Lithium-Free Sodium Batteries Exit the Lab, Enter US Production (newatlas.com) 138
Natron Energy, a pioneer in sodium-ion battery technology, has officially commenced mass production of its lithium-free sodium batteries in its Holland, Michigan facility, offering an alternative energy storage solution with benefits such as faster cycling, longer lifespan, and safer usage compared to lithium-ion batteries. New Atlas reports: Not only is sodium somewhere between 500 to 1,000 times more abundant than lithium on the planet we call Earth, sourcing it doesn't necessitate the same type of earth-scarring extraction. Even moving beyond the sodium vs lithium surname comparison, Natron says its sodium-ion batteries are made entirely from abundantly available commodity materials that also include aluminum, iron and manganese. Furthermore, the materials for Natron's sodium-ion chemistry can be procured through a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption. The same cannot be said for common lithium-ion materials like cobalt and nickel.
Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage. [...] Natron says its batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, a level of immediate charge/discharge capability that makes the batteries a prime contender for the ups and downs of backup power storage. Also helping in that use case is an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.
Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage. [...] Natron says its batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, a level of immediate charge/discharge capability that makes the batteries a prime contender for the ups and downs of backup power storage. Also helping in that use case is an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.
https://natron.energy/company/news (Score:2)
403 Forbidden.
Too bad - I am buying a large quantity of batteries for a project.
Way to launch.
Re:https://natron.energy/company/news (Score:5, Informative)
There was even a word for this phenomenon once upon a time. Slashdotted.
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Once upon a time, tens of thousands? of geeks used /. GP has a 4 digit UID - probably remembers.
Once upon a time, a server might have a hard time dealing with a whole lotta users hitting it all at the same time. Now a pi could probably do the job.
Once upon a time, a /. user might have looked up the site.
nslookup and whois seems to show that this is cloudflare hosted. I'm pretty sure this wasn't the /. effect - unless they moved the server. Seems more likely it was a misconfiguration.
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Alternate sources [Re:https://natron.energy/co...] (Score:2)
The original link worked for me, but some alternate sources may be of interest:
https://cen.acs.org/business/s... [acs.org]
https://www.businesswire.com/n... [businesswire.com].
https://www.energy-storage.new... [energy-storage.news]
https://www.environmentenergyl... [environmen...leader.com]
Re:https://natron.energy/company/news (Score:4, Funny)
Baba Maga? Is that like Baba Yaga?
Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds good, let's see it IRL. How much usable energy per unit of battery weight?
On a slightly different note, if only I had a dollar for every slashdot battery story...
Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:5, Informative)
How much usable energy per unit of battery weight?
That really isn't their concern, because they're not marketing to the automotive sector, where weight is an issue. Their focus is for stationary storage like data center, grid scale, etc. Weight is no longer a major concern when you aren't hauling it around.
According to this page [natron.energy], energy density in Wh/l is 1/2 to 1/6 that of Lithium. On the other hand, significantly better maximum sustained power and recharge times.
They do mention EV fast charging, but they aren't talking about the car batteries but rather battery storage at the charger so charging stations can level out their power draws and reduce their utility bills.
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Energy density is always an issue.
Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:5, Informative)
Energy density is always an issue.
It's of little importance for grid storage.
If the energy density is lower, just stack 'em higher.
For grid storage, the important metric is not kwh per liter but kwh per dollar.
Re: Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:3)
It depends. If the grid storage is located at homeowner's, space is certainly an issue. My roof fits 70 solar panels but 0 kWh of batteries. Space for a 100 kWh battery might be there outdoors, but not indoors.
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You'd want it outdoors anyway, and separated from your house by a firewall. Storing large quantities of energy is dangerous.
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Sigh...no. From the website:
UL9540A 'Champion' rated nonflammable at the cell level with no thermal runaway under any condition
People have heating oil, propane, and kerosene tanks next to their houses all the time and rely solely on the fire-rated tanks. Batteries aren't special in this regard, unless you consider they aren't a liquid that can spread or a gas that can expand so they're safer.
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People have heating oil, propane, and kerosene tanks next to their houses all the time and rely solely on the fire-rated tanks. Batteries aren't special in this regard, unless you consider they aren't a liquid that can spread or a gas that can expand so they're safer.
Fuel oil (whether you're talking about heating oil, kerosene, diesel, or anything else in this category) is relatively difficult to ignite. Propane tanks are usually separated from the dwelling by some significant space.
