The recently announced terminations of battery manufacturing facilities in Midland and Big Rapids (Michigan), are part of a disturbing retreat for American technology and manufacturing, in part orchestrated by anti-science MAGA ideologues.
Director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, wrote last week that batteries are the “crucial technology for the 21st century”, pointing to a “worrying dependency” on a single country — China, which currently dominates that space.
In Michigan, Republican politicians attacked a proposed cooperative venture with the Chinese company Gotion, making chest pounding claims about National security concerns, tapped out on their Chinese made keyboards.
But hobbling America’s capabilities in a crucial technology hardly seems productive.
It’s a paradox that the key enabling technologies of the defining industrial transition of this century, – solar cells, advanced wind turbines, and lithium based batteries, were all invented in the United States, with taxpayer funded research, but have since been commercialized successfully by our most serious global competitors.
The Chinese obtained these technologies by inviting and incentivizing western manufacturers to locate there, then mastering and building on the engineering themselves.
The Gotion project and others were an attempt to rebalance that equation, by inviting Chinese manufacturers with world leading technology into the US, and using that platform to develop our own competitive industries and expertise.
The fossil fuel industry has long regarded clean energy as a threat, and prioritized electing a Republican administration with deep commitments to the 19th century technologies that made Oil Oligarchs wealthy.
Big Fossil has also successfully operated an active disinformation campaign that has seeded anti-clean energy messaging in areas where local news sources have disappeared, and skewed social media algorithms are, for many, the only information resource. Opposition to Gotion was tied to MAGA style activists working against all forms of clean energy.
A combination of that disinformation, and the parochial interests of short sighted politicians, has been a perfect storm for some clean energy efforts.
As a result, the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, “America has given up its effort to challenge China in the renewable-energy industries that increasingly power the global economy.”
The consequences could be immense.
In a recent interview, Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley related that his recent trips to China to evaluate EV technologies were “the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen”.
“The quality of their vehicles is far superior” he said, adding, “We’re in a global competition, If we lose this we do not have a future at Ford.”
Pressed further, Farley pointed out the importance of a domestic manufacturing industry. “What happens if you have to defend yourself? Is Google going to make the tanks?”
Actually, it probably won’t be the tanks we have to worry about.
A few months ago, Ukraine sent shock waves thru defense establishments across the world, when, using a few trucks full of cheap drone vehicles, parked near Russian airbases, they destroyed as much as a third of Russia’s strategic bomber force in a surprise attack.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s drones, costing a few hundred dollars each, have made battlefields impassable even for main battle tanks costing millions of dollars. We are clearly at an inflection point in military technology, and history is rife with examples of failed empires whose military tactics were overwhelmed by newer technologies.
The key enabling tech of this new warfare is batteries, and China makes up to 90 percent of them.
The only way to compete in the battery space is to create a domestic market for those batteries, and the way to do that is to incentivize EV manufacturing. But EVs are anathema to MAGA and the fossil bros whose only loyalty is to the next quarter’s profits, not America, its constitution, or democracy.
The withdrawal of those incentives is a big reason for Xalt’s impending departure.
Meanwhile, Republicans have been working diligently to undermine every aspect of America’s long time technological and science leadership, in large part because science has delivered so many truths, about climate and other areas, that GOP donors don’t want to hear.
But disrupting and dissolving our technological leadership will have a long term cost. A recent study by the Dallas Federal Reserve showed, that non-defense R&D spending at agencies like NASA, NIH and the Department of Energy is estimated to account for about a fifth of post-World War II business-sector productivity growth in the US.
Trump administration’s wrecking ball approach has already disrupted America’s international image, as well as a generation of young researchers, causing bright students to look for alternative careers.
Policies that continue to sabotage those contributions may leave future American startups without the research base or talent pool they must have to compete.
- Political opposition to Chinese investment may be undermining America’s ability to develop battery manufacturing expertise
- Ford-CATL licensing agreements offer alternative models for accessing Asian battery manufacturing knowledge
- Industry experts warn that building battery capabilities without learning from established producers is unrealistic
The collapse of Gotion Inc.’s $2.4 billion battery manufacturing project in Big Rapids, Michigan, represents more than just another failed economic development deal. For an industry still learning to compete with Asian manufacturing prowess, it signals a troubling pattern: political opposition may be undermining America’s ability to acquire the technical expertise needed to build a competitive domestic battery sector.
When Gotion first announced its Michigan plans in October 2022, the project promised 2,350 jobs and represented something potentially more valuable than investment dollars—a chance for American workers to learn from one of the world’s leading battery manufacturers. The company, a subsidiary of China’s Gotion High-Tech, brought decades of large-scale battery production experience that US manufacturers are still working to develop.
“There’s a world of difference between writing a recipe or seeing a recipe and going, ‘Yeah, I know how to do that,’ and actually producing the dish,” explained Celina Mikolajczak, then Chief Battery Technical Officer at Lyten, in a 2024 Battery Show North America panel discussion. “Asia has been doing the cooking. They have been making the cells and learning all the little things, all the little details, all the little bits and bobs of what makes a good cell, what makes a high-volume production line.”
The Gotion project would have provided exactly this kind of hands-on manufacturing knowledge transfer—Chinese expertise applied in an American facility, creating jobs while building domestic capabilities.
America needs politicians with enough backbone to make it clear, in no uncertain terms, to all citizens exactly what MAGA is doing to destroy their futures. Sadly there are damn few of them. There is an urgent need for a 3rd party that can gain support, or a clearing out of the vast majority of the Democratic party politicians.
Great article, Peter!