Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

You've stated:

>"Mostly from Australia and Chile" seems like the opposite of baggage, that sounds like about the best you could hope for in a global commodity, so many of which come from unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries.

So let's break it down with some facts (all easily searchable.)

(1) The graph states that Australia is the largest producer of Lithium, and states that of their exports, 90% goes to China.

(2) Australia exports the majority of its lithium. (https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/insights-australian-exports-...)

(3) Lithium ion batteries are currently reliant on Cobalt for their cathode.

(4) The DRC (Congo) is the largest producer of Cobalt, then Indonesia, then Russia.

>"seems like the opposite of baggage ... unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries"

From (1) and (2) we can see that the world is dependent on China for the only viable battery option for a range of modern applications. Thus the claim that this isn't baggage is not supported. Secondly China is also considered an adversary of the USA, by the USA. Thirdly the claim that this does not involve unstable/conflict regions is also not supported due to (3) and (4).

Part two: you've also stated the below:

>"Building new Na-ion capacity outside China" is probably even harder than "building new li-ion capacity outside China."

While this is a baseless comment, let's look at it anyway:

(5) The article is specifically about the commencement of mass production of Na batteries in the USA.

That already refutes the core premise of your statement, but let's follow it further.

(6) The article notes that unlike Li batteries, the materials are trivially sourced domestically.

That's an important difference from Li batteries, and significantly boosts the viability of competitive production in the USA (and other countries outside of China).

Now sure not that many species of animals/plants will be affected compared to say some rainforest location, but it still pains me to even imagine it. If it will bring good jobs to the locals then at least some good locally will be achieved, but thats not always the case.

1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60784614-cobalt-red

The energy consumption seems to be even a bit better than of the model 3

"with energy consumption approaching 10 kWh per 100km."

So roughly half capacity equals roughly half range - sounds about right to me (23.2 kWh are the same avaiable energy, whether sodium or lithium).

https://www.dnkpower.com/will-sodium-batteries-replace-lithi...

While LFP and the Sodium battery mentioned in the title, is 95-97%.

10x of charging speed of Li-ion would be in megawatts per single charging device.

Have short charging strips at traffic lights then prioritize lanes with cars that dont need much charge.

Think of it like modern SLC backed QLC flash storage. As long as the usage profile fits inside of the cache, it runs as though the entire system is cache.

If it's just the former, the slow steady march of EV mindshare might solve your needs before the "L4" super-fast-charging battery. I am starting to see L2 chargers pop up in apartment parking lots, for example. IMO, "always charged" is significantly more convenient than short stops at a station, so it would still be desirable in a world where "L4" batteries and stations were common.

A lot of people tend to think of the ideal charging station as a gas station, where lots of cars go to quickly add range. But gas stations have large capacity because of their disadvantages. Ideally if they were safe, cheap, and compact, wouldn't you want gas stations everywhere? I'd love to have a gas station at home, in every parking garage, and at every scenic viewpoint on the road. The reason we don't have that is because gas stations emit toxic vapors and have giant tanks of combustible liquid. They need tanker trucks to regularly refuel them. Charging stations don't have those problems, which is why you can make them much smaller and put them almost anywhere. You don't even need a grid connection. Solar + batteries works in places where land is cheap.

But I am definitely not expert on this.

You are almost certainly not charging from 0->100%. It's probably more like 10%->90% which gives you 32kW to charge. We currently have 350kW chargers on the market, they'd do that in ~6 minutes.

At some point trying to get 2 minutes vs 6 minutes is just silly nit picking.

Other systems, think Volvo, pop the EV bits in the back of the car and replace where the drive shaft used to be with batteries. That seems like a decent trade to me as well. Still have a transmission, but at least it's not purely additive.

AND one man's added complexity is another's redundancy. If the charging module goes bad in a hybrid, you can still drive. Or if you run out of gas.

All that said... I still prefer EVs to hybrids. Do one thing, do it well, I say!

But all those costs are correlated with engine hours, in a hybrid used most of the time for commuting, ICE engine hours would be really low

Suppose 90% of your miles are electric. After you've put 250K miles (400K km) on the car, you've only got 25K miles (40K km) on the engine. Rarely do you have significant engine trouble at that mileage.

Also, the engine design can probably be simplified if it's just acting as a generator. You don't need a turbo to provide extra bursts of power. Nor things like variable valve timing for good performance across a wide range of RPMs. Maybe you could even use an air-cooled engine like old VW Beetles and Porsches.

This was a lower middle class area.

Also that’s just cell cost. It takes quite a bit to assemble a pack, plus profit margin.

p.s. I doubt that rumour, unless Hyundai really likes to milk their customers. Teslas largest packs are less than 20k. Small ones less than 10k (which is how much I save per year because power is cheap and gas is expensive here).

That's ~= 15 light bulbs from the 1990's, or roughly 6 desktop PCs. I switched from incandescent to LED bulbs, and a desktop to a laptop, so that's almost enough to offset the EV's usage. Also, we have solar panels, and a house battery that can time shift our energy consumption.

The power grid also naturally grows from year to year. As more and more battery systems come online and are available to store and discharge power (your car, a household power backup system, solar, etc), the load on the grid will smooth out.

