Will Sodium Batteries Become an Alternative To Lithium? (economist.com) 129
Smartphones and electric cars are both powered by lithium-ion batteries, notes the Economist. These "Li-ion" batteries "form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable." But unfortunately, building them requires scarce metals.
"A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead..." And the idea of building "Na-ion" batteries at scale is "gaining traction." Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium's place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged... [A]ccording to Rory McNulty, a research analyst at Benchmark, Chinese firms have 34 Na-ion-battery factories built, being built or announced inside the country, and one planned in Malaysia. Established battery-makers in other places, by contrast, are not yet showing much interest. Even without a five-year plan to guide them, though, some non-Chinese startups are seeking to steal a march by developing alternatives to layered oxides, in the hope of improving the technology, reducing its cost, or both.
One of the most intriguing of these neophytes is Natron Energy, of Santa Clara, California... Natron claims that its cells can endure 50,000 cycles of charging and discharging — between ten and 100 times more than commercial Li-ion batteries can manage. The firm has built a factory in Michigan, which it says will begin production later this year. Other non-Chinese firms are less far advanced, but full of hope. Altris, in Sweden, which is also building a factory, employs a material called Prussian white that substitutes some of the iron in Prussian blue with sodium. Tiamat, in France, uses a polyanionic design involving vanadium. And Faradion, in Britain (now owned by Reliance, an Indian firm), intends to stick with a layered-metal-oxide system.
Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.
"A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead..." And the idea of building "Na-ion" batteries at scale is "gaining traction." Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium's place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged... [A]ccording to Rory McNulty, a research analyst at Benchmark, Chinese firms have 34 Na-ion-battery factories built, being built or announced inside the country, and one planned in Malaysia. Established battery-makers in other places, by contrast, are not yet showing much interest. Even without a five-year plan to guide them, though, some non-Chinese startups are seeking to steal a march by developing alternatives to layered oxides, in the hope of improving the technology, reducing its cost, or both.
One of the most intriguing of these neophytes is Natron Energy, of Santa Clara, California... Natron claims that its cells can endure 50,000 cycles of charging and discharging — between ten and 100 times more than commercial Li-ion batteries can manage. The firm has built a factory in Michigan, which it says will begin production later this year. Other non-Chinese firms are less far advanced, but full of hope. Altris, in Sweden, which is also building a factory, employs a material called Prussian white that substitutes some of the iron in Prussian blue with sodium. Tiamat, in France, uses a polyanionic design involving vanadium. And Faradion, in Britain (now owned by Reliance, an Indian firm), intends to stick with a layered-metal-oxide system.
Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.
They will coexist (Score:5, Interesting)
Na-ion batteries have lower energy density and lower voltage than Li-ion. This is not something that can be worked around, this is due to the physical and chemical properties of Lithium vs Sodium. Basically, the atomic size of both, with Na+ being larger than Li+, which leads to differences in the packing density within the electrode material. This affects the overall energy storage capacity because the larger ions may not fit as efficiently into the crystal lattice of the electrode materials, reducing the amount of energy that can be stored
This energy density can be directly linked to battery weight. Which is why high-end EVs will keep using Li-ion.
There is a market for Na-ion batteries though:
- lower-range cars (cheaper ones too), if people start to not care about range that they use 1-2 times per year
- static batteries for storage, of the same kind as the Tesla Walls, where size/weight don't matter (although for inter-seasonal storage, pumped hydroelectric energy storage would seem a better option).
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And this is where legislation to ensure conformance might be a useful tool - once the tech is viable at commercial scale... ban or at least apply a penalty tax for using li-ion in situations where na-ion is adequate.
Because that frees up more lithium for mobile applications where sodium is a poor substitute.
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Cars happen to be an application where energy / weight is critical but for many other applications, from grid / home energy storage to low energy density transportation (ships, rail) the cost of the stored energy (including lifetime) is more critical.
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Standard economics will take care of that.
Yep. Ventilatory CO2 scrubbers in orbit use lithium and magnesium compounds for weight; those on earth (used in anesthesia and rebreathing SC(U)BA units) use sodium and calcium compounds for price.
Re:They will coexist (Score:5, Informative)
I'm philosophically opposed to regulating this. Regulation should be a last resort, when market forces produce a clearly bad decision. In this case, the various market factors (cost, space, efficiency, etc) will divide into situations where Na batteries make more sense or where Li batteries make more sense.
Now I acknowledge some (many?) believe government should be prescribing solutions based on perceived 'best value to society.' I acknowledge that as a philosophical axiom starting point. It's not an axiom I find compelling. That's particularly a distrust of government effectiveness in managing economic or resource allocation (same thing at some level) decisions. Markets aren't always the most efficient decision-makers, but in my experience governments very rarely are efficient decision-makers. YMMV
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> Regulation should be a last resort, when market forces produce a clearly bad decision.
Tragedy of the Commons. Every time there's an easy way to externalize problems and deal with the fallout later, you find enough people doing just that to be a huge problem.
It's OK to regulate in anticipation of something when you can look at history and say, "in similar situations, this is the inevitable result of letting the market handle it".
And government regulation (at least in a democratic society with a decent
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The government should be treated like a gun, an imperfect solution for an imperfect world, and one that has consequences you have to deal with as well, but that in some cases is better than the alternative.
It's not a wish granting machine.
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While that analogy is helpful I prefer another:
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-- George Washington
https://www.goodreads.com/quot... [goodreads.com]
Perhaps the analogy didn't begin with General George Washington but it is how we remember it today. I don't want to belittle your analogy in any way as I appreciate any recognition of how important it is to balance the authority of government with constraints on government. I merel
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It do give the impression that many people didn't got the memo, and think of the government like some sort of genius of the lamp, and end up getting burned up, burning everything up, or something inbetween.
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> Regulation should be a last resort, when market forces produce a clearly bad decision.
Tragedy of the Commons. Every time there's an easy way to externalize problems and deal with the fallout later, you find enough people doing just that to be a huge problem.
Somewhat ironically, you've picked a prime example of when government regulation (c.f. The Inclosures Act(s) [wikipedia.org]) created an arguably worse situation than it was designed to solve.
It's OK to regulate in anticipation of something when you can look at history and say, "in similar situations, this is the inevitable result of letting the market handle it".
And government regulation (at least in a democratic society with a decent legal system) isn't a bad thing. It adjusts the market so selfish actors have more difficulty fucking it up for everyone else.
However, you're not wrong, per se. I'd add that it's not wrong to regulate in response to something 'novel', i.e. regulation that changes an existing situation that hadn't been foreseen before it happened. The current business response to this, however, has been a string of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses in internati
Re:They will coexist (Score:4, Insightful)
>Government regulation is a bad thing.
Ah. A libertarian.
If you ever got your free market 'paradise', you'd be one of the first up against the wall. Somehow despite the obvious outcome, you all think you're going to be the warlord ruling the fiefdom.
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Somehow despite the obvious outcome
Explain, exactly, the terrible "obvious outcome" of two parties freely negotiating the give & take exchange of something each side has an excess of and the other side needing a supply of? Explain how you draw an unbroken line between free markets to, "warlord ruling the fiefdom" ...
Re:They will coexist (Score:5, Informative)
Government regulation is what stops companies putting lead sugar in your food or ethylene glycol in your wine.
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Government regulation is what stops companies putting lead sugar in your food or ethylene glycol in your wine.
Explain to me why a company would want to harm the people who it needs as customers? Why would a company harm the people who it relies on to buy its products?
Government, on the other hand? Oh yes; plenty of historical examples of government eliminating the nuisance of people by the thousands or millions.
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Protip: Your teeth are made of fluoride and calcium. Your fucking bones are a biologically-derived hydroxyFLUORapatite rock.
Go back to school.
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Hey-o mr personal stalker. Still no idea who Jessica Price is. Anyhoo
Your fucking bones are a biologically-derived hydroxyFLUORapatite rock.
No, it's mostly a composite of collagen fibers and calcium phosphate.
Your teeth are made of fluoride and calcium
I mean kinda, but mostly it's calcium. Fluoride in toothpaste or water will cause fluoride to go into your teeth, and appears to improve teeth beyond what they naturally are. But they're not naturally made of fluoride.
