lots of exciting battery developments in general, especially if donut labs by some miracle is not a fraud.
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.
They are not forced to make those kinds of capital investments if they're unable - they'd be no worse off than today. Those who do get cheaper electricity (in lieu of whatever they could've otherwise spent that capital on).
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.
The cost of the grid has already been paid for. Upgrades to the grid has a higher per-capita cost, if there's fewer people paying for those upgrades today.
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.
yah, this is more for low density/mid density housing, I am sure the roots of 2-3 floor apts should be more than enough to sustain it as energy needs of apartments are lower to begin with. They can also bleed them into parking lots and have cover from the sun.
nothing stops them from also using swarms of solar panels on their roofs to at minimum offset the energy needs, localized power plants to save on transmission costs, raw high voltage power.
It's batshit crazy that the most powerful and influential person in the world dismisses the above (practical, clinical and irrefutable) as "a green scam" and people go along with it. We do so at our peril on so many levels.
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.
Your comment is ambiguous; in the event that anybody is interpreting this as "use your propane BBQ to heat your house" don't do that. You are highly likely to get a first-hand experience of CO toxicity.
BYD / Denza z9 gt claim 10-70% in 5 mins, 97% in 9 mins. With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results? I don't know enough about this space to know if I am missing something here, but would love to know because something about this feels more exciting than i think i am grasping. anyone know?
This article is about a sodium-ion battery which is a different chemistry to the one BYD claimed those results on (that was LFP).
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.
What sodium ion lacks in energy density, it actually partially gains back in the reduced need for cooling. The same properties that make it work across a larger temperature range also mean that you don't need a lot of (or any) cooling/heating to condition the battery. That means less weight is used for that and less energy is needed for running a heat pump.
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.
Well it is exciting, but not for the reasons you think. More like a Michael Bay movie exciting...there is nothing practical about this design. Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off. Pure Na-ion probably isn't viable and certainly isn't viable in a car. Maybe mixing in some Na into the Li-ion to stretch the small amount of Lithium but even then you are significantly increasing the volatility of the battery.
This isn't a practical step, its an act of desperation from people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
> Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off.
People say the same thing about Li-ion batteries yet they have proven to be significantly less likely to catch fire compared to ICE vehicles [1].
> people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
I'm very curious to hear why you think this. If nothing else, the 'situation' with the Strait of Hormuz would seem to have shown the importance of energy independence achieved through large scale electrification. Individually, I couldn't go back to an ICE car or even garden tools, they're worse in every way.
I see no charge rate numbers so there is no way to compare. however, these sodium batteries are cheaper, do not require lithium, and are operable at lower temperatures of -20C/-4F. Sounds like a bit of a win and opens the door for battery options in cars.
And the fire safety risks are significantly reduced (thermal runaway is much harder). They can also be transported and stored completely discharged, something not done with lithium ion batteries because of it degrades them much more than regular usage.
The sodium-ion batteries are said to work satisfactorily down to -40 Celsius = -40 Fahrenheit.
-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.
I have no idea how true this is, but the press releases claimed that both most of the capacity is retained down to -40 and that the charging speed is proportionally retain down to -40, and that this is the meaning of the operational range.
> With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results
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.
Sodium-ion batteries will always be heavier than the best lithium-ion batteries, but for now they have the same energy per kilogram with LFP batteries.
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.
Ok, but the Rivian R1S is a particularly inefficient EV (2-2.5 mi/kWh = 31-25 kWh/100 km). 12.5 kWh/100 km is efficient but not outlandishly so considering these are likely CLTC ranges, which are higher than WLTP which are higher than EPA, and the car in question is not in fact a dumptruck.
The range claims depend on the size of the battery pack. The Denza has a larger pack than what is quoted in the article. Also, the Chinese CLTC range ratings are overly optimistic with 1000km CLTC being ~820km WLTP or ~700km EPA.
I still remember in 2016 when Elon Musk made a big announcement about his "acqui-hire" of the Dalhousie University EV battery research team led by Dr Jeff Dahn. There was much fanfare and announcements of million-mile batteries and 3% increase in energy density every year.
