Welcome back to The Electric!

The year is just three months old, yet a torrent of events has already happened and new trends have taken shape. To help make sense of it all and connect the dots, below you will find the first issue of The Electric Quarterly, a four-times-a-year special edition of the publication that both wraps up the most recent quarter and looks ahead to what’s coming next. I’m keen to hear your feedback. Just email me at: steve@theinformation.com.

As major automakers and battery companies rush to create a massive new electric vehicle industry, their urgent to-do list is long: Scale up new vehicles for electric propulsion, develop and build the right batteries to power them, and organize enormous plants to produce everything. There are the matters of establishing networks of charging stations, scraping up tens of billions of dollars to fund the entire gargantuan effort, and accomplishing all of this—what would ordinarily take a generation—in just a few years.

Yet as things stand today, the EV transformation could still fall short and leave the automakers perilously uncompetitive if they fail in what has become the most urgent priority of all: securing a colossal, reliable supply of critical metals and minerals and plant capacity to refine them into the intricate powders that make batteries work.

That’s the backdrop to the first issue of The Electric Quarterly, a special edition that will take stock of the most important developments and trends of the quarter in EVs and batteries and provide an outlook for the coming months. This quarter, the dominating topic without question has been the stark slowness of U.S. companies to build local plants to refine nickel, lithium and iron, and end their complete and dangerous reliance on China’s battery supply chain. The war in Ukraine, and doubts surrounding the reliability of Russia’s supply of nickel, palladium and other critical metals, should have led automakers to more decisively address their lengthy and costly supply lines, bringing them closer to home. But so far, what we mostly see is Chinese battery manufacturers extending their dominance: