This whole piece is a great example of "frozen world" fallacy: the idea that we will continue to do things exactly the way we are doing them now, just more so.

This whole piece is a great example of "frozen world" fallacy: the idea that we will continue to do things exactly the way we are doing them now, just more so. Roadblock 01 assumes we will continue to use nickel-based cathodes, and more generally lithium chemistry. The first is already false: now that the core patents have expired, use of ferrophosphate in place of nickel cathodes (so-called "LFP", lithium iron phosphate) is taking off. The largest battery manufacturer in the world by quite a distance, CATL, has announced (and is rolling out) sodium-ion batteries, eliminating the "buh buh the lithums!1!" objection. Sodium production can be expanded as fast as buildings can be built near the sea. There are several other chemistries that either use lithium more efficiently or are based on more abundant materials. The price of LFP batteries is falling fast--see below. But continuing to use LFP is the worst case: we'll do it only if none of the alternatives work out, so nothing better and cheaper comes along. That seems unlikely on present indications.[1] Roadblock 02 is being falsified. The trend in costs is a fast reduction in acccordance with Wright's Law: historically approximately a 16% reduction in cost per doubling of production, driven by the fall in battery costs, manufacturing process improvement, and economies of scale. 38M vehicles is 4 doublings from last year's 3M vehicles, implying a price half of today's. Roadblock 03 assumes that the grid is going to look exactly as it does today. With cheap storage and cheap PV, it will be quite easy to site storage and generation near heavy demand. In any case, long distance grid costs are falling as demand increases thanks to the use of ultra-high voltage (>200 kV) transmission, and the cost of grid import and export points is also falling thanks to ordinary engineering improvements as demand increases. 1. As an analogy, the "lithium availability" objection is like saying in 1964 that "transistors will never take off, because there isn't enough germanium". It wasn't true, but it was irrelevant.