The largest battery factories in the world

in #economylast year

Here's a chart of the top ten:


source

Six are in China, two in the United States, one in Norway, and one in the EU.

The European Union has been screeching about the "unfairness" of the American Inflation Reduction Act (which aims to incentivise production of batteries, solar panels etc in the United States) - completely missing the point that the legislation is not aimed at the EU, it's aimed at China.

It's designed to persuade American multinationals to reshore production back to the USA from China.

Ah, but it will also incentivise European multi-nationals like Volkswagon to re-locate factories from China to the US, argues the EU.

For the EU, if a factory can't be in the EU, they'd rather it was in China than the USA.

Why? No-one knows. Perhaps it's down to sub-conscious anti-Americanism.

There is a solution: the EU could have it's own incentives for it's multinationals to re-locate from China to the EU.

The trouble is the EU has spent decades inserting "no state aid" clauses into the dozens of trade deals it's been signing across the world. It would be tough to renegotiate those deals.

The USA by contrast is unencumbered with trade deals. It has only one: NAFTA. And it squared things with Canada and Mexico by including them in the Inflation Reduction Act.