Anyone who produces a kilowatt hour of battery in Europe gets EUR 25. Published, the same rate for everyone, no negotiation.
That is Julia Poliscanova's worked example of what European support for the industry should look like, and the number itself is not the point. The point is that an investor could read it, do the arithmetic and know what the business case is before deciding where to build.
Nothing in Europe currently works that way, which is the substance of her complaint.
The money is already there, the mechanism is not
Her position on whether Europe needs its own Inflation Reduction Act is yes, with an immediate qualification: Europe already spends a great deal. There is money at European level, mostly for research and a little for capital support, and then there is national state aid, which she puts in the hundreds of billions and which already goes to battery companies.
The problem is the machinery. State aid, as she describes it, is an old-school framework built around member states competing with each other rather than Europe competing globally, settled behind closed doors through per-project haggling. It is intransparent and it does not create a business case.
What she wants instead is production-based support that covers both operating and capital costs, set out clearly enough that a company can price it in from abroad. Hence the EUR 25. The same instrument, she suggests, could be applied to green hydrogen.
The trade side of her argument is blunter. China's success was not a subsidy story: the government ran an all-in strategy for over a decade across supply-side policy, demand-side policy, investment support and help for its companies abroad. Europe should be equally all-in, which means going all in on trade and, in her words, "stop being naive about WTOs". She dislikes the word protectionist and thinks the era needs a new one.
One thing she does not want touched. The decision to go all electric in Europe by 2035 is what creates investment certainty across batteries and minerals. If that falters, the belief underneath the whole value chain goes with it.
Half of Europe's battery investment is being made by beginners
The structural fact she uses to explain why generic policy will not work is one most people get wrong.
Over 50% of battery investment decisions in Europe are being taken by European companies, and those companies are startups without manufacturing expertise. In the United States it is mostly experienced tier-one South Korean players who already know how to build a factory. Europe is trying to do the harder version.
Which is why she thinks the missing instrument is operating support rather than more research money. Europe funds R&D, which is necessary and insufficient. It funds some capex, so the plant gets built. It gives nothing at the opex level, and the early years of running a cell factory are simply expensive.
The cost gap breaks down into three parts on her account. Energy in Europe is around 50% more expensive than in China and still 20 to 30% higher than in the US, which argues for faster renewables rollout, faster grid connection and quicker power purchase agreements between battery makers and renewable generators. Scale and yields are low because the industry is still learning, which means waste. And vertical integration is missing: when European companies approach the same Chinese suppliers their competitors use, they get completely different quotes. Her counter-example is domestic, Renault with Verkor and Verkor with Imerys on lithium, where the pricing can work differently.
The explanation she rejects is cheap labour. That may have been true twenty years ago. The reason Chinese factories are cheaper today is very high automation and superior process efficiency, and Europe can copy that without paying anyone less.
The other thing Europe is missing is a framework for technology transfer. Yield improvement is not something a company reasons its way to. It hires people who went through it in China ten years ago and avoids repeating their mistakes. She wants Asian and European players working together on terms where the European side actually learns operational and scaling expertise rather than only hosting the plant.
Market access is the power Europe forgets it has
The sharpest passage in the conversation is about how Europe talks to itself about China.
The prevailing narrative, as she characterises it, is "we're poor Europeans" at the mercy of the Chinese, obliged to please them or lose access to the technology. She does not believe it. The American market is closed to Chinese companies. China's domestic market has weak demand and huge oversupply. The only market of real volume left is Europe, and access to it is bargaining power Europe is not using.
Her use for it is conditions on foreign direct investment, particularly battery joint ventures: local control of the venture, genuine IP and technology transfer including skills, and a requirement to use local suppliers so that Asian factories in Europe do not simply generate orders for their existing Asian material suppliers. That last condition doubles as offtake for European anode, cathode and minerals startups.
On China's restrictions covering LFP and cathode processing technology, she read the regulations and found something useful. The ban applies to newer, more advanced LFP. Current LFP is not banned, and current LFP is good enough for Europe, which still has to learn how to make it before improving it.
The United States is already doing what she has in mind. CATL's licensing deal with Tesla, and a similar one with Ford, hands over LFP technology that the licensee then owns and develops further. In Europe, in the Stellantis and CATL joint venture, meaningful technology transfer is not happening. She is careful about why. It is not that the companies are behaving badly. Nobody has asked them to transfer anything, so they do not.
