Evan Bernstein

New Chinese iron battery lasts 16 years.

Ooh, 16 years.

New.

An iron battery.

That sounds impressive.

Is it impressive?

It must be impressive, right?

Well, what's an iron battery?

First of all, iron batteries use iron, water, and air to store electricity.

They are often called iron air or rust batteries.

Have we talked about rust batteries before on the show?

We have talked about it.

Okay, I just wasn't familiar with rust batteries.

That's what, for short, they're called.

And they operate via a reversible oxidation reduction cycle that can provide 100 hours of discharge, which far exceeds, say, lithium-ion.

But iron batteries are primarily designed for long-duration and grid-scale applications.

In other words, you're not going to see these in mobile devices or EVs or anything like that.

So here's what the article says, or they say the core claim is.

They report that Chinese researchers have developed an all-iron flow battery

with a record-breaking 6,000 cycle lifespan equivalent to 16 years of operation with zero degradation at a fraction of lithium's cost.