According to the article there are no economics of scale. A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run. This is apparently a very difficult problem: "But the truth is this: For cultured meat to move the needle on climate, a sequence of as-yet-unforeseen breakthroughs will still be necessary. We’ll need to train cells to behave in ways that no cells have behaved before. We’ll need to engineer bioreactors that defy widely accepted principles of chemistry and physics. We’ll need to build an entirely new nutrient supply chain using sustainable agricultural practices, inventing forms of bulk amino acid production that are cheap, precise, and safe. Investors will need to care less about money. Germs will have to more or less behave. It will be work worthy of many Nobel prizes—certainly for science, possibly for peace. And this expensive, fragile, infinitely complex puzzle will need to come together in the next 10 years."
> A ten times larger facility would cost more than ten times as much to run.
This is an impossibility. You can just build ten smaller factories to scale up and get at least a linear gain. No economics of scale just means that you can't get much better than linear, but in nearly all cases you at least get linear scaling.
Linear scaling of any project large enough to disrupt an industry (as is being suggested here) is a pipe dream.
When you are trying to scale up something that big, you eventually get beyond economies of scale for the required infrastructure and feedstock, and as a result, increase overall demand, which raises prices.
You only get near-linear scaling for a very short, initial "ramp-up" period.
Beyond that, you start cornering markets, which makes prices spike, not decrease or even hold steady.
Environmentalists often have a bias for small scale operation. They just really like the idea of everyone having their own bioreactor in their closet powered by their own rooftop solar panels. I think it may be simply an aesthetic preference that they then try to rationalize, facts be damned.
It depends, if they share some facilities with other functions that pay parts of the bills then those parts wont scale up. Like lets say you rent out part of your capacity to a nearby lab that pay research lab money for it, that could cover most of their expenses for a small facility. I wouldn't be surprised if that is how they are running things right now.