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I'm biased. The house I currently live in had the oil burning furnace explode in 2011. It was located in the basement and the fire gutted the kitchen above it. I'm surprised the whole house didn't burn, but there was significant damage.
Where I live it is common for 120 gallon propane tanks to be strapped to the outside wall of the house. Granted, I'm in West Virginia and this place isn't know for intelligence. Safety regulations are for them liberal hippie communist types.
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"But the manufacturer said is was safe" is not really convincing without a supportive history. I've run into too many cases where one of the terms wasn't defined in the "obviously correct" manner. Or perhaps there are failure modes that aren't covered by "thermal runaway".
The argument about propane tanks is better...but when I lived with an external (butane) tank, it was placed at a considerable distance from the house.
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I don't trust the manufacturer, either. That's what the UL listing and certification is for. UL I trust as much as possible. And installing anything like that will require it to be to State electrical code, which is fairly picky on battery storage.
Re: Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:2)
Batteries can spontaneously combust in ways those other things can't. Ask me about the battery recall on my 2017 Chevy Bolt.
Fortunately, mine did not explode. But it was a non-zero possibility.
Reducing the odds of combustion with new chemistry is a good thing.
But this will be a struggle in EVs due to energy density problem.
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Space for a 100 kWh battery might be there outdoors, but not indoors.
Why would put a battery outdoors especially one that powers a house? Unless "outdoors" to you means a shed or garage.
Re: Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:2)
Why ? Because I'm using all the living space indoors, and the garage also houses 2 cars and many other things in the 3rd spot. All the walls are covered with furniture and 15,000 CDs. There is no spot for a shed outside either. The backyard is inclined on a hill and that's pretty much the only usable spot. Probably about 60ft away from the main panel.
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Yeah, if it doesn't work, just throw more money at it has always been a winning strategy.
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Reading comprehension?
"the important metric is [...] kwh per dollar" is exactly the metric that prevents "throwing more money at it" by optimizing for cost-effectiveness.
Your comment would have been relevant (but nonsensical) if it had been: "Yeah, if it doesn't work, just throw more volume at it. [...]"
Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:4, Informative)
Energy density is always an issue.
It's of little importance for grid storage.
If the energy density is lower, just stack 'em higher.
For grid storage, the important metric is not kwh per liter but kwh per dollar.
This. Exactly this.
Energy density is just one aspect of battery systems, and while some people think it is the most important one, it is not. All depends on the use case.
Some times you don't care about or even want super high energy density. That's because packing in a lot of energy means that problems tend to be more dramatic.
Your grid storage comment is spot on point. You can take something like a nickel-iron battery, pretty much the opposite of the Li-ion battery. It doesn't have good charge retention, and is quite heavy. You'd never want it in your smartphone.
But it is tough as nails and can withstand a lot of abuse. The electrolytes (potassium and lithium hydroxide) are not consumed or altered during chugging or discharging, and are nowhere near a problem as other types. And it doesn't have toxic metals like lead or cadmium. And it doesn't have the propensity to explode or catch fire that Li based batteries do.
So need some storage at the bottom of your solar array or wind turbine? You calculate out what you want, pour a concrete pad for the number of batteries needed plus the electronic conditioning, and there ya go.
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Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:4, Informative)
I think if weight were the primary concern with vehicles they woudn't still almost exclusively favor the heaviest optopn available (lead acid) and would be going with something more like lithium.
Lead acid isn't chosen for its weight - it's chosen for its cost, energy density, resilience to vibration, and cranking amps.
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The 12v is lead acid for the reasons you state. It's tough as nails needed for the operating environment. It's also only a few dozen pounds so in the 1% of vehicle weight territory. So it's 'features' vastly outweigh it's weight issues.
But you won't see any EVs with primary batteries of lead acid, expressly because of the weight.
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Weight is a primary issue in mobile scenarios. It's why you don't see EVs based on Lead Acid.
You see them all the time. We call them "golf carts".
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We do not. Pedantics aside. Do feel free to name 3 mass production vehicles road legal that use lead acid for primary battery.
You said "EVs". Now you've shifted that to "mass production vehicles road legal".
You just shifted the goal posts. Golf carts are EVs.
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Fortunately for your it doesn't weigh as much as a car
Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:5, Insightful)
On a slightly different note, if only I had a dollar for every slashdot battery story...