Naturalism is a bad argument and they guy
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If you overdose fluoride, your teeth will get white spec
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You want hydroxyfluorapatite in your teeth as it's more resistant to acid and physical wear. You do not want it in your bones because it weakens the structure and makes them more prone to fracture. (I've also seen suggestions that it makes them less flexible and that also decreases fracture resistance, but I can't find scholarly literature on that.) The excess fluoride that creates the mineral or sheds from it can also cause ossification of tendons and ligaments, making for a lot of joint pain, and may also
Re:They will coexist (Score:5, Insightful)
Our lawmakers (again, here in US, other places might be more sensible) will side like for instance in the EV car. So we put regulations and tax brakes to make it appear cheaper. But there is no thought to the environmental impact of the full process of making said car.
That's because the issue isn't as black-and-white as you might imagine. EVs don't contribute to smog which can be a local problem in many cities. They do not require gasoline or engine oil, both of which are sources of groundwater pollution. Reducing the need for oil also has positive geopolitical ramifications.
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Petrol/diesel cars are deprecated. Nobody's developing those types of engines for cars anymore. I
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If EVs had the same levels of subsidy, everyone would switch with their next vehicle purchase & auto manufacturers wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand.
Clearly not true.
EVs have far fewer parts, are more durable, cheaper to manufacture, less prone to manufacturing faults, etc..
BEVs are worthless for towing. There's all kinds of YouTube videos that show what happens when people try to tow with a BEV. Does this make BEVs worthless? Clearly not, but it does put a hole in your premise that everyone would buy a BEV if it were not for the price difference, a price difference that you claim comes from subsidies. I expect the PHEV to become popular but every time I mention a PHEV I get a reply that they aren't "real" EVs. If BEVs offered half the benefits that are a
EVs still contribute to smog (Score:2)
As someone with a history of lung cancer in their family I was hoping EVs would give me cleaner air, but it looks like that's a no go. EVs might help some emissions related to climate change, though the jury is still out on that (you still have to build the things) and we should probably be building walkable cities and public transit if we're going to get serious about climate change (we're not).
The one thing EVs might do is reduce foreign dependence on oil.
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most of the smog comes from tires [theguardian.com].
That article references particulate pollution, which isn't the same thing as smog. Smog is primarily the result of NOx, ground level ozone, and VOC emissions (ever watch the fumes escaping while you're pumping gas?). Yes, modern ICE vehicles are ostensibly [caranddriver.com] designed to limit these sort of emissions, but with the average age of a vehicle in the US being close to 12 years, emission control systems do wear out. Some states don't even do emissions testing.
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"we should probably be building walkable cities and public transit "
sigh, yes we should. some of us have been waiting 50 years for this to happen; some of us don't have more than a couple decades left so will never see it happen.
"if we're going to get serious about climate change (we're not)"
we will but not soon enough; I won't be around to see it happen
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"The USA can barley build new nuclear power plants"
That's an idea, they should build nuke plants in the barley fields
Re:They will coexist (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember just about 15 years ago
15 years ago? I'm an old guy, and I remember over 50 years ago (I'm much older than that).
I know what it was like to live in an East Coast industrial city before the EPA . One factory near me daily expelled sulfuric acid (among other things) into a stream that connected to a major river. At low tide that stream had a ph below 2.
Much of this country outside of the desert and midwest was turning into a chemical dump and smelled like it.
I spent a few years in the 1970's working in the valley in Los Angeles. The air was greasy. Unless you had experienced it, you can't imagine.
Many rivers were just open sewers with the added odor of abbatoirs dumping guts into them.
It's a different world now. The EPA was one of the best things to happen to the USA.
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I was there in the LA Basin during the 1970s and 1980s. We spent so many days indoors without recess or PE that the kids became difficult to handle. As the first regulations kicked in at the beginning of the 1980s, there was a lot of backlash. People fought against catalytic convertors, mileage requirements, and phasing out of leaded gas.
But the politicians (even the Republicans of the time) went with it, and things got better. It was slow at first, but then things seemed to kick in really fast. In 1981, we
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"In 1981, we had 160 Very Unhealthy or Hazardous Air Days"
Holy shit, that's 3rd world!
