Donald Sadoway, a chemist at MIT and entrepreneur, does a good job drumming up interest in this technology. Although not entirely an original concept, he frames the liquid metal battery as his own creation and explains how it can be easily scaled and used for grid energy storage to offset the intermittency of renewable energies such as solar and wind. He hits on a lot of points and explains the battery well, but fails to put it in context in the market. The only characteristics that decide whether this battery will successfully change the game as he predicts are price and energy density. He mentions that it is "designed to the market price point", but does not elaborate on this at all in comparison with the lithium ion competitors that currently rule the world. If you look around the web, there are hints that they may be cheaper and have more capacity, but mostly in relation to the currently in-development "cold" liquid-metal version for use in electric vehicles. See more about these batteries.
Summary
All in all it's an interesting topic from a good speaker with too little context. Enjoy!
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