this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I've recently become interested in metal-air batteries, e.g. iron-air batteries, which use only a very plentiful metal (iron) and are thereby suitable for storing energy on a power grid (not much use in consumer electronics, of course - it's not for that!). Also it's conceptually hilarious to me that it's basically rust-powered
It also feels like some of the transportation needs that were included in this video's lithium battery calculations could be handled with capacitors instead of batteries. I believe we should be targeting capacitors for all of our public transportation infrastructure that travels set routs and routinely stops for 10-30s. Busses, light rail, etc can have quick charging stations along the route and you can not only drastically reduce the electric storage (and therefore remove lithium entirely), you can reduce the weight of these vehicles.
Yep, forgot about iron, and about flow batteries.
The nice thing about flow batteries is that storage capacity and reactive cell size can be scaled independently. :)