It's difficult to see any of the alternatives displacing batteries for short-term storage. Batteries aren't a good fit for long-term storage, which is where alternatives should be competitive. But that market is essentially 0 right now.
There's also various schemes to use gravity. Pump water uphill above a dam when power demand is low like at night, also I have read speculation of trying to do this in some underground mine or something so it doesn't evaporate.
Yes, there are excellent non-"battery" technologies. I'm explicitly talking about the high capacity chemical batteries everyone's crazy for these days.
Sodium ion batteries are chemical and can have as much capacity as you like. They just need a bit more space, but not too much more, as they are already used in cheaper electric cars.
"Chinese automaker Yiwei debuted the first sodium-ion battery-powered car in 2023. It uses JAC Group’s UE module technology, which is similar to CATL's cell-to-pack design.[82] The car has a 23.2 kWh battery pack with a CLTC range of 230 kilometres (140 mi)."
And for grid storage, "slightly bigger size" really doesn't matter.
There are lots of companies trying to build out different kinds of flow batteries for storage. Think of a shipping container filled with some substance that stores charge and just sits there, waiting for you to use it, grid storage. But they all seem like research projects. https://news.mit.edu/2023/flow-batteries-grid-scale-energy-s...
There have already been some flow battery startups going bust since that started.
But there are many battery companies for gird batteries. Flow is just one type and one that seems far less poplar now-days. They were all the hype like 10-15 years ago.
The problem is the Li-commodity race has already beaten most of those designs. You need to use very, very cheap materials. Form Energy considered some flow designs but rejected them.
That's why Form Energy are going to things like Iron batteries, because Li batteries will never reach those numbers.
But very few of those alternative have had any real commercial success yet.
Depends on what long term means. But batteries are used for power grid storage. Tesla is selling huge numbers of tesla megapacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Megapack) often used to replace peaker plants.
Peaker plants are power plants sitting there ready to turn on during peak power usage. I think they used to be often coal, which took a while to start up and produced lots of pollution, but then more recently natural gas plants start up faster and have much lower emissions. So during an evening power usage peak, or during really cold or hot times when power demand is high, the grid can tap that power source. Now you can replace those plants with a bunch of batteries that are ready in milliseconds to provide additional power, and then you can charge them if they get used up at night when electric usage is low.
Yeah, I think my question was a bit fuzzy, what is the definition of long term? Batteries are excellent for short term storage, days or weeks but they don’t have the same storage performance as fossil fuels of where talking months and years.
