The president may disdain clean energy tech, but energy storage is also crucial for A.I. and defense — and China’s dominance in the sector has officials worried.
President Trump has been scornful of electric cars for years. But his administration is now pouring billions of dollars into the battery technology that powers them.
Large lithium-ion batteries have become one of the rare energy technologies that both parties in Washington strongly support — though for very different reasons.
The Biden administration saw batteries as a green energy tool crucial for addressing global warming and sought to encourage manufacturing them, for use in electric vehicles and to backstop wind and solar power on electric grids. The Trump administration has rolled back efforts to expand clean energy, but officials have nonetheless come to see batteries as essential for many of Mr. Trump’s priorities, including powering A.I. data centers and manufacturing drones for the military.
The Trump administration has been particularly alarmed by China’s dominance of global supply chains for lithium-ion batteries, and in recent months has made a major push to bolster domestic production of many battery components and associated critical minerals.
“There has been a growing appreciation for just how important batteries are for so many things,” said Tom Moerenhout, who leads the critical minerals initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “It’s not just E.V.s, it’s automation, robotics, data centers, drones for defense. And there’s a real move to making sure China doesn’t have a choke point here.”
Last week, the Energy Department awarded $500 million to seven companies that make battery components or process critical minerals like cobalt in the United States. Earlier this month, the Pentagon announced a $1.4 billion loan to an advanced battery start-up building a factory in Washington State. Federal agencies are funding various domestic efforts to produce graphite and lithium, two raw materials for batteries.
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