I'd prefer LFP Batteries anyway. Much more stable chemistry in regards. Higher Cycle Life, Higher Temperature Stability and they are significantly less likely to blow up or catch fire in an accident. Their only disadvantage is energy density.

The idea with really cheap batteries is that they don't need good energy density. You just swap them every so often and put the one you aren't using in the charging rack. You could even carry your own reserve energy with you!

The idea is not that Na-Ion batteries are better than LFPs, they are not. The main goal is to make them dirt cheap.

It seems that $15 per kWh of storage should be achievable with them. At this price, it's trivial to install enough grid-scale storage to completely move off fossil fuels in more southern areas.

I don't think cold climates will be that different here. grid scale storage doesn't care about outside temp because heating/cooling a warehouse is pretty cheap

To add some meat to that correct statement:

CATL is launching volume production of their second generation sodium ion battery in December 2025. That's in about 2 months. I'm sure they'll use most of next year to ramp up production but they are targeting multiple gwh of production capacity with this first factory. More will likely follow. Apparently converting existing LFP production to this is relatively easy. This is not some experimental thing but a completely validated and ready for mass production chemistry.

Some basic stats of their cell: 175 wh/kg, ~10K charge cycles, -40 to +70 degrees celsius operating range, 5C charge rate (very fast basically). That's basically very competitive with LFP for both storage and low end EVs (up to 500km/300miles is a number they've cited).

That is all straight from CATL's recent press release on this. They are either playing some really amazing poker game here or they really are about to massively change things in the market.

That temperature range means these batteries can operate pretty much anywhere on this planet.

Peak Energy is actually starting to produce low volume production for their unique chemistry for grid storage. Their pitch is basically that they can deploy these in the desert with passive cooling only. No fans or moving parts. No cooling liquids. Nothing. Apparently this should work fine in a desert where it's freezing cold at night and blisteringly hot during the day. No fire risk. No mechanical parts that can break. Basically plonk them down and forget about them. Of course highly uncertain if they can scale all the way but it sounds promising.

There are other companies with production plans (or actual production happening) on this front as well.

Sodium ion has definitely left the labs now and it's now a matter of time before either these batteries are mass produced and widely used or something even better comes along to displace this. My guess is sodium ion will eat significantly into LFP market share for both storage and automotive in the next five years or so. After that, I would be very disappointed if nothing better comes along. Five years is about the same time it took for LFP to make a big dent into NMC market share. It might be some time before these things start showing up in the US though because of the tariff situation and the lack of local production capacity for this new chemistry. But if it is successful elsewhere, it will eventually happen there as well.

The biggest feature of this chemistry is actually the low cost of the materials. There are no exotic metals that you need. Everything needed can be sourced cheaply and locally in abbundance in pretty much every country. There have been some persistent rumors that CATL is targeting a long term cost of this chemistry of around 10$/kwh starting at maybe between 30 and 50$. 10$ is almost 10x lower than what is common today. Most EVs only have about 500-700$ worth of battery at those prices. As opposed to 5-7K right now. And many manufacturers don't produce their own cells so they would be paying more.

The cost is basically why people are a bit bullish on this technology. The low cost is a really big deal. It changes everything.

IMO, for large scale, nothing beats pumped water storage if you have the right conditions for the required lake. No risk of a bad cell causing a fire, no chemical degradation, no cooling or heating required and zero to full power within seconds just like a battery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#Comparison Has an overview

They aren’t better.

The allure is cheaper input materials, potentially very long lifespans and creating a hedge against the boom and bust cycle of the lithium market.

I bought 18650 sodium-ion batteries last year. Price is about the same as lithium-ion in small quantities, capacity is about half.

But this is currently small batches backyard production, so I expect the prices to go down. Also, the materials are available practically everywhere, so even 3rd world countries should be able to make them.

Haven't watched the episode but the comment about price seems incorrect - CATL announced its pricing at $40 per kwh and said $19 is their target in future, which compares with $65 per kwh today for their li-ion

It used to be the case that the USA was very successfull in making the talent (from everywhere, not just China) "steal" itself to the USA.

I have heard that the USA has abandoned that strategy recently, but I think it is too early to see any impact.

