Businesses in China expect to have 120 gigawatt-hours per year of battery manufacturing capacity in place by 2021, “enough to supply batteries for around 1.5 million Tesla Model S vehicles or 13.7 million Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrids per year” and leave the 35 GWh of output at Tesla’s Nevada gigafactory “in the dust,” Bloomberg reports, citing analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
China already manufactures 55%, the United States only 10%, of the lithium-ion batteries that power the world’s smart phones, laptops—and now, electric vehicles. “While Tesla may be building the biggest and splashiest factory, the Chinese government has launched a sweeping effort to increase the country’s dominant market share,” the news agency notes.
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“This is about industrial policy,” said BNEF analyst Colin McKerracher. “The Chinese government sees lithium-ion batteries as a hugely important industry in the 2020s and beyond.”
“The gigafactory announced three years ago sparked a global battery arms race,” added Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Managing Director Simon Moores. “China is making a big push.”
Global battery manufacturing is expected to grow from 103 to 273 GWh per year between 2017 and 2021, and the Bloomberg report points to differences in development pathway between China and the U.S.
“There are few, if any, individual Chinese battery companies that can match the scale of Tesla’s production toe to toe,” writes reporter Joe Ryan. “Yet while China lacks a dominant battery behemoth, it makes up for it with a constellation of smaller players, including Amperex Technology Ltd., Tianjin Lishen Battery Joint-Stock Co., and dozens of others.” Now, the country “plans to consolidate battery manufacturers to help the industry mature,” part of a drive to get five million new EVs on the road by 2020.