You'd probably be able to afford enough of an education to know batteries have improved dramatically over the decades and you'd understand they are a very important and active research focus which is why you hear a lot about the work being done with them.
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On a slightly different note, if only I had a dollar for every slashdot battery story...
You'd probably be able to afford enough of an education to know batteries have improved dramatically over the decades and you'd understand they are a very important and active research focus which is why you hear a lot about the work being done with them.
In support of your point, I recall as a teenager, and interested in model airplanes, it was "common knowledge" that there would never be a battery powered model plane. Today we are starting to implement battery driven planes that carry people. Despite this, there are still people who have a 1950's mindset. Battery technology is mostly about adapting the characteristics of the well known chemical properties of the elements used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And the research needed to make the batter
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Even though very few of the supposedly massive breakthroughs ever manage to pan out, with twenty years of steady progress and incremental improvements we'll wind up getting to that level anyways.
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$/kWh has had a halving time of about 3-4 years over the last decade, compared to the Moore's law heyday with a doubling time of about 1.5 years. It's not as fast, but it's exponential, pretty close, and damn impressive.
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" If we really want energy density, Calcium-ion might be the way to go."
No, metal-air is what you want. But that has inherent problems that need addressing.
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And it is so odd that we now have people going on as if Li-ion batteries are the pinnacle of battery technology. They aren't. If we really want energy density, Calcium-ion might be the way to go.
Excellent point.
Also, making an aluminum/air battery is nearly the holy-grail of high specific energy battery tech.
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On a slightly different note, if only I had a dollar for every slashdot battery story...
You'd probably be able to afford enough of an education to know batteries have improved dramatically over the decades and you'd understand they are a very important and active research focus which is why you hear a lot about the work being done with them.
Seriously, after decades of "marvelous new miracle battery/ultracapacitor/whatever" stories that come to nothing ... yes, research has been very active. A lot of laboratory results have, for one reason or another, not yet made it out of those laboratories. And some (one of the ultracapacitor "companies") seem to have flown by night with the venture capital.
These sodium batteries are a different story, They are actually being manufactured (apparently several companies are making sodium ion batteries) and a
Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds good, let's see it IRL. How much usable energy per unit of battery weight?
On a slightly different note, if only I had a dollar for every slashdot battery story...
Sodium batteries are real. Lithium has better energy density - although as more adoption occurs, that advantage will likely be a bit diminished. Also, sodium ion batteries are playing catch up in the recharge cycle department.
Both of those issues are being worked on.
Potassium batteries are also a possibility. Interestingly, the potassium battery has a real life biological example of potassium batteries in plants - it acts as a charge carrier
Then there is Calcium batteries, which could end up having higher energy density than lithium-ion.
Lithium is just another alkaline metal, the other batteries only need the research to bring them to their potential - pun kinda intended! 8^)
Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we get a bonus for every battery story that's total garbage?
"Earth-scarring extraction" - what sort of nonsense is this? The three main sources of lithium are salars, clays, and spodumene.
Salars = pumping up brine (aka, unusuable water) to the surface of a salt flat, letting it sun-dry, collecting the concentrate, and shipping it off for purification. When it rains, the salt turns back into brine. It's arguably one of the least damaging mineral extraction processes on planet Earth (and produces a lot of other minerals, not just lithium).
Clays = dig a hole. Take the clays out. Leach out the lithium. Rinse off the clay. Put the clay back in the hole.
Spodumene: This one actually is hard-rock mining, but as far as hard-rock mining goes, it's quite tame. It has no association with acid mine ponds and often involves very concentrated resources. Some of the rock at Greenbushes (the largest spodumene mine) for example are up to 50% spodumene. That's nearing iron / alumium ore levels.
Lithium also is only like 2-3% of the mass of a li-ion battery. And the LD50 of lithium chloride is only 6x worse than that of sodium chloride (look it up).
The hand wringing over lithium nonsense gets tiring.
The US has no shortage of lithium deposits. There's enough economically-recoverable lithium in Nevada alone to convert 1/4th of all vehicles in the world to electric. The US has had (A) past underinvestment in mining, and especially (B) past underinvestment in refining - as well as (C) long lead times from project inception to full production. Sodium does not "solve" this. As if sodium refining plants are faster to permit and build?
