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How much are the batteries? Why do you think the window is closing?

• gandalfian 6y ago
  Because if lithium becomes established as cheap and good enough then there will less incentive to develope other technologies. Redflow I believe costs as much as a lithium battery but claims to degrade less and be able to be 100% discharged. In practice they have proven hard to manufacture reliably or competively. They seemed better when they stayed theoretical. Share price is down about 95%...
  • woodandsteel 6y ago
    The big advantage of flow batteries for large scale long term storage is to expand capacity you just need larger tanks and more chemicals. With lithium-ion you need to build more batteries.
  • Andys 6y ago
    They have two big problems: 1. lack of efficiency - only 80% roundtrip, much less than Lithium. 2. they go completely offline for periodic maintenance. This is done automatically by Redflow, but the loss of availability is problematic in some circumstances.
    • ZeroGravitas 6y ago
      Lithium seems to have won the high efficiency niche, but there's probably room for lower efficiency flow type batteries as long as they're super cheap.
      • Andys 6y ago
        Agreed, but unfortunately, they are not cheaper and I'm not sure if its economies of scale or something else