[state_less]

The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.

I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!

[ak217]

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

[api]

It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past.

Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.

I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.

[ksec]

May be it is not of an innovators dilemma?

Chinese CCP are willing to scarifies whatever traditional industrial era infrastructure in order for things to move forward and gain a global advantage. Especially when they are not the one paying for the scarifies.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Certainly sounds like a sunk cost dilemma.

Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.

[api]

That political sunk cost is why the innovators dilemma happens. It happens in companies too where managers, executives, and top employees will have their careers built around a certain way of doing things. Change threatens that so they will resist change and double down.

Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.

It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.

[mcswell]

"Make America Little Again" --Donald J. Trump

[jack_tripper]

>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century.

You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.

"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"

-HN comments

[api]

No I saw it. I just felt like that was the moment it tipped.

[epistasis]

This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff.

And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students.

We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation.

We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.

[jack_tripper]

>our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it

Which industry? How 'huuuuuge' was the investment?

>We were the most admired country in the world

According to who?

[nutjob2]

It was that Trump and the MAGA crowd conceded to the Chinese by destroying US goodwill and credibility built up over decades. The US will probably never recover those advantages, just as China is ratcheting up its program of dominance. Trump et al have destroyed many things that made the US great.

It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.

[tim333]

I don't think it's unfixable but the behavior is still kind of odd.

[calvinmorrison]

good. maybe we can copy some shit for cheap and leap frog a few generations instead of leading the world!

[jfengel]

Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators.

That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.

[dalyons]

Chinas labor costs are no longer cheap either. They just have higher tech factories now.

[sdoering]

Same here in Germany/Europe. Our conservatives actually destroyed the solar industry for the third time. Our conservative party has actually destroyed significantly more jobs in solar industries over the last 20 years than it keeps alive with subsidies of 70k€ - 100k€ per person working in that industry (direct and indirect subsidies make the 70 - 100k€ range).

But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).

But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.

Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.

[bootsmann]

> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago

This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.

[toomuchtodo]

Their energy prices are an outcome of incompetence, having tied their energy prices to Russia and a gas supply from them. In hindsight, economic diplomacy is not the path to keeping an authoritarian in check; a strong military and energy independence is.

German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.

[ViewTrick1002]

I think this take is too shallow, and based on hindsight.

Germany has had fossil gas ties to Russia since the Soviet time.

https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-ye...

When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.

Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.

I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.

[Gibbon1]

> Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.

Societies tend to not change how things work no matter who is in charge.

[toomuchtodo]

‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-depend... - June 2nd, 2022

> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”

> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.

> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.

> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”

We win or we learn.

[aktuel]

> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago

Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.

[tirant]

I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example.

Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.

[junto]

That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly at 95% of the market rather than under 10%, it will finally make a difference on steering pricing for such consumers as yourself.

Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.

If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.

[ben_w]

> If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.

Too slowly, if I'm following local news correctly (I might well not be, my German is enough to listen to podcasts but it's still not good).

e.g. this train station upgrade is currently about 20 years behind the original schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Presen...

[jack_tripper]

>but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments

How would the political class know this obvious fact from the top of their ivory McMansions?

[lukan]

"If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly."

What happened to Blitzkrieg?

[antonvs]

> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate …

Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?

Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

[ak217]

China is governed by the CCP, which holds the world record for the number of people murdered by the state, feeds its citizens militaristic propaganda at scale, is currently controlled by a guy who fancies himself a dictator, and is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade. It takes a dangerous kind of willful naivete to just ignore that fact.

[lossolo]

This is oversimplified view of the world and China.

China being powerful is not something new, it was the world's largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the US surged ahead after the industrial revolution).

> is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade.

Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news.

In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively so freedom from chaos, poverty, foreign domination etc, whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. You know that 100 million Chinese travel abroad every year and all of them come back to China? Chinese leaders and citizens still remember periods of fragmentation and civil war.

There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity (you know how many ethnicities there are in China?)

This is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.

[adwn]

This and your other comment in this thread reads exactly like propaganda paid for by the CCP.

[lossolo]

That's a funny meta comment, where are you from? Are you consuming a lot of US based content? I ask because I mainly see Americans here writing about the "CCP" based on what they regularly hear from government officials and certain news outlets. It's rarely framed as "China" it's usually "the Chinese Communist Party" emphasizing "Communist" because that word carries negative connotations in the US given its history and in the EU. But maybe framing is similar in your country.

So just to clarify, I'm from the EU, and I'm not paid for anything I write here. Maybe your world model is influenced by propaganda? The world isn't black and white.

I also encourage people to read more about the history and culture of other countries, especially the ones they have strong opinions about, which they often haven't formed themselves (In my experience, this is often lacking in US education, people learn a lot about US history, but not as much about the rest of the world).

Reading more philosophy can also broaden your perspective. In particular, I recommend learning about Singapore, its history, Lee Kuan Yew, and why many highly educated people there willingly accept restrictions on individual freedom. If you understand that, you can then start reading about China, its culture, and its history.

[ak217]

Yeah. I have also been to China myself, and have first hand experience walking around Hong Kong with people who later found themselves in jail, or riding the subway getting bombarded with saturation level jingoistic propaganda urging attack against the capitalist aggressors, or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

The silent majority is silent, yes. Those who try to do something get pushed out, or worse. It's the double-edged sword of immigration. But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.

[lossolo]

Then you've had a very different experience than I have. If you don't mind me asking, where exactly were you in mainland China, and for how long?

Hong Kong isn't representative of China. I've been there and honestly, it felt like a post colonial UK dump. Going directly from Shenzhen to Hong Kong felt like going from a first world country to a third world one, but I digress.