What it does do is introduce a whole host of new problems. Beyond (A) the most famous one (lower energy density - not only is the theoretical lower, but the percentage achievable of the theoretical is *also* lower), they usually struggle with (B) cycle life (high volumetric changes during charge/discharge, and lack of a protective SEI), (C) individual cathode-specific problems (oxide = instability, air sensitivity; prussian blue = defects, hydration; polyanionic = low conductivity; carbon = low coloumbic efficiency / side reactions); and (D) the cost advantages are entirely theoretical, and are more expensive at present, and are premised on lithium being expensive and no reduction in copper in the anodes, both of which I find to be quite sketchy assumptions. When you reduce your cell voltage, you're making everything else more expensive per unit energy stored, because you need more of it.
That said, it's still interesting, and given how immature it is, there's a lot of room for improvement While sodium kind of sucks as a storage ion in many ways, it's actually kind of good in a counterintuitive way. You'd think that due to it being a larger ion diffusion speeds would be low, but due to its low solvation energy and several other factors, it actually diffuses very quickly through both the anode/cathode and electrolye. So it's naturally advantaged for high C-rates. Now, you can boost C-rates with any chemistry by going with thin layers, but this costs you energy density and cost. So rather than sodium ion's first major use case being "bulk" storage ($/kWh), I wouldn't be surprised to see it take off in *responsive* load handling for grid services ($/kW).
Re: Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:2)
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Pros: 10X charging than lithium, less environmental impact, sodium is more abundant
Cons: Average lower energy density. Natron models 70 Wh/kg whereas other sodium can be 160 Wh/kg. Lithium ion ranges from 50 - 200 Wh/kg
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70 Wh/kg is from a 2022 news article. Literally the first half of the sentence you got that number from says we do not know what the Wh/kg of these cells are yet...
=Smidge=
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Don't know about weight, but you can buy 18650 cells using Na-Ion right now. They have the power capacity and curves of LiFePO4 cells at the moment.
The key part is that we have tons of sodium, unlike lithium, and a lot of it is already in ion form. Earth's lithium supplies are limited, while sodium supplies are basically limitless, and thus, it's stupidly cheap and unlikely to rise due to its abundance.
Sodium batteries are very
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"Lithium slavery" is an ironic reference to all the stories we hear in which "the free world" becomes a slave to China, which is "the only lithium producer".
Slavery isn't going to end until it is more expensive than the alternatives.
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Australia is the largest lithium producer. And they don't do slavery there.
Accurate [statista.com]. Chile is number two.
However, China is number one in refining lithium from ore (or salt) into usable lithium or lithium carbonate.
On a slightly related note, not sure what makes you assume workers won’t be exploited mining even something as plentiful as sodium. Not like you’re going to get the new American soft man to do manual labor, so that leaves the work to underpaid immigrants who know they’re in country illegally.
Sodium is most easily sourced from salt, so there's no hard rock mining. In any case, salt production is already an order of magnitude higher than lithium production, so diverting a few percent to batteries isn't going to require more mining,
Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:4, Informative)
the weight of another car to the underside
No American car in history has come close to being 400lbs which is the weight of a typical battery pack+electric motors minus the weight of the engine and gearbox.
Actually the lightest production car (non insanely weird sports cars made entirely of carbon fibre and glue) on the market is a Citroen Ami. And it's electric.
Re:Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it's tiring, this notion that you just add the mass of a battery to that of an ICE car to get the output mass. Meanwhile, a Model 3 is roughly the same weight as its performance and class equivalents on the BMW 3-Series line.
An EV is not just a battery pack.
An ICE vehicle is not just a puddle of gasoline.
You have to compare full systems masses - and not just adding in powertrain masses either. Everything has knock-on impacts in terms of what can bear what kind of loads / adds what kind of structural strength, what you need to support it, what you need to provide in terms of cooling air / fluid or other resources, how it impacts the shape of that vehicle and what that does to your energy consumption, and on and on down the line.
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Nailed it with weight, since our current EV battery solutions involve bolting the weight of another car to the underside.
And how much does the engine/transmission/gas tank weigh in a fossil fuel car?
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Mining in the US uses megamachines, not coolies with pick-axes.
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Hi, I do mining.
What the FUCK are you talking about? We use core drills and hand tools first and foremost, and only bring out big machinery when there's something actually worth getting in large amounts.
