Unlike with oil, we are not speaking of billions upon billions tons of product. Just a few million tons. It's easily possible to build up stocks of multi-year supply of lithium when it's cheap - storage won't be prohibitively expensive - so those price swings will probably be mitigated (and taken advantage of) by speculators, who buy low and sell high, to everyone's benefit.<p>My belief is that lithium, polysilicon, and other main renewable energy supplies will never be like oil - matters of life and death and/or origins of the very genesis and existence of whole nations. They will be more like uranium fuel for reactors - something that is still finite and has to be kept in mind, but never a stumbling point or a bottleneck.