Moving on from miracle batteries to Thai rescue to Hyperloop tunnels and presently to data centers in orbit.
"CATL’s “Naxtra” sodium-ion batteries achieve an energy density of up to 175 Wh/kg, the company said, putting it on par with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries."
Useful, but not a "breakthrough" in energy density. More like another good low-end option.
I've driven a car that had about a 200 mile range (small fuel tank) and it's annoying on a long drive, given that you don't want to push it to the extreme but start looking for a fuel stop somewhere around 1/3 tank remaining. So you end up stopping to refuel every 2-3 hours. Still better than a 1-hour recharge every 300 though.
lithium cost $22/kg. 1 KW/h is 0.2kg lithium in 5 kg of batteries that costs $100 retail on AliExpress. So it isn't about lithium price. It seems that just manufacturing and delivering a 1kg of low-mid-complexity stuff comes about $20/kg. (just for example - a car weights 1000-2000kg and costs $30K)
Amusingly, $20 to $30 per kilogram is about what we pay for groceries here in Australia from the supermarkets when averaged over a few bags of mixed items.
huh? shipping 10t of metal via ocean to europe is ~3k if you want it fast, less if it's batched with other deliveries. (I would know. I've purchased some)
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.
either the OP is a poorly worded statement or I lost the plot, we're talking about shipping cost here? the price of lithium is a very big factor for battery pricing?
Just remember, the US Na-Ion battery startup died last year with _products_ _in_ _warehouses_ just because it couldn't get a UL certification. All it needed was a bridge loan.
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.
To a first approximation, an inability to get UL certification means a product failed to demonstrate compliance with well established safety expectations…technically it means the insurance industry will not treat it as ordinary risk.
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.
While this article is about cars, there is another Chinese company that offers 50 MWh sodium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage.
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.
Decent returns aren't enough for a risky investment, they need to be spectacular returns.
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.
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.
Guys!!! Important!!! Don't buy or lease an EV now!! Battery breakthrough is coming! Your car will be obsolete trash in two weeks tops! Buy ICE car instead! Stable investment!
It is a slightly weird experience trying to buy an EV as they genuinely do get significantly better very quickly. It's like buying a computer in the 90s or a phone in the 00s.
People posting claims about EV charging time should be required to also post the size of cable required. And the grid capacity needed to provide their fast charging at a typical 8-bay charging site.
The grid capacity depends only on the number of charged cars, not on their charging speeds.
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.
Yes, but have you ever seen 8 queues of cars, about 8-10 cars in each, at Sams Club or Costco buying gas? You'd need a awful lot of battery buffer to keep up with that kind of demand. At some point you'd deplete the batteries and be stuck with charging at whatever rate the grid connection could deliver.
With EVs, most of your charging should be done at home, with fast charging mostly just existing for trips.
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.
I don't know what chemistry exactly these cells are using, but in sodium-ion batteries, prussian blue analogs as they are called are common anode materials. Overcharging these cells can lead to a release of hydrogen cyanide gas, notoriously known as Zyklon B.
It has damped my enthusiasm for perusing it as a potential future home energy storage solution.
Do you have any link for the claim that overcharging can produce cyanide?
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.
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.
Your links do not describe any problem that is inherent in the principle of such batteries.
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.
I'm sorry, do you actually know about batteries, or do you just casually read about them and now feel obligated to defend a point you tried to make?
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.
By normal conditions I mean charging and discharging and even overcharging if the controller is defective.
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.
Or you could just have the batteries in a separate enclosure away from your house. I think I would be inclined to do this anyway, certainly for Lithium batteries given the possibility of fire.
hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category. When you consider failure you have to consider what is the most catastrophic possibility and if that is “this battery silently kills people” then you dont make it.
Batteries with Prussian blue cannot kill people silently.
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.
We also have to adulterate that methane with bitter smelling agents too warn people of the danger when there's a leak. The line into the house is also limited by a regulator to ensure the pressure is very low. If gas builds up in a battery, it's either going to leak out slowly or build up and leak out all at once.
