I’m so desperate for home battery using sodium batteries. Safer and lower temperature it can operate at. Low energy density but I don’t care for home battery.
I want to have viable replacements for all the old school lithium ion battery packs so that I won't wonder when the day will come that one of the many we have will experience thermal runaway while nobody is around to deal with it. IMO a world where we no longer worry about spontaneous battery fires can't happen soon enough.
Battery voltages are dependent on chemistry, or, standard electrode potentials of metals used. It can't be configured like way past fractions of volts. And Li has about the highest potential among metals, which is kind of the point of using Li. Which means straight swapping NMC cells with any substitute will cause overcharging. Maybe there are cell configurations that could work in series packs, but it can't be simple swap-ins.
LFP batteries are quite a bit safer than the LMN or NMC batteries. The sodium batteries are more stable than LFP I think but I'm not sure how much longer and if that matters too much for home battery usage.
There will probably never be a battery that can power your home but can be used without any kind of worry.
The right thing is to place the battery in a way that you don't have to worry abut the fire, not to expect a high-density battery to be perfectly safe.
Battery safety has very little to do with energy density. High energy density can make the outcomes worse for an unsafe battery, but doesn’t tell you anything about the risk of the fire to begin with.
The reason current Li-ion batteries are unsafe is that they contain a flammable electrolyte. There are batteries with higher energy density that have solid or semi-solid electrolytes. They’re so safe you should probably worry a lot more about driving your car than charging your battery.
Worrying about LFP or So-ion is probably also a waste of time.
LFP batteries are pretty safe. Look up some videos of demonstrations. You can cut them in half with a metal knife and nothing happens besides the loss of capacity, and I suppose the knife heats up from the short-circuit current as well.
I don't know what kind of chemistry shenanigans are going on to make that happen, but it's impressive.
Of course, but that was not the point. Evidently there are ways to store energy that are quite safe, so you can't conclude that all forms of storage are inherently unsafe.
CATL has demonstrated much better safety for their sodium EV batteries, but home and energy storage packs are more likely to be made of standard 18650 cells like the one in the video.
There is an aqueous variant of sodium ion batteries that are safer than lithium, but most sodium ion batteries are NOT that variant and are more dangerous than LiFePO4.
Tldr: while sodium thermal runaways are less dangerous than lithium, they are more likely to happen, and in particular charging a sodium battery to 100% SOC makes thermal runaway significantly more likely than in LFP batteries.
It's true that things like puncture or short circuit are much much less dangerous than with lithium. That is a big part of why the increased thermal runaway risk gets overlooked.
The main thing about LFP is people (stupidly) shove them in a basement or enclosed space because they are "safe".
But the "safe" part is that they outgas hydrogen when in thermal runaway, which, combined with enclosed spaces like basements (where people often have gas heaters or ....), is .... a super super bad idea.
Ironically, in this situation, sodium-ion is worse than LFP in almost every conceivable way - the gas is more flammable, toxic, etc.
People who think sodium-ion is "safer" are being sold a bill of goods.
There are many alternative materials for the cathodes of sodium-ion batteries and for now the industry has not settled on one of them as being the best.
The safety properties depend on the cathodic material. The vented gas can be toxic only for one class of materials (Prussian blue analogs) and IIRC none of the currently existing commercial sodium-ion batteries uses this kind of cathodes.
For the other cathode types, the vented gas is hydrogen exactly like in almost any kind of battery, and it is equally flammable for all kinds of batteries.
In the article linked above, the conclusion was that for one kind of cathodic materials, which perhaps is the one used in most currently existing sodium-ion batteries, the risk of damaging the battery by overcharging and the risk of thermal runaway (assuming that the battery management system fails to prevent these), are slightly higher than for LFP but lower than for other lithium-ion batteries.
On the other hand, mechanical damage by puncturing the batteries is less dangerous than for any lithium-ion batteries.
These conclusions are not definitive about sodium-ion batteries, because other cathodic materials will behave differently, and there is still a lot of experience to gain with sodium-ion batteries, so it is certain that the cathodic materials used in 2030 will not be the same as today.
That can happen only for the sodium-ion batteries that use 1 of at least 5 possible classes of cathodic materials, i.e. Prussian blue analogs, and it seems that none of the currently existing commercial sodium-ion batteries uses this kind of cathode.
