Woosh, that is unlike you. The potential value of an aluminium foil based fuel cell is that it allow us to store a lot of immediately useful electrical energy for months on end and if necessary transport it long distances. Aluminium as a fuel is virtually inexhaustible,it is the process of turning it into a metallic film ,which is the energy intensive action. So rather than being anti renewables it actually is potentially a game changer.
At the level of an electric bike, it could create another market, where the user goes in to Halfords or Curry's or Aldi and replaces a used cartridge with a fresh one. The used one gets re manufactured.
Obviously it depends on the detailed energetics and chemistry,but chemistry books were discussing this 15 years ago.
you could say the same about using hydrogen fuel cells.
The difference between Lithium ion batteries and fuel cells such as Aluminium Air is that the loss in each cycle of charge for secondary batteries like our Lithium ion ones is very small, less than 10% and cheap, we spend about 50p to £1 on overall running cost when we recharge our e-bikes. You can't say the same for primary batteries such as fuel cells.
Each time you want to recharge an aluminium air battery, you have to dismantle it, pull out the electrodes and replace them with new ones. The cost of remanufacturing against the useful charge is uneconomical.
It's not just the case for Al-Air, even the most developed fuel cells can't match the low cost of use of secondary batteries.
That's why the world has not switched over to fuel cells yet.