Why the U.S. Should Race Post-Haste to Use China’s Batteries

Steve writes on the future of batteries and the technologies they enable—electric vehicles, robotaxis, humanoid robots, drones, flying cars, and AI data centers, among them, and their epochal impacts. He formerly founded and wrote The Mobilist at Medium, and before that, founded and ran the Future newsletter at Axios. He taught energy security to graduate students at Georgetown University for nine years. Previously, Steve was a foreign correspondent in the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, and the Philippines and ran a bureau for The Wall Street Journal, and before that for The New York Times, the Financial Times, and Newsweek. Steve has written three books. The latest is The Powerhouse: America, China and the Great Battery War, which was long-listed for the 2015 Financial Times-McKinsey Book of the Year prize. In 2007, Random House published The Oil and the Glory, which chronicled the struggle for fortune and power on the Caspian Sea. It was a Businessweek Top 10 book for the year. In 2008, Random House published Putin's Labyrinth, a profile of Russia through the life and death of a half-dozen Russians.

Abstract: 

The U.S. can still compete in batteries. But it needs to be nuanced and exercise policy and industrial continuity: Encourage a scaleup of the chemistries and components just getting into the marketplace; meanwhile, buy and use those that China already owns like crazy in value-added products. The big winners in 200 years of industrial age history have not necessarily been the inventors of the most important technologies, but those who best shoveled those technologies into their economy.