North Carolina is getting a $1.4B sodium-ion battery gigafactory | Hacker News Reader

North Carolina is getting a $1.4B sodium-ion battery gigafactory

electrek.co

16 pointspeutetre4 comments

TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory

"The term "gigafactory" has also been adopted by other companies which are involved in the manufacture of electric vehicles and other clean tech products. ..... Newer companies such as Stellantis have also embraced the term[7] by referring to four new "gigafactories" in France which will produce lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. ..... The term is therefore understood[by whom?] to generically refer to large industrial facilities which are associated with the decarbonization and electrification trend.[citation needed]"

Thanks for the link. I always assumed the "giga" meant that there was some size or output threshold that had been crossed, but it seems that the industry has accepted "big" and EV-related as the only qualifications. That's unfortunate.

Of course, the other option is to establish the factory size equivalent of the Council on Tall Buildings [1] which would certify whether or not a factory had earned the right to be called "giga". And that is ridiculous.

[1] https://www.ctbuh.org/resource/height

If you are interested in sodium-ion battery chemistry there is an interesting review of some of the first consumer batteries:

https://old.reddit.com/r/batteries/comments/14xhlw6/review_o...

TLDR; lower density, poor low temperature performance, safer but still capable of thermal runaway.

I think I saw a test somewhere that showed they're extremely sensitive to charge rate, the cycle life is way better at lower rates, which might explain why some people say they had them die in just a few hundred, while they're actually supposed to give thousands.

Manufacturers mostly seem to test and say they don't explode until above 4.4-4.8v, and they're 70% to 80% charged by 3.6v, so there's the possibility of of using them with LiFePo4 chargers and LiPo protection chips.

There are even 3.7v LiFePo4 chips that should get them 85% charged.

I'm currently working on a dev board with selectable 4.05, 3.6, and 3.7v charging, to cover all the common chemistries except LTO and ultracaps.

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