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The cofounders of The Impact Project have a three-step test for voters.
Third Way’s head of climate and energy argues that both sides have lost voters’ trust, with serious consequences for our infrastructure.
An investor argues that climate tech should learn to stop worrying and love the robots.
We have run out of time for half measures, argues the Natural Resources Defense Council’s head of climate science and policy.
The problem isn’t just affordability, two researchers from Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub argue. Bill volatility also creates pain for electricity consumers.
GOP lawmakers know climate change is real. But they lack political incentives to do anything about it.
Two former defense officials argue that Rivian may be as important to America’s national security as SpaceX.
For years, policymakers have debated electric vehicles as if they were merely another consumer product. They are not.
Electric vehicles are the largest source of demand for advanced batteries, and batteries are rapidly becoming one of the foundational technologies of the 21st century. They power cars, drones, data centers, grid storage systems, autonomous weapons, military platforms. Over time, they will power most of the wider economy. In strategic terms, batteries are beginning to look less like mere automobile components and more like semiconductors — that is, chokepoint technologies critical to the functioning of modern society.
The future of the U.S. EV industry matters far beyond transportation. Given that electric vehicles remain the primary source of demand for batteries, a healthy U.S. battery sector requires an American auto industry that produces and sells EVs at scale. Without a strategic plan that marshals both public and private sector investment in support of EV uptake by American consumers, the U.S. will leave itself with critical security vulnerabilities — not in some far-distant future that may never come to pass, but in the present.
Right now, China rules the global battery ecosystem. Chinese firms lead not only in battery manufacturing, but also in the upstream processing of critical minerals, the production of midstream cathodes and anodes, and the commercialization of next-generation battery technologies. China also controls most of the global processing capacity for graphite, the key material used in battery anodes, and dominates production of the intermediate components that determine battery cost and performance.
The implications of this imbalance extend well beyond auto production, or even mere economics. As we know well from our time serving in the Pentagon, the Department of Defense’s future force will rely increasingly on electrification. Tactical drones and other autonomous systems, portable power units, communications equipment, unmanned logistics vehicles, and resilient military installations all require advanced batteries. In case any of this remained in doubt, the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated beyond dispute the central importance of battery-powered platforms on the modern battlefield. The same will inevitably prove true in the Indo-Pacific, where the U.S. military is investing heavily in unmanned systems designed to operate across vast distances and obviate risks from lengthy supply lines.
Unfortunately for the Pentagon, defense demand alone is far too small to sustain a globally competitive battery industry. The Department of Defense cannot create the manufacturing scale necessary to compete with China, as military procurement represents only a tiny fraction of battery demand. Only the commercial market can provide the volume needed to drive innovation, lower costs, and sustain domestic production, and the commercial market is driven overwhelmingly by electric vehicles. Here, the loss of consumer tax incentives undermined American automakers’ turn towards EVs, causing them to write off tens of billions of dollars of investments.
This is the strategic reality often missing from America's energy debate. Even a country as large and powerful as the United States cannot maintain a world-class battery industry while undercutting the largest source of battery demand.
Some policymakers appear to believe that the United States can support battery manufacturing for military systems, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and grid storage while simultaneously slowing EV adoption. That is wishful thinking.
Without a robust domestic EV market, battery manufacturers lose the scale that makes investment attractive, and production will inevitably move elsewhere. That's fine for other manufacturing sectors like t-shirts and toys, but unacceptable for technologies with critical national security applications.
The United States has seen this movie before. American firms pioneered many of the technologies behind solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and lithium iron phosphate batteries, but China ultimately captured much of the manufacturing base for these products. Through sustained investment, patient industrial policy, and relentless focus on scale, Chinese firms drove down costs and built ecosystems that are now extraordinarily difficult to replicate. The result is that companies such as CATL and BYD occupy increasingly dominant positions in the battery sector, akin to those once held by American technology champions.
As a result, China's EV industry is now becoming a global export powerhouse. Chinese automakers are no longer producing low-cost copies of Western vehicles. As we know firsthand from a recent tour of the Xiaomi factory outside Beijing, Chinese factories are now producing technologically sophisticated products that are winning on price, performance, and quality when compared with the best that the United States or Europe have on offer. As a result, companies like BYD are rapidly gaining a larger share of the huge Chinese market and rapidly expanding their footprint internationally.
This matters because automobiles remain one of the world's largest manufacturing industries. The global auto market generates trillions of dollars in economic activity and supports millions of jobs. For more than a century, American prosperity has been tied in part to leadership in transportation manufacturing, but that leadership can no longer be taken for granted.
In China, electric vehicles and hybrids already account for more than half of new vehicle sales. Across Europe, adoption continues to rise. In many developing countries, falling battery prices are making electric transportation increasingly affordable. The direction of travel is unmistakable: The global market is shifting toward electrification.
If American automakers fail to compete in that market, they will steadily lose market share abroad. That would not simply reduce profits. It would weaken one of the country's most important industrial sectors and diminish the manufacturing base that has historically supported national defense in times of crisis.
Recent geopolitical events underscore the stakes. The disruptions to Middle East energy infrastructure because of the Iran conflict and the related threats to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz served as a reminder that oil remains vulnerable to geopolitical shocks. Electrification is not a complete solution to energy insecurity, but economies (and militaries) with greater electrification, diversified power sources, and advanced battery industries are better positioned to withstand such disruptions.
China understands this. Beijing does not view batteries, EVs, renewable energy infrastructure, and industrial competitiveness as separate issues. It views them as components of a single strategic package. As energy storage, modularity, and transmission become the key enabling technologies of the global economy, the United States must adopt this same holistic approach.
