There is competition in battery production. Pretty much all of society would be better off with better batteries, so price gauging in an industry like that is quite hard. And if it was, it would not go unnoticed.

The problem is simply the technology. There’s advancements like molten salt batteries, but it’s practically in it’s infancy. The moment a technology like that would become a big improvement over the norm, it would pretty much immediately cause a paradigm shift in energy production and every company would want a piece of the pie. So you’ll know it when you see it. But it might also just start off very overwhelmingly like nuclear fission and very gradually improved with the hope it can scale beyond the current best technologies for batteries.

All we can do is wait and hope for breakthrough, I guess. Because cheap and abundant batteries could really help massively with reducing our carbon output.