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While true I suspect that the future of energy storage is overwhelmingly dominated by large scale battery storage. A lot of the alternatives fall in the "cute,

• adrianN 2y ago
  It depends on what you mean by future. The next couple of years certainly. But once you start looking for technology that can store weeks worth of energy over several months, batteries don’t look like the clear winner.
  • jandrese 2y ago
    Depends how much need there is for long term energy storage. Off grid users have this problem currently when building solar+battery systems. They can pretty reasonably afford to install enough battery to cover a couple of cloudy days in winter, but if you think about two weeks of solid cloud cover the battery planner goes nuts. The solution is to install a sane amount of battery, enough for 2 to 3 cloudy days, and a small backup fuel generator for those few days a year when the solar falls short. Does this solution scale to the grid? It involves a fuel plant that sits idle for the vast majority of the year which is not great for paying off its construction costs. It would almost certainly have to be subsidized by the ratepayers, but since they're otherwise getting almost free solar power maybe this can still work. It's also bad news for the fossil fuel extraction industry. There isn't much need to drill baby drill when you're only burning fuel for like two weeks out of the year.