My company operates two Jupiter Power owned LFP batteries in the MISO market. Each of them draws .5 - 2MW constantly for the HVAC system. If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.
My interpretation of TwiztidK's comment is that they could save the cost of that .5–2 MW power draw by switching to a battery chemistry with looser temperature requirements.
Cost of replacement? Cost of insurance against a fire? Cold weather performance may also be quite important, and not only somewhere in Alaska, but even in places like Dallas, that are hot in summer but cold during winter nights.
Not an expert, but from what I read the expectation is for sodium ion batteries to get substantially cheaper than lithium, mainly due to material cost.
Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean.
The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.
AT grid scale, sodium quickly closes the gap on lithium. The safety overhead, active cooling, and physical spacing needed to control lithium’s thermal runaway risk eat away most of its energy density advantage. Plus, CATL is hitting cost parity between full sodium BESS and LFP BESS systems.
The other big reason is the longevity. LFP life span gives you about 2000-5000 cycles depending on where your application can't tolerate the capacity reduction.
Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
This makes financing a large grid scale storage plant look way better to the bean counters because the investment continues to work and make money, after the 5 year amortization, typical of a corporate investment. This will be the kicker IMHO.
> Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
The article claims much better:
> the company’s GS1.1 [Sodium Ion] system will store energy for 20 years, over roughly 20,000 cycles, and still retain 80 percent of its capacity. For LFP, a basic durability benchmark pegs them at 70 percent capacity after 8,000 cycles.
I saw an interview with I think the CATL ceo and he was saying it's quite a headache ensuring the batteries last that long. Grid storage companies want 25 or 30 year guarantees. It sounds like sodium may have the advantage there.
Net Present Value isn't quite the right thing to look at. Inflation-adjusted energy prices have been rising over time, so the thing these batteries are projected to deliver (fixed impact on that electricity grid) increases in value over time even after the NPV discount. The more important component is the "risk-adjusted" NPV, which may or may not make tech like this effectively worthless.
A dystopian possibly impractical dream..
imagine a pyramid like structure in every neighborhood, made from blocks of such cheap sodium ion batteries, the outside of the pyramid is covered in soil and greens, the top which could even be a windmill. The green space is for walking around, kids playing, a few bike trails, whatever fun.
The whole neighborhood is power buffered through this pyramid.
The national power grid only needs to supply these pyramids.. with renewable energy.
The houses, parking lots etc have solar panels that feed into the pyramid.
I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.
It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.
So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.
Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.
Fortunately for me, I could just bop down to the bog box store and buy a more appropriate fridge from vevor; horses for courses.
I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.
For something like a battery backup that last decades that doesn't need maintenance, maybe you could bury it out of the way (like under a deck or lawn?), maybe even under the frost line.
Underground is a big problem with it comes to water permeation and flooding.
The other potential problem with a lot of energy systems that use things that have hydrogen in them is running power over the systems for long periods of time can start to leak hydrogen. You'll always want to ensure you have ventilation to ensure whatever is outgassing can escape the system. You'll end up with explosions, hydrogen embrittlement, or interesting corrosion in ways you didn't think were possible.
might need to be in some special containment at that size, depending on the technology -- some sodium ion battery implementations are very toxic / highly reactive / flammable.
I am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.
I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.
Surely this will just be Chinese hardware with a "made in America" label slapped on it. I can't fathom why anyone would allow GM of all companies to get any contracts
This is the same story everywhere. Nobody has the know-how or the deep ecosystems needed to do these things.
India has a "made in India" mandate which is hilarious. >80% of solar panel (polysilicon, ingots, and silicon wafers) is from China. Situation is worse with batteries and EVs. Tata, which has been making vehicles for quite some time doesn't have any clue how to make EVs and is building an entire plant with a Chinese company (Chery).
Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....".
In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm:
1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah.
2) When its impossible to compete: China is security threat, we can't allow them. But we'll import most of it (80 - 90% of components) and still put our label.
Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).
