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A huge battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant
(www.canarymedia.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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This is awesome, but now we need better battery tech that doesn't rely on lithium and cobalt. Getting that up to this scale will be hard, though.
There's some promising headway with molten sodium-sulfur batteries. Not only are they at similar capacity as lithium, but their molten nature allows for the batteries to store energy long-term. The downside is a low cycle rate and the heating requirement. Another promising battery tech is sodium ion batteries, which can use iron as a cathode to output similar power and cycling as lithium
This application needs the opposite of that. They need lots and lots of cycles, easy to maintain, and density is not much of an issue.
Sodium-sulfur batteries are designed for the role of grid storage.
Iron-Air batteries will fill that role