Sodium-ion EV battery breakthrough delivers 11-min charging and 450 km range
electrek.co
electrek.co
it was a bit worrying as there was somewhat of a stagnation in battery chemistry, but having non toxic/dangerous battery storage is going to make off-griding so much more attractive.
technically speaking, if every household had solar panels and batteries it would not only be cheaper than the grid it would also have complete independence from oil fluctuations, weather disasters and centralization.
now if you combine that with electric cars that charge off your off-grid system and transition to eletric appliances instead of something like gas the benefits keep stacking all while being pretty much net neutral post manufacturing.
But if you have a BBQ with propane and the sun didn't shine for many many days that should be sufficient.
Solar does seem to be influenced by those, though. So before battery storage is really, really cheap and plenty, for off grid situations I do would prefer backup gas as well.
(can also be produced locally: https://www.homebiogas.com/shop/backyard-systems/homebiogas-...)
Which is fine if your fantasy includes offshoring all of that and shipping the finished products in to the local market.
Which, no matter how you slice it, has to be more energy intensive than manufacturing locally.
Hetzner does this!
Bulk container ships are crazy efficient. It makes more energy sense for a nation like France to trade with the eastern US than it does with Hungary.
High density housing is unlikely to be compatible with that.
Also rental dwelling owners and people with limited economic resources tend to be less likely to make those kinds of capital investment.
Apartments have walls too, but we're getting into a territory where it might start becoming ugly.
Honestly, I think it's fine to just keep the electric grid as it is, and not attempt to power every building only from the amount of solar electricity that it can generate from its roof area. The electric grid lets us take advantage of economies of scale, build gigantic solar arrays or nuclear power plants on cheap land outside of town, and crucially leave the management of that grid up to one well-known organization rather than a consortium of several households in an apartment.
However, it's the onus of the gov't (regional or federal) to create the investment needed for large, industrial scale solar and battery storage. That's what taxpayer money should be spent on.
They will, assuming the people that went off grid stop paying for it. As fewer people pay for it the costs per capita grow
But they're not worse off, because the upgrades are better. For them to be worse off, the upgrades they pay for has to be worse than what they got today.
You should really talk to some California utilities and their wildfire exposure.
And anywhere else, anything you put up you need to maintain. And aren't most grids built with loans anyway? That interest would be born by fewer people.
Not sure if you own a house, if you do, here's a thought experiment.
It's all paid for, right? Doesn't cost a thing to own a home?
To the level of total energy independence? Indeed. But even an apartment can get some PV.
There's even PV specifically designed for renters in apartments.
> Also rental dwelling owners and people with limited economic resources tend to be less likely to make those kinds of capital investment.
Not so: https://www.lidl.de/p/tronic-balkonkraftwerk-860-wp-800-w-to...
As per my first line, 800 W is not going to be total energy independence.
But it's €249, cheaper than all but the cheapest phones.
In the best case, it can pay for itself in the first year; though obviously a north-facing apartment gets almost nothing from it.
(Pardon me if you live in another country. I'm starting to wish I did.)
Grid level batteries are going to be a more efficient way of using the same materials to achieve a particular level of supply. It's just at the moment there's a "competency arbitrage" where infrastructure is way slower than building it yourself.
To be fair, many of the costs are because of high demand (artificial, because the gov. mandates it to be installed) and lots of work to be integrated in the national grid. But as things are right now, it not economically convenient (at least where I live) and for what I have heard, in other places is not much different.
Everyone has panels on their roofs and they own a shared grid-scale battery that they feed into.
Absolutely not, economies of scale. To say nothing of the cost incurred when an issue appears with your installation (lightning strike, water damage, etc) would be much higher.
Just the grid is often up to 50% of people’s electricity bills, cutting that out is a massive saving.
I think we might see a future where the grid becomes smaller. Still utility scale but skip the continental transmissions and instead run a local city scale grid with renewables, storage and a chemical based carbon neutral backup.
While I don't regret getting them, they are absolutely not good enough to be the only solution.
however in the southern hemisphere - solar is a win .
Solar is a win everywhere with a sunny weather.
It doesn't have to be perfect a generator with ~7 days of fuel can go a really long way for any kind of low solar activity event. 7 days of fuel is roughly half the size of the generator.
At the end of the day it's math, figure exactly what is needed, if it works out then great, if not, continue waiting.