As much as I've complained about air pollution, I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that ever broke 50 such days.
I guess the LA Basin is a natural trap for polluted air.
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" I remember over 50 years ago (I'm much older than that)."
You're a bit older than me but I can recall those days too.
Like how temperature inversions used to trap a thick layer of polluted air on even otherwise perfect summer days.
Haven't seen that in 25 years; hope to never see it again where I live
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With a bit of skill you can cook up a new virus in your garage with fairly modest equipment. DIY manuals in the science journals. You can even mail order the DNA from several companies for about $1000. Labs around the world are doing this, particularly Gain of Function research where they see what it would take to make a virus truly infectious.
What could possibly go wrong?
(Of course, this has never happened before. Covid-19 resulted from a pangolin eating bat soup or similar. www.originofcovid.org)
So yes, there is a place for government regulation. But probably not in picking battery technologies.
I have to agree with that. Government should limit itself to what you cannot do that affects other people.
Picking winners and losers? nope.
Re:They will coexist (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a self-fulfilling libertarian fantasy.
Re:They will coexist (Score:5, Informative)
If you removed all the regulation there wouldn't be any nuclear plants. They could never get insurance for the almost unlimited liability they would face in the event of an accident, and nobody would invest in something that couldn't be insured.
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Oof. Good answer.
I love the cognitive dissonance of a libertarian nuclear power plant though. Free power for the keyboard warlords.
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We have the power of hindsight now, i bet you could tweak, remove and add new regulations that would make the power plants cheaper and safer at the same time.
The key probably lies on regulations that push the power plants to modernize to be more efficient .
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I'll wager that if you removed the regulation of nuclear power plants, they'd be just as expensive & we'd have a lot more nuclear accidents.
I'll wager that if you removed the regulation of nuclear power plants, they'd be a lot cheaper & we'd have a lot more nuclear accidents.
It's easy to make a wager when there is no way to prove it. But in that particular case, probabilities are in my favor: with less regulations, nuclear plants wouldn't need to have so many redundant systems (4x is the norm for all emergency cooling systems for instance; you can compare that to planes which for most critical components only require 2x redundancy factor),
Who exactly is the selfish actor here? (Score:4, Informative)
And I scoff at your "selfish actors". The most selfish actors are the ones making the regulations, the government.
Only a few years ago, one of if not the largest areas of US Government scientific knowledge was decimated, by a partisan hack that makes shit up [npr.org], spouting nonsense like, "windmills kill whales" [youtube.com]. US farmers need that collective knowledge and experience, now mostly lost, to help better manage crops as the climate changes.
Who exactly is the selfish actor here? The same entity making shit up as the world literally burns? Someone with similar skills and successes as Nero [wikipedia.org]?
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"Remember just about 15 years ago we had this great idea, which was pushed by government, call compact florescent lights."
It's unsurprising you are wrong about everything, you can't remember even basic facts correctly. The government didn't "push" compact flourescents, it banned incandescents. It set an efficiency standard. CFL sucked at the time, but the regulations created incentive for new development. That incentive resulted in improved solutions including LED. The government action provided a bene
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"there is no thought to the environmental impact of the full process of making said car"???
There are literally hundreds of lifecycle/well-to-wheel analyses of EVs vs ICE, and they clearly show EVs are better than ICE vehicles on the basis of carbon-intensity alone after about 20k miles of driving. Here's an explanation: https://www.carbonbrief.org/fa... [carbonbrief.org]
But that's only accounting for carbon. ICE vehicles are also worse in terms of:
- Noise. Noise pollution isn't just annoying, it causes stress, ischaemic hear
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Lithium is NOTHING like that. It is neither free nor limited.
Lithium is exactly like that. It is very limited. We have at most a 75 year supply right now if we don't use more than we currently are. It is also priced far below what it should be based upon future expected use. It is almost subsidized because the countries that have it are poor and know the western world wants it badly enough to kinetically come and get it. The best use of Lithium are the compliance cars, not full EVs. The same amount of Li can cut 16 people's transport emissions in half compared
Re:They will coexist (Score:5, Informative)
Lithium is exactly like that. It is very limited. We have at most a 75 year supply right now if we don't use more than we currently are.
