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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

And 150 wh/kg sodium ion is entering mass production by CATL and Gotion. No lithium. $40-$60 / kwh expected.

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.

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> And 150 wh/kg sodium ion is entering mass production by CATL and Gotion. No lithium. $40-$60 / kwh expected.

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.

Another one of these. Is this desperate astroturfing?

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.

To really kill ICE you need to address the issue of charging in apartment buildings.

Can easily be done with battery swapping stations, which are already a big thing in China.

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.

Will the batteries be interchangeable between different car brands? I doubt it.

I, too, doubt that car companies would collaborate on their own. But this is a problem that California or the European Union could solve with the stroke of a pen.

Dozens of different makes and models already use the gogoro system. Most of the world isn't allergic to standardizing like the US.

We are talking about the huge 100+ range batteries like in Teslas. I really don't see these being practical to swap.

No. We're not. We're talking about practical charging ability for people in apartments. If a government is too incompetent to enforce charger installation in indoor parking of rentals, light pole and meter charging is impossible, and adding 1kW of solar panels to the car itself isn't sufficient for daily use due to weather, then simply adding 2 3.5kWh battery slots in addition to whatever internal battery the car has is a trivial way of adding 70km of range that can be swapped at a moment's notice.

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.

Luxury car owners gonna lux. This is about cars for the mass market - "the next billion vehicles", as Ample says.

So you will buy an expensive BEV and then throw away the new battery so you can play lottery with used ones. It is not appealing even to users.

You will buy a cheap EV, because the battery is not included in the price.

Who will be paying for them them?

You will, just not as a lump sum. A part of the battery's cost (1/2000 or 1/4000 or whatever) will be integrated into the battery swap charge.

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.

Ample is working with manufacturers

1. https://ample.com/

One option is changing the norm to charging during the day while people are at work and solar is at its peak. We are likely to have over-production in the future and all of those expensive batteries on wheels will be invaluable.

Why will companies want to install a charger for every employee? That is very expensive.

It's an extension cord and maybe a service upgrade. If they split the difference in cost between peak and offpeak power with the employee it will be a net profit in a few weeks.

Hundreds of type 2 chargers are far more than "an extension cord". It is millions of dollars.

Why would there need to be any type 2 chargers for this purpose? A third of the cars in the US being plugged in and at not-full charge can absorb 240GW from just wall outlets. This is close to double what the entire passenger fleet would neet as EVs.

Why not a company running the garage seeing it as a way of making money? Cheap solar should make it an attractive position to sell power during peak hours.

Garage operators would like to get more revenue for their existing buildings and it’s much less expensive if you’re not trying to build a couple hundred spot rapid-charging station to get everyone back on the road in 20 minutes - even a 110V plug would cover around half of the commuters in the United States working a standard 8 hour day, and you wouldn’t need anywhere near full capacity unless 100% of users lacked electrical hookups near their homes.

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.

What issue? Lots of us live in apartments in Norway and I see plenty of upgrades happening to get charging going at apartment complexes. Does not seem like an insurmountable problem. I got asked if I needed charging installed at my garage spot some years ago.

The issue that it is exceptionally rare in the US for apartments to have electric chargers. In my building there are two plug-in hybrid cars that are charged from 120 volt outlets. Type 2 chargers cost up to $7,000 to install and we would need many millions of them. Even if they are allowed to install one, few people are going to be willing to pay to install one in an apartment building they may leave soon. And having tens of cars charging at once will strain the electric system of the building.

One thing to remember is that “up to” means substantially less in cases like this. Suburban home chargers can be expensive because all of the major project costs are amortized over 1-2 vehicles and the homeowner has less experience negotiating. An apartment complex or parking garage is going to be easier across the board: one permit for the entire project, any electrical infrastructure upgrades are serving many customers on an existing high capacity line, the physical install’s overhead costs are amortized across many units and you’re getting wholesale rather than retail pricing on all of the parts.

I'll be watching with interest to see what happens at Reliance in India, with Faradion's sodium-ion batteries.

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...

Outside of India, "crores" looks like a typo, rather than a quantifier.

Handy spoken shorthand for 10,000,000 though. And I was talking about intra-India events.

Agreed, if your goal is the 150-200 mile city car (as in kei-car like compact car), and it's $40/kwhr, wow will those be cheap to make. The "pseudo rocket equation" of EVs comes into play: small car, smaller battery to get usable range.

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.

The conversation was about flow batteries. This doesn't look like a flow battery to me.

NGK has been selling sodium-sulfur batteries for stationary applications for years. In Europe NGK's NaS batteries are remarketed by BASF.

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...

> Are other comments correct? $800/kwhr for flow batteries? Yikes.

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.

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