Sodium-ion battery breakthroughs may be key to our electric future
It's no secret that lithium-ion batteries are at the forefront of modern energy storage and a key driver for electrification efforts worldwide. However, manufacturing them at the...
I've seen so many "this new battery technology" articles over the past decade, I can't bring myself to care until it enters production.
from the first paragraph of the article, it sounds like they share your feelings:
Battery technology is one of those areas that is getting a lot of promising research results but very little in the form of commercial products we can use to power digital devices, electric vehicles, or off-grid homes. That may soon change thanks to sodium-ion batteries that are safer, more durable, and cheaper to manufacture when compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries.
This is an ignorant opinion. My first cell phone (about 30 years ago) had a battery pack about as big as my current cell phone, and had a capacity of 500 mAh. My current phone has a bigger screen, the rest of the phone, and a 4000 mAh battery. How do you suppose that happened if none of those new battery technologies ever panned out?
I agree that the technologies did pan out, but I don't think it's an ignorant opinion.
I also feel blasé about the new battery articles because they tend to promise orders of magnitude changes rather than incremental change. Batteries did get much better, but it doesn't really feel that way I suppose. Our experience of battery power hasn't changed much.
It's really about getting excited about the article or the tech, it takes so long to see its mild effects that there's no real cashing out on the excitement, so it's not very satisfying.
Sounds to me like those new battery technologies entered production.
That’s just how media works. Sexy titles about revolutionary new technologies attract clicks, whereas titles about tiny incremental improvements don’t.
Most likely, the incremental and practical improvements have also been documented in special magazines and journals written for battery experts. It’s just that those articles tend to stay in the bubble of the battery experts.
Until then take it with a grain of salt.
I see what you did there.
Factories are being built for sodium-ion batteries right now.
Every battery breakthrough you've heard of in the last 30 years contributed something. It might have shown a method of what not to do, or it might have contributed a 1% boost. Stack several of those 1% boosts on top of each other, and you get a workable EV.
Well then, good news! Sodium ion is in production.
Molten salt reactor vibes
Man I wonder how conservatives will justify still driving fossil fuel cars now, because we all know they will. They keep using "Dangerous and terrible lithium mining" as their first and foremost excuse, if we get cheaper and easier to make batteries I wonder what the next scapegoat will be.
I know, lithium mining is terrible, but we all know that they don't actually care about it being terrible. They're just regurgitating what Fox has told them
As a leftist, the fact that everybody has just gone along with the concept that battery-powered vehicles are an everyday necessity is pretty frustrating. Long-haul trucks with batteries instead of freight trains. There’s a trial in Germany powering trucks on freeways with overhead lines. People with range anxiety dragging around a 500km-range battery for their usual 40km daily driving, just so they can do their once yearly road trip. When better public transport could solve this. We don’t need new battery technology, we just need to actually spend the money to improve public transport.
We can have both - they aren't mutually exclusive. I both want better public transport - but also acknowledge there are towns with populations of 800 people in the midwest where it's going to take a century before they even start thinking of having bus routes - let alone rail lines.
Electric vehicles are a now solution. Public Transport is a solution that will take centuries in areas like that.
Yes public transit.
But also the improvements in battery technology are helping make grid-level storage viable, which is making renewable energy like solar more useful.
Ironically, the US by some metrics has more freight rail than anyone else.
We're just using it to carry around rocks and coal and shit, and putting literally everything else in trucks. We SHOULD be using the trains for rocks and coal and shit, don't get me wrong, but it'd be nice to put some other stuff on it.
But the class 1 railroads mostly own the actual track and right-of-way. Norfolk and all their moronic lot. They're slaves to the lines going up and pass on good, sensible business expansions that would make them lots of money just because it would lower their profit percents by some tiny margin. Everywhere else in the world, the rail and right of way is a public good even if the service on them is deregulated.
Meanwhile Cincinnati just sold the Cincinnati Southern Railway to Norfolk Southern for a short-term cash injection. Fucking idiots. Norfolk TOLD them they were undervaluing the line by offering to buy it and they sold it anyway. And now that's one more route that has 0 chance of ever having meaningful passenger service.
My perspective...in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we're looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that's a staggering change in energy delivery...largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.
I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car's lifespan or the battery pack's lifespan in that car. So...joe six-pack's rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.
Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state's mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.
I don't see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.
I mean, the Australian mines are terrible for the environment, not like the nice and clean coal mines next door; and i mean, you can only recycle like 97% of the lithium with modern processes, not like gas where you can use it over and over again./s
Obviously this newer technology is only marginally better for the environment, so it'd be stupid to even try it. Who cares if it's only partially better? So I'm completely justified in using my outdated fossil fuel vehicles that we know are 100% terrible for the environment.
