Mateo Jaramillo was giving me his spiel about his battery company when he mentioned, in passing, that the battery was “not super efficient.”

在口若悬河地向我介绍他的电池公司时，马泰奥·哈拉米约顺口提到他的电池“效率不高”。

Oh. So that’s bad, right?

哦。这不是好事吧？

Not in this case, said Jaramillo, the chief executive of Form Energy. Efficiency is how much energy you get out of a battery compared with how much you put in when charging it. More efficiency is always nice, of course, but for the market that Form Energy is going after, what’s far more important is keeping down the cost of making the batteries.

这位Form Energy首席执行官说，也不尽然。效率是指你从电池中获得的能量与充电时投入的能量之比。当然，效率更高总是好事，但对于Form Energy所针对的市场来说，更重要的是降低电池的生产成本。

There’s no costly lithium in Form Energy’s batteries. Instead, there’s plain old iron, which people have been using since the Iron Age (which ended about 2,600 years ago). Form Energy’s batteries produce electricity when the iron in them rusts. They’re recharged by using electricity to return the rust to iron.

Form Energy的电池中没有用到价格不菲的锂。取而代之的是普普通通的铁，人们从铁器时代（大约止于2600年前）以来一直在使用的东西。Form Energy的电池通过铁的氧化反应来产生电力，而再充电则是通过电力将氧化物还原为铁。

Form Energy’s target markets include electric utilities, which need to store power when it’s plentiful and dribble it out when there’s demand for it. So much wind and solar generating capacity has been installed in some parts of the world that electricity prices in certain markets often go negative: The utilities literally pay customers to take their power because that’s cheaper than shutting down generation.

Form Energy的目标市场包括电力企业，这些公司需要在电力充足时储存电力，在需求高峰时将其释放出来。世界上一些地方已经安装了大量的风能和太阳能发电设备，以至于某些市场的电价经常为负值：电力企业实际上是付钱让客户用电，因为这比关闭发电设备更便宜。

For utilities, a battery farm that’s cheap to build and soaks up lots of inexpensive, or even negatively priced, electricity for later sale sounds like a great deal, even if it’s bulky and inefficient. Form Energy broke ground in August on its first commercial project, for Great River Energy, a nonprofit electricity cooperative in Minnesota.

对于电力企业来说，建设一个电池农场的成本很低，它可以吸收大量廉价甚至负价的电力，供以后出售，这听起来很划算，尽管它体积庞大，而且效率很低。Form Energy的首个商业项目于8月破土动工，客户是明尼苏达州的非营利性电力合作社Great River Energy。

There probably will never be an iron-air battery in a cellphone or electric vehicle, but Form Energy isn’t trying to conquer every niche. As the English say, horses for courses.

手机或电动汽车可能永远不会采用铁-空气电池，但Form Energy并不打算征服每一个细分市场。正如英国人说的，各尽其善。

I began this newsletter with Form Energy partly because I love the idea of capturing energy from rust, and partly because it’s part of a wave of American companies that are helping the United States try to get back to the leading edge of battery development.

我拿Form Energy作为本文的开头，部分原因是因为我喜欢从锈蚀中捕获能量的想法，部分原因也是因为它是美国众多帮助这个国家试图重返电池开发前沿的企业之一。

The United States has let the lithium-ion battery market slip away. John Goodenough, a University of Texas physicist, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for a variety of breakthroughs, including developing in 1980 a better cathode material for lithium-ion batteries. A start-up that attempted to commercialize it got hundreds of millions of dollars from the Obama administration but went bust. A Chinese company bought the start-up, A123, out of bankruptcy in 2013. Other Chinese companies plunged into lithium-ion battery production just as Americans were pulling back.

美国已经将锂离子电池市场拱手让予他人。得克萨斯大学物理学家约翰·古迪纳夫因多个突破性研究而与他人分享了2019年的诺贝尔化学奖，包括在1980年开发出更好的锂离子电池正极材料。一家试图将其商业化的初创企业从奥巴马政府那里获得了数亿美元，但最终破产。2013年，一家中国公司收购了破产的初创企业A123。就在美国企业退出撤出锂离子电池的生产之际，其他中国企业迅速进入了这个领域。

Today, China utterly dominates the global production of lithium-ion batteries, which go into electric vehicles, cellphones, laptops, cordless tools and much more. One Chinese company, CATL, accounted for 38 percent of global production of electric vehicle batteries in the first seven months of this year, while another, BYD, was second at 16 percent, according to SNE Research of South Korea. No American companies were in the top 10.

今天，中国完全主导了全球锂离子电池的生产，这些电池用于电动汽车、手机、笔记本电脑、无线工具等众多产品。根据韩国SNE Research的数据，今年前七个月，宁德时代占全球电动汽车电池产量的38%，而另一家中国公司比亚迪位居第二，占16%。前十名中没有美国公司。

Mind you, it’s wonderful for the fight against global warming that China has brought down the price of lithium-ion batteries and the price of solar panels, which help charge those batteries, as my colleague David Wallace-Wells wrote this month. But it would be good for the U.S. economy if Americans were making, not just buying, more of that planet-saving equipment.

