by epistasis | 2026-01-14 17:36:39+00:00
I read through the IEA document when it came out, and didn't find anything like what you say, because I remember people claiming things like you say and I couldn't find anything that supported it. If you have quotes, pages, etc. please point to them. The closest contention is also in the summary:

> For lithium, near-term markets appear well-supplied, but rapidly growing demand is expected to push the market into deficit by the 2030s

We've been pushed into lithium supply deficit in the past, and quickly got out of it. This is not a statement that there's not enough lithium or copper, rather that the market wants more than they currently see in development. The IEA document doesn't say anything about electrification not being possible, it's meant as a signal to policy makers to ensure that new copper mines can open up in the future, and that there's great opportunity for countries that do that.

When people are making 100 billion dollar bets on factories that use copper as an input, they are also ensuring their supply years out, which enables development of the necessary mines.

Say the worst case predictions from the document come true: there's a price spike in copper due to there being greater demand than supply. That drives up prices, which spurs on more copper mine development, but the existing copper is still being used to make the energy transition. The electrification trend continues, but just at the rate of current copper extraction! Clever people find substitutions for the electrification challenge. Or people substitute inferior and more expensive non-electrified traditional industry rather than the new tech.

There's a fundamental difference between metals for infrastructure and fuels like oil: if you have a fuel supply shortage it causes inflation, economic contraction, etc. With a shortage of copper and increase in prices in devices that use it, people wait a bit to replace that old appliance (maybe), or use an alternative that perhaps requires fossil fuels.

> Most grids aren't built that way anyway. The residential units are sinks, not sources. In Sweden we don't even have much solar power but already there have been policies aimed at reducing grid exports from residential units, because they are mostly redundant and even harmful.

Grid engineers are extremely conservative, and don't want to learn anything new, and always resist at first. Until somebody shows them how it works, they claim it's impossible. That allowing individual homes to feed back to neighbors will break everything. Then people do it and its fine. Then grid engineers claim that at 1-2% of variable supply the whole grid will come down. Then 1-2% of supply is variable solar and everything is great, so the engineers claim that 5% is the new limit. Or 10%. Or 30%. They are living in the past, don't want to learn anything new, and assume that anything new is impossible. It's a natural feeling for engineers that should be very conservative, but also incorrect. They complain about needing inertia, reactive power, without realizing that all that is quite possible with existing tech! Until a proper cost analysis is done by independent people that are fully honest about the costs, I wouldn't trust anybody saying that allowing a home to feed back into the grid is harmful. Plus, batteries negate the need to feed back into the grid at all. Keep homes as 100% sinks, just pulling down electricity far less. Or put batteries in homes to reduce their peak draw from the grid, so that all the rest of the grid can be far cheaper. There's so much potential that gets ignored just because batteries are new tech.