> 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?

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.

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).

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?

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.

Why? You also need to replace your inverter in that case.

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.

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.

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?

Chinese companies started similarly 25-30 years ago.

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.

your comment would be more interesting if you actually provided any details at all

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.

If it only cost 5M for something like that investors would have been in a line around the building.

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.

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.