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

> 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?

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

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

China knows this, developed countries that lost their manufacturing capacity are relearning this.

The people who are hired and organized by the korean comapny. This is litterlly the logic that collapsed venezuela's oil industry after it was seized by the state.

Holy shit, finally someone who understands this, this comments needs to be to the top.

Same thing happened in my ex-commie country when the communists kicked out the capitalists, shipped them to UK, US, Switzerland, and took over their factories. Over years and decades, those factories became inefficient and went bust under state control, while those capitalists who got kicked out flourished by making new business in their new homes that were business-friendly countries.

Just because you seize factories doesn't mean anything if you don't know what to do, they're just commodity equipment anyone else can buy within walls and a roof. The people with the secret-sauce know-how and IP are just as if not more valuable.

That's why US had operation Paperclip.

If you go to a TSMC factory, you'll find the same ASML EUV machines every other country and and company on the planet (minus China) has access to buy, but yet only TSMC can extract the smallest nodes and highest yields because only they managed to perfect the entire process.

The people are physically in Europe, too. (Adding limits on remote management for national-security reasons might make sense.)

If Korea and Europe get in a war, or, more likely, China pressures them to straight up ditch that capital investment, that lets the EU hold those folks until knowledge transfer can be conducted. Again, this is a strategically different place of leverage from those assets being overseas.

Wasn't it sanctions? The state seizing ownership should not have meant the loss of:

> the people, the managers,engineers,etc

Ownership of companies change every day across the world without collapse.

I think the EU performing such an action is outside the Overton window, at least for now...

China does know that but they knew how to make the deal palatable enough for auto manufacturers (other companies too, but this one IMO is a big factor in the grand scheme[0]) to all sell out one way or another for a stake in the pie, be it cheaper manufacturing or accessing that market.

Developed countries are re-learning it but are struggling with paying the piper. By that I mean, a lot of manufacturing, especially technology based, can be dirty as heck. Doing certain widgets results in environmental costs that have to be managed or externalized[1].

[0] - I posit, that Auto manufacturers probably keep a lot of documentation around, but also have a lot of history of 'good ideas' being killed by business politics one way or another. You can glean a -lot- of manufacturing tribal knowledge being able to access any existing or new incoming data on that set of signals.

[1] - No, we should not externalize, to be clear.

There's an established base of steel mills in Europe. Take one over, and your local talent pool can probably keep it running. There's less risk.

You had something: production. Now you have nothing.

For one it's a peace-time situation where strong-arming interventions are met with consequences, in this case China can stop supply of critical products to punish the Dutch. In a wartime situation such supply would've been stopped anyway, so there is nothing further to lose and everything to gain from an intervention, but such an intervention is only possible if the factory is on your soil.

Second, Nexperia is a legitimate Dutch company with Dutch expertise. The Chinese bought it. The Dutch don't need Chinese expertise to operate the local factory they built and sold to the Chinese.

Third, China is a global hegemon, South Korea isn't by comparison, and South Korea is a neighbour of China, the Netherlands isn't. China could pressure a battery factory in South Korea during a military conflict by military force, but in Western Europe that's a different story.

That doesn't happen between democracies and hasn't for generations, except for one democracy recently. I don't know that it happens between any significant economies, outside of wars (when and where has it happened?), except one recently. Trade is reliable, despite the nationalist attempt to use FUD. That's how countries get access to the best products and sell their best products.

russia and {ukraine, georgia, etc}?

Hell, the US still hands tons of intelligence to ukraine, even though the trump makes big noise about cozying up to putin

Neoliberalism and globalization is what guaranteed this. That is, Pax Americana. The US thought it was a great idea to become the reserve currency of the world, and became a net importer to spread the dollar. The dollar hegemony gave the US great influence and it defended it with its military. Becoming a net importer hollowed out the US industrial base as it moved overseas, which was fine until China speedran owning large parts of the industrial production and exportation. They also very quickly moved up the ranks of economic and geopolitical sway.

Now the US is ditching globalization for more mercantilist policies. That means the US will be less influential in a multi-polar world, as it can no longer strongarm so easily through the dollar. Trade will become more closed off as other countries rush to do the same now that they are less supported by the US military and economic influence and need to defend themselves more.

Thus, I wouldn’t discount the possibility that the EU stops cooperating as much with SK in the future

In response to US's changes, the 'middle powers' (e.g., Canada, Japan, etc.) are working to promote the rules-based international order, including trade. But I agree risk is higher than before.

> Becoming a net importer hollowed out the US industrial base as it moved overseas, which was fine until China speedran owning large parts of the industrial production and exportation. They also very quickly moved up the ranks of economic and geopolitical sway.

> Now the US is ditching globalization for more mercantilist policies.

Rationalizing the policy is a serious error, I think. It's a political move by a group that has more power in conditions of nationalism, economic and otherwise. For example, the US is also 'ditching' military relationships, including NATO, for which there is no policy rationlization. Some believe in these things ideologically; most are acting politically, I think. Claiming policy reasons is dishonest. As another example, many countries in very different positions, with very different policy needs than the US, are behaving similarly.

I think both are true and feed on each other to gain populist momentum

> As another example, many countries in very different positions, with very different policy needs than the US, are behaving similarly.

This may be influenced by the wave of populist nationalism but it again may also be a reaction to the reality that there isn't just one hegemony pulling the strings anymore (the US, or the west in general). Especially if said hegemony is acting unpredictable and other countries are now acting belligerent. That seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. I'm sure there's more reasons beyond these

> Trade is reliable

"reliable except when it isn't" is just a convoluted way of saying "unreliable"

That being said, extremely disappointing that the world's most populous country can't be arsed to maximize battery output. They don't seem to be anywhere in the rankings.

But honestly, why can't it just be a comment about the EU numbers without this weird jingoism attached?

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

  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

volt-amperes are joules

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt

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

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...

"640k ought to be enough for anybody" :) I'm sure with more electricity available, prices would drop, meaning people will use more electricity and so on. Just like desktop applications and available system RAM, I guess some things just consume what becomes available.

The other thing that prevents an individual from using more is that electricity usage creates heat.

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).

For future energy consumption I would look to India, which is on the same energy growth path as China 20 years ago. And there are many countries with low per capita energy consumption but high potential. Like Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt,..

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

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

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

I agree that efficiency of electric motor + battery is much higher that ICE. ICE cars are now slowly replaced with EV cars. About 42% of oil is refined to gasoline, but much of oil is refined to diesel, jet fuel and used in transportation which is harder to convert to EV, like long-haul trucking, or much harder to convert to EV, like international shipping, air transport.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

" efficiencies of up to 43% for passenger car engines, up to 45% for large truck and bus engines, and up to 55% for large two-stroke marine engines"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine#Efficiency

"By generating power from multiple streams of work, the overall efficiency can be increased by about 50–60%. That is, from an overall efficiency of say 43% for a simple cycle with the turbine alone running, to as much as 64% net with the full combined cycle running"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant