"For batteries, the constraint is mineral availability; though mining the minerals for batteries is far less environmentally destructive than mining fossil fuel

"For batteries, the constraint is mineral availability; though mining the minerals for batteries is far less environmentally destructive than mining fossil fuels, limited availability of lithium and we will probably have to switch to types of batteries that don’t use lithium in order to get enough storage for the whole world. [...] These are real challenges, but I doubt they’ll be prohibitive. [...] Meanwhile, there’s no reason to think that iron-air batteries or other types of batteries that rely on common minerals aren’t subject to the same scaling effects as lithium-ion batteries were. So I think we’ll get grid storage reasonably cheap and scalable as well." This is just handwaving away an incredibly difficult problem that is going to be a massive choke point for batteries. Yes there is lots of ongoing research in the material science of batteries to route around the lithium bottleneck, but there is a large lead time from finding success in research to generating end products at scale. 5-15 years of being blocked here will be extremely painful/crucial. He also purely focuses on the economics of getting solar based energy to market, eg the cost for consumers per kwh of electricity and the cost of batteries for things like EVs. But what about the added weight of these batteries? The damage done to roadways is exponentially related to the weight of the vehicles on the road, so making all cars 2x heavier means way more than 2x the road maintenance, which leads to increases in concrete and steel production. Both of which have environmental/carbon impacts of their own, and steel production especially uses an INTENSE amount of energy. And you also have the rocket problem where the bigger the battery you have to increase your range, the more of your range is being wasted by the energy required to lug the battery around. Any serious work here has to at least look at the benefits of increased train, tram, and trolley bus networks with overhead electrification as that gives all the benefits of electrified transportation but without the downsides of batteries.