The methane is almost always piped in to be burned, and that can easily create odorless carbon monoxide. And the smell is not foolproof either. This does routinely kill people and we keep doing it. The jurisdictions that are banning it are doing so because of environmental reasons, not safety.
> hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category.
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?
The only people with any significant amount of lead acid batteries on their property are off grid types who typically store them away from their primary domicile as a fire safety precaution.
Fast charging a car/chemical weapon in your garage isn't terribly appealing.
Its metallic sodium. Its about 30 times more volatile than Lithium. We don't use metallic sodium for almost anything industrial because of this volatility. I assumed there would be some mixed Li-Na-ion batteries. A pure Na-ion battery is an explosive waiting to go off. Putting these in a car...seems rather like a poor choice unless you are a personal injury lawyer.
I doubt that it is metallic sodium, for the same reason why the rechargeable lithium batteries do not use metallic lithium electrodes like the non-rechargeable batteries.
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.
This is incredibly misleading. It's not like there's a bunch of metallic sodium sitting in the battery waiting to react. It's a lot closer to a solid solution. Do you have a personal injury lawyer on speed dial for your table salt?
Your response is even more misleading than the misconception you're trying to correct. The complexes formed in (charged) lithium batteries are unstable and reactive in ways quite similar to the base metal. The salt molecule, in contrast, is pretty unreactive. Salt shakers don't catch fire if dropped.
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.
Fine, now show a video of what happens if you pierce the Na-ion cell with something metallic. Because explosion doesn't even begin to cover what happens next in that situation. And you are suggesting that everyone should be 2 ft from such a cell, traveling at 60 mph, in all weather conditions. These things should be restricted to grid stabilization batteries and nothing else and you know it. Don't mislead people on such things.
Piercing a Na-ion cell is not good, but the effect is pretty much the same like piercing a Li-ion cell.
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.
How much assumption we can make here that advanced AI systems, kinda like Google's Alphafold, but customized for chemistry, is helping accelerate such breakthroughs?
lots of exciting battery developments in general, especially if donut labs by some miracle is not a fraud.
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.
if every household had solar panels and batteries
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.
They are not forced to make those kinds of capital investments if they're unable - they'd be no worse off than today. Those who do get cheaper electricity (in lieu of whatever they could've otherwise spent that capital on).
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'd be no worse off than today.
They will, assuming the people that went off grid stop paying for it. As fewer people pay for it the costs per capita grow
The cost of the grid has already been paid for. Upgrades to the grid has a higher per-capita cost, if there's fewer people paying for those upgrades today.
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.
yah, this is more for low density/mid density housing, I am sure the roots of 2-3 floor apts should be more than enough to sustain it as energy needs of apartments are lower to begin with. They can also bleed them into parking lots and have cover from the sun.
People just don’t realise how energy intensive a manufacturing economy is.
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.
nothing stops them from also using swarms of solar panels on their roofs to at minimum offset the energy needs, localized power plants to save on transmission costs, raw high voltage power.
Hetzner does this!
Interesting that the script has flipped, now china is leading breakthroughs and hardware startup culture is perpetuating frauds
"it would also have complete independence from oil fluctuations..." Indeed. A foreign country can't turn the sun off. And yet Trump.
(Pardon me if you live in another country. I'm starting to wish I did.)
It's batshit crazy that the most powerful and influential person in the world dismisses the above (practical, clinical and irrefutable) as "a green scam" and people go along with it. We do so at our peril on so many levels.
"weather disasters "
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-...)
Having some natural gas purely as a secondary emergency heat source is well worth it IMO.
having a military grade generator (can pick up decomissioned ones for pretty cheap) as a backup still works.
It might not be needed though if you have a battery generator and enough solar panels.
But if you have a BBQ with propane and the sun didn't shine for many many days that should be sufficient.
Your comment is ambiguous; in the event that anybody is interpreting this as "use your propane BBQ to heat your house" don't do that. You are highly likely to get a first-hand experience of CO toxicity.
