Super Power To Spare: How Battery Tech Illuminates Competition Between U.S. & China

These Eureka! moments, much heralded by renewable energy champions, make it appear that China has leaped over the Energizer bunny and eclipsed the U.S. in a field Americans have long dominated. Coming on the heels of the billions the Biden administration poured into batteries and other green energy projects, the apparently superior Chinese technology raises questions not just about what the U.S. has to show for its spending, but also about larger concerns regarding America’s ability to compete with its main rival.

“Kamala Harris said the Biden administration spent $1 trillion on green energy, and if we’re now falling short in that area, one has to ask where the money went,” said Daniel Turner, the founder and executive director of Power The Future, a conservative advocacy group for rural energy communities. “None of it seems to have materialized.”

But the situation, as they say in Hollywood, is complicated. While China’s natural resources, economic structure, and ideology give it some advantages when it comes to producing EV batteries, that market is but a star in the sprawling battery universe. On the cutting edge of battery technology, which includes grid storage and backup along with classified programs, several experts told RealClearInvestigations that U.S. technology remains unrivaled.

An RCI look at the evolving landscape of batteries suggests that, given the immense resources the U.S. and China have poured into the technology, it is a good barometer of key advantages and disadvantages each rival superpower possesses. But the limits of that technology also mean it may never provide either side with true superiority.

“Mature Technology”

At its core, a battery still relies on what Alessandro Volta pioneered two centuries ago, when he produced a stream of continuous juice by separating discs of copper and zinc with material soaked in Mediterranean brine.

“It’s a very mature technology in many ways; it’s not a ‘new thing’ because there are no new battery chemistries,” said Mark Mills, the executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics. “To make lithium batteries, you always need copper and aluminum, and lithium of course, then you need the trace metals needed, depending on the battery type, those could be cobalt, nickel, manganese, or iron oxide.”

The challenge for battery innovators is how to pack as much power as possible into the unit, while also extending the battery’s hours and lifespan and reducing its weight and cost. Breakthroughs are always possible, but incremental advances are the norm, and a big boom could be years away.

“Battery technology is consistently improving, but the process is slow,” said Brent Bennett, an energy expert at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “We are used to computing power, which scales at 50 percent per year, or software, where advances seem to come every day. Batteries, and energy technologies in general improve at rates of three to five percent per year.”

But there are always new combinations and seemingly endless uses for them. At “The Battery Guy” website, for example, one can scroll pages of offerings under 16 different categories, from dog collars to voting machines, and 13 different “battery types,” from the familiar alkaline to “nickel metal hydride” or “nickel cadmium” and “pure lead.” 

Most of these fall into the first of two battery categories, that of “SLI,” or “starting, lighting, and ignition.” But the real high-tech work in modern batteries is in “UPS,” or “uninterrupted power supply,” which is instrumental for data centers, backup power, industrial machinery, cellphone towers, and more, and it is here U.S. technology shines, according to several battery developers.

It is unlikely that batteries alone will ever provide sufficient power to back the grid for long periods of time if conventional sources falter. The world’s largest battery backup system, in Fairbanks, Alaska, is designed to keep the town running for up to seven minutes before backup generators can kick in.

China’s Advantage

All the recent stories about China’s dominance involve EV batteries, several experts noted. The featured players on that field are BYD Auto and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), with its “Shenxing Superfast Charging Battery.”

When it comes to making EVs, China enjoys some undeniable advantages. The country possesses greater supplies of the critical ingredients for batteries, and it has also built greater refining capabilities to turn these elements into usable materials. Chinese companies also benefit from much cheaper labor costs.

In addition, the Chinese Communist Party labeled batteries a key component of energy policy more than a decade ago and has featured them in consecutive “Five-Year Plans,” the staple of Communist central planning. In that span, the EV and battery industry there benefited from an estimated $500 billion in state money that provided cheap land, tax breaks, subsidies, and more for battery makers.

The mining and refining that go into making EV batteries come with environmental costs that are of little concern to party leaders in Beijing, who are focused strictly on economic power. Similarly, the country simply tosses unsold products like EVs into fields to rot, potentially causing greater environmental damage.