This does not mean attempting to replicate China's economic model or wantonly abandoning domestic fossil fuel production. It simply requires recognizing that batteries are a strategic industry — and that electric vehicles are the primary mechanism through which that industry achieves scale.
During the 20th century, policymakers understood that leadership in steel, automobiles, aerospace, semiconductors, and telecommunications had national security implications, and thoughtful policymakers sought to build U.S. advantages in these key sectors. The same logic applies today.
The question is no longer whether the future of transportation is electric. Most of the world has already answered that question. The issue before us now is whether the United States intends to build the batteries that will power the next era of economic growth, military capability, and industrial strength or import them from China, with all the vulnerabilities that will entail.
A longtime energy analyst argues that there are no solutions to the hyperscale problem, only tradeoffs.
Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk need sign-off from fewer than a dozen board members to commit their companies to multibillion-dollar moves. The power plants that supply their data centers need sign-off from 13 states (plus D.C.), thousands of generators, millions of customers, and a federal regulator whose ratemaking standard predates the personal computer in order to build anything new.
Everyone in tech knows about the CEOs of the foundational artificial intelligence labs. Only energy nerds know the names of the people running our grid operators. That anonymity is a feature, not a bug. Grid operators generally think in decades, not years. But right now, they’re telling the U.S. that it has years, not decades, to figure out its own new path forward.
For decades, this process sufficed for energy generators (and regulators) grown accustomed to gradual, predictable load growth. But over the past several years, the scale and speed of increasing energy demand has overwhelmed the supply -side’s ability to respond. The resulting strain on the grid has reverberated through every rung of the supply chain, delaying development timelines, increasing costs, and elevating energy from political conversations to dinner table discussions.
The loudest creaks and groans are coming from PJM Interconnection, North America’s largest grid operator. Residential bills in the PJM service area are climbing at a dizzying pace. Recent capacity auctions have ended with record prices, which PJM’s own market monitor blames on the explosive growth in data center power demand. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has attempted to pressure PJM to lower its capacity price cap. Even Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has called on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to develop new procedures to help get data centers online faster.
David Mills, PJM’s CEO, published a 70-page report in May acknowledging that current market rules cannot keep pace with AI-driven load growth. And yet he also refused to recommend a path forward, leaving the decision to “state regulators and legislatures, to FERC, to consumers.”
The most essential grid infrastructure, he explained, “is not a price curve or a performance obligation — it is legitimacy.” In other words, what’s broken isn’t a parameter inside the capacity market, but rather the capacity market itself, along with the political conditions under which it operates. PJM calls this the “credibility trap”: high prices accurately signal that new investment is needed, but when those prices become politically untenable, government intervenes and investment stalls.
The fix, Mills writes, “requires structural choices, not just parameter adjustments.”
Mills is speaking to a deeper issue with the grid than its ability to respond to shifting market dynamics, which is that hyperscalers and grid operators are built to solve two different kinds of problems. Hyperscalers solve engineering problems with specifiable objectives, known constraints, verifiable outcomes. Engineering problems reward concentrated authority and unilateral decision-making.
Grid operators, on the other hand, solve coordination problems. The information they rely on to do so is dispersed across millions of stakeholders, continuously revised and often contradictory, and operators’ preferences are not so much known as they are revealed through deliberation. FERC’s standard for wholesale rates is not whether those rates are objectively “correct,” but rather whether the market settled on those rates through fair competition. The process does not just determine the answer, it essentially is the answer.
This construction is the category error driving the current AI-grid collision. The electricity grid is not an engineering problem with coordination problems attached. It is a coordination problem with engineering problems embedded in it. Treat it as the former and you lose all the information that gets generated in the process of market-based price discovery. You also lose all the buy-in that occurs when real people are faced with real trade-offs and have to make hard, binding choices.
Mills did lay out three possible structural paths in his May letter:
These pathways are not equivalent — unlike with an engineering problem, there are no cut-and-dried solutions here. There are only trade-offs and questions about who bears their consequences. Path C is likely the better answer, while Path A is more expedient. The gap between them is the work PJM’s constituents have to manage over the coming years. PJM may choose the wrong path, or arrive at the right one too late.
The alternative is not hypothetical. If hyperscalers aren’t willing to wait for PJM customers to decide which path they want to take (and recent history suggests they are not) they will build behind-the-meter generation, sign bespoke deals with regulated utilities, and restart dormant nuclear plants. America would be left with two grids, one for compute, one for everything else. The first will be reliable and expensive. The second will be cheaper, fragile, and stranded with the costs of the system the first walked away from. The market would lose the dispatch signal, the error-correcting price mechanism, and the legitimacy of the system that has reliably powered the Mid-Atlantic for two decades.
Economist Friedrich Hayek described the limits of humans’ planning capabilities better than anyone in his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture, using the metaphor of the craftsman shaping his handiwork versus the gardener cultivating growth. The craftsman thinks they can make a perfect tool but repeatedly runs up against the boundaries of their own knowledge, whereas the gardener learns to manage new information as it arises, tending not to the product itself but rather to the conditions that produce it.
Hyperscalers are not bad actors. They have legitimate interests and the political capital to help shape the grid’s future. But we should resist the Newtonian urge to meet unexpected, swiftly moving demand with equally swift supply. Markets and physical systems both tend toward equilibrium, but the former finds it through deliberation, not collision. Instead of trying to unilaterally craft a better grid, hyperscalers might find a better path if they work with the practitioners who already know how to garden.
