Look up Formenergy they are commercializing a Iron air battery that is based on the Edison cell but w/o the nickel side of the cell. Edison cells have cycle lifetimes in the 40,000+ range there are Edison cells from over 100 years ago still in active use. They are targeting $20 kWh in LCOS that’s nothing short of a paradigm shift. Even at 50% efficiency at those costs you could put up panels for 18 cents per watt lose 50% and still be cheaper than the grid wholesale even three times cheaper than retail.Iron cells are not 50% they are 90+% round trip efficient. Making the numbers even better. The batteries are the size of washing machines and industrial strength no fragile lithium cells. Georgia LP just signed up to do the first grid scale test with 1500 megawatts hours of storage that’s equal to one of the South Texas nuclear plants reactor output for an hour. Or a large sized Hydro electric plant. They plan on using it to store solar during the day and let it back to the grid at night. With Edison cell cycle lifetimes as all Iron anode exhibit they should easily get too $20 kWh the expensive part is the nickel cathode. Iron is cheap and easy to recycle as well. It’s one of the most abundant elements on earth second only to aluminum and silicon in the crust. For off grid set up Formenergy which is a spin-off of MIT is going to set the bar for storage. Iron nickel cells are routinely used for off grid applications today they beat lead acid in energy metric including LCOS which is levelized cost of storage the all in over the entire life span cost to storage energy round trip.
And so far we're talking about industrial scale stuff. That is the problem. Fossil fuels work very well at industrial scale levels too until the gubment makes it hard to use them. Edison cells or any other kind of future power will suffer the same fate.
The only power applications I'm interested in are the ones I can do myself.