Indian companies do not like to do research. Too much risk. They prefer to buy proven stuff. There are small companies doing a lot of what the Chinese are doing (including LFP and other battery chemistry). But they cannot scale up because they lack the necessary investment and order book.
GOI has a new locally-produced solar cell mandate that has been pushed back by six months because the requirement is 8-10x the current production. People are being forced to keep factories shut due to the lack of locally produced cells.
Huh Tata is the best selling EV manufacturer in India.
Their new Chery tieup is utilizing the Freelander architecture from the Chery and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) joint venture in China instead of a pricier internal or JLR roadmap. Remember they own JLR.
You're not wrong, but this is the economic and industrial strategy model for how countries build complex manufacturing capabilities from scratch.
Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen.
You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output.
By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable.
India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized.
There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.
I thought they were too busy with a hardon for hydrogen power for the future. When'd GM suddenly decide they wanted to get into the salt battery game too?
It's all a game of desperation for a failing automaker once again desperate for bailouts in new, fun ways.
First they run over a few kids with Cruise, then they decide they wanna get into the H-bomb game, now it's... molden salt?
I want to replace my Lithium home battery, and what I really want to do it to move to one of the new sodium ion batteries..e.g like the one CATL is supposed to have at some point?
Anyone have a good idea when these will be available for consumers?
Bluetti has a small battery pack for now. I think the options for consumers will balloon once CATL mass produce sodium ion cells. Solix/anker, jackery, ecoflow, etc all use CATL cells already.
Probably in a year or so. CATL is expecting about 1GWh deployment by the end of the year and has contracts to deliver ~7GWh in Europe next year, so they're clearly ramping up production towards the end of this year.
Na-Ion batteries are not practical for home storage right now. They have a much higher voltage range compared to LFP batteries, so regular inverters and chargers will not work reliably. Nothing insurmountable, but the supply chain is just not here.
Na-Ion cells are great for grid-scale storage because they potentially can go down to something like $20 per kWh. But bulk LFP cells are already at ~$60 per kWh, so their cost is not really a deciding factor anymore.
I've been pondering the question of what happens if you change the design requirements to say, 20 charge/discharge cycles in total, then use it over seasonal timescales. Can you get the price so low that you can scale up enough battery storage to buffer a whole season?
the trouble is it's easy enough to propose such things but hard to be economically competitive with existing solutions. My guess is sodium ion will get cheap because the ingredients are cheap and there's a lot of money going into mass production which will bring the cost of that down over time.
There's an ancient non electrical seasonal solar storage practiced in Austria and such places where they grow tree and then chop them into logs for the winter but it's a bit labour intensive.
from what I've heard, the problem with moving sodium from lab to manufacturing is that all the industrial processes and machinery have been setup for lithium and the factories are reluctant to invest in entire new sodium setup for not much benefit for them; lithium works perfectly well and is in fact the superior product, why switch?
Lithium prices have faced a massive crash, so there is no cost penalty for them anymore. Sodium's cost benefit isn't that significant now, and while other technical benefits exist, the question remains, is it worth it to setup an entire new factory from scratch for that marginal benefit?
Sodium batteries use a relatively similar process to lithium, so I'd say overall that has sped up their adoption in manufacturing.
But the economics part is true, people looked to sodium as lithium prices went high and then enthusiasm cooled as they dropped again.
However they now seem to be passed that slump and the long term benefits seem enough for sustained investment.
It helps that the wider market is growing. You can keep your lithium battery factory and use your know how to set up a new sodium battery factory and aim to sell both to slightly different markets for the life of a factory.
“You need to keep an LFP cell at 25 °C, give or take, or it will rapidly degrade” so LFPs have to be heated and cooled - not difficult to solve but it does add cost and complexity to a battery, something Sodium-Ion doesn't require.
But looking at the discharge profile of Sodium-Ion [1], then a 24v stable output would need about 48v at 100% battery charge and that means cost and complexity on the input and output sides to keep a steady voltage over the discharge cycle. LFP have a much flatter discharge curve but it's a much greater concern with Sodium Ion. Sodium Ion is also criticized for its lifetime cycle degradation.
