A short film: why America lost the battery race
(and how it can win it back)
TLDR: we worked on a short battery documentary with Spiral Studios!
Spiral Studios is a creative studio built for deep tech storytelling. Rahul and the team match world-class story telling to the companies building breakthrough technology.
We’ve been documenting the battery industry since 2020. Over that time, the United States has struggled to produce a clear winner in commercial-scale battery manufacturing. Despite around $100B of investment since 2020, any success at climbing out the valley of death to get to gigawatt-hour scale has remained elusive in the West so far, except Tesla.
The industry’s history has been sprinkled with academic breakthroughs that coexist alongside factory cancellations and bankruptcies, shifting political priorities, and difficult economics. We wrote about how state intervention could change the game, but there is no suggestion of it from this administration, while China continues to dominate the global battery market.
Yet entrepreneurs, scientists, and investors continue to build companies pushing battery chemistry, manufacturing, and commercialization forward. These are stories we wanted to tell.
We partnered with Rahul Dhiman and the team at Spiral Studios to produce a short documentary on the current state of the US battery industry, with a focus on California’s innovative ecosystem. Whether these efforts ultimately translate into globally competitive manufacturing remains an open question: what will it take for the United States to build a globally competitive battery industry?
The documentary features six individuals helping shape that future:
From left to right, top to bottom: Kara Rodby (Investor at Volta Energy Technologies), Jonathan Tan (CEO at Coreshell), Brenna Teigler (Co-Founder and CEO, Electrochemistry Foundry), Richard Wang (CEO at Voya Energy, Co-Founder at Electrochemistry Foundry, Former CEO at Cuberg), Vivas Kumar (CEO at Mitra Chem), Asma Sharafi (CTO at Ensurge Micropower).
We explore China’s technological leadership in lithium ion batteries, what has worked in the USA (and not), and where the next opportunities may lie.
We hope you enjoy, and that it contributes to a conversation about the future of battery manufacturing in the United States.
🌞 Thanks for reading!
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