAction• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

MisterTea• 1 month ago

They also accept higher environmental impacts such as anthropogenic lakes of battery waste.

hnthrow02873452• 1 month ago

Cheaper labor, for sure

pertymcpert2• 1 month 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?

riskd• 1 month ago

Everything and anything that China does better than the west: It must be cheap labor.

noosphr2• 1 month ago

They have a centrally planned economy. It's almost like the Chinese communist party is indeed made up of communists.

zx80802• 1 month ago

They have a centrally planned economy.

Pre-1978, not now.

morkalork• 1 month ago

This attitude of denial and stuck in the past beliefs is exactly 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.

pjc50• 1 month ago

Well, they have an industrial strategy. Not exclusive to communism, places like South Korea and Singapore managed it as well.

incompatible• 1 month ago

They have the culture and infrastructure to support manufacturing and research. Just so much stuff in one place.

eggplantemoji69• 1 month ago

A near monopoly on rare earth mineral mining and refining certainly must play a part.

defrost5• 1 month ago

It's a "near monopoly" because a bunch of engineers made a plan, stuck to it, and now have vertical integration.

There's nothing preventing others from also processing concentrates (the post physical mining product).

The mining aspect is hardly monopolised either - much is sourced from Australia, South America, etc.

Put in an order, buy a 49% share of a resource company and now you're part of the action.

thehappypm• 1 month ago

How are rare earths used in batteries?

jandrese• 1 month ago

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.

dyauspitr2• 1 month ago

I wish the Democrats wholeheartedly picked favorites look at what the POS in power are doing now

overfeed2• 1 month ago

What did they do differently?

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

BLKNSLVR• 1 month ago

And the US voted for "drill, baby, drill" in 2024.

Says a lot about the future we should be expecting and strategising for.

epistasis9• 1 month ago

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.

pstuart3• 1 month ago

we were on track to being highly competitive

Gosh, I'm sure there was a very good, some might say even the best, reason why that is no longer the case.

yanhangyhy• 1 month ago

we publish the 5 year plan and finished it... basically every time.

phatfish• 1 month ago

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.

aetherspawn• 1 month ago

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

standeven• 1 month ago

Only millionaires were driving Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts?

Rohansi• 1 month ago

Tesla Model S was apparently the best selling electric car then.

supertroop• 1 month ago

10% of the us population are millionaires. That’s 33 million people. Mostly boomers.

Animats• 1 month ago

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.

ford• 1 month ago

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

verdverm• 1 month ago

related: Electrostates, Petrostates, and the New Cold War

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

nxy• 1 month ago

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

adjejmxbdjdn• 1 month ago

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).

pstuart3• 1 month ago

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.

US battery manufacturing output continues to break records

Related Stories