YouTuber "NightHawkInLight" just made a flow battery from common materials. Why would I want a solid state battery when I could have a battery whose capacity expands just by duct taping plastic water barrels to it?
For storage at the level of a home or a grid-level battery, absolutely.
Li-Ion is dominating because of the amount of inertia and economies of scale it has. But if we assumed equal amounts of R&D and investment you'd expect a future of solid state batteries for mobile applications and flow batteries for stationary applications
Is energy density required for all applications? Something that's not desirable for say a car doesn't mean something isn't good enough for say non-mobile applications.
Well, yes actually. If you're talking any kind of batteries above Duracell level, then it's important to understand how much power can be stored in a given "unit"
Of course you need to know the power per unit to some degree, but when you're building warehouse-sized stationary storage arrays, land is cheap and LCOS is more important than energy density. That's a very different tradeoff calculation than if you're building a car.
Li-Ion is dominating because of the amount of inertia and economies of scale it has. But if we assumed equal amounts of R&D and investment you'd expect a future of solid state batteries for mobile applications and flow batteries for stationary applications