Enervenue is developing a new 30-year battery based on American technology funded with American tax dollars, and it promised to build its first factory in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and bring 450 jobs to this Louisville suburb. They walked away from Shelbyville in 2024 and instead built a factory in Changzhou, China. Peter Navarro says technology funded by American tax dollars should be built in America. (Shutterstock/Blue Meta)

China’s Sneak Attack on the Battery American Taxpayers Paid For

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Technology that is developed with US taxpayer money should be manufactured in America, not China.

“We are an American company with a Chinese footprint.” So says Henning Rath, the German chief executive of EnerVenue, which started production at its first battery factory the same September that President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington. Rath said the date was a coincidence.

EnerVenue is not just another battery company. Its battery is a game changer. A steel vessel with nickel on one side, hydrogen on the other, and water in between, it cannot catch fire the way a lithium-ion battery can.

It uses no lithium. It uses no cobalt, the metal dug in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Chinese companies and refined in China. Its raw materials, by the company’s own list, are steel, nickel, fiberglass, resin, and water—four of them mined or refined in America, the fifth mined next door in Canada. And it runs 30 years, 10 times the life of the lithium-ion cells now going onto the American grid.

The American taxpayer built this battery twice. NASA developed the nickel-hydrogen battery half a century ago and has flown it ever since; the Hubble telescope ran on it for 19 years. But it needed platinum, and engineers built it one cell at a time for spacecraft. It was too expensive for anything on Earth.

Then a Stanford laboratory, on Energy Department money—the American taxpayer’s dime—found a way to make it without the platinum. The cost problem was solved. The commercial door was open.

Today, EnerVenue has the one storage chemistry that could let America compete in one of the world’s fastest-growing battery........

© The National Interest