Uh... ShanghaiBill is actually correct. We have an effectively unlimited supply of lithium. Indeed, as long as we keep it out of nuclear reactors (to make tritium), lithium doesn't get used up either. When the pressure becomes high enough, we could recycle the stuff as well.
Your "75 years" is like the "12 years of oil" we've been in for the last 100 years or so. You see, that 75 year supply is the "economically recoverable reserves". To wit, it's the reserves of lithium that we:
1. Know about, in the sense that we've surveyed the deposit
2. Could profitably mine using current technologies at current prices.
If the price of lithium goes up, then the economically recoverable reserves goes up. If the price goes down, the amount goes down. If we develop new more economical mining/recovery systems, the amount goes up. Etc...
It's like the oil shales in the Dakotas - they weren't considered part of the reserve until oil prices rose enough and we developed new deep drilling technology. Now they're the newest hot thing for oil extraction in the USA.
In addition, I think you don't mean "compliance cars", which can be full EVs (and was, in the case of GM's EV1), but PHEVs. Which can indeed have around 1/16th the battery, using said battery much more efficiently, IE using a higher percentage of its total capacity daily, while retaining some form of cheap-ish gasoline engine to give it acceptable range.
I actually agree with Toyota on this one - they're apparently going heavy on PHEVs rather than full EVs. They can make a much higher percentage of their fleet PHEV than they could EV, and that would save much more gasoline than a mix of traditional ICE and EV cars instead. 16 PHEV is better than 1 EV and 15 ICE.
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ShanghaiBill is actually correct.
As always.
as long as we keep it out of nuclear reactors (to make tritium)
Yes, and even if we switch to 100% fusion and increase our energy consumption ten-fold, the amount of lithium consumed will be utterly negligible.
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"...they can make a much higher percentage of their fleet PHEV than they could EV..."
PHEV can be made without Lithium batteries at all, just as hybrids have been since the beginning. It's not an argument, it's a smokescreen.
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EVs can be made without lithium as well. The old EV1s started out as lead-acid, and NiMH is still an option. The point remains, all battery production is limited at quantities EVs demand. Even PHEVs at full production requires massive battery production.
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The EV1 never had a lithium-ion battery. It started with lead-acid and later switched to NiMH. Many hybrids are now using LiIon, but the early generations used NiMH. Some companies in China are now building EVs with sodium-ion batteries; those cars have less range than cars with LiIon batteries but they're acceptable for some uses and cost less.
Unless we see a future battery technology that is superior in every way to what we have now, it's likely that more than one type of battery will coexist. Even within
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Never said it did, note how I followed up with "NiMH is still an option", I was trying to allude that it switched to NiMH and that they can still be used today if you have to. I will agree that the lithium chemistries are overall superior performance wise.
Hell, the battery in my hybrid(non-plug in) is that.
Like I said though, whatever chemistry you go with it takes a big battery factory to keep up with a major car production line. Whether it be EV or PHEV.
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Like I said though, whatever chemistry you go with it takes a big battery factory to keep up with a major car production line.
The production of enough batteries to make any impact on CO2 emissions from transportation will be a problem since it takes a long time to build the factories and open the mines. Switching to sodium will help, at least that is how it looks now, because we have more capability and/or infrastructure behind sodium production than lithium and other materials we use commonly for batteries today.
Whether it be EV or PHEV.
I believe the PHEV option is the best path forward, and is an option all too often ignored. While it might be ideal (
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I believe the PHEV option is the best path forward, and is an option all too often ignored. While it might be ideal (and I'll emphasize "might be") to make a switch to pure BEVs this isn't likely practical any time soon.
