Should I hold on to my aluminum and copper?

Aluminium is made ( smelted ) in medium/large sized paddling pool sized 'Cells'. Made of Carbon blocks and they are quite expensive to make.
If they cool down, they crack where the joins are.
So its not easy to 'just turn a few cells off' or turn off a line of cells ( normally 50 + )
Each cell makes a ton a day.
Since all of the cells in each line are connected end to end, like batterys, they have to juggle the setup when they take a cell out of service. Mostly to replace the whole cell unit. It would take too long to describe how the cells made up , and any explanation would be a bit inaccurate.

But, @ $160,000 ( from what i was told, say US$100,000 ) to refurbish a cell. They won't be wanting to take perfectly good cells out of use.
So they will still be making Aluminium even if there's no immediate buyer for it. Untill the cell needs replacing.
I guess then they will take it out of the circuit. Any excess Aluminium made would probably be kept untill the price gets up again & it will provide $ to refurbish the cells as they are needed.

One other thing is. Smelters use a very very stable amount of electricity. Often that powers generated just for the smelter & & its not a case of just sending that power somewhere else.
At our NZ Smelter, the electricity is made at a huge specific hydropower station.
The station is between a very large lake & the sea. All of the water goes thru the turbines generating electricity, theres a small amount that does go down the river that used to drain the lake.
But that rivers a lot smaller than it used to be, they cannot just send all of the water from the now several metres higher lake. So its gets turned into electricity no matter what.



Its High voltage transmission lines & transformers are made to do the job of supplying the smelter and one small city & not much more.
Now thats a problem.
They dont want to make excess Aluminium, but the powers got to be used.
So i see that the oversupply of Aluminium will continue for a long time. So its price will keep dropping and it will take a long time to get back up there.
Aluminiums cost is also largely dependent on the cost of electricity. Its often called 'Solid electricity'.
With oil fuel prices dropping, power price drops, making cheaper Aluminium feasible to a extent.

But from what i can see, no new airplanes for quite a while. Less cars being made. Excess hydropower electricity. Low oil fuel prices mean lower electrical bills.
Aluminium being made regardless of it being sold, untill potlines are taken out of commision, and the electrical grids been adjusted to suit.
The Aluminium industry is in for a huge shakeup. Rock bottom prices. Whole smelters being shut down ( its already happened ). Power grids will be adapted, probably at the best time too, low Copper prices & higher unemployment.
Coal & oil fired power generators might shut down in preference to hydropower. ( They will in NZ, most of our powers hydrogeneration & coal & gas for peak periods, + wind )
Interesting times ahead.