需要注意的是，正如我的同事戴维·华莱士-威尔斯本月曾撰文指出的那样，中国在降低锂离子电池价格和太阳能电池板价格方面的成就（太阳能电池板有助于为锂离子电池充电）对于对抗全球变暖来说是一件好事。但如果美国人能制造更多这种拯救地球的设备，而不仅仅是购买，将有利于美国经济。

Things are moving in a better direction now. Under President Biden, incentives in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act are spurring major investments in batteries, including domestic production capacity for lithium-ion batteries. Also, the Department of Energy has pumped billions of dollars into development of new kinds of batteries, including promising solid-state batteries, which use solid electrolytes instead of liquids or gels. The initiative includes a “Long Duration Storage Shot,” whose goal is to reduce energy storage costs by 90 percent from their 2020 level, in batteries that provide at least 10 hours’ duration, by 2030.

现在事情正在朝着好的方向发展。在拜登总统的领导下，《两党基础设施法》和《降低通胀法案》中的激励措施正在推动对电池的重大投资，包括锂离子电池的国内生产能力。此外，美国能源部还投入数十亿美元用于开发新型电池，包括前景广阔的固态电池，这种电池使用固态电解质代替液体或凝胶。相关项目包括一个“长时储能攻关”计划，目标是到2030年将储能时长10小时以上电池的储能成本从2020年的水平降低90%。

Last year President Biden issued an executive order that “when new technologies and products are developed with support from the United States government, they will be manufactured in the United States whenever feasible and consistent with applicable law.”

去年，拜登总统发布行政命令，规定“在美国政府的支持下开发的新技术和新产品，只要可行并符合适用法律，就在美国制造”。

The federal government’s initiative “mimics what China did over a decade ago by using demand- and supply-side subsidies and government support to build a supply chain,” Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy said in a report last year.

哥伦比亚大学全球能源政策中心在去年的一份报告中指出，联邦政府的举措“模仿了中国十多年前的做法，即利用供需两侧补贴以及政府支持来建立供应链”。

China has such a big lead in lithium-ion batteries that I have trouble imagining the United States catching up, although simply supplying domestic needs would be a welcome development. I think the most likely path for the United States to leapfrog China is with new technologies, such as Form Energy’s iron-air battery.

中国在锂离子电池领域遥遥领先，我很难想象美国能赶上来，能做到满足国内需求都谢天谢地了。我认为美国最有可能超越中国的途径是采用新技术，如Form Energy的铁-空气电池。

I love the creativity of battery designers, who rummage through the periodic table for elements with the ideal electronegativity and other characteristics. ARPA-E, the research-and-development branch of the Department of Energy, is funding start-ups that are working on battery chemistries including lithium-air, aluminum-air, zinc-air, sodium metal, sodium beta-alumina, vanadium redox flow and Prussian blue dye (yes, really). There are also energy storage technologies that aren’t batteries at all, such as pumping water to the top of a hill or storing heat in the form of molten salt.

我喜欢电池设计师的创造力，他们在元素周期表中寻找具有理想电负性和其他特性的元素。ARPA-E是美国能源部的研发部门，它正在资助从事电池化学研究的初创公司，它们包括锂-空气、铝-空气、锌-空气、金属钠、β-氧化铝钠、钒氧化还原液流和普鲁士蓝染料（是的，真的）。还有一些根本不是电池的储能技术，例如将水抽到山顶，或以熔盐的形式储存热量。

“One-size-fits-all doesn’t pass the sniff test,” Eric Dresselhuys, the chief executive of ESS of Wilsonville, Ore., which makes an iron flow battery (different from an iron-air battery), told me. “How many different kinds of salad dressing are there? It’s impossible to believe that one energy storage tech is going to win.”

“用单一方案适用所有情况是经不起推敲的，”俄勒冈州威尔逊维尔市ESS公司的首席执行官埃里克·德雷塞尔胡伊斯告诉我，该公司生产铁液流电池（不同于铁-空气电池）。“沙拉酱有多少种？无法相信一种储能技术会胜出。”

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-funded think tank, has been banging the drum since 2012 for the United States to focus on battery development. A report it released in July said the U.S. response to China on electric vehicles “should include investing in R&D to accelerate technological innovation, stimulating consumer adoption of E.V.s (e.g., by deploying charging infrastructure) and defensive trade measures.”

信息技术与创新基金会是一家由科技界资助的智库，自2012年以来一直在呼吁美国重视电池的研发。该基金会7月发布的一份报告称，美国在电动汽车问题上对中国的回应“应包括投资研发以加速技术创新、刺激消费者接受电动汽车（例如，通过充电基础设施的部署），以及防御性贸易措施”。

I spoke to the report’s author, Stephen Ezell, the foundation’s vice president for global innovation policy, about where the battery race between the United States and China is headed. “Tech policy scholars are going to look back on this in 20 years as a test case of whether more muscular policies can succeed,” he said. “I think so long as we do make it a national priority, we can succeed.”

我与该报告的作者、基金会负责全球创新政策的副总裁斯蒂芬·埃泽尔讨论了美中电池竞赛的前景。“20年后，科技政策学者会将其视作一个案例，检验更强硬的政策能否取得成功，”他说。“我认为，只要我们真的把它作为国家的优先事项，我们就能成功。”