this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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I don't care about batteries becoming cheaper. What I care about is them becoming safer.
I had far too many sudden spicy pillows in devices this year, I'd prefer something that isn't as dangerous as Lithium-Ion.
It's going to be a key to unlocking proper grid-scale energy storage.
For example, in my country, there's decent solar output from about april to october at most. November to February we just sit in the dark, the sun barely rises at all. With li-ion, the cost to store enough energy in the summer months to use it in the winter would be at least 100x for the batteries compared to the solar panels themselves. Not the least of our issues is that energy usage in winter is significantly bigger than summer, largely due to increasing number of heat pumps and the fact that EVs require way more electricity in the winter for the same distance as well.
Wind helps out in the winter, but mostly we're at the mercy of fossil fuels, whereas in the summer we have nothing to do with our plentiful solar energy so the price often goes negative, meaning if anyone accidentally sells their power to the grid, they have to pay for the privilege.
Personally I don't significantly care about batteries becoming safer. I do care about them becoming cheaper. I've not had a single spicy pillow on anything I've owned, only seen them at work when I refurbished laptops.
In the medium term, I'm hopeful for technology like this:
https://www.photoncycle.com/
That's mostly interesting for flat places that can't use pumped hydro to store energy, like the Netherlands or Denmark....
Netherlands nd Denmark can use hydro-storage in Norway.
They don't have a closed national grid.
How good is the link?
Here in Estonia, two problems we face are that the two Estlink cables connecting us to Finland (which has a nuclear plant! yay!) are sometimes down for maintenance, and also they're sometimes fully saturated in the winter. In fact when that happens, power prices go up a lot because our national consumption can reach 1600 MW (actually new record this February was 1723 MW) and when the main shale burning plant is down for maintenance (which is about once a week for 8 days at a time in the winter when it would be useful) we're pretty much at the mercy of wind and and the Finnish nuclear plants. Oh and since we're the bridge between the rest of the Baltics and Finland, we don't really keep all of what is transferred over Estlink, the Latvians and Lithuanians are part of the same grid so their demand gets added to ours.
Point being, our grids might not be closed, but particularly when talking about overseas connections, there are bottlenecks.
I mean maybe if we invested in our grid here in the Netherlands. The government's answer to increased renewable has been to remove incentives and encourage everyone to get their own batteries. 😞