The article is nothing but a hit piece, very likely funded by meat industry. I don’t see any theoretical reasons argued here. You cannot write off future potential based on current state of technology. It’s like you will look at mainframe and say that there will never be a computer in every home. The thing that matters is rate of change over time.
Write’s Law dictates that as the total production capacity increases, cost exponentially declines. This law is the driver of Moor’s law and it is exactly why we can enjoy so many modern conveniences ranging from TVs to refrigerators that was initially affordable to only ultra rich. The cause of this law is believed to be the fact that far many more brains looks at various parts of production pipelines and optimizes it relentlessly. Cultured meat factories may look expensive today but over next couple of decades, they can become norm compared to traditional industry.
If it's a hit piece it is easily the longest and best researched hit piece I've ever read. It's mostly a summary of Humbird's report and the people it's "hitting" end up agreeing with basically everything in it by the end of the article, only arguing that where there's a will, there's a way.
The idea that any imaginable technology will become efficient enough to be competitive on useful timescales is wrong. In my lifetime battery storage for the grid and nuclear power are all examples of technologies that were once predicted to become highly efficient and widespread. Flying cars and moon bases are examples of tech people in the 60s and 70s frequently assumed were just around the corner but which never even got off the ground. Decades on nuclear is being killed by massively increased costs, and batteries have become more efficient but the gains have been incremental rather than exponential. They are still nowhere near being cheap or abundant enough to switch the grid to windmills.
Engineering challenges are real. Improvements are usually not exponential. Computers are an exception, not a rule, and even there the exponential growth story is complex and not ideal: the era of big chip performance improvements stopped decades ago and since then it's all been incremental improvements for anything that doesn't trivially parallelize, which is most stuff.
Finally, you're comparing lab grown meat to TVs and refrigerators. That's not a valid comparison. Those machines had no competition, they enabled huge, immediate quality of life wins that couldn't be obtained in any other way. Lab grown meat is - in the absolute best case - identical to normal meat. It doesn't improve quality of life in any way. It's basically an indulgence, a psychological prop that rich people can pay for to feel virtuous. For everyone who already feels virtuous enough and isn't interested in charitable giving, lab grown meat has no purpose, and especially, it's easy to rationalize away any small amount of guilt felt (e.g. better for the cow to have had a nice life in a field than never having lived at all, nature is full of predators that are nastier than us, scientists are lying about climate change, etc). So there just isn't the growth market that benefited things like TVs.
I know this was mostly an aside, but the comment on grid battery storage isn't quite right. This hasn't been widely publicized beyond people working in the industry, but the efficiency of battery storage actually has improved exponentially in the last 20 years. The cost of leading edge NMC battery packs has fallen from $1000+/kWh in the mid-2000s to around ~$100-150/kWh today. Most industry insiders believe grid-level battery storage can be cost effective somewhere in the $50-100/kWh range. So, pretty close.
Reminds me of all those articles from ~20 years ago saying that solar power will never be cost-effective [0].
There'll be a series of incremental improvements, a couple of sudden "aha" shifts in thinking, and suddenly it's not only cost-effective, but massively better.
[0] searching for one now, I can't find an example, which is interesting. Did I mis-remember, or have they all been pulled down?
Serious critics of solar (and wind) power where never about price[1], they were about about availability and, as expected, with the growing share of wind and solar in the electricity mix the grid is getting more and more disturbed when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine for a few days.
[1] in fact, price is a terrible metric when talking about electricity because you can't (realistically) store it, even today. Price only make sense when you have a bunch of fossil fuel power plant sitting idle, waiting for the break-even price to happen before adding their power to the grid.
Solar power isn't cost effective, which is why there's now an energy crisis in Europe ... it became a lot cheaper, but it didn't reach the point of making economic sense for it to replace other forms of power at scale, largely due to fundamentals outside of the semiconductor industry: lack of reliable sunshine, lack of sufficiently cheap batteries, etc.
I used to live in Western Australia. Vast areas of land with extremely reliable sunshine, and very little other uses [0].
The storage problem is being solved, battery tech is hot and getting hotter (kinda pun intended).
The transmission problem is still being worked on - there are unconventional options for cheap, plentiful solar power, like extracting hydrogen from seawater and then shipping the hydrogen to power plants near where the power is needed.
The costs used to be prohibitive because the panels were so expensive. But the tech for solar panels has progressed hugely (and quickly) and this is no longer a factor.
Solar power plants will never be a drop-in replacement for fossil fuel plants, for the reasons you describe. But that doesn't mean we can't replace fossil fuel plants with an energy system that uses solar power for generation.
The same will happen with vat-grown meat. One by one the difficulties will be overcome and the commercial problems will be solved. What we end up with will probably not look anything like our current meat industry. But it will replace our current meat industry.
[0] apologies to the indigenous people who have "used" this land for tens of thousands of years and would probably disagree with this statement.
Western Australia is the absolute best case possible for solar panel cost effectiveness though. You can't generalize from that to it being cost effective everywhere. Lots of people live in places like Europe where there often isn't strong sunshine, and there isn't a lot of available land. And as for being solved, well, that's my point. Batteries have been around for over a century. They haven't gone through some sort of exponential progress explosion that renders them "too cheap to meter". They improve but only incrementally and it's simply not enough.
off the cuff claims made by executives, like "there will never be a need for more than, like, 5 computers in the whole world" are different from calculated engineering limits though. While faster-than-light travel may be possible someday, it's beyond our current technology (though there are some interesting theories at the edge of physics). Fundamental engineering limits tend to be harder to work around. eg despite all our scientific advances, cars engines are still lmited by the Carnot cycle. Moving to electric cars doesn't get rid of that limitation, just makes us subject to other limitations (currently, battery technology).
Write’s Law dictates that as the total production capacity increases, cost exponentially declines. This law is the driver of Moor’s law and it is exactly why we can enjoy so many modern conveniences ranging from TVs to refrigerators that was initially affordable to only ultra rich. The cause of this law is believed to be the fact that far many more brains looks at various parts of production pipelines and optimizes it relentlessly. Cultured meat factories may look expensive today but over next couple of decades, they can become norm compared to traditional industry.