Yeah, I said that a few posts earlier, in that I agree with Toyota that PHEVs are, at this time, the better path forward for reducing carbon emissions/reducing oil use. While they have higher emissions than a pure EV, they have much lower emissions than a traditional ICE vehicle, and used correctly (IE plugged in regularly), they're still much better than a mild hybrid. I've actually looked into converting my HEV into a 'mild' PHEV, whether that be by 'merely' charging the existing traction battery to ful
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That 75-year supply is rapidly expanding, too. A couple of months ago, Lithium Americas Corporation announced that it may have identified a single deposit with 20 million to 40 million tons of lithium [chemistryworld.com] bound in illite containing 1.3% to 2.4% lithium in an easily mined near-surface location near the Nevada-Oregon border. There is a problem in that local indigenous tribes consider the extinct volcano sacred, but if that can be accommodated, it would be up to twice what Bolivia has in known deposits (which are
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PHEVs are often bought by people who have no ability or willingness to charge them from a plug. IDK why they would do this, but they do, in large numbers. About 3 in 5 journeys in privately-owned PHEVs use the ICE drivetrain, and that rises to 4 in 5 for company-owned PHEVs.
And because they have two powertrains, they have weight and complexity penalties cf cars with one drivetrain.
So while they could theoretically be better, in practice, they rarely are. The best way to save resources when buying cars would
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The four countries with the largest Li reserves are, in order: Chile, Australia, Argentina and China. Neither Australia nor China could reasonably be described as poor, and neither is remotely at risk of invasion by the "western world" (and the same is true of Chile and Argentina too, tbh). Heck, Australia *is* the "western world".
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The tragedy of the commons applies, your objection is merely wordplay. The government creates the concept of property rights which carves up the commons.
To make batteries you need resources, and Lithium is only one resource in lithium batteries. Other resources are relatively scarce. Relying on imprecision in others' arguments doesn't make yours strong, but then what else do you have?
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Even if the battery weighs a literal ton, given that the heaviest batteries in consumer cars is more around 1200 pounds total, or just over half a ton. Sodium might weigh a bit more, admittedly. There's around 63 kg of lithium in a Tesla battery pack.
Given that the atomic mass of lithium is 6.94 and the atomic mass of sodium is 22.99, we should be looking at around 210 kg of sodium, in a theoretical sodium ion battery pack, assuming that sodium can store as much power per atom as lithium, with most of the
Re:They will coexist (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps look up videos of people using Sodium to explosively fish.
Link please.
I bought some metallic sodium on eBay for my kids to play with. We tried many things, including dropping it into water.
It sputtered and burned, but most definitely did not "explode". You need potassium or cesium for that.
Batteries are even less explosive because the sodium is not metallic.
Disclaimer: If you play with metallic sodium, wear gloves and eye protection. We had both, but still got some minor lye burns on our forearms from the sputtering. The shared pain helped with the bonding experience.
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Link please.
I bought some metallic sodium on eBay for my kids to play with. We tried many things, including dropping it into water.
Here you go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
There's other videos I found with more powerful explosions but they took too long to get to the part where the sodium was chucked into the water.
Batteries are even less explosive because the sodium is not metallic.
Perhaps but I don't believe we can dismiss the hazards of sodium batteries so easily. Hydrocarbon fuels are certainly a hazard but we have considerable experience with these fires, and considerable resources in place to fight these fires because they are common enough to justify the costs of such materials and training.
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Regulation for Safety is a VERY DIFFERENT thing than Regulation for Market Management.
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This is the dhmo.org [dhmo.org] fallacy all over again.
Yes, you can build something explosive with Sodium. But you can do build something explosive with Nitrogen too, like Trinitrotoluol (TNT) or Nitroglycerin, and right now, you are bathing in 78% Nitrogen.
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I have a couple of pounds of sodium in my pantry, and another couple of pounds of chlorine. I'm not worried about it, though, because they're bound together and cannot react in a dangerous way. Sodium batteries are similar. Their battery chemistry is different from lithium-ion, making them far safer, including not being self-sustaining when it comes to fire.
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Dunno, I just dropped some sodium in a pot of boiling water. It didn't do much except make the pasta taste salty.
OMG, we're running out of lithium! OMG, the sodium will blow up and KILL YOU!
A cynic might think you have some kind of ulterior motive....
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I'm philosophically opposed to regulating this.
If you're philosophically opposed to regulating this then the technology wouldn't exist in the first place. The free market doesn't give a shit about the world beyond profit, it doesn't seek out benefit to society and suffers incredibly from tragedy of the commons, especially when it comes to managing raw resources required for bulk production.
