US sets a battery strategy as demand heads for 707 GWh by 2035

Six pillars

The strategy organises the work under six pillars: targeting investment in the upstream and midstream supply chain; moving laboratory discoveries into commercial use faster; prioritising manufacturing process innovation; deploying batteries where they modernise the grid; coordinating with international partners; and investing in skilled people.

The demand figures cover transport and energy storage together. They are DOE's own estimate and projection, not a measure of what factories will actually build.

BattMan

The Battery Manufacturing Accelerator, shortened to BattMan, is the consortium DOE launched alongside the strategy. It is led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and sits under the manufacturing pillar: making cells and packs more reliably and cheaply, not only discovering new chemistries.

DOE's release does not give BattMan's budget or membership. Those are the figures to watch as the consortium starts work.

A consortium like this usually brings national laboratories, universities and manufacturers together around shared test lines, so that a process improvement proven in one place can be adopted by many factories rather than kept inside one company.

What it means outside the US

The strategy is American, but the problem it describes is global: battery demand is rising faster than factories, refining and skilled workers can follow. Countries that want electric transport and grid storage, Nepal included, depend on the same supply chain.

For electronics engineering students, the pillars on grid deployment and manufacturing point to the skills involved: battery management systems, power electronics for charging and storage, and the control and testing that make cells safe and reliable at scale.

From mine to battery pack

A lithium-ion battery passes through several industries before it reaches a car or a grid storage site. Minerals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite are mined, then refined into battery-grade chemicals in the midstream stage. Those chemicals are made into cathode and anode materials, coated onto foils, and assembled into cells, which are then built into modules and packs with their wiring, cooling and electronics.

The strategy's focus on manufacturing process innovation targets the cell stage, where small improvements in coating speed, drying energy and defect rates decide whether a factory is profitable. Its grid pillar targets the other end: using batteries to balance supply and demand on electricity networks, store solar power for the evening, and support the grid when a power plant trips.

Every pack also depends on a battery management system, an electronic controller that measures the voltage and temperature of each cell, balances their charge and shuts the pack down if something goes wrong. Designing those systems, and the power converters that charge and discharge the pack, is everyday work for electronics and electrical engineers.