this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Which battery technology are you referring to?
Lithium-ion has pretty big operational safety concerns (thermal runaway) and as far as I know we haven’t completely figured out the recycling either.
Pumped storage has massive environmental implications and is typically very difficult to get approved by local governments.
Flow batteries are still a very infant technology. There’s very big design differences between manufacturers that have very big tradeoffs. But I do believe these will “win” the storage race, eventually.
Flywheel and gravity storage don’t have the magnitude and duration requirements for grid-level storage solutions.
Lithium grid batteries are a non-issue for safety, in practice. They're LFP (which is really forgiving heatwise, as lithium batteries go) and adding a ton of passive cooling isn't a big deal since weight isn't a problem when it's stationary. And sodium-ion will only be better in this regard.
Recycling is overblown as a problem. Like any industry, recycling needs scale to be economical, and every new tech isn't recycled at scale until 1) it's produced at scale, and 2) that generation produced at scale reaches EOL and needs to be recycled.
In practice, recycling lithium batteries is a non-issue because a lithium battery contains an entire battery's worth of lithium (it's ~10%+ lithium - and that lithium is a liquid that, when drained out, is >99% lithium!), whereas lithium brine is like 0.1% lithium. It's not hard to recycle most of the battery, and the other parts will only be learned after we have mountains of free dead batteries to practice on, not before.
I listen to news, some of them dedicated to sustainable energy markets, but I'm not an engineer nor so I pretend to be. That news reported in depths about how many large scale battery power plants want to get permission, being blocked primarily by regulation, not technology.