I'll believe it when someone actually produced one at cost efficient prices.
And 200 wh/kg sodium ion is on the "roadmap" for the next few years. They've been generally about a year behind their roadmaps, but those projections aren't some pray-for-invention thing.
And sodium-sulfur? Hoo boy, if they get those going it's like 500 wh/kg, although last I saw they were using graphene to get the prototypes work, so we'll see.
Are other comments correct? $800/kwhr for flow batteries? Yikes.
Lithium is not the problem. There's plentiful lithium. And I'll believe the prices when they actually start selling it. I've heard "expected" prices many times before and they always turn out false.
Also still to be resolved is the lifetime of that kwh price. Again unproven with many wild claims.
Flow batteries are the thorium nuclear reactors of the battery world.
> And sodium-sulfur? Hoo boy, if they get those going it's like 500 wh/kg, although last I saw they were using graphene to get the prototypes work, so we'll see.
There's many magical claims in the world of batteries. Reserve your judgement until someone actually produces one. It's not just energy density but also power density and cell lifetime that needs to be considered.
Sodium ion is going into production at CATL and Gotion. It's GOING to be in EVs. Sodium Ion is happening. 160 wh/kg, 3000-6000 cycles. Stable. Good temperature range. I don't know any other way to emphasize this.
https://www.catl.com/en/news/665.html
This isn't a research paper, a clickbait headline. They are ramping up production for 2023. Not prototype cells looking for investors, etc. It's not a far flung announcement. This is "hey who wants to buy a shitton of these for a 300 mile range car?" call for sales.
And Lithium may be not really scarce, but you still need to find the sources, develop new sources, extract it, etc. Sodium is far more abundant than lithium. Like, 1000x more. As much as you want.
If it was January 2022 your comment would have weight. It doesn't now.
To emphasize, this means the 300 mile range (real not WLTP) sodium ion car that is fundamentally cheaper than an ICE. City cars for billions of people. No cobalt constraints, no nickel constraints, no waiting on lithium development. You're just waiting for the companies to make more production lines as fast as they can.
This is the beginning of the end for the ICE. There's no maybes or what-ifs or whatabout is there enough of this or child slave miners of that or we have to wait on South American government Z to allow Y.
Simply that this marks the point in history where you don't need to worry about feasibility of the switchover from ICE for 90% of commuter traffic. It's just a matter of time and scale, and ICE staring down the barrel of a drivetrain it can't economically compete with and still likely will drop another 50% in cost in the next ten years.
There are a lot of low-cost vehicles there that are designed around battery swapping, and one luxury car maker, Nio, also offers it. Nio is setting up shop in Europe and already has swap stations in Norway where EV penetration is high.
Your inability to imagine anything other than the laziest most spoiled american's habits (even when alternatives are easier) doesn't invalidate the huge space of other solutions.
If all of those don't work for some reason, then just treating it like an ICE and usingthe 250kW fast chager is only an extra 15 minutes once every week or two.
This is how things work for poors. They don't have access to lots of credit, so a car that costs $15K less is good, and they are used to whatever a tank of gas costs, and will pay that. Again, this is the mass market, the next billion drivers/families. You're well down the income ladder at that point.
More importantly, this is the kind of thing which government funding could cover. Just the healthcare savings along from getting rid of ICEs would pay for a lot of it.
India seems like an ideal market in that a cheap EV with a smallish sodium-ion battery represents a huge step up in mobility for many crores of Indian families. That's less true in Europe and North America.
1. https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/Reliance-buys-s...
So some behemoth Model S or X sized car in the US that needs a 100kwh pack to get 300+ miles needs 20kwh hours to get a kei car 150 miles.
And of course e-bikes, e-mopeds, e-scooters, etc.
Although it is still early days, with less than a GW and a TWh total installed at customer sites.
Sodium-sulfur's advantage over lithium is long lifetime. (4500 cycles at 100% depth-of-discharge and at least 15 years calendar life claimed).
0. https://www.ngk-insulators.com/en/product/nas.html
1. https://www.energy-storage.news/ngks-nas-sodium-sulfur-grid-...
2. https://www.basf.com/global/en/media/news-releases/2019/11/p...
No, this is completely uncompetitive, so batteries as costly as that would only be used for space applications, for which flow batteries are probably unsuited.
$800 per kW (not kWh) is plausible as a capital cost.
One reason to use flow batteries in grid applications is extremely long lifetime compared to Li-ion (tens of thousands of charge-discharge cycles, multiple decades of calendar life). Grid engineers are used to thinking in terms of the next forty years.