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Lithium is not super precious, but its price is still a non-trivial multiply of aluminium's price.

Your graphs show it. They also show that there has not been a substantial reduction in its price over the years.

This means there is market potential for other (al/sodium) chemistries, mainly for grid-level storage.



This seems to ignore the entire supply/demand context of both metals. Demand for Al is basically flat, and the supply/demand relationship has reached an equilibrium.

Electric cars (by far the biggest consumer of lithium) have been experiencing a an average compounded growth of something like 50% per year for the past 10 years. Li production is still catching up. The earth has plenty of Li deposits but there is a lead time to purchase the heavy machines needed to turn those deposits into productive mines.

Once electric car growth hits the inflection point on the adoption curve, and growth becomes sub-exponential, we'll start to see major downward pressure on Li prices.


If we're just racing to the cheapest available reactants, iron flow batteries are going to win that race. And, unlike these others, there are already iron flow batteries on the grid.




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