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A comment on California Grid Breezes Through Heatwave with Batteries. Parent comment

Re:California Grid Breezes Through Heatwave with Batteries by redleader55 on Sunday July 14, 2024 @05:52PM (#40963471)
You are right: there are a lot of proposals at the moment trying to replace lithium. I'm hopeful, but let's wait until they are widely adopted before claiming victory. Let's not forget the carbon and environmental cost of such alternative batteries are not known because they are not mass built and mass deployed.
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Re:California Grid Breezes Through Heatwave with Batteries by Gibbon1 on Sunday July 14, 2024 @06:19PM (#40963617)
When I read people talking about replacing lithium batteries I think of the decades of reading about material X replacing silicon in IC's and solar cells.
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Re:California Grid Breezes Through Heatwave with Batteries by timschmidt on Sunday July 14, 2024 @07:23PM (#40963997)
These are available for purchase from a number of companies in mass production today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
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Re:California Grid Breezes Through Heatwave with Batteries by adgjlsfhk1 on Monday July 15, 2024 @02:25AM (#40965679)
I think there is a fairly big difference between these examples. solar panels need pretty complicated semiconductors. Batteries on the other hand can be made by sticking 2 random metals in a jar with some salt water. since grid storage only cares about price per capacity rather than energy density, it seems unlikely for expensive materials to win out.
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