It's difficult to see any of the alternatives displacing batteries for short-term storage. Batteries aren't a good fit for long-term storage, which is where alternatives should be competitive. But that market is essentially 0 right now.
https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/poison/dry-cell-ba... https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002805.htm https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-703-health-concerns...
And cannot always be easily recycled:
https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-09/Lithium-I...
In addition to general concerns about chemical availability, and processing issues.
E.g. Demand expected to outstrip supply as soon as next year:
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
We have nuclear energy, we don’t need to use technology from the medieval ages.
Only some are toxic. But can you name the poison or danger with saltwater batteries?
"Chinese automaker Yiwei debuted the first sodium-ion battery-powered car in 2023. It uses JAC Group’s UE module technology, which is similar to CATL's cell-to-pack design.[82] The car has a 23.2 kWh battery pack with a CLTC range of 230 kilometres (140 mi)."
And for grid storage, "slightly bigger size" really doesn't matter.
Why would want to build an enery system on low-energy-density technology?
That would be equivalent to using relays for building computers in 2024.
But there are many battery companies for gird batteries. Flow is just one type and one that seems far less poplar now-days. They were all the hype like 10-15 years ago.
The problem is the Li-commodity race has already beaten most of those designs. You need to use very, very cheap materials. Form Energy considered some flow designs but rejected them.
That's why Form Energy are going to things like Iron batteries, because Li batteries will never reach those numbers.
But very few of those alternative have had any real commercial success yet.
Peaker plants are power plants sitting there ready to turn on during peak power usage. I think they used to be often coal, which took a while to start up and produced lots of pollution, but then more recently natural gas plants start up faster and have much lower emissions. So during an evening power usage peak, or during really cold or hot times when power demand is high, the grid can tap that power source. Now you can replace those plants with a bunch of batteries that are ready in milliseconds to provide additional power, and then you can charge them if they get used up at night when electric usage is low.