Finally, there is the black, sulfurous cloud that looms over China’s manufacturing push. China’s EV and battery boom, like much of its industry, relies on coal for much of its power, and the country burns more coal than any nation on earth, accounting for more than half of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions from that source.

“Right now, China controls the supply chain and it is hugely subsidized,” said H. Sterling Burnett, a policy director at the conservative Heartland Institute. “If you control those markets, have cheap or even slave labor, and don’t care a whit about the people who do the mining and refining, if you have government support and lax standards like that it would be a surprise if you weren’t the leader in the industry.”

Not So Green

Despite China’s mammoth carbon footprint – it is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases – stories championing its superiority in renewable energy projects have long been a staple of those pushing green policies to combat what they characterize as the “existential threat” of global warming. 

In 2010, prior to one of his many visits to China, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, “the self-evident fact is that China will clean our clocks in terms of addressing the green economy if we don’t wake up to the opportunities and do the same.” Two years ago, a bipartisan group of mayors praised China’s green initiatives after a visit there, and last year, the New York Times hailed “China’s green triumph.”

Today, the EV batteries that have left many Westerners starry-eyed come with strings. There are U.S. firms that could match China’s steps, several experts told RCI, but they are unlikely to do so for a variety of reasons. These include the fact that batteries absorbing such jolts of juice wear down quickly, the superchargers these batteries require are rare, especially among car owners, and the EV market is faltering in the U.S. 

“It’s an impressive feat,” Mills said of the Chinese announcements. “But it’s not unique. There are lots of people who can give you 60-plus percent of that in 20 minutes or less with superchargers, that’s not new. The problem is it is around 20 to 50 times more expensive than [charging] overnight.”

Neither CATL nor Tesla, the top EV company in the Western world that sometimes partners with Chinese firms, responded to requests for comment.

The cost of building an EV-charging infrastructure in the U.S. equal to what exists today for gasoline and diesel vehicles would be $2-$4 trillion, according to a 2024 report by the National Center for Energy Analytics. And that’s just for commonly sold EVs – building a supercharging infrastructure that could juice motorists for more than 300 miles in minutes would cost vastly more, Mills said.

The fact that China may be first in this area is more a reflection of its domestic economy than superior technology, experts said. China’s automotive system is in a more fledgling state than America’s and, lacking the infrastructure to power gas and diesel vehicles, China decided to take an electric route as it builds out. Something similar happened in the cellphone world in the 1990s, where Europe, lacking the continent-wide phone infrastructure of the U.S., used the gadgets much more widely than Americans, said Chris Antoniou, the owner of the EVERLAST brand and “The Battery Expert” who has spent a quarter century in the battery world and crisscrossed China looking at “hundreds” of battery-related businesses.

“I’m not surprised because you have a huge part of our economy backed by oil and gas,” he told RCI. “Plus, the world’s economy is also driven by that, plus the American auto makers slow played the transition. It’s a niche market and the only reason EVs exist is for green people and climate change.”

Bennett, whose PhD thesis was focused on developing large-scale batteries, agreed. “We still have world-class battery technology and technology development,” he said. “The problem is getting from a prototype to a commercial project, and that valley of death has been hard to bridge here. Profitable battery companies require not just good technology but also massive scale.”

Biden Bucks

The billions the Biden administration poured into batteries were intended “to boost the domestic production of advanced batteries and battery materials nationwide.” Yet, much of the money was directed to political allies in the green energy sector – some of whom lacked any experience in the field – while also focusing too heavily on EVs, according to administration critics and many energy experts.

Bennett echoed that view, while Turner said that for too long, climate has “served as a shield,” in which imputed good intentions can mask backscratching and failure.

Still, despite sectors like defense and grid storage where U.S. battery technology excels, one big question remains: Why hasn’t the money showered on green energy projects under Biden shaved the competitive edges China has achieved?

“We did spend oodles of money, and the One Big Beautiful Bill the Republican congressional majority passed last year maintained subsidies for both battery manufacturing and installing battery systems on the grid,” Bennett said. “But the U.S. should not try to force technology to be adopted or scaled in the way that China is doing. We need to give private markets the space and regulatory certainty to develop on their own and stop trying to use taxpayer money to ‘create’ new industries.”

