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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Two things are happening here. One, we're bringing on much more Lithium production all around the world. The price increase is coordinating that, but people can also see the writing on the wall. There's plenty of innovation happening in Lithium mining and extraction.

The other thing is we're innovating in battery chemistry. It would not surprise me if Lithium were only one of many options in ten years, depending on the storage capacity and number of cycles needed per kg. Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. Iron, aluminum, and others are a possibility, for stationary batteries where weight doesn't matter.

I know people here are very skeptical of every battery advance press release, and rightfully so. But nonetheless, some of that is going to pan out, and the world of energy storage is going to fundamentally change the economics for cars, airplanes, and grid storage within the next decade.

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I'd bet a decent amount of money that most electric cars in the developed world will still use the Goodenough chemistry in ten years.

The theoretical energy density of sodium is too low for the weight, this isn't a matter of developing the technology.

What we can look forward to is sodium batteries becoming cheap and reliable, replacing every application of lead-acid, and most, perhaps all, stationary lithium. Great choice for house or grid-level storage, where the lower density is basically harmless.

Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.

This will never pencil out.

Sulfur has entered the room.

I did say ten years, rather than more.

150Wh/kg is completely fine. A small vehicle with a 100kg battery can do 95% of what is needed for the average person (or as a second family car), it's just a matter of whether the trend of legislating sane vehicles out of existence continues.

> Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.

This is absolutely not clear. Active lithium is just ~60g per kWh in a battery, or ~1% of the mass of a state of the art LFP battery. Even though sodium weighs 3.5 times more for the same charge, if it's use would allow just a few percent reduction in total weigh, either by reduction of inactive cathode material or some other source, it could easily beat lithium batteries.

Type of material decides on battery's energy density. It's just impossible for battery of "inferior" chemistry to get to same level of capacity.

There is a reason lead ones are not "just" heavy but also physically much bigger than same capacity lithium one.

What will (probably) happen if we get competitive sodium batteries is that they will phase out lithium from the stationary storage so there won't be that huge demand for lithium for everything. Or possibly they will become "cheap EV's battery"

Stationary storage will more like be taken over by iron batteries which are much cheaper. Sodium batteries will happen in cars because not everyone needs really long range.

Sodium is both heavier and less energetic, enough so that the equation points to a worse car: heavier than a car which goes substantially further.

Sodium cannot improve lithium by replacing it in batteries, for physical chemistry reasons which can't be negotiated.

I don't consider it likely that lithium will become so much more expensive that people will want their second-largest purchase, a car, to be inferior in the way that it must be with sodium batteries.

Rather more likely that cheap and good sodium batteries relieve pressure on lithium supply for the enormous amount of battery storage we need to handle intermittent renewables.

If a significant proportion of a lithium battery was lithium, this would absolutely be true.

By weight, something around 1% of a lithium battery is lithium.

Sodium is seen as an interesting alternative, because there are some indications that it can make that 99% that makes up the rest of the battery lighter. Even though sodium is ~3.5 times worse as a charge carrier, if it's use allows cutting enough weight from that rest, it can be a winner overall.

For example, aluminium is, for complex reasons, not compatible with every part of a li-ion battery, and so they use copper connectors internally, typically containing by weight at least 10 times as much copper as they contain lithium. Sodium batteries can use aluminum everywhere, which saves on not just cost, but also more in weight than the weight difference between equal molar amounts of sodium and lithium.

That all makes sense about the weight, and it will likely matter for airplanes. But it doesn't matter enough for cars.

LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.

CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg. Even if that doesn't come to fruition, it's already higher density than what's being used in electric cars!

Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway. You might be able to drop weight in hazard protection systems. Battery cycle times are competitive with Lithium chemistry. Contrary to your prediction that it doesn't pencil out, I expect sodium-ion to completely displace Lithium batteries for use in electric vehicles because it pencils out so much better. It will just be so much cheaper and doesn't bottleneck on any materials as you scale up.

As someone who occasionally walks and often cycles, I really hope batteries that are even heavier than lithium don't become commonplace.

Why? compare the weight of SUVs or trucks. It's more than the battery weight, so better hope for smaller vehicles.

I hope for smaller vehicles as well. It's hard to separate "big" and "heavy" statistically because they are highly correlated, but in general, heavier vehicles means higher likelihood of fatality in a crash 1. I suppose we will be doing a natural experiment to tease out the difference over the years as heavy EVs become more commonplace and pedestrian fatalities continue to increase.

> It’s also about weight. Trucks today averaging around 5200 pounds -- that’s a jump of more than a half ton since 2000. And things get heavier as electric vehicles look to become our new normal.

> On average electric vehicles are 10 percent heavier than gas powered cars. For instance, the new electric Hummer weighs in at a staggering 9,100 pounds or more than 4 and a half tons. All that weight can have deadly consequences. Researchers have found that for every 1,000 pounds a car puts on, a pedestrian is nearly 50 percent more likely to die if they’re hit and the more a truck weighs the longer it will take to stop.

1. https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2022/08/08/size-does-mat...

I dunno that "lighter cars" is a realistic thing to hope for at this point. I do hope to see better bumper crush zone designs, more protected bike lanes, blinking crosswalks, better in-vehicle collision detection systems, etc.