Discharging is not the issue with LiPo4 or other lithium tech. They can work up to negative temperatures without any issue. They can go down to -20°C (-4°F).
The problem is charging the battery at negative, as this damages the internal structure. So you need to heat up the battery (aka, you discharge by warming up heating elements), until you hit the right point. And then you can charge up, what will create heat and thus allow for non-damaging charging.
Some even have a fun trick, where if your going to a EV station with your car (end point route on your build in sat nav). They can start to pre-drain the battery if its really too cold, to warm up the batteries even more. So by the time your at the charger, the batteries are on temperature. I forgot what brand did it that way, seen that feature years ago.
What is different is that Sodium-Ion batteries can charge from negative (i think it was -10°C), as they do not suffer from the same damaging effect.
Nearly all EVs now do "battery preconditioning" when on the way to a charger. They would be pretty unusable without, I know one person had a model that didn't have it (this was a few years back) and he could barely pull more than 10kW in winter from public chargers, vs 100kW+ in summer at the exact same chargers.
There's a yttrium-containing variety of LFP that's supposed to work better at lower temperature (down to -45 C). But yttrium itself is quite expensive ($35/kg).
LFMP variant of LFP with added magnesium mostly solved this. Presently it is not as long-lasting as LFP so is not suitable for home batteries, but it covers typical lifespan of a car and solves the issues with cold climate.
The ratio of the stored charge per mass is 23/7 = about 3.3 times higher for lithium than for sodium (7 and 23 are the atomic masses of lithium and sodium), and the voltage can be higher by around 10% for lithium, leading to an even higher energy per mass ratio.
Nonetheless, both sodium and lithium are only a small fraction of the mass of lithium-ion batteries and sodium-ion batteries, so the difference in stored energy per mass is much smaller than for the pure metals.
In practice that means that today LFP batteries and sodium-ion batteries have about the same energy per mass ratio (and similar prices), with both having a lower specific energy than the more expensive NMC lithium-ion batteries.
For now, sodium-ion batteries are very new, so they are still a little more expensive than LFP, but eventually they will be significantly cheaper.
Already now, they have important advantages, so there are applications for which they are preferable even when still more expensive, e.g. where it must be possible to charge them at very low temperatures or where it must be possible to discharge them completely.
Honestly, yes, re energy density. I hadn’t seen home batteries in-person until a couple of years ago. I was surprised by how small they could actually be (still with a decent capacity). I’d totally trade some of that for chemistry with a less… catastrophic failure mode, and I don’t even have a big house, even for non-US standards.
Not speaking one way or the other on sodium ion’s properties specifically. I see from sibling comments that it’s not straightforward.
I’m hopeful that sodium batteries are going to come down in cost quickly, but if you can find a provider like Base Power or similar where it’s heavily subsidized, there’s a small upfront fee, and they can provide you the economic benefits until sodium batteries reach favorable economic success criteria, that’s a shim until you can replace that with sodium batteries you own outright at a favorable price. You’d have to model what you can get today with a sodium chemistry versus what you can get on offer from one of these battery service providers.
It’s fundamentally a modeling exercise in the forward economic returns curve in the context of your energy needs. Lithium battery lease today as a power purchase agreement (potentially), and then swapping out for a purchased and owned sodium battery pack when the cost hits the right price. It’s always harder to predict the future the further out you attempt to predict, and this technology state of the art is moving very rapidly.
The promising thing with sodium ion batteries is the ingredients are cheap (~$20/kwh) and abundant so although they are still quite expensive currently there's a lot of scope for prices to drop and volumes to go up over time as manufacturing increases. You don't really get the good prices until they overdo production and have a bit of an excess.
I switched the 12v lead-acid batteries on my EV to the 12v Lithium from OHMMU. Best upgrade I've done. I recently saw that they now offer 12V Sodium, and their warranty now went up to 3 years on the sodium, from 1 year. They have new data on its robustness.
Why? What do you notice? I was told the 12v fail in a few years and it will be swapped out at the 3rd year service and every few years there after for about $100. I will probably never see it as it three big bolts under the passenger seats that I have no interest spending my Saturday removing. What does this upgrade get you?
I did this with a Polaris Ranger EV that had 8x12v Lead Acid in a 2x4 configuration that produces 48V. Instead of going with more 12V batteries, I switched to two 48v BigBattery LiFePO4. In doing so, I dropped the weight by about 600-700 lbs. I use it in very hilly terrain so that weight makes a huge difference to me.
