Why did the U.S. miss the battery revolution?

Once in a great while, Twitter X can still be a place for interesting discussions instead of breathless political screeching. Yesterday was one of those times. I wrote a thread asking why America missed the battery revolution, and got a lot of very interesting responses. So I thought I’d redo that thread as a blog post, and expand on it a bit. Basically, batteries are a technological revolution in progress. They’re a key part of a larger, more general revolution: the replacement of controlled combustion with electricity as the main way that human beings produce energy and move it around. The key advantage of batteries — the thing that no other technology or energy source can really do well — is that they let you store energy, move it around, and then remove it again. They’re a way to move energy through both time and space. I first realized the transformative power of batteries when I saw people using battery-powered leaf blowers as a weapon in the riots of 2020. But what really drove

Once in a great while, Twitter X can still be a place for interesting discussions instead of breathless political screeching. Yesterday was one of those times. I wrote a thread asking why America missed the battery revolution, and got a lot of very interesting responses. So I thought I’d redo that thread as a blog post, and expand on it a bit. Basically, batteries are a technological revolution in progress. They’re a key part of a larger, more general revolution: the replacement of controlled combustion with electricity as the main way that human beings produce energy and move it around. The k