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> which requires constant, continuous resource extraction

Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?

It's probably fairly high, considering the existence of the sodium-sulfur battery. It's not economically competitive since it operates at high temperature, but it's based on very abundant materials.

What about salt water batteries? Seem almost commodity

Once you have enough to power the world and are able to recycle them, then you're done with extracting resources for them.

Unfortunately human energy use appears to be proportional to the amount of energy available

Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand rises

It's based on cost, like anything else. If running everything on solar and batteries makes it cheaper then we'll use more. But the same is true regardless of the technology. What's not true regardless is whether a given amount of energy usage requires continual resource extraction just to sustain it, or whether it's only needed for new capacity.

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