Even if a "lighter" car hits you, it's gonna be a bad day. Better to avoid the collision altogether, no? :)

I "hope" for lighter cars in the same way I "hope" we start taking necessary drastic measures to combat climate change, which is by knowing that it won't happen and advocating for change anyway.

On the other hand, I think maybe hoping that vehicles become no heavier than modern EVs is at least somewhat realistic.

>LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.

Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.

BYD sells a lithium-iron-phosphate battery with an energy density of 150 Wh/kg. CATL's LFP is 125.

Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".

>CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg.

This is reported as the "single-cell" energy density, and is not directly comparable to the battery pack density.

>Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway.

Surely this isn't because of the stability of sodium, which anyone who watched that chemistry demonstration in high school knows, is significantly more reactive than lithium. I expect the risks to be similar; furthermore, the concept of a dense energy storage that has no risk of sudden release is physically unlikely.

> Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.

In theory 490 km, in practice, 380 km. Because they don't degrade as much, after a few years they are closer to what you call the high end models.

> Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".

Correct, I want to point out that John Goodenough was responsible for the basic research which lead to all lithium-ion batteries.

I explicitly intended LiFePO to be included, and I hope for a variety of reasons that it's much more popular than cobalt-heavy formulas in ten years.

Only now do I realise that "Goodenough" is a real person's name, and neither a placeholder name nor a case of Emphasis Via Capital Letters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough

I have been interested in the technology from TexPower:

https://texpowerev.com/

They offer a lithium-nickel chemistry without cobalt. If it can be proven in practice, it would allow comparable density to the best car batteries in a scalable chemistry. The founder is a researcher at the University of Texas who wrote several papers on the chemistry:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/adma.2020027...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240582972...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/aenm.2...

Is it likely that current cars would be compatible with batteries that are that different to not even be Lithium in 10 years?

If I look at say my laptop or phone, they definitely aren't compatible with newer batteries even if it's technically feasible so why would we expect cars to be?

It’s a software update to support different chemistries. This is how Tesla supports various pack types (Li, LFP, etc) across vehicles and stationary storage products.

To clarify: did you mean HW update? For instance, I can't imagine a software update changing my battery chemistry from Lithium Ion to Nickel Cadmium.

I think they meant that _supporting_ this type of battery is a software update. Software can't do matter-energy conversion yet.

Your car doesn't have to know about the "chemistry" of your battery. It just needs to know specifics about voltages and power draw and temperatures. This is what drivers do.

This is like suggesting that my computer can't go from AMD to nvidia because they would need to know deep specifics about AMD's proprietary chips to support them. But that's what drivers are for!

That’s because your video card sits on a standard well defined port. Where as charging an EV right now comes a bunch of plugs, voltages, charging times, etc. until a unified open standard is reached where you can go from super charging a Tesla to charging a sodium hyndai is reached, this whole ev dance will remain anti consumer.

It's "just" different charge profile; wouldn't need any hardware change.

Most chemistries can be charged using the same "constant current up to this voltage, constant voltage to the max voltage" method, just need to set the right values.

Yes, it is likely. As long as the form factor is well defined or standardized, new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots.

The reason it's not true for laptops is that batteries aren't standard form factor sizes in laptops.

> new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots.

You might notice that Li-Ion AA batteries CAN'T be charged by Ni-Cd or Ni-MH AA battery chargers. Even a smaller change like Ni-MH to Ni-Zn requires different equipment.

They were shoehorning V8's into miatas, well outside of the warranty period. Locked into obsolete engineering is a crutch/impediment, not innovation.

Seeing the 4G rollout was a good economic course in environmental pollution and abandonded psuedo-innovation. All of the older surplus 2G/3G/4G hardware and abandonded software was sold to developing countries. Now every device on tcp/ip has inferior muck with an out-of-date ecosystem.

Desktop computing had it right when the information superhighway still existed. Just install new hardware thats backwards compatible (the hardware was forward compatible by design).

The tabloid quality fodder and disposible commerce has always been 3rd world, much in the same way that tcp/ip evolved.

Anything for an inferior integer to stay relevant, huh? The environmental impact is someone elses problem :p

> Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt.

If you split salt into sodium and chlorine, and use the sodium for batteries, what do you do with the chlorine?

Dump it into Californians tap water supply apparently :)

On serious note, Chlorine is widely use chemical, used in cleaning products, bleaching paper and cloth, pesticides , rubber, and some solvents.

Chlorine has lots of industrial uses, so I imagine you sell it. If you produce enough as a by product the cost will go insanely low.

If you had to dump it, you'd probably react it with something cheap to make it inert. This would generate energy, it's akin to combustion with oxygen. You could use that energy to decrease the energy requirements of splitting the NaCl in the first step.

For example, you could use it to turn calcium carbonate AKA limestone into calcium chloride, which is rather harmless. You would get carbon dioxide out of this.

Then what do you do with the CO2, which we already have too much of?

Something that might work on a small scale could become an ecological threat on the scale of a billion electric cars.

Bleach. Clorox sells lots of it.

Use carbonate, which doesn't have this problem.

This would be preferred anyway: HCl is nasty, and carbon dioxide is not.

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