You may be philosophically against to regulation, but precisely instances like this would not be able to effectively function without them. The outcome of regulation
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I'm philosophically opposed to regulating this
I am too, but oil companies are snapping up lithium production [mining-technology.com] as fast as they can. And not in small scale kind of stuff, they are going big because they know that's their next meal. I have every expectation for oil to toss everything they can at ensuring that Lithium stays as rare and expensive as absolutely possible. I don't see a fair and open market in the future of Lithium, all the actors are starting to misbehave very badly. If they were going to behave, I'd give them benefit of the doubt but no,
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it is looking like oil companies have every aim to make Lithium the new oil and do everything they can to make a market that acts that way.
... and I, for one, welcome our new lithium-monopolizing overlords, and will be happy to throw away my EV's non-rechargable lithium batteries every week and install new non-rechargable lithium batteries at my local used-battery-replacement kiosk.
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Markets aren't always the most efficient decision-makers, but in my experience governments very rarely are efficient decision-makers. YMMV
It's not said enough, and it may shock Anglo-Saxon audiences with their protestant ethics, but economic efficiency is not the sole axis to measure public actions. Sometimes we want governments to regulate some topics precisely because we don't want the most efficient outcome but because we pursue other values like human life, dignity, equality or not leaving anyone behin
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Yeah, government can intervene for different outcomes. BUT THE PROPOSAL HERE WAS MARKET MANAGEMENT, and that's what I object to.
By the way, this is a good read: Michael Tanner, The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America's Poor https://www.amazon.com/Inclusi... [amazon.com] I don't agree with everything, but it's a good examination of how government policies and expenditures have not succeeded, and part of the problem is that they're rarely evaluated against the goals for the policy. (Disclosure: I went t
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One of the most frustrating aspects of American exceptionalism is that it requires a parochial view of the world. If the author has truly written a book examining "government policies and expenditures have not succeeded [in helping the impoverished]", looked at the US alone, and then concluded that government policy and expenditure is incapable of helping poor people, then the author is a perfect example of that. Because there are other examples, such as the Nordics, where government policy and expenditure
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"Markets aren't always the most efficient decision-makers, but in my experience governments very rarely are efficient decision-makers"
Don't know why you think efficiency is the concern, or what that even means. "Market forces" often result in predictably bad outcomes, that's where the government role lies whether they are efficient or not.
"Regulation should be a last resort, when market forces produce a clearly bad decision."
No, there is no value in letting "market forces" do damage that you know will happ
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lower-range cars (cheaper ones too)
You can already make a cheaper, lower range EV today by simply putting less lithium cells in it. The problem is that even if the car's limited range is adequate for the average commute, you're still effectively putting more cycles on a lower capacity battery and it's going to wear out faster. Look at earlier model Nissan Leafs as an example (yes, bad cooling design also played a part in the degradation, I know).
On the other hand, if you have an EV with 4x the range of your workday commute, you're only put
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Early Nissan Leafs are just about the *only* example of this issue. Lots of early Renault Zoes are around that still have 95%+ of their original range of just 80 to 100 miles, because the BMS has turned to be much more effective than anyone expected.
So while I agree that a larger battery capacity should lead to a longer life, I don't think the gains are going to be especially stark.
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Totaly, though the order would be static storage first and formost, and maybe, very cheap EVs depending how much cheaper this will be than Li.
Re: They will coexist (Score:2)
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Lower voltage is actually not much of an issue anymore, converters have made massive strides in size, efficiency and cost due to advances in MOSFET technology. Lower energy density is an issue for all mobile applications but may still work for some, just as you say.
What I am also interested in is the fire-risk of Na vs Li batteries. Natrium is pretty reactive as well. Do you have any insight into that?
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The problem is that Na is volatile and explosive when it interacts with air or water.
Uh... The same is true of Lithium, if one cell goes, the rest tend to go as well, the only question being "how fast".
The sources I'm seeing claims that sodium ion is the more stable battery chemistry as well. IE less likely to go up in fire.
Elemental lithium combusts in water too [youtube.com].
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https://chem.libretexts.org/Bo... [libretexts.org]
Lithium is 222kj per Mol
Sodium is 184 kj per Mol.
