Sam Evans

speaker

11,513 appearances 100 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 17 Aug

Sam Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 100 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 32.

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The Electric Viking · China Is Now Taxing LFP Batteries To Fund The Sodium Battery Revolution · 25 Jul 2026 podcast

China's biggest battery makers, including CATL and BYD, are racing to mass commercialize solid state cells with small batch vehicle installations planned around 2027, but huge gigawatt scale batteries planned over the next 12 months for energy storage. matched

Give those technologies a clear cost advantage over lithium at exactly the moment they're trying to scale and you accelerate the transition. matched

This means the move to sodium ion batteries for many sectors of the market will now accelerate. matched

It's a pretty big deal. matched

I mean, going from having a 4% tax to 0% tax is a bigger deal than you realize at this level. matched

The same playbook actually applies to solar. matched

By the way, this is because PV cells get taxed at 2% from April 2027, but that will rise to 4% a year later, while emerging technologies like perovskite and tandem cells stay exempt from taxes. matched

So solar panels, you know, they may get cheaper this year, matched

but they probably won't next year when these new taxes come in. matched

Will this push up costs for Chinese EV makers? matched

In the short term, yes, potentially. matched

A 2% tax on the most expensive component in an EV isn't nothing, but it will rise to 4%, and 4% is something. matched

And that is landing in a market already in a brutal price war. matched

But step back and look at what this actually signals. matched

China isn't slowing down its battery industry. matched

It's kind of steering it to where it thinks it should be. matched

While Western governments are still debating whether to support EVs at all, I mean, some of them do, some of them don't, Beijing has moved on to engineering which battery chemistry dominates the 2030s. matched

11 years ago, a tax exemption helped make China the lithium-ion superpower. matched

Today, a new exemption is designed to make it the solid state and sodium-ion superpower as well. matched

The gap isn't closing, the target just moved. matched

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