Additionally, the original batteries were not sealed and required maintenance. Each battery has two ports which need to be filled individually. On top of those ports are supports/braces and wires in an already inconvenient space.
I'm so happy to not have to deal with refilling those batteries anymore. That alone made the conversion worth it to me. Also, lead-acid doesn't necessarily last longer. The new (LiFePO4) batteries have lasted about as long already and (knock on wood) seem to be doing fine. Maybe it's because I don't have to top them off with distilled water?
Yeah, such a big difference. I had a similar choice with a skid steer and the lithium version adds weight into the rear of the machine in order to stay useful.
Tossed the lead-acid battery in my DR-Z400S motorbike, put a LiFePO4 in. The weight and mass placement difference was so significant that I had to re-set the suspension sag.
My DR-Z400S dual-sport motorcycle is like… 140kg?, kind of tall and narrow for a motorbike. The lead-acid battery is placed sort of high on a sort of fulcrumy point over the rear suspension. It's a very real difference. Didn't expect this dramatic a difference.
My guess: With all the telemetry and processing that continues to happen in modern cars, if you leave an EV parked for a longer time, the 12V battery will be discharged faster.
So having higher capacity 12V at the same size and only slightly more expensive might help?
> three big bolts under the passenger seats that I have no interest spending my Saturday removing.
I’m not familiar with BYD but yes you need some mechanical aptitude to change the 12v battery yourself.
Premature failure of 12V lead-acid batteries remains a persistent complaint among EV owners and is a recurring frustration. Just go to any EV forum. The traction battery will not top it off either when parked for extended periods.
Lithium batteries generally tolerate periods of inactivity better than lead-acid batteries. The OHMMU batteries are also “smart enabled”, see their website.
ALL the money that flew into "Fossil & Co" throughout the last, lets say, 50 or 60 years, including all implicit fundings, like state-building-streets or universities-masters-engineering-focus-ICE, all the money for lobbying, all the money for all the (counter)campaigns (from ALL sides), and all that money....
...WHAT IF we would have spent all of this money instead on Battery Research and all this Renewable Energy stuff?
We would probably be dramatically farther behind in the Materials Research conducted by the chemical companies underlying the fossil fuels industry, which has itself been necessary to the improvements in battery & semiconductor technologies we are now enjoying. Polyimides don’t invent themselves!
“What If?” history is fun, but there are always Tradeoffs.
You have it entirely backwards: Oil is refined to create feedstock chemicals for everything from beauty creams to jet engine ceramics to lithography intermediates to hydrogenated oils and decaffeinated coffee. It is these new and inventive uses which have continuously increased demand for the raw resources and driven research.
Since WWII where Germans mastered production of fuel from coal oil is not necessary for feedstock. China is ramping up using coal to produce methanol and other precursors for its chemistry industry. Then Teraform startup managed to produce methanol via CO2 capture from atmosphere using solar batteries.
So in alternative world where oil would not be available coal will serve its role. The only big difference would be less geopolitical tensions as coal is much more evenly distributed.
And in yet another alternative where even coal is not available something like modern civilization will still be possible but the path to it will be entirely different.
Already tens of thousands of years before learning to use fossil coal, humans learned how to make charcoal from wood.
This can be considered as the first method for extracting an almost pure chemical element from its compounds.
While in the beginning charcoal was used mainly for non-essential activities, like drawing, eventually charcoal was the reducing agent required for smelting metals from their minerals, first lead, then copper, then many others. Without charcoal, humans would have remained in the "stone age".
Without fossil coal, anything that is made from coal can be made from charcoal, except that this requires a lot of additional energy (for making first the charcoal; but with modern technology it is not necessary to pass through charcoal; carbon dioxide can be reduced to substances like methanol or formaldehyde or passing through syngas to hydrocarbons, which can feed other chemical processes).
I'd love to see a 'manhattan project' to get off of oil, in any way possible eg batteries or algae-produced diesel, whatever works, for geopolitical purposes.
In a very concrete way China has basically been running it. It's given us EVs, a massive PV cost reduction, cheap hydropower, cheap wind power, lots of battery cost reductions, and perhaps even enhanced competitiveness in the nuclear market. Also modern high speed rail which is readily fueled by non-ICE methods.
