Lithium Stocks Soar…and Should Continue to

By Selva Freigedo, 17/08/2022

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In March 2009, a group of reporters and car enthusiasts gathered up in Hawthorne, California, for the presentation of a new car.

The company doing the unveiling was relatively small. It only had one car model on the roads, a US$109,000 sports car, of which it had only sold 250 units.

Although still a luxury car, the model the company was unveiling that day was a cheaper sedan that could go from 0 to 60 in less than six seconds.

The company had huge ambitions for their new car.

As the CEO mentioned that day, the sedan was set to make history by playing a similar role in reshaping the auto industry, just as the Ford Model T did in its day.

As he said:

‘This is one of the most historic cars. We are trying to accelerate the EV revolution and get us off oil.’

If you haven’t guessed it yet, the company is Tesla, and the car is the Tesla Model S.

Musk wanted to have the Model S hit the roads by the third quarter of 2011 and to build 20,000 of them a year.

But the truth was that the company was struggling to get financing.

This was just after 2008, and money was scarce.

‘We can’t move forward with that without a major amount of capital,’ he had said during an interview just a few months before.

But talk about being in the right place at the right time…

Only a month before the unveiling of the Tesla S, US President Obama had signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a stimulus package that would drive US$800 billion into the economy…and that included US$90 billion to promote green energy.

Dubbed the ‘biggest energy bill in history’, the stimulus helped push companies like Tesla, which got a US$465 million loan from the Department of Energy to design and build electric cars.

Today, Tesla is a US$900 billion company, manufacturing close to a million electric cars per year.

Yet Obama’s stimulus also boosted more than 100,000 renewable energy projects across the country. It established large-scale solar and wind farms and lowered power costs. In fact, the stimulus doubled solar and wind capacity in the US in just four years.

Now, last night, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law…

Dubbed as the ‘boldest climate package in history’, the landmark bill allocates US$369 billion to clean energy. This is four times the amount brought in by Obama and the largest clean energy investment in US history to date.

Its effects have already been flowing into all sectors of the US clean energy economy: wind, solar, hydrogen, cleantech, batteries, to name a few…

Yet the climate bill has also been pushing ASX lithium stocks.