Zach Dell

And now you're seeing these auto OEMs and some of these Korean companies and the Chinese companies form JVs to build factories here in the US.

That's fair.

I think that the materials problem is one that people like to worry about.

They're like, oh, we don't have enough minerals to build all these batteries.

And I think that's just fundamentally untrue.

I'd point people to Tesla's master plan three, where they address this head on.

And that is a really clear documentation of the abundance of these minerals in the Earth's crust.

Turns out there's a lot of lithium, a lot of iron, a lot of manganese, a lot of cobalt.

A lot of it's not been mined, and the cost to mine it is high, and there's complexities and nuances, and it's not easy, but these minerals exist in great abundance in the Earth's crust, and I think that is not a real constraint.

Now, getting them out of the ground is a constraint, and there are certainly hard problems to solve there, but yes.

We will not live in a world where we're unable to build incremental battery capacity because of some kind of mineral constraint or unsolvable engineering problem.

One way to think about what we're building is battery storage behind the meter at homes in Texas.

Another way to think about it is a yield curve.

It's just a cash flow stream.

I'll just simplify it here.

It's matching that cash flow stream to a cost of capital that has the appetite to underwrite those cash flows.

And so we put money in the ground and then money comes out of the ground towards us at some frequency.

And we have to find the capital provider who's willing to underwrite that amount of money and the frequency by which it comes relative to the amount of money we put in the ground in the first place.

And there's volatility and predictability and unpredictability in each part of it.

And so on one hand, it's complicated asset-backed financing and people have to go underwrite batteries and their salvage value and the volatility of the grid and all that kind of stuff.