Instead of stopping to charge my car for half an hour (up to 80%), I can stop for 5 minutes?

Sign me up.

We ended up sizing our batteries to meet wattage demands for our appliances. I wish we had ~ 2x as many kWh as we do. Anker has a home battery whose main selling point is that you can add kWh without adding peak wattage.

For use in vehicles, faster charge rates are a big win. Faster discharge probably doesn't matter much for cars (0-60 times are already ridiculously low). They might for drones / planes though.

there are available li-ion batteries with a charge and discharge rate of '15c', which is to say, 1 hour ÷ 15 = 4 minutes. they are used in drones. (there are some advertised as '30c' but i suspect those are maybe just a fraud? like the notorious amazon million-lumen flashlights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceA5xL6ggEw) if they really reach '150c', you could discharge 10% of the battery in 2.4 seconds, which is closer to a firework rocket engine than a conventional battery. but, a rocket engine that you can recharge 50000 times

a charge rate of '150c' would mean you could charge the battery halfway in 12 seconds, and there are a lot of scenarios where that would be useful

you could imagine '150c' batteries displacing much larger supercapacitors from many uses, rather than displacing conventional batteries. the number given in the article of 70 watt hours per kilogram is, in si units, 250kJ/kg. if you divide that by the 24 seconds implied by '10 times faster than lithium-ion' you get a power density of 10.4 kilowatts per kilogram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_density says supercaps are in the 15 kilowatts per kilogram range. quadcopter drone electric motors are typically in the neighborhood of 4–5 kilowatts per kilogram, so this would make the drone battery much smaller than the motor instead of bigger

more likely, though, it's a press release lie, where they're saying something that's technically true (there are lithium batteries with a '1c' charge and discharge rate, which have higher energy density than the higher-powered ones, and their batteries reach '10c', i.e., 6 minutes) but creates a false impression of something that would be a huge breakthrough if it were true

These aren't for laptops or cars.

Though they seem to trying to increase energy density, so they can become for cars. But not there yet.

E-waste laws at some point will become inevitable, so planned obsolescence will be under scrutiny. Devices will have to have a minimum design life etc. Moreover, user-replaceable batteries—whether long life or high capacity—are likely to be mandatory as a result of such legislation.

My old Nokia used to have a replaceable battery which also served as the back of the phone, a quick release button meant the battery could be replaced within seconds.

Manufacturers can't use the argument that it can't be done because it was common practice with Nokia 20 years ago. Nowadays more modern design practices will make that even easier to implement.

I don't think the battery is a big block of pure sodium. That would be unsafe.

The battery electrolyte contains sodium ions, but the same is true of salt water and Gatorade.

I think the industrial source of their sodium is sodium hydoxide, a common industrial feedstock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hydroxide

In the article it says, that they are using a "patented Prussian blue". Isn't CATL also using Prussian blue in their first generation sodium batteries?

The fact it supports more cycles and tolerates a broader temperature range than Lithium counts points towards safety too. Lithium isn't happy above like 30 Celsius, which a fast charging portable device can _easily_ reach.

Seems like sodium is better "hidden" in the cathode/anode so it won't react witth the air so quickly as lithium when battery innards are exposed.

Beyond that, all the complexity is in software. Software needs to monitor cell voltages and currents to detect a self-heating cell. Software then needs to stop balancing that cell up (ie. let it discharge). At the moment the cell voltage hits zero, software needs to close the 'short' across the cell, permanently taking it out of the circuit.

This design might occasionally prevent charging the entire battery for a few minutes during this process. Specifically, when a cell is midway through being taken out of circuit, it can only be discharged, and would be dangerous to recharge.

But a few minutes of downtime per year seems acceptable to me.

I once bridged a ~2,500mAH 18650 battery that was in my bag when my keys created a circuit between the anode and the cathode. The result was a small fire inside my bag that was quickly stamped out. Now, if I'm carrying batteries capable of dumping a lot of current quickly, I use cases.

What excites me most about this new battery tech is home and commercial backup energy storage that's much 'greener' and cheaper than lithium. There is a lot of space in rural and grid settings, so the density of Li-Ion isn't really needed.

Well, super interesting.

At first I doubted because the apple watch has very little energy, then I looked it up. Turns out the biggest ones have 2Wh worth of power. Doesn't seem like much until you consider that 2Wh is roughly 6000J. Bullets are launched in the neighborhood of 1000J.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-...

You're telling me that the AVERAGE usage in germany is 1.25 incandescent bulbs 24/7?

my LAPTOP uses more power than that!

Houses mostly, the reason we need such high voltage is because someone can turn on an oven and consume 5kw. But that oven only runs for 1 hour, or more averagely, 30 minutes. So in the context of 200kwh battery systems at EVERY house, and inverters at every house, that oven can easily run off the inverter, and the house would never need to pull down heavy wattage from the grid. In this scenario, the grid's variability goes down dramatically, thus, reducing the voltage requirements... Instead every house would have small solar and a trickle feed of, lets say 800w-1kw consistently during the day.

Additionally, for places that have a shit-ton of sun, can do much better with microgrids and generators.