Technology

It's like he wakes up every morning and asks himself "What can I do to make sure China owns the 21st century?"

Coal Brittain -> Petro Murica -> Electro China.

It's funny how China said years ago that was the plan and they're doing it while nobody stopped them because of short term greed.

Yes, China has very purposefully put itself at the forefront of the first technological revolution of the 21st century and done this at multiple levels (solar panel production, battery tech, EVs)

Meanwhile the American elites have decided that 19th century technology is were they want to be. Well, that and dead ending killing the country's lead in the Tech revolution by going down a branch with no future in the form of LLMs and making everybody lose trust in keeping their data in anything owned by American companies.

And, of course, the crooked politicians here in Europe are actually following America more than China in this.

Beyond EVs, the much cheaper sodium-ion battery is entering mass production in China. We can already buy B-grade cells on AliExpress. This will have implications for all sorts of use cases that could use batteries but don't due to cost.

Yeah, conservatives don't think of the future except through the lens of the present. They can't imagine a world with EVs and batteries because they have oil brains. They are looking for solutions to problems with an oil first mindset. Sunk cost is everything.

Our Danish company Ørsted which produces wind power, has been in a huge legal dispute with the American administration for months over this. He wants oil, even if wind is cheaper:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/02/rsted-files-legal-challenge-against-us-government-over-windfarm-lease-freeze

I wonder if the prediction that China will hit peak oil in 2027 will come true. This will have a massive impact on oil markets.

Oil is the longest word he can spell without spellcheck.

Oil companies will probably go the way of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, going broke. They’re continuing to invest heavily in oil infrastructure at a time when the market is shifting and even now there is a flattening of demand for oil products where EVs are becoming prevalent. The trend will start to hit profitability and they will most likely double down.

I don't know if he's obsessed by oil. So far when a president invaded a country because of it's oil, it always went with a cover story to justify it. Now the (cover) story provided by Trump is oil, so it may be possible it was all just to get the Nobel prize. As trinkets are all he cares about. Now it looks like he wants what I want when playing hearts of iron: make all the continent mine.

EVs alone have major grid balancing potential. You can get home batteries for under $100/kwh in US right now, and cost of EV batteries have always been lower due to bulk/contract purchases. At $100/kwh, even from grid TOU use power, you can time shift profitably for just 1c/kwh before financing costs, but before resilience/backup benefits from batteries.

Solar is by far the cheapest way to charge those batteries, where home solar without monopoly persecution from utilities, as in Australia, can be extra affordable. But even before abundant solar is permitted in our countries, or even net metering, simply having TOU rates that are cheap at night allows for enough arbitrage for when TOU rates are high. Where some EVs are $300/kwh to $500/kwh for the entire car, TOU rates can allow for arbitrage that pays for whole car.