The problem starts when you need the grid for some amount of the year or in periods over several years. As consumer we would like to pay 10% of an annual electrical bill if we can produce the remaining 90% ourself. The grid however want to have be paid for investments in power plants and transmission, and to them, costs associated with consumption is only one part of the bill. If the customer consume less energy, and the costs in infrastructure is the same or greater, then they will continue charge the consumer for the full year. In that scenario, you may only consume 10% but your bill will remain at close to 100%. As a consumer one could decide to go without those 10%, but that in itself can be dangerous or expensive, in which case paying 100% may still be rational.
And the government did nothing.
Why didn't a private investment company, even venture capital, extend them a bridge loan? It seems like the type of technology that could have decent returns in licensing fees.
I ask this question because it seems odd to someone in the software world so flooded with startups that the government would be expected to intercede on behalf of a startup.
I'm looking forward to the eventual investigational report.
BTW, the company was Natron Energy.
The benefit to the country as a whole is potentially large, but most of it wouldn't show up as profit for the company itself. I'm sure it would do quite well if it was successful, but the benefits to car manufacturers and to having this sort of technology on-shore would not translate into monetary returns on private investment. That's the sort of thing government intervention is good for.
While for cars sodium-ion batteries will never reach the energy per kilogram of the best lithium-ion batteries, for stationary use it makes absolutely no sense to use lithium batteries, because sodium batteries will become much cheaper when their production will be more mature, so they should always be preferred to lithium batteries.
Even for cars, sodium-ion batteries have a second advantage besides price, they retain their capacity and their charging speed down to much lower temperatures than lithium-ion batteries, so they will be preferred in cold climates.
The ramifications range from inability to obtain product liability insurance for manufacturers, the voiding of general liability for users, and the fire marshal shutting down places where the system is installed.
Keep in mind that new products get listed under new standards developed by manufacturers all the time. But only when the new standard demonstrates ordinary safety.
The simplest likely explanation is that vc did not believe the technology was worth betting on.
[1] https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aen...
If it is, there are probably multiple intermediate small scale experiments and then the tooling and production line technology might still need to be developed as well. Someone in a lab making a theoretical discovery is not the same as something making sense commercially in the slightest.
-20 Celsius just happens to be a temperature for which a retention ratio was specified in the parent article, and not the limit of the operation range.
For -20 though, it can happen each year in 4 season temperate climates and north of that.
Sodium-ion is exciting because it has the potential to have less degradation over time, much less sensitivity to cold and less reliance on rare earth metals. Could also end up significantly cheaper. However it has struggled to reach the same energy densities and so hasn’t been practical thus far.
This seems like a big step towards it being a practical technology choice for certain models, if it bears out.
Another thing here is that volumetric density matters more than weight density in cars. Space comes at a premium and while weight affects efficiency somewhat, it pales in comparison to aerodynamics and rolling resistance. The difference between the best and the worst cars on the road is at least 3x. You have some heavy, brick shaped, monstrosities that barely do 1.5 miles per kwh and then you have some cars with low drag coefficient that easily do 5-6 miles per kwh. Even swapping tires can add meaningful range. Weight reductions help a bit but the difference between the best and worst energy densities on a 60kwh battery is probably 1-2 big passengers in terms of weight.
Peak energy makes sodium ion batteries for energy storage. Their pilot batteries are deployed in a desert. High temperatures during the day, freezing temperatures at night. They use only passive cooling without any moving parts (fans, pumps, etc.). Aside from that being impressive, that also lowers maintenance cost because it reduces the amount of stuff that actually needs servicing.
Sodium ion gains back volume because it doesn't need cooling. At the cell level, they are worse but at the pack level, it starts looking pretty decent. Anyway, there are multiple sodium ion batteries on the road now in China. It's practical right now. The rest is just the widening technology gap the US and EU have with China. We'll just have to wait a few years for local manufacturers to catch up. Some models with these batteries will probably start making it to the EU in the next two years or so.
The 1000km range likely has more to do with the efficiency of the drivetrain and the aerodynamics of the car more than the battery tech. kWh is an absolute value that is fungible and the Denza has a 122.5 kWh battery pack, which means its getting 5mi/kWh. For perspective my Rivian R1S gets ~350 miles on a 135 kWh pack which is about 2.5mi/kWh (so about half that)
The only part of the battery tech that could affect range is the weight. Sodium batteries are typically much heavier than Li-on. I believe the Denza uses LFP, which means it's likely somewhere else on the car that they're gaining improvement in the range - not from the battery tech. That being said, the battery tech definitely affects the charge/discharge rates.
