Submission Statement

Neither company is giving much detail on the reasons why. From the little they say it appears they both believe the technology will eventually work, but it doesn't seem to be happening "near term" enough.

It's interesting to compare this with middle mile robot delivery. Middle mile refers to trips between two fixed points. A major distribution center and its end retail locations for example. That finally appears to be arriving, with Level 4 vehicles traveling from fixed point to fixed point without safety drivers now a reality.

Who knows how long we may have to wait for true level 5 autonomous robotic driving, but if Amazon & FedEx can't make it work soon with small, slow robots, it seems it will be Level 4 robotic vehicles reshaping transport and logistics first for some time.

Submission Statement

This research seems quite tied to Korea's domestic battery production industry, so I hope this bodes well for its commercialization.

Other questions need to be addressed too. As this is quite a fundamental redesign of lithium-ion battery chemistry, how much lithium would this new battery use? That could have quite a significant effect on the final cost.

> This is great and all but it spans 7,850 acres. That's a whole lotta land.

It's worth noting that the USA devotes 781 million acres entirely to cows. (That's pasture + land that grows other food for livestock).

You could fit 100,000 of these renewable plants into that amount of space.

But don't worry, that would never happen. If all US electricity was generated by plants like this one, you would only need (approx/ball park) 1,500 of them, thus only needing 1.5% of the land devoted to cows.

Note - based on total generation capacity by capacity load

Submission Statement

As OP notes, the project is “getting closer and closer to having something with a very stable output profile that we traditionally think of being what’s capable with a fuel-based generation power plant.”

It's an interesting question as to just how much storage a 100% renewables system would need to provide all the backup needed to supply continuous power.

A recent study that did this for Germany points out that the issue here is that most of the time that storage capacity would be small relative to total generating capacity, but that occasionally (concurrent long periods of low wind) there would be a need for very high storage reserves to be called upon.

It suggested batteries for the bulk of the normal storage requirements, and hydrogen stored in salt caverns for the rarer times much more storage needs to be called on.

Submission Statement

I wonder if microgrids are due an economic boom? [13% of the world](https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access#:~:text=940%20million%20(13%25%20of%20the,100%2Dfold%20across%20the%20world.) (940 million people) don't have access to mains electricity. These people are poor, but the cost of microgrids can be shared among small communities. If ten households could share the cost of something costing several thousand dollars, something that costs several hundred dollars seems much more doable. Especially if you consider tying the purchase to microfinance initiatives.