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A comment on An open-source flow battery kit. Parent comment

Re:An open-source flow battery kit by mschuster91 on Tuesday August 13, 2024 @02:38PM (#41238199)
> I'm not trying to say flow batteries are stupid or dumb, but their use cases are going to be very limited without some huge breakthroughs that will probably dramatically increase the complexity too.

The largest use case is going to be grid scale storage, and for that one a bunch of dumb tanks and a bank of cells are far easier to handle and less risky than a bunch of li-ion cells that can go into runaway for whatever reason.

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Re:An open-source flow battery kit by Workaccount2 on Tuesday August 13, 2024 @04:52PM (#41239719)
The thing is that there are like 50 other options for energy storage, it's not just lithium-ion that flow batteries have to out compete. Everything from electrolyzed hydrogen, to hot sand, to air pressure tanks, to sodium-ion and zinc air and LiFePo batteries.

Flow batteries are cool because the storage element is extremely easy to scale. But its not even that great because you also need to scale the amount of cells dramatically to make it useful outside of edge cases. At which point it probably makes more sense to just use another storage mechanism.

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