These are different things.Converting energy from one form to...

These are different things.

Converting energy from one form to another (wind or solar to electricity, for example) will always have inefficiencies. A coal fired plant is, at best, around 40% efficient, for example.

When you’re taking electricity and storing it, you will have losses. With lithium, those losses might be only a few percent. With my ZBM, they were over 20%.

My garage was very warm while the Redflow battery was running - all of that lost energy was converted into heat. Now that I have LiFePO4, it’s a lot cooler - meaning that I get more effective energy out of my solar system.

In the context of energy storage, if you don’t have decent efficiency, you need a lot more energy going in to make up the difference. That’s not an insurmountable problem, but it does mean that the battery has to be significantly cheaper for a given capacity, so you can build out more generation capacity more cheaply than the more efficient storage options.

Or maybe there are other factors at play, like fire resistance, that make the lower efficiency worthwhile.

Point is, a low efficiency has to be justified somehow; and Redflow’s efficiency is very much at the lower end of the scale.