A battery usually hides its nastiest chemistry from view. Inside many rechargeable systems, useful energy moves through liquids that are strongly acidic, alkaline, flammable, corrosive, or difficult to discard. The battery works, until the same chemistry that made it powerful begins to eat away at its parts.
A team in China and Hong Kong has now built a very different kind of battery. Its electrolyte is a neutral water-based solution of magnesium and calcium salts, chemically close to the brines used to coagulate tofu. In tests, the device ran for 120,000 charge cycles, used nonflammable ingredients, and met several disposal safety standards, the researchers in China report.
It is not ready to replace the battery in your phone. But it points toward a cleaner kind of battery for the place where longevity matters most: the electric grid.
Per the article:
Just under 50Wh/kilo but still over 70% capacity after 120.000 charge cycles in lab environment. So quite interesting for grid storage and such.
so for a typical us household about 3 bathtub or 3 il drums worth but if put into a lead acid batter type configuration it would be 150 of them. If the larger deep cycle were used it would be like 60. I feel like this is duable in a shed shelf server room type of configuration. Thats for one day so 365 or about 1/3 of a 100 years or like 30 years. Will be very interesting if you don’t change them all at once although might need to increase everything by 1/4th unless of course the house is setup to be energy efficient and then that could reduce it by quite a lot.