Comment by epistasis

20,000 daily cycles if 55 years. 10,000 daily cycles is 27 years. The expected usage case for these batteries is near daily usage.

I hadn't really thought about thermal tech in such extreme terms until your comment, but to me it appears to be the tape storage of our times. There will always be a fair amount of infrastructure hidden that almost nobody knows about, but it's going to be dwarfed in active usage by HDDs or SDDs.

The tech advantages really are that big for batters and other solid state energy tech over the moving parts thermal variety. Thermal tech hasn't had an upgrade like LTO-6 (or is it 7 now) and is pretty much at the end of its possible engineered capabilities, but batteries are just barely getting started on what they are capable of.