lead acid batteries being dumped in a landfill is pretty much a thing of the past.
today there are all sorts of incentives to keep them recycled, to the point that lead acid batteries
are the most recycled waste product we have in the US.
with the scroungers around cutting out copper, believe you me they will not allow a battery to sit around
unguarded either, poof it is gone to the recycler.
even those that end up in dumpsters, in larger cities at least, end up on a huge covered concrete floor, where the
compactor trucks dump the refuse, and a high loader moves the stuff about to take out to the landfill, there are guys
there on the lookout for batteries as they are not only horrible for our ground water, but they have a significant value
which the landfill folks understand very well.
this doesn't mean some don't slip through, but it is said that well over 95% of all lead acid batteries are completely recycled,
every last bit of the battery is recycled, from the plastic case to the lead plates, it all gets recycled.
i know this is a side note, but thought it might be pertinent to the discussion.
it just seems very unlikely to me that any RE battery system will end up in a landfill, the core return is large enough to
make then very desirable from an economic standpoint, if you got to load them to go to a landfill, you might as well drop them
at a recycler and get paid for the labor.
as for iron batteries, at 4x the cost of lead acid, and because of the rather large installed base of lead acid powered equipment, it is doubtful that they will every get a significant market share. like it or not that is about the way it is.
folks that don't have much in the way of inverters and such, generally don't have the rather large pile of money to pay for iron batteries, and those that have the pile of money already have put out a pile of it on inverters, controllers, backup charging systems etc that work on the lead acid technology.
the price is going to have to come way down, for the iron batteries to get any real market share.
also just because a battery is stated to last for 20-40 years does not mean a set you buy will last that long, it may well be that they
only last 15-20 years or less, due to other issues related to things like case materials, or some other issue unrelated to the core technology. only time will prove them one way or the other.
i am just very wary of any claims of longevity of a new production product based on experience of an old manufacture, a case in point is the lister vs listeroid diesel engine.
when these indian built listeroids (clone of a lister diesel) came to this country it was widely reported or stated that they would last a lifetime, 100k hours, etc. this apparently based on the original listers history of longevity, which in my opinion was overstated and romaticized too. the reality turns out that the listeroids will not make 100khrs, as a matter of fact most would never make 5khours without some major issue, and there were even some that had issues making a thousand hours before some catastrophic failure occurred.
therein is the basic problem,
folks generally will not change until there is a compelling reason to do so,
a battery made in china, at 4x the price of a lead acid battery, with no dealer structure on the continent, that needs very different charge and discharge voltages, etc. does not make a very compelling case for change.
environmental concerns are not a case for change either, anyone that is concerned with the environment is not going to dump the lead batteries in a landfill under any circumstances.
the price has got to come down, there needs to be a distribution network for product support/warrantee issues, and the manufacture has to prove his quality of the product, all of which is going to take time, a lot of time, or one heck of a pile of money.
my opinion only
bob g