And where will we get the raw materials needed to build such vast amounts of batters? Global supply of lithium is already an issue just for electric car production. Global supply of lithium will not be sufficient to store grid scale amounts of energy.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...

The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”.

About 2 billion EVs need to be on the road by 2050 for the world to hit net zero, the IEA says, but sales stood at just 6.6 million last year, and some carmakers are already selling out of EVs.

Lithium supply faces challenges not only from surging demand, but because resources are concentrated in a few places and over half of today’s production is in areas with high water stress.

The same way we found oil for the last century and a half; we explore and produce based on the price of the commodity. Lithium is one of the most abundant materials in the Earth's crust.

> Lithium is one of the most abundant materials in the Earth's crust.

Sure, and rare earth metals aren't really all that rare. The problem is that the processing cost is well beyond economical for most of it.

Markets disagree: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

"Lithium is one of the most abundant materials in the Earth's crust."

Abundance alone is irrelevant; you need certain concentrations for the mining process to be viable. AFAIK that is the challenge with Li: the necessary concentrations are only found in several places of the world.

Same was true of oil. People predicted peak oil multiple times over, thinking we’d found all the easy oil, and drilling for the expensive oil was gonna lower production. That never happened, instead people found ways to get the hard oil cheaper, e.g. by fracking, and peak oil has yet to happen. Lithium mining is sure to go through similar story. Maybe after the third failed prediction of “peak lithium” they will find ways to harvest it from the ocean or something.

It is well possible, but there are factors other than price in play. Fracking seems to be fairly dangerous for the environment, and current methods of lithium production have this problem as well (a lot of water is consumed in dry Bolivia to produce lithium).

In the future, we might be able to mine lithium from some sources that are now useless, but the environmental cost might be enormous.

This is a good point. I certainly hope this history doesn’t repeat. However if we keep our current economic incentives, it probably will.

In an ideal world we would innovate with better chemistries which would render the need for lithium obsolete before we cause more damage. I know the technology exists (particularly for grid scale storage), but knowing humans, we will probably ruin more environments (and foreign economies) before such technologies will be meaningfully explored.

There’s a lot of methods of grid scale energy storage that don’t have anything to do with lithium.

Such as? Pumped hydro is really the only practical one.

Consider also various forms of thermal storage. Pumped thermal could have a round trip efficiency as high as 75%, using no rare materials.

What are you even talking about?

Odd. As you are playing the internet expert and telling us the problem was unsolvable, I had assumed you knew all about this sort of thing. I mean, you wouldn't want to be exaggerating the level of knowledge backing up your assertions, now would you?

Anyway, consider: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054

This paper explains how one can storage power at an efficiency of 65-75% using machinery made with ordinary materials operated at modest temperatures.

That is a terrible efficiency.

It's acceptable as an efficiency for backing up renewables. The cheaper the input energy is, the less important efficiency is vs. the capital cost of the storage system.

Renewables are so cheap (and getting cheaper still) that you can pretty much just swallow the cost of the reduced efficiency.

To be fair, grid-scale storage does not have to use lithium batteries, and likely should not use too much of them, because they are such a fire hazard.

A number of alternative chemistries exist, which are much less expensive and less flammable. They of course have lower energy density, but it does not play a major role: batteries sitting on the ground can afford to be be bulky and heavy.