Biden also left office with a regulatory system that made the toll over the bridge to market too high, burdens that do not exist or are easily waived by Communist Party officials in China.

“The regulations here are basically hostile to these sorts of industries,” Mills said.

The U.S. Scene

Just how big the gap between China and the U.S. may be depends, to some extent, on which expert one consults. For example, last month the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition released a report saying that, “for the first time, American factories have the capacity to supply 100% of future U.S. energy storage projects with American-made battery energy storage systems – including advanced power electronics, battery management systems, controls equipment, operational hardware, and specially engineered and fabricated steel enclosures designed for grid-scale facilities.”

The cutting edge for battery companies in the U.S. isn’t EVs. On EverLast’s home page, for example, it lists “cars, trucks, boats, powersports, fleet vehicles and generators” but not EVs.

In at least one area – military applications – Antoniou and others told RCI the United States is far ahead of the world. This has been true for decades, as when, during the buildup for the invasion of Iraq from Kuwait, U.S. Army tanks had cutting-edge batteries that allowed them to keep their place in formation without having to refuel. 

Much of the Pentagon’s use of batteries is classified, but they are known to play a role in the drone warfare that has become part of combat in the Ukraine and Iran wars, and batteries are also part of high-tech weapons like the Navy’s “high-energy laser.” 

The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment, but the Trump administration has also poured money into battery supplies and technology, trying to bridge the drone gap between the U.S. and China.

What’s Ahead

In recent years, when the conversation was dominated by fear of catastrophic global warming and NetZero policies to fight it, grid storage batteries were usually seen as repositories for energy produced by renewables such as wind and solar. That juice needs to get from the panels and windmills to the grid, and batteries are the main method of storing and moving that power.

But U.S. industries have multiple visions for grid storage batteries. It is a mistake to see these batteries, the size of shipping containers stuffed with cargoes of supercomputers, as only or chiefly coupled with renewables, according to Aaron Zubaty, founder and chief executive of Eolian, a Silicon Valley energy storage company.

He argues these batteries should also be used to augment existing grids, and Eolian has developed batteries that can store power already produced in non-peak hours and then feed right back to the grid when needed. Since it is cheaper to squeeze the most out of a fading power plant, including coal, than it is to build a new plant, batteries can also prolong the life of those diminishing producers.

Another U.S. company, Form Energy, is utilizing what it calls “iron air battery technology,” which it manufactures in the repurposed former Weirton Steel factory in West Virginia. Essentially, Form is rusting and then un-rusting iron, generating power in the process that it stores in batteries. The company has been able to ramp that up to industrial scale, and last month announced a 12-gigawatt deal with an AI company to help sate the gargantuan energy appetite of its data centers.

“Large scale energy storage is by far the largest sector of the energy storage market, and it can be the primary support for the main power grid,” said the Coalition’s executive director, Noah Roberts. “And there we’re still leading in innovative battery technology.”

Even China’s big advantage in the supply chain could be mitigated, according to energy executives. At last year’s RealClearEnergy Forum, Zubaty said he believes the U.S. could build its own lithium supply chain, and last week the U.S. Geological Survey announced a find of potentially 2.3 million metric tons of lithium, enough to power America’s battery industry for a century or more. Brandon Craig, recently appointed chairman of the mining conglomerate BHP Americas, proposed a kind of NATO alliance between North and South American allies that could capitalize on big lithium deposits in Chile, Australia, and elsewhere.

Expanding battery production outside of the faltering U.S. EV market is also a plus, Roberts said. Currently, the battery industry is concentrated in Appalachia – where most of the recent lithium discovery sits – the Midwest, and the Southwest, but the Coalition estimates close to $100 billion in private investment in battery development and production by 2030, which in turn could produce 350,000 jobs.

In other words, any perceived gap in battery technology between the U.S. and China is mostly one of priorities rather than know-how. The most important issue with batteries is always power generated, and it is the tradeoffs between performance and price that limit designers. It’s the difference in regulatory attitude and framework, meanwhile, that warps production.

“The question is the same for every technology: Why does it seem like none of the things we buy were made here even though we invented them?” Mills said.