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Another car? Teslaâ(TM)s 100 kWh battery is around 480 kg or 1050 lbs. A mid size engine block doesnâ(TM)t weigh much less. Do you also comment on gasoline cars that they âbolt the weight of another car inside the engine compartmentâ(TM)? This boomerism against EVâ(TM)s just keeps getting more and more pathetic.
Pathetic anti-EV sentiment? It's true that the detractor's and their whining is getting pathetic. But this as some sort of boomer problem is way off the mark.
The biggest haters of EV's at least in my area, are 20's to mid 40's males with their overpriced pickup trucks that get maybe 9 miles per gallon, and their leaders with the diesel engines who when they see an EV, elect to "roll coal, having detuned their rides in order to belch out huge plumes os smoke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And the dr
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"... are 20's to mid 40's overcompensating males with their overpriced oversized pristine pickup trucks that get maybe 9 miles per gallon with a tailwind..."
Fixed that one for you in several places....
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100 kWh battery is around 480 kg or 1050 lbs. A mid size engine block doesnÃ(TM)t weigh much less.
No. Not even close. The old 7.3l "Powerstroke" diesel in 20+ year old pickup trucks only weighs 920 lbs, that's the entire engine, block and heads. The more recent 6.7l units still don't break 1000 lbs. The "large car" V8's like the Dodge SRT8 Hemi is well under 900 lbs, and if you wander all the way down to the 4 cyl Toyoda M20's you'll find in the very efficient Prius you find they get as light as 359 lbs. So the prime mover in a Prius is about 1/3rd the Tesla's battery in weight, in a car of similar ca
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An EV does not have that.
Re: Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:2)
That's a generalisation - some have transmissions.
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That's a generalisation - some have transmissions.
What EV has a transmission? They have a reducing gear, but AFAIK, that's it.
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There's a porsche one with a transmission. Make of that what you will.
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NA+ is somewhat less energy dense which makes it less attractive for EVs... but doesn't matter a lot for grid storage. If they're cheaper and they can dramatically drop the price of backup storage, I'm in.
Check your units [Re: Yay to the abolition of ...] (Score:2)
The problem is that nobody is going to drive such a death trap. Sodium releases 30x the energy as Lithium when it burns.
No it doesn't; less. Check your data. 416 kJ/mol for burning sodium, compared to 596 kJ/mol for lithium.
If it did have more energy, of course, it would be vastly better than lithium on a battery energy per unit weight basis. Unfortunately, it's not.
Sodium does ignite more easily, but that's cancelled out by the fact that really it's the electrolyte that's burning, and the electrolytes used for sodium batteries are harder to ignite.
Re: Yay to the abolition of lithium slavery! (Score:2)
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This just popped up as well. NEW electric car motor is 67% more powerful, 20% smaller & weighs 75kg. (165 lb)
Plus the lighter, more efficient motor can have a significant impact on range.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
That's Nifty, but consumer? (Score:3)
Where's the "consumer" home battery power solution?
I'd be much more interested putting this into my house than Li battery...
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Where's the "consumer" home battery power solution?
I'd be much more interested putting this into my house than Li battery...
I’d be tabling this with your homeowners insurance provider. Chances are we’re not getting away from lithium mining anytime soon, which means other avenues (like safety and liability) need to be explored and pushed if you want to accelerate the consumer path.
We know the dangers of lithium, and the potential safety of a sodium-based solution. Insurance stands the most to lose, so put that bug in their ear.
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According to TFS, these sodium batteries are non-flammable.
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Most states and towns in the USA do not have building codes for residential off-grid battery storage.
I thought that was in the National Electrical Code (NEC) section on solar, at least if they're on the 2017 version (or some earlier versions). Most jurisdictions adopt some version of the NEC (and occasionally move to a later version - my county is on 2017 as of a year or so ago) and then maybe add a few changes, rather than write their own electrical code.
Main remaining downsides, if you want to keep your
Re:That's Nifty, but consumer? (Score:4, Informative)
Given the fact that they're less energy dense than Li-ion, you'd think stationary would be the first use case they'd look at.
But I vacillate between grid scale and home scale. Grid scale's nice because it's more efficient and by it's nature is deployed to the entire grid at once. Home scale's nice because it means it's yours and the power company isn't charging you a premium for it.