LTO (Lithium Titanate) batteries hit the sweet spot between both chemistries and are used in electric buses, but I still like Sodium batteries for their environmental considerations.
Wouldn't it be great to somehow harvest power from the temperature swings between night and day in arid regions? Also large changes between sea level and cruising altitude.
I know black tourmaline and certain lithium compounds being pyroelectric generate power upon temperature change due to mechanical stress, which instigates piezoelectricity.
"If the goal is maximum electrical energy generated per degree shift, single-crystal PMN-PT (Lead Magnesium Niobate–Lead Titanate) is currently the top-performing synthetic material." [2]
LFP’s flat discharge curve is actually kind of annoying: it makes it quite difficult to measure the state of charge of a cell. BMSes mostly need to track the SoC by counting coulombs, and balancing a series of cells may be challenging unless the SoC to reach the steeper part of the curve.
Meanwhile, most serious applications have power conversion circuitry, so a variable voltage may not be much of a problem.
The low-end “12V” LFP packs without real BMSes or power conversion that sort of pretend to be lead-acid batteries in RVs and such are awful designs and work pretty poorly, and their “24V” and “48V” cousins are not much better. It’s true that Na-Ion may not be an easy drop-in replacement. That being said, some people are working on Na-Ion as a lead-acid replacement for car starter batteries (and for low voltage systems in EVs), and they have a lot of potential in this application. (LFP doesn’t have adequate not temperature performance and lead-acid sucks for many reasons.)
Yeah, I had questions when Kurt Kelty was saying that Peak's battery was "kicking butt" after the article said Peak is still building their battery factory and currently buys its cells from China.
Is GM testing Peak's cells or some Chinese company's cells?
Lithium batteries in cars are usually at least that good already. Most of the efficiency lost is in converting back and forth between AC/DC between the grid and the motors, and the rest in the auxillary features such as heating and cooling the cabin.
sorry, probably should have quoted the entire thing:
> The batteries are showing a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent, a significant 2 to 3 percent better than LFP. (“Round trip” refers to the amount of energy a battery discharges, relative to the amount used to charge it).
I think for cars, the efficiency probably doesn't matter that much. If it costs $1.03 per kwh instead of $1.00 per kwh, or 103 miles vs 100 miles, no car owner will care.
Is it? Isn't there usually a very large price ratio between when grid batteries are charged and discharged? Like charging at 5 cents and discharging at 25? In that situation a couple percent of inefficiency is nothing special, just a small cost.
Keep in mind, we could have had local Na-Ion battery production in the US. The company producing them needed about $5m of bridge loans, with products already sitting in warehouses awaiting the UL certification.
> In October 2012, A123 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was thrown into a narrative of Obama-era green energy failures with defunct California solar company Solyndra that had received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees — a comparison to which Vieau objects because A123's technology was "proven," and it built plants and hired people with government support.
> Wanxiang Group Corp., a subsidiary of the largest auto parts supplier in China, acquired its assets for $256.6 million after it had sought to acquire 80% of A123 earlier that year
Given that $5 million is not that much in the heavy industry game, I'd like to know why they couldn't get the bridge loans.
Like, that's not an unreasonable size of loan for a regional expansion for medium-sized businesses; there should be some sort of lender interested in doing that for them.
That's why, if you look at Fervo energy's makeup, and ask why do your have so many finance people, relative to the number of engineers; that's why. As a software developer, I have no idea how to get a $5 million bridge loan other than whatever ChatGPT could tell me. Meanwhile, a team of finance guys with domain expertise could have gotten them that $5 million.
Its a failure in the U.S. because the bet is on solid state batteries. Personally I won't take the EV plunge until they have those. The only exception for me to not wait would be the 10k BYD car. At that price point and it lasted 3 years i'd be happy.
The article is about grid storage, but grids can also use solid state and battery tech is shared between different usecases. My point was where the bet is.
