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anyone read that article?
It has absolutely zero information in it. It's a bunch of puffed up nothing. it's a website called interesting engineering but there's no engineering. it's an article with zero technical information.
This article says that the iron batteries cost is as low as $76.11 per kWh, but lithium ion prices are $108 per kWh right now. I have no idea how they got to 80x cheaper in that headline
Edit: I think they're just saying that the cost of raw iron is 80x cheaper than the cost of raw lithium by weight. That's really deceptive
Are they including the price over time if they last significantly longer than the lithium batteries?
16 years, that's similar to the expected lifetime of lithium solar batteries.
Yeah not a very good description then
Why not post that
because I looked it up after reading your comment and I don't have the powers of precognition
I don't have the powers of precognition
your username rather specifically implies otherwise, yog
lmao touche
It's from 2022, so the OP article is about more recent developments I think.
To put it simply: iron batteries are at a third of the density of lithium and is roughly the same price for housing installation per kWh as lithium. Idk what the other benefits of the medium are but if space or weight isn't a concern iron could make sense. If the batteries have better effeciency in hot and cold I could see it out competing lithium household batteries in places like Canada or Russia. But shipping prices will likely be astronomical
I imagine having cheap batteries paired with stuff like solar for grid stability would be an obvious use case here.
Yeah there's already some data centers and solar stations with these. This team made the longevity longer thus making them "cheaper"
Currently I think vanadium flow batteries are the hottest rn
it seems like there's been a whole explosion of different battery tech in recent years, mostly coming from China
I've been saying for decades if we only had advanced battery tech, oh the things we could do.
I've had an electric scooter since I got to China and it's great. Love the thing. Yes ti will run out of battery so you have to charge it. A battery is enough for a day's use usually. No, you don't drive to Tibet on a single charge.
Yeah they clearly want to explore as many energy avenues as possible to avoid dependency on any one thing the west controls
And different types of batteries work best for different purposes too. If you're making a vehicle then weight and size matters. If you're building battery parks for grid stability then cost is a bigger concern. China is going to end up with a big toolbox which will allow for efficient solutions no matter the context.
All these advances in energy technology make me envious of people who own a house like nothing else.
Makes sense when you think about what a lithium battery fire looks like compared to a thermite reaction. Get those iron oxides into a stable solution with electrodes and a salt bridge, and that's your battery if you have reversible redox reactions for the iron oxides to do their thing
Man, solid state batteries when?
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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