competition...?, page-2

At the small user scale (i.e. a few to 10-20 kWh/day) their only real competition for the moment are lead-acid and lithium - and once they ramp up production they'll be beating those handily. Zinc is just so much cheaper and less hazardous.

At the grid scale there's a lot more competition, both already established and up-and-coming. A number of flow battery companies already exist (primarily vanadium or zinc-bromine), but the smallest currently available unit is 50kWh and they go up steeply from there. Vanadium has an advantage in that both oxidized and reduced vanadium remains in solution (whereas zinc plates out as the neutral metal) so it's easier to achieve longer electrode lifetimes - but this is heavily counterbalanced by the fact that vanadium is over ten times as expensive as zinc. Still, it probably makes more sense for really big applications where minimizing maintenance is key.

At the really massive scale, though, they may well be beaten out by the liquid metal/liquid salt battery systems coming from MIT (and being commercialized by Ambri). No good for small scale since they have to stay hot enough to remain molten - but they can stuff 2MWh into a 40 foot shipping crate, and have near infinite lifetimes (since everything's liquid, there's no wear to speak of).

TL;DR: I think Redflow's carved themselves a sweet niche in the small-medium scale market where they'll dominate very lucratively for a while (assuming, of course, no more hang ups in getting to production). But I'm also hedging my bets by investing in the raw materials (zinc, vanadium) that all these companies are going to need. Do some sums: to really make a dent in the need for storage, it's going to take a few years' total production of each of these metals.