> The scale we're talking here is not just a shack with a couple of batteries. Even with low prices of today, we're talking several millions of investment for 10 MWh.

1.78 million USD at current exchange rate. Before sales tax, but if you're buying at this scale, you claim that tax back anyway:

https://www.ladeengel.de/Batteriespeicher/Grossspeicher-ab-5...

> Only if you can scale manufacturing and materials the same way. Hopefully not with Lithium, because that's just not abundant enough.

1. Sodium is already cost-competitive with lithium, for batteries.

2. There's loads of lithium all over the place, the hard part of using it is that it's spread out everywhere rather than particularly concentrated. Like, we're talking 150 million tons of "reserves", 250 billion tons dissolved in the seawater, and plausibly 5 quadrillion tons in the bulk of the planet's rock.

Look at the graph in the article. The trend is clearly log-linear at the tail end in 2024, which is to say, still dropping exponentially. People said the same thing about solar for years, of course. Exponential decreases in cost are apparently hard for people to reason about. As others say in adjacent comments, there's lots of lithium around, and lots of promising work on salt based chemistries for mass storage. Plenty of room for progress.

Chinese companies are building salt batteries now.