BYD / Denza z9 gt claim 10-70% in 5 mins, 97% in 9 mins. With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results? I don't know enough about this space to know if I am missing something here, but would love to know because something about this feels more exciting than i think i am grasping. anyone know?
This article is about a sodium-ion battery which is a different chemistry to the one BYD claimed those results on (that was LFP).
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.
What sodium ion lacks in energy density, it actually partially gains back in the reduced need for cooling. The same properties that make it work across a larger temperature range also mean that you don't need a lot of (or any) cooling/heating to condition the battery. That means less weight is used for that and less energy is needed for running a heat pump.
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.
"Sodium-ion is exciting because..."
Well it is exciting, but not for the reasons you think. More like a Michael Bay movie exciting...there is nothing practical about this design. Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off. Pure Na-ion probably isn't viable and certainly isn't viable in a car. Maybe mixing in some Na into the Li-ion to stretch the small amount of Lithium but even then you are significantly increasing the volatility of the battery.
This isn't a practical step, its an act of desperation from people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
> Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off.
People say the same thing about Li-ion batteries yet they have proven to be significantly less likely to catch fire compared to ICE vehicles [1].
> people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
I'm very curious to hear why you think this. If nothing else, the 'situation' with the Strait of Hormuz would seem to have shown the importance of energy independence achieved through large scale electrification. Individually, I couldn't go back to an ICE car or even garden tools, they're worse in every way.
1. https://www.mynrma.com.au/open-road/advice-and-how-to/unders...
>People say the same thing about Li-ion batteries yet they have proven to be significantly less likely to catch fire compared to ICE vehicles [1].
Isn't the nasty thing about lithium fires not how likely they are, but how difficult they are to put out, as well as how hot they burn?
Yep. Let it burn is currently the high bit of fire fighting protocol for EV fires used by local fire services.
It's only a matter of time before an EV catches fire after crashing into a building and a bunch of people die because the fire couldn't be put out.
No.
Yes.
If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data.
If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with yours.
For a sobering look at the reality of electric vehicle fires, including his involvement in some original research, you can’t go passed StacheD:
https://youtube.com/@stachedtraining?si=rMfvXq_GFa1hT5ra
> We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
Not even close. We electrify more and more as tech improves. Do you really think people were using electric leaf blowers in the 1970s?
> Pure Na-ion probably isn't viable and certainly isn't viable in a car.
You're saying: https://insideevs.com/news/786509/catl-changan-worlds-first-... ?
I see no charge rate numbers so there is no way to compare. however, these sodium batteries are cheaper, do not require lithium, and are operable at lower temperatures of -20C/-4F. Sounds like a bit of a win and opens the door for battery options in cars.
And the fire safety risks are significantly reduced (thermal runaway is much harder). They can also be transported and stored completely discharged, something not done with lithium ion batteries because of it degrades them much more than regular usage.
The sodium-ion batteries are said to work satisfactorily down to -40 Celsius = -40 Fahrenheit.
-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.
Operating at -40 is one thing, charging at -40 is another.
When you're at a charger you can easily spare the 3-4% of battery capacity it takes to heat the pack by 40C. Less if you use a heat pump.
I have no idea how true this is, but the press releases claimed that both most of the capacity is retained down to -40 and that the charging speed is proportionally retain down to -40, and that this is the meaning of the operational range.
i would have imagined that charging at -40 is easier than operating at -40.
> With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results
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.
Sodium-ion batteries will always be heavier than the best lithium-ion batteries, but for now they have the same energy per kilogram with LFP batteries.
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.
Ok, but the Rivian R1S is a particularly inefficient EV (2-2.5 mi/kWh = 31-25 kWh/100 km). 12.5 kWh/100 km is efficient but not outlandishly so considering these are likely CLTC ranges, which are higher than WLTP which are higher than EPA, and the car in question is not in fact a dumptruck.
The range claims depend on the size of the battery pack. The Denza has a larger pack than what is quoted in the article. Also, the Chinese CLTC range ratings are overly optimistic with 1000km CLTC being ~820km WLTP or ~700km EPA.
