Comment by vlovich123

Since we're teaching each other first principles, bringing a new mass-scale battery manufacturing facility online to full production typically takes anywhere from 2 to 5 years. Planning takes ~1-2 years, construction & setup takes ~1-2 years and ramp to full output takes 6 months to 1 year. And since we're on Econ 101, investments require payoff so all of this is done carefully to not tank the price of batteries by overproducing supply. In control systems terms, supply side investments always aim for undershooting demand as overshooting hurts how much money you make and risks destabilizing your market.

As for scarcity, inputs to lithium ion ARE scarce which negates your entire model. Pretending they aren't is where you're making a mistake. Lithium, cobalt & nickle are relatively scarce and the mines for that have to scale up to meet demand as well. You've also got a workforce to train to do the work which takes time & is also input-constrained. That's why there's massive NEW lithium mines being opened in the US & elsewhere to extract existing reserves to meet the growth in lithium ion batteries. If the world thought that sodium ion or ion air was an immediate future, you wouldn't see these massive large-scale investments into lithium. Lilthium-ion batteries is going to be a large and growing market for decades which brings me back to the strip mining of the ocean floor that's coming to support that.

Whright's law by the way isn't also an inevitable effect that goes on forever. At some point your exponential plateau's and you no longer see such exponential decrease in pricing. That's why processors aren't getting cheaper and compute isn't scaling up quite in the same way as in the early days. There's only so efficient you can make something.