QuantumScape is a good example as it entered into agreements with opertors for their battery tech.
Certainly giving strong Taylor Sheridan Landman ranting against windmills vibe, with a twist of bad chemistry and bias against batteries thrown in for good measure.
My company operates two Jupiter Power owned LFP batteries in the MISO market. Each of them draws .5 - 2MW constantly for the HVAC system. If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.
> If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.
Why would that be a reason to switch, given the LFP batteries typically have better operational parameters in everything except cold-weather charging?
My interpretation of TwiztidK's comment is that they could save the cost of that .5–2 MW power draw by switching to a battery chemistry with looser temperature requirements.
Cost of replacement? Cost of insurance against a fire? Cold weather performance may also be quite important, and not only somewhere in Alaska, but even in places like Dallas, that are hot in summer but cold during winter nights.
Not an expert, but from what I read the expectation is for sodium ion batteries to get substantially cheaper than lithium, mainly due to material cost.
Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.
AT grid scale, sodium quickly closes the gap on lithium. The safety overhead, active cooling, and physical spacing needed to control lithium’s thermal runaway risk eat away most of its energy density advantage. Plus, CATL is hitting cost parity between full sodium BESS and LFP BESS systems.
The other big reason is the longevity. LFP life span gives you about 2000-5000 cycles depending on where your application can't tolerate the capacity reduction. Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
This makes financing a large grid scale storage plant look way better to the bean counters because the investment continues to work and make money, after the 5 year amortization, typical of a corporate investment. This will be the kicker IMHO.
> Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
The article claims much better:
> the company’s GS1.1 [Sodium Ion] system will store energy for 20 years, over roughly 20,000 cycles, and still retain 80 percent of its capacity. For LFP, a basic durability benchmark pegs them at 70 percent capacity after 8,000 cycles.
Does it really look more favorable? My understanding was that such far future returns had minimal Net Present Value
I saw an interview with I think the CATL ceo and he was saying it's quite a headache ensuring the batteries last that long. Grid storage companies want 25 or 30 year guarantees. It sounds like sodium may have the advantage there.
Net Present Value isn't quite the right thing to look at. Inflation-adjusted energy prices have been rising over time, so the thing these batteries are projected to deliver (fixed impact on that electricity grid) increases in value over time even after the NPV discount. The more important component is the "risk-adjusted" NPV, which may or may not make tech like this effectively worthless.
why dont you think revenue from energy prices isnt baked into the NPV? The time discout is applied, on top of whatever the revenue model is.
SIBs have TR risks as well, no?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...
A dystopian possibly impractical dream.. imagine a pyramid like structure in every neighborhood, made from blocks of such cheap sodium ion batteries, the outside of the pyramid is covered in soil and greens, the top which could even be a windmill. The green space is for walking around, kids playing, a few bike trails, whatever fun. The whole neighborhood is power buffered through this pyramid. The national power grid only needs to supply these pyramids.. with renewable energy. The houses, parking lots etc have solar panels that feed into the pyramid.
I’d love a shed sized battery sitting on the corner of my property if it could give me 5-7 days of power.
I'm writing this from my off grid shack.
I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.
It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.
So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.
Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.
> It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.
If the GP commenter is typing in from the UK .. that's a not uncommon garden tool shed size.
By contrast modern Australian farm sheds have clouds forming within them and host birds that seasonally migrate from one side to the other.
They make hyper-insulated refrigerators for use on ships with limited electricity that use either vacuum insulated panels or aerogel insulation.
Fortunately for me, I could just bop down to the bog box store and buy a more appropriate fridge from vevor; horses for courses.
I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.
For something like a battery backup that last decades that doesn't need maintenance, maybe you could bury it out of the way (like under a deck or lawn?), maybe even under the frost line.
Underground is a big problem with it comes to water permeation and flooding.