I still remember in 2016 when Elon Musk made a big announcement about his "acqui-hire" of the Dalhousie University EV battery research team led by Dr Jeff Dahn. There was much fanfare and announcements of million-mile batteries and 3% increase in energy density every year. Moving on from miracle batteries to Thai rescue to Hyperloop tunnels and presently to data centers in orbit.
"CATL’s “Naxtra” sodium-ion batteries achieve an energy density of up to 175 Wh/kg, the company said, putting it on par with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries."
Useful, but not a "breakthrough" in energy density. More like another good low-end option.
Isn’t the benefit that it is durable and has much higher charge/discharge amperage limits?
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.
I've driven a car that had about a 200 mile range (small fuel tank) and it's annoying on a long drive, given that you don't want to push it to the extreme but start looking for a fuel stop somewhere around 1/3 tank remaining. So you end up stopping to refuel every 2-3 hours. Still better than a 1-hour recharge every 300 though.
Sodium is a lot more abundant than lithium. Scaled up this could be a breakthrough in battery cost per kWh.
lithium cost $22/kg. 1 KW/h is 0.2kg lithium in 5 kg of batteries that costs $100 retail on AliExpress. So it isn't about lithium price. It seems that just manufacturing and delivering a 1kg of low-mid-complexity stuff comes about $20/kg. (just for example - a car weights 1000-2000kg and costs $30K)
Amusingly, $20 to $30 per kilogram is about what we pay for groceries here in Australia from the supermarkets when averaged over a few bags of mixed items.
huh? shipping 10t of metal via ocean to europe is ~3k if you want it fast, less if it's batched with other deliveries. (I would know. I've purchased some)
>> low-mid-complexity stuff
> 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.
either the OP is a poorly worded statement or I lost the plot, we're talking about shipping cost here? the price of lithium is a very big factor for battery pricing?
The benefits are cold performance, durability and potentially price in the future.
Just remember, the US Na-Ion battery startup died last year with _products_ _in_ _warehouses_ just because it couldn't get a UL certification. All it needed was a bridge loan.
And the government did nothing.
>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.
To a first approximation, an inability to get UL certification means a product failed to demonstrate compliance with well established safety expectations…technically it means the insurance industry will not treat it as ordinary risk.
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.
In this case, Natron was focused on energy-storage for data centers, a sector which is ordinarily a prime recipient of government intervention.
While this article is about cars, there is another Chinese company that offers 50 MWh sodium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage.
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.
Apparently, there were shenanigans from investors/creditors. So the company got quietly carved up instead of going through a bankruptcy auction.
I'm looking forward to the eventual investigational report.
BTW, the company was Natron Energy.
Decent returns aren't enough for a risky investment, they need to be spectacular returns.
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.
Which company?
Starting to think that the American century of humiliation meme was prophetic.
One could argue that in that case, doing nothing was very much a choice.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"
Think not,'what can my country do for me?', but, 'How can I further enrich Trump'
note that the quoted 170Wh/kg is about the same as currently available LiFePO4 cells and half that of the best available NMC cells
Another better battery bulletin
Not really.
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.
Guys!!! Important!!! Don't buy or lease an EV now!! Battery breakthrough is coming! Your car will be obsolete trash in two weeks tops! Buy ICE car instead! Stable investment!
It is a slightly weird experience trying to buy an EV as they genuinely do get significantly better very quickly. It's like buying a computer in the 90s or a phone in the 00s.
People posting claims about EV charging time should be required to also post the size of cable required. And the grid capacity needed to provide their fast charging at a typical 8-bay charging site.
The grid capacity depends only on the number of charged cars, not on their charging speeds.
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.
could a charging site have a buffer of fast charging batteries?
Yes, but have you ever seen 8 queues of cars, about 8-10 cars in each, at Sams Club or Costco buying gas? You'd need a awful lot of battery buffer to keep up with that kind of demand. At some point you'd deplete the batteries and be stuck with charging at whatever rate the grid connection could deliver.
With EVs, most of your charging should be done at home, with fast charging mostly just existing for trips.