Some innovations are intimately coupled with scale through the learning rate and cannot be ported from one country to another.

China has by this point large advantages in industrial ecosystems and modest cost labor, and that the state is willing to make large long-term bets on technologies it sees as important in the future.

It's not insurmountable for 'the West' to claw back some of that manufacturing, including high-tech items like batteries. It will take a large, long-time and very expensive effort, however. But talk is cheap, and largely 'the West' has drunken the neoliberalism kool-aid and is staring at quarterly shareholder value so little gets done.

Heck, some Western government are even in bed with the fossil fuel industry, desperately trying to hold back progress in order to claw a bit more profit out of the industry before the full force of the electric revolution hits.

The sodium ion battery was invented over 200 years ago. No one needs to steal the technology, and manufacturing is basically the same.

All the research is in finding ever better combinations of anode/cathode.

Lithium mining and processing is dominated by Western countries, which is why China is incentivised to develop and manufacture sodium ion batteries. They know the game and haven't ignored it, unlike the West who ignored the geopolitical risk of China dominating rare earth processing for 20+ years.

The West should have a similar incentive despite having most of the lithium, namely supply risks for graphite, cobalt and nickel. There is a lot of research going on but mostly in Europe.

It’s not only about longevity in time but also in terms of miles.

For heavy users and given a standard range of 250+ miles, we are talking about a longevity of 1 000 000 miles. I never had a car with more than 200.000km (120 000 miles).

Phone and laptop batteries probably make up a tiny fraction of the battery market. My EV battery is almost 5000 times the size of my iphone.

Sodium batteries, if the technology works, would replace EV batteries and provide support to the electrical grid, and would be purchased at thousands of times the volume of iphone ad laptop batteries

Well, because they probably never will.

Phones and laptops are weight/volume sensitive, and sodium ions are a lot larger than lithium ions, thus the battery energy density is lower.

As another comment mentioned, sodium ion batteries compete very poorly against lithium when portability is paramount.

But more on that point, it always struck me as bizarre that lithium was dominant in so many areas despite vastly different requirements. For home and grid storage, battery weight is almost immaterial, while it's a paramount concern in portable devices. I think it would be very surprising indeed if one chemistry performed best in all scenarios. Lithium became dominant primarily because it had so much research and supply chain maturity behind it, even if it was suboptimal for areas like grid storage. Glad to see other battery chemistries are getting more investment.

the point of sodium batteries is that for stationary applications (e.g. ups/house backup), we've been using scaled up cell phone batteries for the last decade because the tech space was doing all the r&d. now that we know how good batteries can be, every important niche is getting it's own billions of dollars spent to find the perfect battery for that application

Ideally they will be used in personal electronics as sodium chloride solid state (SCSS) batteries are far safer and not going to explode or cause a run-away fire.

They also don't need some "critical" minerals such as graphite, cobalt and nickel.

Your personal use is drop in the ocean with how much power AI will require (10GW of datacenters already planned, multiply this by 100-1000x for next 100 yrs)

Just curious, what's your background in batteries? From my understanding, sodium based batteries are safer than lithium, but I would defer to anyone with real expertise in the subject.

Replace your Sodium Or Lithium by petrol or gas, and your comment would have been typical in the beginning of the 20 century.

We are all sitting on ‘minibombs’ since we developed cars and personal devices with batteries. That is the point of those objects, to carry an extremely dense storage of energy in order to operate. And indeed, that is the basic premise of a bomb, concentrate high amounts of energy in a small volume, but similarities stop there. Human development has made those devices extremely safe to use, fortunately.

As you go down the table, the alkali metals (in metallic form) get far nastier.

Na is the safest Alkali, they get increasingly bad as you go DOWN (not up) the perodic table. Learn basic facts before you spit BS

There are plenty of laptops and phones in airplanes today.

What makes you think the risk will increase in the future?

Are sodium batteries more dangerous?

Wait till you find out what internal combustion engines run on...

> Look, I'm all for better battery technology

Go on.

> but we are also building a ton of mini bombs that we all hold in our pockets

Yea. That's the definition of "battery".

Clearly you are against batteries.