Brad Plumer at The Washington Post writes about the massive over capacity of the domestic battery industry right now, owing to the fact that EV sales have been disappointing. Borrowing a chart from consulting firm Advanced Automotive Batteries, he shows that the anticipated demand from EV production in 2013 was expected to be 3,900 megawatts of battery production capacity while it is more likely to be in the ballpark of about 330 megawatts. That’s more than a ten times miss in forecasting demand.

It’s never been completely clear to me how American battery makers were going to compete with their experienced East Asian counterparts, which have been at this game for a couple decades and which can always feed extra lithium ion batteries into their internal consumer electronics divisions. That’s what battery developers like Samsung do to keep cash coming into their battery divisions. They always have internal customers.

There is no Moore’s Law for batteries and the advantages of American battery technology are typically very incremental. Companies like Ambri have some promising new tech for grid storage and Envia says its got a battery in development that could do a 300 mile range at under 30K.  Should any of these technologies every actually see the light of day, the trick is to find a way to keep manufacturing in the U.S., which is strangely an even larger hurdle than creating a technological breakthrough.