Either way though, it solves a disconnect between power generation and power production - we have cyclical power requirements and traditional power generation is fairly flat and most sources of 'green' power are inconveniently on cycles not bound to our usage cycles. Massive amounts of energy storage solve this issue and make power generation more efficient while doing so.
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You can even break the grid--scale down to production and distribution sides, so an ideal backup solution involves production, distribution, and consumption. You can cover the grid services portion of the equation from any location, but each location helps to improve utilization of infrastructure and reliability.
I want to add a home battery, but real world round-trip efficiency from solar is 92% so I really need to add more solar with the battery. Even just adding something for the "UPS" loads gets hard t
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Doesn't exist yet to my knowledge. It is too early. Natron's BlueTray 4000 is a 1U rack mount battery intended for commercial applications.
You could DIY a pack from some of the early Chinese Na-ion cells from AliExpress/Alibaba - if you are so inclined.
GreatScott tested a model of these early Na-ion cells that are showing up on AliExpress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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https://www.biwattpower.com/ [biwattpower.com]
https://solarbuildermag.com/pr... [solarbuildermag.com]
And etc.
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Where's the "consumer" home battery power solution?
Here for example: https://hakadibattery.com/prod... [hakadibattery.com]
(But of course not produced in the US, only East Asian producers bother to produce stuff for consumers.)
Hope it lives up to it's promises (Score:3)
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That would make the charger infrastructure horribly expensive, the charging cables as thick as an arm and considerably heavier, and losses with the resulting waste heat also much higher.
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The 10x charging rate would be great for EVs. Might help solve one of the most common problems with these vehicles. Instead of a 30 minute fast charge, a 3 minute charge time, would be as fast as filling up gas or diesel.
You'd be happy to know that problem has been solved. Not only does it not take 30min to fast charge an EV (closer to half that), but 99% of EV owners won't ever actually use a fast charger; Myself included, and I live in an apartment. I charge at work once a week. In the 8h work day my EV is full again from a standard L2 charger. If I had a garage at home (like most Americans) I'd probably never charge anywhere other than my garage except for those times I drive internationally, and then I just charge at th
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"Internationally" tells me you're European. You have a vastly different experience from us Americans.
First, what little time we get for vacation (the only time most of us would go the distances where we'd need to charge mid-trip), those charge times are eating into our vacation time. We want to spend that time at our destination, not sitting around waiting hours for a charge.
Second, our distances traveled are vastly larger than yours, with far less infrastructure in between. You can go 200 miles somet
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First, what little time we get for vacation (the only time most of us would go the distances where we'd need to charge mid-trip), those charge times are eating into our vacation time. We want to spend that time at our destination, not sitting around waiting hours for a charge.
I vacation around the US in an EV all the time, and it's really not an issue. Not unless your vacation travel is of the "pee-in-a-bottle-no-stopping" sort. If you aren't hardcore about minimizing travel time, making stops for decent meals, and stops for bathroom breaks and leg stretching, you'll find that you spend little if any time waiting for the car to charge. What you do is drive for 2-3 hours, then stop for 15 minutes for bathroom (and charging), then drive for 2-3 hours, then stop for an hour for l
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"Internationally" tells me you're European. You have a vastly different experience from us Americans.
Indeed I am, and I hoped that you would recognise this, because it points to the core issue that it works just fine the only thing holding you up is American perception of an unsolvable problem.
those charge times are eating into our vacation time
Studies have shown that after as little as 2 hours of driving a minimum of 15min break is required to prevent you from driving as poorly as a drunk driver. Are you special? Probably, studies have also shown that more than 90% of men (lower for women) *think* they are above average and better than the studies have pro
Re: Hope it lives up to it's promises (Score:3)
I lived with an l1 charger for the first month I had an EV. It was January in Maine. I could reliably recharge 3 to 4 miles of range per hour on the charger.
That profile may not work for everybody, but considering it's pretty trivial to ensure that the car is charging 10 to 12 hours a day for most commuters, I found level one very adequate. Especially since even in cold weather I have more than 180 miles of range so if they don't pick up all of their driving EVERY day there is buffer capacity in the batter
Re: (Score:2)
Unless your commute is particularly long.
The average commute time in the USA is about 27 minutes, so it depends on whether you're stuck in traffic or not. If you are, the EV will probably do well. If not, level 1 charging will be insufficient.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah to add to the averages, the average commute in the USA is 42miles. If you can plug in your car for 10 hours at home you'll be fine.