So they have 2 essential advantages over LFP, retention of capacity to much lower temperatures and their cost will become significantly lower when their production technology will be more mature, because they not only do not use lithium, but they also do not use other expensive substances, e.g. nickel or cobalt.
Weight is a pretty low factor for cars, sub-percent (aging wheels did a comparison using a pickup empty versus loaded with a pallet of shingles, though with a more efficient vehicle the influence of weight probably shows up more).
Energy density (amount of energy per unit of volume) is a much bigger factor than energy specificity (amount of energy per unit of mass), it means you can either cram more energy in the same volume for more range, or have a lower vehicle with better aero.
Doesn't the charging speed affect how much regenerative braking can be done? If you have to stop fast enough or the battery is sufficiently hot/full/etc. then one that can't charge as fast requires more of the energy to be lost.
Braking is the reverse of accelerating so the rate is about the same for the same acceleration (positive or negative).
It’s really only if the battery is extremely close to full that this is a potential issue, and that’s assuming the manufacturer either has little to no buffer, or didn’t take this in account and won’t regen into (some of) the buffer.
If the battery is hot and you want to accelerate, increasing the 0-60 time from 3 seconds to 10 seconds isn't a problem for ordinary usage. If the battery is hot and you want to stop, increasing the stopping time isn't acceptable so the car is going to use the friction brakes instead.
Useful, but not a "breakthrough" in energy density. More like another good low-end option.
> metal
One of these things is a manufacturing input (metal), where as the other (stuff) is a manufacturing output.
Steel mills are on a different scale altogether. And anyway, the wholesale price of steel to manufacturing industry is around the $2.50 / kg mark for plate and hot rolled sections, but you have to be buying it by the hundreds or tonnes up qualifying for those prices.
A battery that can charge as fast as you can pump electricity into it, as many times as you want opens up a lot of possibilities.
E.g. a car that has a 200 mile range and a 5 minute charging time is way more useable than a car with 300 miles of range that takes an hour to charge.
Lithium batteries have been increasing in density at about twice that rate for the last decade. And million mile LFP batteries are available, NCM is nearing that benchmark.
All credit to the people who actually research and build them which is not Elon, since Tesla don't even produce the majority of their own battery usage.
This is not about research articles, but it is advertising already existing commercial products.
There are a handful of competing Chinese companies, which have launched during the last few months greatly improved batteries, both for cars and for stationary energy storage, removing the main complaints against such batteries, like charging times, loss of capacity at low temperatures and use of materials that might become scarce.
The latest high-power chargers made in China that achieve the 5-minute charge times have their own batteries for providing the charge power, so they take from the grid only the average power, not the peak power.
I know not everyone can charge at home (especially if you live in an apartment), but the solution to that is pretty straightforward and a lot more convenient compared with trying to scale up fast charging to match petrol stations.
Second, wow, I live in Europe and I have never seen 64+ cars queueing at a single station. If I saw 15, I'd be wondering what the hell happened.
It has damped my enthusiasm for perusing it as a potential future home energy storage solution.
Also, I think HCN can be scrubbed by adding a special absorptive cap onto the battery.
It has the same LD50 dose as HCN. It literally _is_ just as bad. It routinely kills people on oil rigs because in lethal concentrations it immediately shuts off your nose.
How often do you hear about people getting poisoned by it from lead-acid batteries?
Fast charging a car/chemical weapon in your garage isn't terribly appealing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide - 107 ppm (human, 10 min)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide - 600 ppm (human, 30 min)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide - 4000 ppm (human, 30 min)
These are "LCLo" values from the databoxes on those pages. More easily comparable numbers may be around somewhere.
Very much not an equal comparison.
Cyanide could be released only at high temperatures over 300 Celsius degrees.
During a fire, there are many other things in a car that can release toxic fumes easier than a sealed battery.
Cyanide could be released only at high temperatures, e.g. if the battery is opened and burned, not during normal operation, even if overcharging is not prevented, as it should.
The sulfuric acid from the traditional lead-acid car batteries is more dangerous than this.
During charge-recharge cycles, a metallic electrode is likely to be degraded quickly.
So it is more likely that the reduced sodium atoms are intercalated in some porous electrode, e.g. of carbon, while at the other electrode the sodium ions are intercalated in some substance similar to Prussian blue.
The volatility of sodium does not matter, because it is not in contact with air or another gas, but only with electrolyte.
The substances similar with Prussian blue are very stable. During charge and discharge, the ionic charge of iron ions varies between +2 and +3 and the structure of the electrode has spaces that are empty when the charge of the iron ions is +3 and they are filled with sodium ions when the charge of the iron ions is +2.