The other potential problem with a lot of energy systems that use things that have hydrogen in them is running power over the systems for long periods of time can start to leak hydrogen. You'll always want to ensure you have ventilation to ensure whatever is outgassing can escape the system. You'll end up with explosions, hydrogen embrittlement, or interesting corrosion in ways you didn't think were possible.
might need to be in some special containment at that size, depending on the technology -- some sodium ion battery implementations are very toxic / highly reactive / flammable.
That would you pay for that shed size battery?
Depending on just how much more cost effective sodium battery tech gets, that might not be a questionable proposition
I mean, I pay around $2,000 (AUD) per annum for electricity from the grid.
If this battery plus some solar panels could get us free power for the next 20+ years, that's easily worth $15-$20k or so.
I am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.
I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.
Just to clarify - you were looking at 50k+ for an on grid setup and solar + battery has cost you 8k so far?
It's called diesel fuel.
Surely this will just be Chinese hardware with a "made in America" label slapped on it. I can't fathom why anyone would allow GM of all companies to get any contracts
This is the same story everywhere. Nobody has the know-how or the deep ecosystems needed to do these things.
India has a "made in India" mandate which is hilarious. >80% of solar panel (polysilicon, ingots, and silicon wafers) is from China. Situation is worse with batteries and EVs. Tata, which has been making vehicles for quite some time doesn't have any clue how to make EVs and is building an entire plant with a Chinese company (Chery).
Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....".
In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm:
1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah.
2) When its impossible to compete: China is security threat, we can't allow them. But we'll import most of it (80 - 90% of components) and still put our label.
Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).
Indian companies do not like to do research. Too much risk. They prefer to buy proven stuff. There are small companies doing a lot of what the Chinese are doing (including LFP and other battery chemistry). But they cannot scale up because they lack the necessary investment and order book.
GOI has a new locally-produced solar cell mandate that has been pushed back by six months because the requirement is 8-10x the current production. People are being forced to keep factories shut due to the lack of locally produced cells.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-solar-push-id...
Huh Tata is the best selling EV manufacturer in India.
Their new Chery tieup is utilizing the Freelander architecture from the Chery and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) joint venture in China instead of a pricier internal or JLR roadmap. Remember they own JLR.
This is for their new premium EV line.
You're not wrong, but this is the economic and industrial strategy model for how countries build complex manufacturing capabilities from scratch.
Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen.
You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output.
By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable.
India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized.
There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.
I thought they were too busy with a hardon for hydrogen power for the future. When'd GM suddenly decide they wanted to get into the salt battery game too?
It's all a game of desperation for a failing automaker once again desperate for bailouts in new, fun ways.
First they run over a few kids with Cruise, then they decide they wanna get into the H-bomb game, now it's... molden salt?
I want to replace my Lithium home battery, and what I really want to do it to move to one of the new sodium ion batteries..e.g like the one CATL is supposed to have at some point?
Anyone have a good idea when these will be available for consumers?
Bluetti has a small battery pack for now. I think the options for consumers will balloon once CATL mass produce sodium ion cells. Solix/anker, jackery, ecoflow, etc all use CATL cells already.
Probably in a year or so. CATL is expecting about 1GWh deployment by the end of the year and has contracts to deliver ~7GWh in Europe next year, so they're clearly ramping up production towards the end of this year.
Na-Ion batteries are not practical for home storage right now. They have a much higher voltage range compared to LFP batteries, so regular inverters and chargers will not work reliably. Nothing insurmountable, but the supply chain is just not here.
Na-Ion cells are great for grid-scale storage because they potentially can go down to something like $20 per kWh. But bulk LFP cells are already at ~$60 per kWh, so their cost is not really a deciding factor anymore.
Why would you replace it? That asset likely has at least 10 years in it if you already have it.
Probably operating temperature and safety.
Why? You also need to replace your inverter in that case.
I've been pondering the question of what happens if you change the design requirements to say, 20 charge/discharge cycles in total, then use it over seasonal timescales. Can you get the price so low that you can scale up enough battery storage to buffer a whole season?
I don't think anyone's cracked that yet. There was a YC startup trying to do stuff with iron oxide. (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/gigantic-form...)