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Over the past winter in the US people were having problems keeping their cars charged.
Yeah, somehow Americans have unique problems that people in Finland don't. *shrugs*
They were consuming nearly as much power just to keep the battery compartment conditioned as they could pull from the wall socket.
Nope. Absolutely not. Not even a slow L1 charger puts you in that situation. Hint: if you're putting 2kW into your battery pack just for heating then you're going to burn your car down.
L2 chargers are fine but a lot of people only have L1s.
Then they should go find a L2 charger. I have none. Zero. No ability to charge my car at home what so ever, and yet charging my car remains a complete non-issue.
Re: (Score:3)
The 10x charging rate would be great for EVs. Might help solve one of the most common problems with these vehicles. Instead of a 30 minute fast charge, a 3 minute charge time, would be as fast as filling up gas or diesel.
That charging rate increase isn't of much use if the batteries are too big or too heavy. On the company website is a mention that they'd take at least double the volume of a lithium battery of the same energy capacity. That kind of volume could potentially be manageable, either adjust the vehicle layout to accommodate the added volume, make do with half the range, or a bit of both. It appears to me that the added volume should be of little concern given that many EVs put in a "frunk" where a gasoline eng
Re: (Score:2)
Not gonna work unless you're planning on charging with a lightning bolt a la Doc Brown.
Megawatt chargers already exist and are used for electric trucks.
Re: (Score:2)
Not gonna work unless you're planning on charging with a lightning bolt a la Doc Brown.
Megawatt chargers already exist and are used for electric trucks.
But how fast can Megawatt chargers charge a battery? Spending 3 minutes on a charging task that currently takes 30 minutes - as commenter 'bubblyceiling' was talking about - requires peak charging currents to be 10 times as high. That in turn requires much thicker cables, along with bigger connectors. You get some relaxation of requirements via the shortened duration of current flow, but you're still looking at hella-big cables, and probably connectors as well.
Bluetti showed a sodium-ion batter station in 2022 (Score:2)
https://solarbuildermag.com/pr... [solarbuildermag.com]
"BLUETTI, a manufacturer of solar + storage products, including LiFePO4 battery stations, is debuting a sodium-ion battery technology at CES 2022. Recently BLUETTI has announced the âoeworldâ(TM)s first sodium-ion battery stationâoe, NA300, and its compatible battery module B480. Sodium-ion batteries have become an alternative to their lithium-ion counterparts in many industries due to their high abundance and low costs. BLUETTI's first-generation sodium-ion b
Weight (Score:3)
About the only downside seems like weight: at 16.9Wh/kg their 1.2kW modules weigh 75kg. Will be interesting to watch.
Re: (Score:2)
About the only downside seems like weight: at 16.9Wh/kg their 1.2kW modules weigh 75kg. Will be interesting to watch.
Yeah, Na-ion is not for cars.
Context Frame needed (Score:2)
Overton is singing from the front porch of a technology yet to see commercial reality
Let’s revisit this song and see if its accolades can dance to its own hype in-practice
Right now it amounts to getting large energy pipelines at the expense of greater surface area footprint
Land ain’t cheap where battery needs are the highest
My salt shaker cakes up from humidity and these my do the same
What would be the cost for home battery with them? (Score:2)
I wonder what would be the cost for average home battery using these sodium batteries.
Will it be much cheaper than Tesla Powerwall?
Abundant (Score:3)
Yeah, next thing you'll be saying that like gold and uranium that you can just get out of sea water.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, next thing you'll be saying that like gold and uranium that you can just get out of sea water.
Probably only part of the production of one of these will be enough.
https://www.materialtestingexp... [materialte...expert.com]
Sea water (Score:2)
Comparison to Lithium (Score:5, Informative)
There is ZERO mention at ALL in any of their datasheets or material of shelf life only recharge cycles.
Self-discharge is about 30x worse than lithium.
Voltage drops significantly to about 30% of full voltage before reaching knee.
Massive cycle life numbers of 50k or 100k cycles at 90% DOD don't correspond with the cycle life chart which is a roller coaster ride at about 25k and uses a wildly different understanding of cycle life as the industry standard of 80% remaining capacity threshold seems to kick in at only 10k cycles.
Embarrassing typos in their datasheets:
-4.5ÂC/-23.9ÂF
rifle - elephant rifle - moon rifle (Score:2)