Honestly not really. Insolation energy is not that high, and photosynthesis tops out at around 10% under best conditions, and that's energy out the end of photosystem (solar cells are pushing 30% and perovskite might go to 40 or 50%), so doesn't take into account inefficiency in your sugar (much less hydrocarbon) conversio. The care and feeding of algae is annoying, they grow really slowly so contamination is a constant problem, and they self-shade, so the suface area to volume of growth conditions must be high. And a high surface area means awful evap problems... The list goes on
Ungodly amount of money was spent on battery research since 1945, at least $100-150B since 2000 alone. Every combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte was tried, tested and evaluated. We got silver-zinc, Ni-Cd, NiMH and finally Li-Ion batteries as the result.
So there wont be never any progress in that field if we pour hundreds of billions per decade into research of this field instead of sending it to the middle east and buying oil?
I cant believe this esp. since CATL is reporting on a regular base new innovations. Im a layman here but if I think about the 3-digit amount of USD that Europe alone is spending on imports of oil, it seems unlikely that this money couldnt be spent on research batteries?
Same with solar: 20 years ago, 1 Wp was about 3-5 EUR, today its 7ct. This wouldnt have been possible if research wouldnt have been massivly accelerted.
We would have inefficient and polluting engines, leaded gasoline, steam engines burning coal, no high performance plastics, and probably more even wars around oil and gas and slower economy leading to less resource to fund battery research...
I mean, batteries and solar panels are cool, but thinking about the future doesn't mean we should forget the present. The advance we could have gotten by diverting funding away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and batteries is to balance with the damage caused by using outdated fossil fuel technology before the transition.
Cities are breathable now thanks to all the progresses modern engines have made. They will be even more breathable with zero emission cars, but I prefer to wait a bit more in these conditions than waiting a bit less in a smog filled city.
Progress is in doing more work with less impact. Burning fossils more efficiently and burning less of them because we have an alternative are both progress.
We might have shaven off ~10 years from the current timeline.
Batteries are only a part of the equation. Practical EVs were enabled not just by Li-ion batteries but by IGBTs. And semiconductor development moved about as fast as possible.
And then there's a gulf between lead-acid batteries and Li-ions. I think only NiMH batteries would have been a reasonable midpoint, and even they would have been impractical for full EVs.
That was fast. CATL is only now ramping up Naxtra production and it's already approaching price parity with LFP. This is early validation of the cost curve predictions for this chemistry.
Most of this is destined for stationary storage that would likely have used lithium-based chemistry instead, or not been built-out at all. Every GWh of capacity sodium offsets is a GWh that isn't supplied by lithium, so demand for higher-value battery chemistry should be lower, and take prices with it. Good news all around.
I've probably drunk too much kool-aid somewhere else, have always assumed sodium-ion batteries are already cheap and it's just trying to beat LFP in terms of energy density...
CATL sodium and ProLogium solid state are the only legit "safe" batteries made.
LFP and NMC are, sadly: ubiquitous, dangerous, and normalized. LFP entering thermal runaway produce hydrogen gas that requires continuous igniters to burn off and burns/smolders for days to weeks.
You make it sound like battery fires are very common. This just isn't the case. Especially LFP battery fires are pretty rare. They are considered very safe at this point. And the flip side of things burning slowly is that the energy gets released over a long time. People walk away from most EV fires. Annoying for the fire men to deal with but mostly just because it involves a lot of waiting. A petrol car fire is over by the time they get there mostly. Once the petrol tank catches fire, it' not going to take long.
Just remember, the most frequent cause (by far) for fire trucks to get called out is vehicle fires. Whatever you may think of battery safety, if you are fine with being in or around a fuel bomb on wheels and still worry about battery fires, you might be a bit confused about risk assessment. EV fires make the news. Petrol cars on fire generally don't because it's such a common event.
Most modern LFP batteries are actually pretty hard to set fire to. It's something battery makers exploit by subjecting their batteries to all sorts of abuse (shooting them, hammering nails through them, throwing them off buildings, etc.) to demonstrate how safe they are. Whereas a petrol car fires can (and frequently do) result in people dying. Combustible fuel just isn't designed to not combust.