And proposals using aluminium but again not in action.
Also zinc air https://inc42.com/startups/sthyr-energy-aims-to-tame-169-bn-...
the trouble is it's easy enough to propose such things but hard to be economically competitive with existing solutions. My guess is sodium ion will get cheap because the ingredients are cheap and there's a lot of money going into mass production which will bring the cost of that down over time.
There's an ancient non electrical seasonal solar storage practiced in Austria and such places where they grow tree and then chop them into logs for the winter but it's a bit labour intensive.
from what I've heard, the problem with moving sodium from lab to manufacturing is that all the industrial processes and machinery have been setup for lithium and the factories are reluctant to invest in entire new sodium setup for not much benefit for them; lithium works perfectly well and is in fact the superior product, why switch?
Lithium prices have faced a massive crash, so there is no cost penalty for them anymore. Sodium's cost benefit isn't that significant now, and while other technical benefits exist, the question remains, is it worth it to setup an entire new factory from scratch for that marginal benefit?
Sodium batteries use a relatively similar process to lithium, so I'd say overall that has sped up their adoption in manufacturing.
But the economics part is true, people looked to sodium as lithium prices went high and then enthusiasm cooled as they dropped again.
However they now seem to be passed that slump and the long term benefits seem enough for sustained investment.
It helps that the wider market is growing. You can keep your lithium battery factory and use your know how to set up a new sodium battery factory and aim to sell both to slightly different markets for the life of a factory.
“You need to keep an LFP cell at 25 °C, give or take, or it will rapidly degrade” so LFPs have to be heated and cooled - not difficult to solve but it does add cost and complexity to a battery, something Sodium-Ion doesn't require.
But looking at the discharge profile of Sodium-Ion [1], then a 24v stable output would need about 48v at 100% battery charge and that means cost and complexity on the input and output sides to keep a steady voltage over the discharge cycle. LFP have a much flatter discharge curve but it's a much greater concern with Sodium Ion. Sodium Ion is also criticized for its lifetime cycle degradation.
LTO (Lithium Titanate) batteries hit the sweet spot between both chemistries and are used in electric buses, but I still like Sodium batteries for their environmental considerations.
Wouldn't it be great to somehow harvest power from the temperature swings between night and day in arid regions? Also large changes between sea level and cruising altitude.
I know black tourmaline and certain lithium compounds being pyroelectric generate power upon temperature change due to mechanical stress, which instigates piezoelectricity.
"If the goal is maximum electrical energy generated per degree shift, single-crystal PMN-PT (Lead Magnesium Niobate–Lead Titanate) is currently the top-performing synthetic material." [2]
[1] https://hackaday.com/2025/10/30/why-sodium-ion-batteries-are...
[2] https://share.gemini.google/0wylEwjLUcOL
LFP’s flat discharge curve is actually kind of annoying: it makes it quite difficult to measure the state of charge of a cell. BMSes mostly need to track the SoC by counting coulombs, and balancing a series of cells may be challenging unless the SoC to reach the steeper part of the curve.
Meanwhile, most serious applications have power conversion circuitry, so a variable voltage may not be much of a problem.
The low-end “12V” LFP packs without real BMSes or power conversion that sort of pretend to be lead-acid batteries in RVs and such are awful designs and work pretty poorly, and their “24V” and “48V” cousins are not much better. It’s true that Na-Ion may not be an easy drop-in replacement. That being said, some people are working on Na-Ion as a lead-acid replacement for car starter batteries (and for low voltage systems in EVs), and they have a lot of potential in this application. (LFP doesn’t have adequate not temperature performance and lead-acid sucks for many reasons.)
> Peak Energy is buying its commercial cells via contracts with Chinese suppliers
So really just assembly and sales then. I suppose it's a good start and maybe if business takes off they can figure out their own cells.
Yeah, I had questions when Kurt Kelty was saying that Peak's battery was "kicking butt" after the article said Peak is still building their battery factory and currently buys its cells from China.
