D.C. Residents Could Be Left in the Dark Without An Essential Federal Utility Assistance Program
The federal utility assistance program is in limbo after the entire staff was fired in April.
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This is the fourth episode of a five-part series exploring the lithium-ion battery supply chain. If you haven’t listened to the first three episodes, we recommend you start there.
China has been the world’s biggest battery manufacturer for over a decade. Chinese companies got in the game early, building an industry from scratch in the 2000s. By 2022, according to the IEA, China manufactured 76% of the world’s batteries.
But that’s changing. Battery factories in the U.S. and around the world are running 24/7 to churn out millions of cells – thanks to growing demand for storage all over the world, and government support for local manufacturing.
In this episode, we’re exploring the rapid buildout of factories to support the battery economy. We’ll tour a lithium-ion battery factory in upstate NY to see how batteries are made at scale. And we ask where a small US factory fits into a global battery market dominated by China.
So far over this season we've traced the global lithium-ion battery supply chain from mining to processing to manufacturing. And we've put it all into a geopolitical and economic context.
Batteries can replace gasoline in our cars, or diesel in our generators with electricity. But batteries and petroleum-based fuels share something in common: they both rely on energy-intensive processes to turn extracted materials into something useful.
To produce enough batteries to reach global net-zero goals, the International Energy Agency says we'll need to increase production of critical minerals by six fold by 2040. It's a monumental task.
Season 4, Episode 1 Batteries are at the center of the clean energy economy. Will they shape geopolitics in similar ways to oil? We need to electrify much...
On April 30, 2025, the United States and Ukraine signed a long-anticipated economic partnership agreement establishing the US–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA jointly organized a workshop from December 3rd to 6th, 2024, in Bellagio, Italy, on how to finance responsible critical mineral supply chains.
The critical minerals executive order signed by President Trump on March 20, 2025, aims to significantly increase domestic production of critical minerals within the United States.