You can't charge batteries with sanctimony
Swiss luxury beliefs play well in fashionable circles but ignore hard natural laws of energy
Switzerland is generally one of the more pragmatic and coherent countries in Europe, a continent otherwise driven askew by fantasial thinking. However, it unfortunately occasionally dabbles in the Nutella jar of luxury beliefs on the topic of energy, as a recent opinion piece in Heidi News1 illustrates. The premise of this editorial - falsely marketed as analysis - is that Trump focusing on oil is a strategic blunder because, instead, China is securing batteries.
To anyone who understands the difference between stocks and flows, this may come as a surprising conclusion since pitting batteries against oil is like declaring that water bottles have made wells obsolete. The author performs a sleight of hand when he obscures where the energy that is supposed to power these Chinese batteries actually comes from.
Between 2014 and 2024, China essentially added the entire EU electricity fleet to its generating capacity with fossil fuel plants alone, mostly coal2. It is currently building at least 40 nuclear reactors.
The strategic question is simple: Can you build enough cheap, reliable electricity to power an electrified economy, regardless of the source?
Both China and the US, now with the brilliant Energy Secretary Chris Wright, answer this question by pressing literally all the buttons at the same time. Sure, solar and wind, but mostly gas, coal, nuclear and hydro.
Cheap energy, in whatever form, is the single most important foundation for any form of prosperity, let alone industrial competitiveness. China’s EV industry is unviable without a massive increase in baseload capacity at the same time, whether it’s to power the cars or to power the factories that make them in the first place. Europe’s energy strategy, in contrast, guarantees power grid failures and a skyrocketing cost of energy, the two horsemen of deindustrialization and impoverishment.
The Heidi piece correctly notes that Chinese battery costs are plummeting. What it omits is that this cost curve depends entirely on cheap Chinese electricity for manufacturing, electricity that costs one fifth of Switzerland’s precisely because China pursued the all-sources energy strategy that the US now advocates, under Trump. Subsidies are a confounding factor but a structural reason why a car-maker like BYD can offer products at competitive prices is that those prices embed Chinese coal-fired electricity for industrial users. When CATL builds battery gigafactories across Europe, they are exporting the products of cheap energy to markets that have made cheap energy illegal.
In Europe, and unfortunately also in Switzerland, the Davos set pursue electric vehicles while rejecting nuclear and increasing baseload capacity. We attempt to charge batteries with moral superiority and streamwater alone. Even if all you wanted was more electric buses, you cannot even electrify transport without the electricity to charge it.
In the same decade, China added 250 times more annual CO2 production than Switzerland has saved. Incidentally, we should be celebrating this, as it is a signal that China is accelerating pulling people out of poverty. The European misery maximalism mental prison, net zero, accelerates pushing people into it instead.
Energy is driven by science and by hard, natural laws. Both Trump, and China, understand this. They are simply creating more energy at the lowest price. This strategy will guarantee the long term prosperity of their industries and citizens. The opposite strategy, that we blindly follow in Europe and Switzerland, is a path to guaranteed impoverishment.
Criticising Trump might be popular in fashionable circles, where luxury beliefs such as “batteries vs oil” have social benefits to one’s status. Notwithstanding what the art gallery crowd might think about it, the facts, science and natural laws of energy show that Trump is, if only on this issue, completely correct. And if Europeans actually cared about the prosperity of their continent, they wouldn't be advocating for anti-science policies like net zero.
China's industrial strategy works because they build power plants. Ours fails because we won't. You can't charge batteries with sanctimony.