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Originally Posted by LightingGuy
Over the past 3 years every electrician and electrical engineer I work with has told me the same thing - that the price of wire has gone up a lot and is very unstable. I assumed this price instability to be as a result of COVID supply chain issues - however I now see that it's a result of the global copper shortage.
Electrical contractors get all their equipment from electrical wholesalers. This includes everything from fixtures, breakers, conduit, wire, relays, switches, poles, certain tools, etc. Whenever most of these items are quoted, the quote is almost always honoured for 30 days so that it has time to get approval from every party (developer, architect, engineer, general contractor, electrical contractor all need to sign off on the shop drawings, and communication takes time).
Wire has always been the one exception to this - historically wire quotes are typically honoured for 7-15 days, rather than 30 days. The reason for this is because wire has very low margin (3% is common), and copper is a floating commodity.
In 2021 and supply chains got disrupted, prices in the electrical industry got extremely unstable, and manufacturers stopped handing out 30 day quotes. For about a year we saw 15 day or even 7 day quotes for fixtures, poles, breakers, and so forth. This only applies to electrical devices, and not wire.
Wire quotes, which previously were as long as 15 days, all of a sudden dropped to 2-3 days. I assumed this to be for the same reason as the rest of the industry, which was COVID supply chain issues.
Fast forward to about a year ago, and all of the electrical supply chain issues have been sorted out, and we are back to 30 day quotes for all electrical devices at every step. Great.
However, wire quotes are still only being honoured for 2-3 days while the rest of the industry has stabilized. I found this very strange, until I learned about the copper shortage..
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I did a huge amount of electrical work in my house over the last few years and I can definitely confirm that wiring has gotten insanely expensive.
Changes to the building code (at least here in ON) in the last few years hasn't helped with electrical costs either; safety requirements have gotten a lot more stringent so GFCI and tamper-proof outlets are required in a lot more places than they used to be which cost a lot more. I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of code-flation and copper inflation have together increased the electrical component of residential construction costs by as much as 5x in the last 5 years.
As for the batteries, lithium is actually pretty abundant, but it's often in very low concentrations whenever it is found which makes mining it expensive & energy intensive and generates lots of rock waste. "Rare earth metals" are the same way; they're everywhere but in miniscule concentrations.
One challenge of course with mining is that we need a lot of these minerals for electrification and decarbonization but environmentalists tend to oppose new mining projects; a lot has been said on this topic already.
I follow developments in space very closely and there's a surprising number of experts who believe that mining in space isn't actually that far off. Last year, the US launched the DART mission to experiment with deliberately altering an asteroid's trajectory, ostensibly for planetary defense research. Dr. Pippa Malmgren speculates that one of the real objectives of this concept is actually to direct near-earth asteroids to crash into the moon, where automated refineries could refine ores from the crashed asteroids and export the metals to Earth. Supposedly a lot of refining and metallurgy processes are actually a lot cheaper/more energy efficient in low gravity, and environmental regulations are obviously far less of an issue. Sounds far fetched to me, but maybe that's how we're going to satsify our copper needs this century!