A good law with no money behind it
The Critical Raw Materials Act, which her team spends a lot of time on, she rates as good on paper. It targets domestic mining, refining, processing and recycling, including a benchmark of processing at least 40% of Europe's minerals domestically by 2030.
Three things are wrong with it in practice. No money comes with the act, unlike the equivalent moves in Australia, the US and Canada. Implementation is slow: the process of selecting strategic projects has been running for six months, and if Europe cannot even pick a project it is not going to get one built. And the targets bind nobody, so if the processing benchmark is missed, no one is responsible and nothing happens.
Lithium is the case where the resource is not the constraint. Europe has it in abundance, including geothermal sources that support cleaner projects than hard rock or brine. T&E's analysis is that if every project currently in development came online, Europe could be self-sufficient in lithium for EVs and storage by 2030. Many of those projects are pre-FID, delayed or cancelled.
Her fix has two parts: opex support for refining, which is energy-intensive and therefore uncompetitive against cheaper-power regions, and European preference or local content requirements. Without the second, new European suppliers cannot win offtake, because sourcing lithium from China is simple and cheap in an oversupplied market, so the local supply never develops and the circle closes on itself. She reads the clean industrial deal as promising here, because for the first time it discusses European content requirements.
Beyond Europe she wants the partnerships to become projects. There are already around 15 strategic partnerships with key countries, and they remain memorandums of understanding signed at big meetings with no joint projects underneath them. She wants the Commission or member states able to co-develop projects in global south countries and to take direct equity, on the grounds that equity brings control and the ability to monitor conditions. The Americans are doing this and the Chinese have been for years. Her illustration of the current position: in the same week Europe announces a strategic partnership with an African country, the Chinese buy a mine there.
On specific countries she names Chile, Australia and, repeatedly, the Philippines on nickel, where she thinks Europe is missing a trick that will not stay open long. European mines will take time regardless, and Serbia shows how uncertain that timing is.
Why she is annoyed with European carmakers
She does not accept the premise that tariffs make EVs and batteries expensive. Chinese cells are sometimes being sold below production cost in the current price war, so the effect is not visible, and the more important question is whether resilience gets priced in at all. Batteries from China are abundant and cheap now, and European EV targets are not at risk because everything can be imported. The Russian gas analogy is the one she reaches for: the taps were open and cheap until they were closed for political reasons. Any country can do that, and America is suddenly not an ally either.
Her prediction is that the pendulum in Europe keeps swinging towards protection, with more anti-subsidy investigations and more tariff increases on batteries in the coming years. Tariffs are a crude tool and the ramifications land outside the sector, on whiskey and pork. She expects China would rather negotiate than escalate, and sketches what that might look like: the first 20% of imports at a low tariff, higher rates above it.
She also expects tariffs would not deter Chinese companies at all. They are already producing in Spain, Hungary, Poland and Germany, they have a global expansion strategy, and they will continue. The question is what those investments are worth to Europe: final assembly of kits, or supply chain, technology and skills.
Which brings her to the carmakers, and the most quotable line in the episode: "I'm just a little bit annoyed with European automakers." Her reading is that they behave as global players optimising global profit, buying cheap and selling wherever there is margin, and are therefore against tariffs almost by definition. In recent automotive dialogues, battery companies and other supply chain players said the opposite, that tariffs are what creates the case for local production. Her hope is that the trade commissioner Šefčovič hears the European players rather than only the loudest ones, and her expectation is that carmakers are resilient enough to adjust, with many already thinking about local-for-local.
The European Battery Alliance matters in that argument for a specific reason. Most of the European players are small and have no lobbying presence in Brussels, so the alliance is the thing that can put a single industry voice against the car industry's. What it should push for, in her view, is standardisation, which Europe lacks and China has because China understands that standardisation drives scale. Not a government prescribing what a battery looks like, but enough pre-competitive convention that a startup does not have to qualify against a different specification for every carmaker.
The deadline she puts on all of it is twelve to eighteen months. Change the policies inside that window, go all in on trade, investment and local content, and a successful European battery industry by 2030 is still available. Miss it, and Europe is an assembly plant for Asian players or an importer of finished product, which she describes in terms of jobs rather than industrial pride.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.