>You're just waving away a very obvious problem, and I don't understand how you can. Lithium production is constrained.

So separate out discussing batteries and lithium.

Batteries are production constrained and require fairly significant capx into new factories to get. That has been happening in a major way for the past few years and is only accelerating. It will take many years of scaling to truly satisfy world demand, but that means a lot of money and investment (again already happening).

Lithium itself has a different dynamic.

Lithium is quite abundant and has been considered a waste product from other types of mining for quite a long time. That has now changed and will be solved in reasonably short order. No new tech is required and tons of reserves are already proven. Within 5 years the price should be reasonably stabilized.

Also, most of the battery mass are what I mentioned. Iron/Aluminum/Carbon/Silicon. People fixate on lithium because it is in the name of the battery, but its a relatively small part by mass. Its just not a serious problem outside of the next few years.

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>Currently, grid-level storage cover at best minutes, sometimes hours in very small areas. To cover windless, sunless periods, we need days, and indeed more like 2 weeks.

The more solar you build, the more predictable it becomes. The solar panel on your house might change based on relative cloud cover, but solar over a whole region becomes quite predictable.

To make power reliable, you have to over build it. The current fossil fuel is overbuilt. So you would need more solar than for you average day. Also major appliances (like EVs) will become more responsive to changing grid prices. Demand will become more elastic.

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>You say nuclear plants take too long to build, but there is no way we can produce enough batteries in 20 years, which is plenty of time to build reactors.

Plenty of time. Now someone actually has to put up the money.

Its already happening in renewables, hopefully government or capital desires to actually invest in nuclear. In the meantime, nuclear is standing still and will waste out another decade.