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.
I don't know what chemistry exactly these cells are using, but in sodium-ion batteries, prussian blue analogs as they are called are common anode materials. Overcharging these cells can lead to a release of hydrogen cyanide gas, notoriously known as Zyklon B.
It has damped my enthusiasm for perusing it as a potential future home energy storage solution.
Do you have any link for the claim that overcharging can produce cyanide?
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.
Sure
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.
Your links do not describe any problem that is inherent in the principle of such batteries.
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.
I'm sorry, do you actually know about batteries, or do you just casually read about them and now feel obligated to defend a point you tried to make?
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.
> Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions
Thank you for the reasonable chuckle I got from this understatement of the day.
By normal conditions I mean charging and discharging and even overcharging if the controller is defective.
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.
The battery heats itself in these failure modes.
Not to 300 Celsius degrees.
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.
Just wait until you find out about hydrogen sulfide from overcharged car batteries.
Also, I think HCN can be scrubbed by adding a special absorptive cap onto the battery.
Or you could just have the batteries in a separate enclosure away from your house. I think I would be inclined to do this anyway, certainly for Lithium batteries given the possibility of fire.
hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category. When you consider failure you have to consider what is the most catastrophic possibility and if that is “this battery silently kills people” then you dont make it.
Batteries with Prussian blue cannot kill people silently.
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.
We pipe methane into millions of homes. I don't think "this can silently kill people in the worst case" is enough to block something.
We also have to adulterate that methane with bitter smelling agents too warn people of the danger when there's a leak. The line into the house is also limited by a regulator to ensure the pressure is very low. If gas builds up in a battery, it's either going to leak out slowly or build up and leak out all at once.
Very much not an equal comparison.
What the other poster said about the risk of releasing cyanide during overcharging is not true.
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.
The methane is almost always piped in to be burned, and that can easily create odorless carbon monoxide. And the smell is not foolproof either. This does routinely kill people and we keep doing it. The jurisdictions that are banning it are doing so because of environmental reasons, not safety.
> hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category.
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?
Not precisely the same:
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.
Hydrogen cyanide has the bonus of being mostly odorless too. Whereas hydrogen sulfide is distinctly bad smelling.
The only people with any significant amount of lead acid batteries on their property are off grid types who typically store them away from their primary domicile as a fire safety precaution.
Fast charging a car/chemical weapon in your garage isn't terribly appealing.
If that battery is a chemical weapon then so is a big half-plastic box with ten gallons of gasoline inside.
Its metallic sodium. Its about 30 times more volatile than Lithium. We don't use metallic sodium for almost anything industrial because of this volatility. I assumed there would be some mixed Li-Na-ion batteries. A pure Na-ion battery is an explosive waiting to go off. Putting these in a car...seems rather like a poor choice unless you are a personal injury lawyer.
I doubt that it is metallic sodium, for the same reason why the rechargeable lithium batteries do not use metallic lithium electrodes like the non-rechargeable batteries.
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.
This is incredibly misleading. It's not like there's a bunch of metallic sodium sitting in the battery waiting to react. It's a lot closer to a solid solution. Do you have a personal injury lawyer on speed dial for your table salt?
Your response is even more misleading than the misconception you're trying to correct. The complexes formed in (charged) lithium batteries are unstable and reactive in ways quite similar to the base metal. The salt molecule, in contrast, is pretty unreactive. Salt shakers don't catch fire if dropped.
Which complexes are reactive?
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.
Fine, now show a video of what happens if you pierce the Na-ion cell with something metallic. Because explosion doesn't even begin to cover what happens next in that situation. And you are suggesting that everyone should be 2 ft from such a cell, traveling at 60 mph, in all weather conditions. These things should be restricted to grid stabilization batteries and nothing else and you know it. Don't mislead people on such things.
Piercing a Na-ion cell is not good, but the effect is pretty much the same like piercing a Li-ion cell.
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.
How much assumption we can make here that advanced AI systems, kinda like Google's Alphafold, but customized for chemistry, is helping accelerate such breakthroughs?