The team says that this battery design would be best suited to the scale of a few dozen kilowatt-hours, like powering an individual home from renewable sources. They could also be useful as charging stations for electric vehicles, thanks to their rapid charging.
That's interesting. I'm guessing that this is because the energy density is too low for a car. But it does potentially answer the question I always have about how the grid can sustain a huge number of rapid chargers. If you build in a buffer, it becomes more like streaming video or something. The connection doesn't need to supply that level of power all the time. You fill the buffer when the station is idle and then empty the buffer when someone comes in for a rapid charge.
If the battery is truly cheap and can sustain many many charge cycles, it's probably cheaper than upgrading the grid just to service a rapid charger in a low-use area, where it only needs to do 5-6 charges per day. Something like that never occurred to me.
