Turns out China Doesn’t Have to Steal Intellectual Property Because the U.S. Government Is Just Giving It to Them

As Americans continue to come to grips with the reality that China is their main ideological and geopolitical competitor, stories about how to counter an economically ambitious CCP have tended to focus on the notion that much of China’s global market dominance has relied a great deal on theft of intellectual property. Which makes a recent story from NPR — one that details how the U.S. Department of Energy simply gave away cutting edge battery technology that U.S. scientists and engineers spent years developing — particulary disturbing.

It gets worse. The agency has also apparently been denying American companies licenses to make the batteries the Chinese are now hard at work developing.

Engineers in Mukilteo, Wash. started creating the batteries 10 years ago, expecting them to be a great leap forward for clean energy consumtion.

[The] vanadium redox flow battery [was] based on a design created by two dozen U.S. scientists at a government lab. The batteries were about the size of a refrigerator, held enough energy to power a house, and could be used for decades. The engineers pictured people plunking them down next to their air conditioners, attaching solar panels to them, and everyone living happily ever after off the grid.

“It was beyond promise,” said Chris Howard, one of the engineers who worked there for a U.S. company called UniEnergy. “We were seeing it functioning as designed, as expected.”

But that’s not what happened. Instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, the warehouse is now shuttered and empty. All the employees who worked there were laid off. And more than 5,200 miles away, a Chinese company is hard at work making the batteries in Dalian, China.

NPR’s investigation suggests the U.S. Department of Energy simply gave the technology away beginning in 2017 as part of a license transfer that vioated the agency’s own licensing rules and regulations about protecting U.S. workers.

Now, China has forged ahead, investing millions into the cutting-edge green technology that was supposed to help keep the U.S. and its economy out front.

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