The unlikely partners who could recharge U.S. battery production

When Congress took an ax to clean energy incentives last month, support for battery production surprisingly emerged unscathed. The One Big Beautiful Bill left intact advanced manufacturing incentives born from the Inflation Reduction Act — along with hope for the bevy of resulting domestic battery factories still under construction.

Those factories, however, were planning not only on supply-side incentives but also on demand that the new legislation reduced. With faster phaseouts of solar-farm and electric-vehicle incentives, two of the country’s largest battery consumers, our nascent battery manufacturers might face slower market growth than they budgeted for.

Yet clean tech entrepreneurs such as these might get an unexpected reprieve from an unlikely source: a defense industrial base suddenly desperate for batteries. Military planners are sounding the alarm that battery-powered drones are transforming warfare, and that the United States is woefully behind in the race to produce them.

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