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China's new iron battery hits 99.4 percent efficiency over 6000 cycles
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
323 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
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WTF!? If this battery is just half as good as they claim, it could be a game changer for storing power for solar and wind!
Those are not the metrics that are important for storing wind and solar. Cost per MWh is the important one.
It is great to see, and isn't an unreasonable jump from lifepo4. They already do 4-6k charge cycles with something like 20% degradation. This is a bigger deal for electronics and vehicles as it would make battery replacements unnecessary.
But cycle life is a central parameter for the cost of a battery, the longer it lasts the more rarely you have to replace it. In the longer term, a battery that lasts twice as long can be practically half as expensive.
Assuming the manufacturing costs (materials + utilities + other fees + labor + profit extraction) for the two types of batteries are equal, yes.
No? Even if the new battery is 3x more expensive to build, and has 50 % of the capacity of a Li-ion battery, it can still have an advantage in large scale storage if it lasts for 10x as many cycles without degrading. At the end of the day, it's a combination of parameters that determine which is the best for a given application, and high resistance to degradation can outweigh other parameters in many scenarios.