Both states of the electrode are very stable, being neutral salts. The composition of the electrolyte does not vary depending on the state of charge of the battery and it is also stable.
The only part of the battery that can be unstable is the other electrode, which stores neutral atoms of sodium intercalated in some porous material. If you take a fully charged battery, you cut it and you extract the electrode with sodium atoms, that electrode would react with water, but at a lower speed than pure sodium, so it is not clear how dangerous such an electrode would be in comparison with the similar lithium electrodes.
In both cells the electrode that stores alkaline metal atoms has high reactivity, but in both cases the reactivity is much smaller than for a compact piece of metal, so the reaction with substances like water would proceed much more slowly than in the movies when someone throws an alkaline metal in water.
If you pierce the cell, but the electrode does not come in contact with something like water or like your hand, nothing much happens, the air would oxidize the metal, but that cannot lead to explosions or other violent reactions.
The electrolyte of lithium-ion batteries is an organic solvent that is very easily flammable if you pierce the battery. The electrolyte of sodium-ion batteries is likely to be water-based, which is safer, because such an electrolyte is not flammable. It would be caustic, but the same is true for any alkaline or acid battery, which have already been used for a couple of centuries without problems.
Overall, sodium-ion batteries should be safer than lithium-ion batteries, so safety is certainly something that cannot be hold against them.
I have never heard such a thing and all the articles that I have seen about overcharging concluded that such batteries are much safer during overcharging than other kinds of batteries, the worst case effect being battery swelling.
In normal conditions, even during overcharging there are no obvious chemical reactions that could produce hydrogen cyanide.
For instance, at
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.4c02915
it is said that cyanide release can happen only at temperatures above 300 Celsius degrees. Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions.
Thank you for the reasonable chuckle I got from this understatement of the day.
Burning the battery is something that I define as not normal conditions.
Many plastics produce toxic fumes when burnt and many such plastics may be used in a car. Burning the battery is not the greatest risk of toxic fumes during a fire. If the fire is intense enough, any released cyanide might also be burned.
A battery of any kind can overheat with the output shorted or during excessive overcharging, but normally whenever a battery is used in a device there are protective devices that prevent such events.
If there are no protections, the designer is guilty, not the battery. Moreover, such risks are greater for Li-ion batteries, which have flammable electrolyte.
Na-ion batteries will replace Li-ion only in certain applications, like stationary energy storage, cars for cold climates and cheaper cars, while Li-ion will remain the choice for maximum energy per kilogram.
But it is weird to be concerned about the safety of Na-ion when that is certainly not worse than for Li-ion and most likely it is better.
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X2...
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.5c02345
Also understand, nothing bad happens under normal conditions. It's when the cell goes awry that bad things happen. 300C is easily obtainable by a runaway cell. I mean, short two ends of the battery together with a thin foil and see how quickly it hits 300C...
Also I'm not trying to fear monger, battery failures are very rare. But SIBs aren't totally free of scary failure modes.
They only warn against the danger of not taking care during fabrication to eliminate the moisture from the electrode.
If such low quality electrodes are made, they are prone to decomposition at lower temperatures than the well made electrodes, which have been dried sufficiently.
Similar risks of bad fabrication exist for any kind of batteries, like there were a few notorious cases of lithium-ion battery models that were prone to catch fire.
Moreover, in most applications of such batteries one must use short-circuit protections, so it should be impossible to overheat a battery by shorting its outputs. If that happens, not the battery is guilty, but whoever has designed a device without protections.
The point is that absolutely any kind of battery presents risks. Without short-circuit protections, any battery could cause a fire when shorted.
There is no reason to believe that sodium-ion batteries are less safe than lithium-ion batteries. On the contrary, it is very likely that sodium-ion batteries are safer, e.g. for not having a flammable electrolyte.
The shorting which causes failure is internal, from manufacturing defects. Yes, it's rare. No, it's not something the end user can detect or short protection can stop. This is pretty basic knowledge...hence my questioning (and you totally wooshing on the foil shorting demonstration I pointed out...batteries internally use foil, the foil is what gets hot).
So you have to decide if you want your possible but very rare event to be a small fire or a hydrogen cyanide gas leak.
Also SIBs are a new tech, so who knows what the failure rate will actually look like. Or if CN will even be a concern, the chemistry for mainstream cells might be different.
I work quite a bit with batteries and the fear of battery fires hunts me in my sleep, especially with lipos.