China is the world's second biggest producer of silver and seventh largest producer of nickel. Bonus is that the biggest producer of nickel is Indonesia, which has a free trade agreement with China and the third biggest producer is Russia (lol, lmao).
Also love the example of Sorghum because China is producer #8 in the world and 4 of the top producers are global south countries that absolutely would not cut off trade with China. Also, lmao at the thought of the CPC just collapsing because people can't get one specific type of liquor. Imagine Russia trying to undermine America by targeting its strategic vodka supply.
All this tells me is that the West doesn't produce anything that is irreplaceable to China and that the think tankers and journalists are too delusional to recognize this.
China is very heavily invested in pumped hydro which is one of the only viable grid scale battery sources at the moment. Chemical batteries are only good for smaller towns where pumped hydro is prohibitively expensive and to smooth outputs on wind and solar
gravity batteries are so neat
There are some really neat ones that use cranes to lift heavy blocks, but I don't know how practical those are because of their complexity. Pumped hydro and using really deep mineshafts with heavy weights are both good gravity battery solutions (with the mine one being much less practical in most places)
Why don't you just pump hydro up a mineshaft?
That would work, just need to build or find a reservoir somewhere down there
I think I saw an engineer once describe the crane-and-blocks one as one of those models that demonstrates the theory really well, but is wildly impractical in most cases