Old is New in battery storage

Renewables and battery storage have become mainstream topics in the last few years, and everyone knows about lithium ion batteries. Correction: everyone owns at least one, in their smartphones. But those batteries do have a number of downsides, including the fact that they can start fires .

On a more global scale, the concern is cost, so finding cheaper, safer forms of large scale storage is critical if we want to transition away from fossil fuels before we all turn into shish kebabs. Given the corporate obsession with profit at any cost, ‘cheap’ and ‘change’ seem to be joined at the hip, so I hope these new-old technologies become mainstream soon.

The video below describes one of the oldest and cheapest contenders for large scale battery storage:

cheers,
Meeks