I also talked with Hong Kongers (this year), and they told me a different story, one that isn't so black and white as the worldview you're projecting onto others.

> or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

That's another interesting anecdote. I actually know a photo blogger and a local journalist from China, neither of them is being followed by the security services, and neither has sought asylum anywhere. What was so unique about your friend?

> But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.

You know Singapore isn't exactly a "free" country either, right? And Singaporeans are generally fine with that and accept the trade off. So who's disproving whose narrative here?

Different cultures have different systems and trade offs, different value systems and philosophies of life. But some people seem not to understand that and view everything through the lens of their own values, convincing themselves there's only one "right" way to live and that everything else is evil. The Holy Crusades had similar vibes.

[antonvs]

What kind of willful naïveté does it take to ignore the nature of the current government of the United States?

[Zigurd]

He's not ignoring it.

[ak217]

Yours?

I'm sick and tired of whataboutism from people who are somehow motivated to carry water for aggressive dictatorships that threaten the rest of us. I've already lost my birth country to zombies like that (they call them z-patriots, or turbopatriots, the supporters of Russia's invasion of Ukraine). In case you missed it, my original comment was intended as a criticism of the current government of the United States.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?

He’s saying it as a realist.

China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.

[dalyons]

Yes and no - yes it’s dumb to give up and let china have a defacto monopoly on the future of energy production. But no insofar as sanctions on battery and solar don’t hit the same as oil and other things. Because once you have them, they keep producing for you.

[JumpCrisscross]

> sanctions on battery and solar don’t hit the same as oil and other things

Oil hits hardest. I’m comparing financial sanctions to a battery embargo. Both are slow. Both are powerful.

[matheusmoreira]

> shutting off battery and rare earths access

Trump just leveraged Magnitsky sanctions against brazilian authorities to obtain access to brazilian rare earths until 2030.

[ben_w]

Brazil?

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth...

Output in 2024 was 20 tons.

The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons.

I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.

[matheusmoreira]

Honestly, I don't know. I just know this rare earths business, among other things, was somehow enough for Trump to drop the very deserved Magnitsky sanctions against a brazilian judge.

I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.

[nutjob2]

It's alas for everyone but China. Who wants to be dependent on an aggressive totalitarian state?

You can't compete fairly with China because the government applies massive subsidies and is coercive with both imports and exports.

Right behind Russia, China is the biggest threat to global order and peace. It's no accident they are in cahoots.

[antonvs]

Where do you place the United States under the Trump administration in that list?

I’m getting a strong sense of denial in this thread.

[throwaway-11-1]

For real. I think there's a type of American that would rather hype up the evils of china than admit the distance the US has fallen from its purported ideals. This year I've seen students deported for criticizing Israel, mobs of poorly trained militarized federal police roaming neighborhoods violently disappearing people without trial, the number of homeless grow to 700,000, food kitchens with lines around the block and a president straight up selling pardons to drug dealers.

Chinese totalitarianism just doesn't seem like such a huge contrast as it once did. At least they get an increase in quality of life for the tradeoff. Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh

[andrekandre]

  > Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh

the grass is always browner on the other side...

[ben_w]

IMO, depends where you are in the world.

I'm in Berlin, I have more to fear from Trump's administration than from Xi Jinping's.

If I was in the Philippines, I think it would be the other way around. Initially I also had Japan and Taiwan in that comparison, but thinking a bit harder, there's also a risk that Trump is isolationist, that means the risk from each is more like a multiplier than a simple comparison.

[epistasis]

You are certainly not alone in your beliefs, but it always amazes me which technologies get the benefit of doubt and which are severely penalized by unfounded doubt. Solar and especially batteries are completely penalized and doubted in a way that defies any honest assessment of reality. The EIA and IEA forecasts are as terrible as they are because the reflect this unrealistic doubt (random blog spam link, but this observation is so old that it's hard to find the higher quality initial graphs)

https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/

Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.

[solarengineer]

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

10 new plants at USD 2.7 Billion each. They take six years to build. USD 2/Watt. They have standardised designs, have invested in grownig their manpower and know-how.

[epistasis]

If you believe China's internal pricing numbers, sure....

But their actual investments in billions of dollars and in GW show that nuclear is not competing with solar, and is sticking around for hedging bets. They the are deploying far far far more solar and storage than nuclear. And if those nuclear costs were accurate, then nuclear would be far preferable. $2/W is incredible, as in perhaps not credible, but it would also be far cheaper than solar.

And even if China figured out how to build that cheaply, it doesn't mean that highly developed countries will be able to replicate that. Nuclear requires a huge amount of high skill, specialized labor, and doing that cheaply is only possible at certain levels of economic development. As economies develop to ever higher productivity, the cost of labor goes up, and it's likely that nuclear only ever makes sense at a very narrow band of economic development.

[ZeroGravitas]

Original source of that observation was Auke Hoekstra nearly a decade ago:

https://x.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1730992987021226002

[alexose]

In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.

Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.

I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.

[venturecruelty]

We are the petro-state, and they're our aging leaders.

[pfdietz]

> cycle 10000 times

This is truly important, allowing the plummeting cost of the batteries to be amortized over so many cycles.

[jasondigitized]

I take solace in the invisible hand which, in the longer term, ultimately directs greedy capitalists. Water finds its level, etc. etc.

[chrisweekly]

Yes! It's awesome!

(Also, "alas" is a lament, expressing sadness, which is clearly not your intent.)

[jauntywundrkind]

In general it's obvious this is the trend & amazing.

It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...