/s
They will say fossil fuel cars are closely tied to American history and culture and driving electric cars is unamerican. They don't need arguments, only emotions.
I've already had these conversations online..
Agree with all of these. Like they need a vehicle that can tow a semi every day for 800 miles. I've had the same talk and for many of them they are at LEAST a 2 car household. I keep saying okay if you need a vehicle that can do all of that... What about the other vehicle. Silence every time. Because they can't accept that there may actually be a valid use case.
You want a giant truck for towing? Fine. But 90% of them are lying to themselves. Those people need commuter cars, and that's where EVs are perfect
Range can be quickly resolved by hot-swapping batteries. A company in China, Nio, is already doing it
Ironically, towing capacity is something that EVs have the potential to be better than ICE. They have the torque, and you don't need a complicated transmission in the drive train being a limiting factor.
You can also put extra battery in whatever you're towing. It's extra weight, but if we're talking highway travel, the weight doesn't matter much. Air resistance matters more, but you've already paid that price by having a trailer at all. High power connection does need to be worked out, though.
If they can already double the energy density of LiFePO4 in the lab and a 25kWh prototype is already in use and rated for 250km, while getting rid of cobalt and removing all the explosive hazards with a cathode base material one-tenth the price that can be made on existing lines, why is research into lithium ion even continuing for this application?
Either the story is connecting lots of dots that actually have yet to be drawn, or Big Lithium is up to shenanigans.
I highly doubt that Lithium mines have that sort of power. More likely there are either more mundane suspected downsides that aren’t being so breathlessly reported, or simply that it’s too new.
It takes time to switch production lines, and actual demand from battery consumers. Of Lithium Ion is good enough to meet thier requirements than why rush to something that hasn’t been proven in the field yet? If thier already struggling to meet demand with thier current output why risk taking a bunch of lines down to maybe see demand there?
Take CPUs for example, ARM CPUs where kind of a joke 20 years ago, but now they are taking over X86. So its actually not bad working on competing technologies. Even about cars there is an example like that, also maybe 20 years ago battery cars where kind of a joke, while hydrogen fuelcells where all the hype back in the day. While now it seems battery is definitely winning. Although maybe in the next 20 years this turned out to be completely wrong again.
There may be an ARM "takeover" of x86 at some point, but that day is very much not today unless you believe the PC market consists solely of Macs.
The hydrogen issue seems to continue being storage. Even if you have all the green electricity you want for electrolysis, the product cannot just go in a tank at anywhere near sea-level pressure and temperature.
"in the lab" is always a dangerous one. If the Tokyo U people only just demonstrated that hard carbon electrode, then who knows if it can be produced at an industrial scale and if that can be done economically. Even if it can, maybe there is still enough time until production picks up that one more technological refresh on the LiFePO4 production is justified in the mean time.
Besides, there is some inherent inertia, in research, in the markets, in politics. Even if a clear technological winner emerged suddenly some researchers would still have a year or two to finish their grant and publish their findings, some production lines would produce until their eventual superior replacements come online and the stocks would be sold off, and some subsidies would still be payed out until a new law could redirect the funds to only support the acceleration of the new best thing.
Because we don't know for sure what will work. It makes sense to pursue multiple lines of research with the expectation that only one needs to work out.
Sodium-ion chemistry, material sourcing, and manufacturing techniques are still in flux. Longevity is still an issue. They're still a breakthrough innovation, not a solved problem.
As it turns out, capitalism is better at driving iteration than innovation. Research into groundbreaking tech is expensive, risky, and the benefits tend to be spread out over entire industries, so private investors find it difficult to capitalize on (read: privatize) the benefits.
There is still investment in optimizing NMC and LFP batteries not because "big lithium" has its hooks in people, but because low-risk patentable iterative improvement is all the private sector is really good for.
This is why, if you dig deep enough, almost every "world-changing" technology you use today has its roots in government research or grants -- microchips (US Air Force and NASA), accelerometers (Sandia Natl Labs, NASA), GPS (US DOD), touchscreens (Oak Ridge Natl Labs), the internet (ARPA), and even the lithium battery itself (NASA). The list goes on, and it gets particularly impressive when you look at medical breakthroughs.
Today, the US DOE has its net spread wide, funding dozens of different battery chemistries. Argonne Natl Lab is working on Na-ion right now, among others. For mostly political reasons, US-funded research doesn't "pick winners," so they won't ever truly go all-in on one tech.
TL;DR: Na-ion batteries are still a breakthrough technology, so expect funding/research from state actors like the DOE or CATL to push it over the line before the private-sector investment floodgates open.
Yeah I'll believe it when I can buy one off the shelf with an xt60 connector, and strap it to my drone.