Also, lithium has an atomic mass of 7 vs soiums's 23. So by mass you get 3.3 times the Mols.
By mass, elemental lithium reacting with water releases 4 times the energy as sodium.
What does happen is that sodium reacts faster for various reasons.
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oh boy, you don't want to hear about lithium then!
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many of us don't want to be trapped in a fire risk vehicle
So then not likely wise to make a truck with bulletproof glass and body panels then put a large battery under the passenger cabin. Are you listening Mr. Elon Musk?
Great but (Score:3)
Natron claims that its cells can endure 50,000 cycles of charging and discharging — between ten and 100 times more than commercial Li-ion batteries can manage.
That's only one of the numbers that matter. How much energy can it hold? How much will it cost? Focusing on only one of the numbers doesn't tell how good it is, and suggests they are intentionally hiding something.
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Re:Great but (Score:4, Insightful)
No, there is definitely another number that matters. The explosive force of the reaction after one of these getting punctured on a rainy day is the other number that matters. Just for reference, its roughly the same amount of energy as a 155mm artillary shell hitting your car after being fired from a artillary piece. It will make cleanup easier as there won't be much left of you or your car.
Yawn. Burning a bucket of coal releases the same energy as a 155mm artillery shell.
Sure, coal doesn't explode the same way as 20 pounds of TNT, and neither does a battery.
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and suggests they are intentionally hiding something.
This is a Slashdot summary of an Economist article. It's not a peer reviewed paper published in Nature. It's not a technical specification released as a part of a product specification.
The fact that they didn't just heap every tiny spec on you doesn't suggest they are hiding anything, it suggests you have incredibly unrealistic expectations for information given the sources you're reading.
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Sodium sulphur batteries have been in use for grid scale storage for decades now. They aren't as energy dense as lithium ion, they are much heavier, and they have to be kept at around 80C to work. But they are cheap and very robust, with a high number of charge cycles before end-of-life.
For grid scale stuff, things like max charge/discharge rate, weight, and within reason energy density, are not major factors. Lifetime cost is the biggest consideration, and lasting for 50k cycles will have a major effect on
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You forgot "how fast can it charge", and it charges VERY fast, much faster than lithium ion.
How much faster? We are already seeing problems with creating connectors that can handle the power that lithium batteries in existing EVs can take so improving the charging speed of the battery isn't likely to gain us anything. In applications like grid scale storage any problem of charge power is likely easily addressed with spreading out the battery to make heat management easier, or putting in bigger batteries to spread out issues of the speed of the chemical reaction or whatever other limit is being h
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Fully charged in 15 minutes or less, at 100 amps. It's not an unsolvable problem, it's solved. That's way better than lithium.
They already are alternative (Score:2)
Lithium isn't exactly scarce (Score:3)
Lithium isn't exactly scarce .. you can extract it from seawater.
Same idea with sodium .. its literally generated by the truck full as a byproduct of refining "sour" crude oil.
The question becomes extracting it in an economical enough manner.
e.g. htere's some opportunities for synergy if there's, say, an offshore wind farm with the power used locallly for lithium extraction.
Re:Lithium isn't exactly scarce (Score:4, Interesting)
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There is, however, plenty of sodium in seawater, and several mature, well established technologies to concentrate it (with the bonus of making desalination cheaper at a time when drinkable water is getting harder to come by).
You can also mine out of the ground by the ton.
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Li can be expensive to extract despite being plentiful but once we have enough for the whole global economy we would just have to get recycling costs down. How about we stop trashing Li batteries like they were cheap?? start now. At least stockpile them in a dump of just Li Batteries.
Geothermal exploration has found to be a rich source for Li and we've not exhausted mining.
Only if it's the cheapest option. (Score:5, Insightful)
For grid energy production and storage, the cheapest option always wins. This mean the cost of deployment and total cost and ownership needs to be lower than all other options. I could be wrong but it looks like the new geothermal tech is now a cheap option that is going to give other energy production and storage technologies a run for their money. So, yeah, sodium-ion might be cheaper option for grid storage than lithium-ion but it would be moot point if there are even cheaper options.
Will Sodium Batteries Become an Alternative To Lit (Score:5, Funny)
Na.
great. (Score:2)