Is GM testing Peak's cells or some Chinese company's cells?
Chinese companies started similarly 25-30 years ago.
> a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent
Doesn't matter for cars, but I think that's pretty good/important for grid storage.
Lithium batteries in cars are usually at least that good already. Most of the efficiency lost is in converting back and forth between AC/DC between the grid and the motors, and the rest in the auxillary features such as heating and cooling the cabin.
sorry, probably should have quoted the entire thing:
> The batteries are showing a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent, a significant 2 to 3 percent better than LFP. (“Round trip” refers to the amount of energy a battery discharges, relative to the amount used to charge it).
I think for cars, the efficiency probably doesn't matter that much. If it costs $1.03 per kwh instead of $1.00 per kwh, or 103 miles vs 100 miles, no car owner will care.
But grid storage is all about efficiency.
> But grid storage is all about efficiency.
Is it? Isn't there usually a very large price ratio between when grid batteries are charged and discharged? Like charging at 5 cents and discharging at 25? In that situation a couple percent of inefficiency is nothing special, just a small cost.
Keep in mind, we could have had local Na-Ion battery production in the US. The company producing them needed about $5m of bridge loans, with products already sitting in warehouses awaiting the UL certification.
This company got sold for scrap.
your comment would be more interesting if you actually provided any details at all
Sorry, I accidentally cut off the last paragraph when posting. The company was Natron Energy: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/natrons-liquidation-shows-...
See also lFP batteries from A123:
> In October 2012, A123 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was thrown into a narrative of Obama-era green energy failures with defunct California solar company Solyndra that had received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees — a comparison to which Vieau objects because A123's technology was "proven," and it built plants and hired people with government support.
> Wanxiang Group Corp., a subsidiary of the largest auto parts supplier in China, acquired its assets for $256.6 million after it had sought to acquire 80% of A123 earlier that year
Given that $5 million is not that much in the heavy industry game, I'd like to know why they couldn't get the bridge loans.
Like, that's not an unreasonable size of loan for a regional expansion for medium-sized businesses; there should be some sort of lender interested in doing that for them.
That's why, if you look at Fervo energy's makeup, and ask why do your have so many finance people, relative to the number of engineers; that's why. As a software developer, I have no idea how to get a $5 million bridge loan other than whatever ChatGPT could tell me. Meanwhile, a team of finance guys with domain expertise could have gotten them that $5 million.
I suspect some shenanigans from investors. The bankruptcy also was handled in an unusual manner, not through a regular liquidation.
If it only cost 5M for something like that investors would have been in a line around the building.
Hardware-speech synthesis.
Its a failure in the U.S. because the bet is on solid state batteries. Personally I won't take the EV plunge until they have those. The only exception for me to not wait would be the 10k BYD car. At that price point and it lasted 3 years i'd be happy.
The constraints and priorities for EVs and grid storage are very different.
In a car it’s worth paying more for higher volumetric and gravitational density. For aircraft even more so.
For grid storage, physical space is usually not the largest issue. Cost of deployment, stability, and cycle life are bigger factors.
This is for grid storage, not EVs.
The article is about grid storage, but grids can also use solid state and battery tech is shared between different usecases. My point was where the bet is.
QuantumScape is a good example as it entered into agreements with opertors for their battery tech.
Good article on solid state for the grid: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/
Nobody in their right mind would put Na-ion batteries in an EV. The lawsuits would never stop. It would be worse than Asbestos lawsuits.
Ridiculous statement without any evidence. CATL and Changan Automotive are already making and putting them in EVs.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-d...
Sodium ion batteries are safer than Lithium ion or LFP batteries and also perform better in very cold temperatures.
Receipts please. This is counter to everything I've read about the technology.
I think you need to start backing up your claims. (And no, beautiful, clean coal won't cut it.)
I think people should start flagging his posts. Obviously he's not here to participate in good faith.
Certainly giving strong Taylor Sheridan Landman ranting against windmills vibe, with a twist of bad chemistry and bias against batteries thrown in for good measure.