"may need to" -Power Utilities worldwide have been looking at flow battery models for decades. What they lacked was supply chain committed to the longterm specific model, and a pricepoint which matched their needs. Lithium batteries were being made in volumes with a supply chain for multiple uses: cars, home storage, this industrial-scale purpose. It provided a pricepoint and a supply chain and logistics to match for BMS and demand management at scale.
Flow batteries are good. They exist. They didn't get the capital required to drive them to ubiquity, in industrial scale deployment .. yet.
Also, putting to one side "duracell" typically means a non rechargable, we actually can green the planet WITH canister sized individual battery instances ganged up into bigger units, because that's precisely what we are doing. The mistake is thinking batteries can do it alone. Not what format they come in and how we aggregate them. There are gigawatts and gigawatt-hours of Tesla batteries in deployment which provide frequency stability, and other load demand management services, and extend the duration that solar and wind power can be supplied without "firming" from Gas or other peaker plants, and they supplant traditional condenser spinning loads, and actually DO supply power. They have helped significantly alter the trajectory of change here.
This is a bit like saying "great: we can't build skyscrapers out of something as small as gravel, this is stupid: we invented bricks for a reason" ignoring the structural role of gravel as aggregate in concrete.
Individual cell technology is not the limiting factor here.
Flow batteries are good. They exist. They didn't get the capital required to drive them to ubiquity, in industrial scale deployment .. yet.
Also, putting to one side "duracell" typically means a non rechargable, we actually can green the planet WITH canister sized individual battery instances ganged up into bigger units, because that's precisely what we are doing. The mistake is thinking batteries can do it alone. Not what format they come in and how we aggregate them. There are gigawatts and gigawatt-hours of Tesla batteries in deployment which provide frequency stability, and other load demand management services, and extend the duration that solar and wind power can be supplied without "firming" from Gas or other peaker plants, and they supplant traditional condenser spinning loads, and actually DO supply power. They have helped significantly alter the trajectory of change here.
This is a bit like saying "great: we can't build skyscrapers out of something as small as gravel, this is stupid: we invented bricks for a reason" ignoring the structural role of gravel as aggregate in concrete.
Individual cell technology is not the limiting factor here.