[xPhobophobia]

Yes, but...this is the case just for the first-order cost basis. The supply of raw battery materials (e.g. Cobalt) is limited in price and quantity. If we don't invent new battery technologies, we don't have sufficient accessible supply of raw resources.

I also wonder how mid term artificial manipulations to the market of these components (i.e. China subsidizing solar cells, America adding tariffs) will keep us on a general decline in solar power costs.

[Brakenshire]

I'm dubious about the resource point, because prospecting and mining are demand-driven. These kind of resource crunches are happening all the time with new technologies. Supply will follow demand, that may even lower prices with new discoveries or technologies. Even if the price has to go up massively to open up new sources, how many orders of magnitude increase would be required to make a dent in the overall cost of a battery for Cobalt? And then, even if there is a serious hard limit there are plenty of alternatives. You can use multiple other materials as an in-place replacement for Cobalt in Lithium batteries, and there are lots of other fundamentally different battery and storage technologies which work using different materials and principles, which have other resource requirements. The peak Lithium or peak Cobalt idea seems quite similar to peak oil, which was sort of right (in the sense of conventional oil) but in a way which turned out not to be especially relevant.

[triggercut]

No problem with being skeptical and typically supply will follow demand, however there are a couple of important things to note when it comes to Cobalt.

Most cobalt is produced as a result of other extraction activities, it is rarely the primary resource. Normally it's in found/produced in conjunction with Copper and Nickel mines. This has a number of repercussions which would take too long to detail here, however to get more Nickel on stream would require either increasing capacity at existing operations, which may or may not be a non-trivial task or a combination of exploring/designing/procuring/operating a new Cobalt asset which is never non-trivial. The result is, there will always be a significant lag between market demand and output capacity creating sudden spikes in price, a surge in investment activity and then eventual stabilization of price once assets start producing.

Most of the worlds known reserves (identified resource which may or may not be economical to extract) for Cobalt come from the the Democratic Republic of Congo, which for the purposes of this discussion can be said to have reserves an estimated order of magnitude over anyone else. In response to growing demand the DRC have raised taxes on Cobalt as recent as a few weeks ago. A number of operations have been sold to Chinese companies in recent years, shoring up their supply chains. It almost goes without saying that a number of these operations have terrible human/labor rights issues and track records.

We've all managed to come to terms with our cognitive dissonance of driving cars and drinking out of plastic bottles when it comes to Oil, but how will everyone feel about funding the DRC in the name of progress?

[the8472]

Stationary storage is a lot more flexible in what chemistries they can use because they don't need to optimize for mass. The article even mentions one bidder offering redox flow batteries which have scaling properties which are much better for grid storage than for cars, so they wouldn't compete for resources with the latter.

[icc97]

Yeah Alphabet have project Malta [0]

[0]: https://x.company/explorations/malta/

[apendleton]

I'm super curious about how the storage market will develop. Renewables as a whole have been competing on the open market with other sources of energy for a long while now, and competitive pressures have been driving innovation and bringing down price there for a bit, but renewables + storage are still (relatively) new as a significant market player, and my (admittedly naive) impression is that while renewable energy providers are starting to bid on projects and incorporating storage, there's room for a serious second-order market of different storage technologies competing for renewable providers' business that's only just getting off the ground.

Seems like there's still a lot of room for innovation there. Certainly there are startups exploring variations in this space (lithium ion, but also flow batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air, flywheels, etc., etc.), but I don't think any of them have realized the economies of scale necessary to be competitive yet. No reason they can't though.

[nl]

Plenty of alternate battery techs around, especially for stationary storage. Flow batteries[1] are commercially available now, are price competitive and don't require rare earths.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery