Can demand-pull industrial policy actually build a battery industry? I've seen this movie before — not in Brussels, but in Russia. Around 2015, the Russian government wanted a domestic wind industry. Their solution was elegant: offer a feed-in tariff roughly double the prevailing energy price, but only if your wind farm hit 60% local content. Later raised to 80%. Within a few years, there were turbine blade factories, nacelle assembly lines, and local supply chains that hadn'

I spent the past week at InterBattery in Seoul — walking the floors, sitting across from engineers and business development teams, and following up on partnerships between European battery startups and Korean manufacturers. Here is what actually happened, and why it matters for how you should be thinking about your battery supply chain right now. It Was Bigger. Meaningfully Bigger. 75,000 visitors. That is not a rounding-up-to-sound-impressive number — the difference in energ

If a board member asked you today — "How do we manage the security and continuity risk in our Chinese partnerships?" — what would your answer be?

Upstream battery innovations, coupled with strong regulations, might let Europe avoid competition from China.

Over the past twelve to eighteen months, the automotive industry has behaved in a way that commentators find deeply unsettling: it has cancelled things. Depending on one’s accounting preferences, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five EV programmes have been scrapped, postponed, or politely redefined across 2025 and early 2026. For some observers, this was sufficient to declare that EV demand had finally met its limits. And yet, 2025 recorded more than 20 million EV s

Europe spends a lot of time talking about battery gigafactories. We discuss cell chemistries, subsidy schemes, factory locations, and how many gigawatts of capacity will be built by when. All of that matters. But a part of the battery value chain rarely makes it into these conversations, even though it has a disproportionate impact on cost, risk, and credibility. Battery chemicals. Not cells or packs, but the solvents, electrolytes, and precursors that sit upstream of every c

I used to think that US sanctions were reserved for criminals, dictators and Russians. Well, a few months ago, an ICC judge authorised an investigation into alleged war crimes by US personnel in Afghanistan. Then she was sanctioned. Her bank access was frozen. Amazon and Microsoft shut down her accounts. She was treated like an international criminal. If that wasn’t a wake-up call for all working with the USA, this January should have been. With Trump openly threatening tarif

After 9 days of the free trial of 2026, can someone please tell me how to cancel the subscription? This week was entertaining: suddenly everyone became a geopolitics expert.
 Mostly AI / data / everything-cool profiles explaining global affairs — often from countries that haven’t had a serious geopolitical shock in 50 years. Fun. Briefly. My own introduction to geopolitics was less theoretical.
In 2014, I was CIO for five power plants in Russia. One ran on a Siemens turbine d

Without clean electrons there are no clean fuels

Chinese EV Exports rose despite tariffs.

Europe keeps announcing “battery partnerships” with Asian players with great enthusiasm — but when you look closely, the only thing landing here in any meaningful quantity is concrete. A T&E/Carbone4 report, which came out this February and which I’ve missed, lays out what many of us working in manufacturing have suspected for years: technology isn’t coming, know-how isn’t coming, and the only thing being localised is the assembly hall.

Robotaxis still don’t make money — not in San Francisco, not in Shenzhen. Yet both the US and China keep pushing, each for their own reasons. I dug into two Economist articles this week and wrote a breakdown of why both countries are accelerating into a business model that still has its unit economics stuck in reverse.

Mega-corporations rarely die from a single dramatic mistake. They fade through a sequence of small decisions that felt “pragmatic” at the time.

Why Tesla Pivots to Korea from China?

Why touchscreens are not the key strength of the Chinese car industry.