I see what you are saying, in reality the right energy storage is very application dependent. The crux of my argument is that I cannot think of many applications where a commercial grade flow battery is the best choice, much less a single application where a DIY flow battery is the best choice.
My main point is that while it definitely has to compete on price, it doesn't have to compete on price while also making you buy ten times as many cells.
Many elements of being the "best choice" are thresholds. Excess performance doesn't make it better. Price is extremely important, but power density is not so important for most use cases. So if it's even slightly cheaper, expect to see a lot of it.
The crux of my argument is that I cannot think of many applications where a commercial grade flow battery is the best choice
I think the argument against that is that we've spent tens of thousands of person-hours a millions of dollars more researching, developing, improving, and refining lithium-ion batteries than we have flow-batteries, and the purpose of the project in OP is to make it easier to tinker with flow-batteries.
Think of how much better lithium-ion batteries have gotten since we first started using them. We went from "You simply cannot achieve the energy density to propel (tethered) cars without fossil fuels" to "Oh wait we have electric cars now." in like a decade, and in the decade since them, lithium ion batteries have improved in every metric by at least an order of magnitude. We simply don't know how good flow-batteries can get, because we haven't tried, and it's silly to say "why bother trying, they're not very good right now" when we've just seen how much of a difference it makes to invest into this sort of technology.
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I see what you are saying, in reality the right energy storage is very application dependent. The crux of my argument is that I cannot think of many applications where a commercial grade flow battery is the best choice, much less a single application where a DIY flow battery is the best choice.
My main point is that while it definitely has to compete on price, it doesn't have to compete on price while also making you buy ten times as many cells.
Many elements of being the "best choice" are thresholds. Excess performance doesn't make it better. Price is extremely important, but power density is not so important for most use cases. So if it's even slightly cheaper, expect to see a lot of it.
Christmas present for a battery enthusiast? :D
I think the argument against that is that we've spent tens of thousands of person-hours a millions of dollars more researching, developing, improving, and refining lithium-ion batteries than we have flow-batteries, and the purpose of the project in OP is to make it easier to tinker with flow-batteries.
Think of how much better lithium-ion batteries have gotten since we first started using them. We went from "You simply cannot achieve the energy density to propel (tethered) cars without fossil fuels" to "Oh wait we have electric cars now." in like a decade, and in the decade since them, lithium ion batteries have improved in every metric by at least an order of magnitude. We simply don't know how good flow-batteries can get, because we haven't tried, and it's silly to say "why bother trying, they're not very good right now" when we've just seen how much of a difference it makes to invest into this sort of technology.