I don't know how much funding does in batteries that are designed to be stationery. I.e. where weight does not matter, where they can be bulky and potentially r

I don't know how much funding does in batteries that are designed to be stationery. I.e. where weight does not matter, where they can be bulky and potentially run hot. There are technologies that are irrelevant for cars or phone (which I do think attract most of the battery R&D) that would be a good fit for a battery the size of a building, designed to store the electricity for a whole city during the night/low wind period. Government can fund the private R&D easily by, for instance, mandate that renewable sources installed on the grid must provide a baseline 24/24. But public research is nothing to sneeze at. It brought us the lithium-ion battery (Goodenough was working at the U of Texas when inventing it). Private R&D is good at incremental improvements and solving deployment problems. Public research at funding radically new tech. They work well together.