[jfengel]

Lithium batteries are used mainly in transportation. And we're already shifting towards them, because they're just plain better.

If we were to start over from scratch, the whole notion of covering the landscape with chemical dispensers would be considered absurd: smelly, toxic, and inconvenient. Why wouldn't you just go home and plug your car into your house? Why have a car with thousands of precision moving parts when you can just have a battery on an oversized skateboard?

We already have electric distribution infrastructure. It needs to be upgraded, but not created from scratch. The only thing that needs large lithium batteries is vehicles. You can use different chemistries for stable objects like the grid itself, or your house -- which is a nice bonus, in that you can run your house even when the infrastructure is down.

And then you can let a whole separate parallel energy infrastructure degrade and vanish. No more gas pipelines or gasoline tankers as we gradually get rid of the dependencies on them. It's not "current infrastructure" forever: it has to be maintained. If we're going to do maintenance anyway, why not put it into the existing electric grid rather than both that and the fossil fuel system?