Cars burning is a popular plot point in movies. Probably not that realistic but they burn so pretty. A slowly smoldering Tesla is a lot less exciting. In general, EVs are underused in action movies even though they'd be a lot better performing in a car chase. Petrol cars are much more dramatic. They make noise. They explode. They struggle to start when they need to or when it is cold. Or they run out of fuel and stutter to a halt. Or you set them on fire to dispose of a body. Easy success for a director. Realism in movies is of course not a thing. But exploding Teslas is a bit of a hard sell.
Likely includes the whole system (pack, BMS, inverter, cabinet, installation) rather than only the cells. In any case, sodium will take a few years until the scale is large enough to offer any cost advantage over fairly optimized and cheap LFP these days.
Yeah I call BS on this. It’s of course will get cheaper, but only so much - ingredients that are cheaper is like 30% of the battery. All while LFP is mature tech that’s also getting cheaper.
It doesn’t even add up on pack cost. Tesla’s NCM packs are like $14k brand new which adds up to $186 per kwh.
I think submitted article isn’t from a legitimate news source. The overall headline about what CATL said about cost parity is valid, but someone ran an LLM over the original source and embellished it into a long article with a bunch of made up numbers.
I’m so desperate for home battery using sodium batteries. Safer and lower temperature it can operate at. Low energy density but I don’t care for home battery.
I want to have viable replacements for all the old school lithium ion battery packs so that I won't wonder when the day will come that one of the many we have will experience thermal runaway while nobody is around to deal with it. IMO a world where we no longer worry about spontaneous battery fires can't happen soon enough.
Battery voltages are dependent on chemistry, or, standard electrode potentials of metals used. It can't be configured like way past fractions of volts. And Li has about the highest potential among metals, which is kind of the point of using Li. Which means straight swapping NMC cells with any substitute will cause overcharging. Maybe there are cell configurations that could work in series packs, but it can't be simple swap-ins.
You can have an interposer charge controller. It isn't complicated. Many/most cells in consumer products already have one.
LFP batteries are quite a bit safer than the LMN or NMC batteries. The sodium batteries are more stable than LFP I think but I'm not sure how much longer and if that matters too much for home battery usage.
There will probably never be a battery that can power your home but can be used without any kind of worry.
The right thing is to place the battery in a way that you don't have to worry abut the fire, not to expect a high-density battery to be perfectly safe.
Battery safety has very little to do with energy density. High energy density can make the outcomes worse for an unsafe battery, but doesn’t tell you anything about the risk of the fire to begin with.
The reason current Li-ion batteries are unsafe is that they contain a flammable electrolyte. There are batteries with higher energy density that have solid or semi-solid electrolytes. They’re so safe you should probably worry a lot more about driving your car than charging your battery.
Worrying about LFP or So-ion is probably also a waste of time.
LFP batteries are pretty safe. Look up some videos of demonstrations. You can cut them in half with a metal knife and nothing happens besides the loss of capacity, and I suppose the knife heats up from the short-circuit current as well.
I don't know what kind of chemistry shenanigans are going on to make that happen, but it's impressive.
A tank of diesel and a generator are a kind of battery that you have to worry about very little.
They are kind of difficult to recharge using solar panels. They also smell bad and are noisy.
Of course, but that was not the point. Evidently there are ways to store energy that are quite safe, so you can't conclude that all forms of storage are inherently unsafe.
inherently self-limiting processes are nothing rare or special
Standard sodium batteries are much more explosive than LiFE
Can they experience a thermal runaway? Can it be triggered by minor deformations or dents?
https://youtu.be/W1ya_ls1zkA?t=209
CATL has demonstrated much better safety for their sodium EV batteries, but home and energy storage packs are more likely to be made of standard 18650 cells like the one in the video.
There is an aqueous variant of sodium ion batteries that are safer than lithium, but most sodium ion batteries are NOT that variant and are more dangerous than LiFePO4.
Wait what? All data I see about sodium ion is safer than LFP. I’m by no means an expert and would love to see why it’s the other way around
It's definitely not that cut and dry. Here's a paper with a good breakdown of safety comparisons: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X2...
Tldr: while sodium thermal runaways are less dangerous than lithium, they are more likely to happen, and in particular charging a sodium battery to 100% SOC makes thermal runaway significantly more likely than in LFP batteries.
It's true that things like puncture or short circuit are much much less dangerous than with lithium. That is a big part of why the increased thermal runaway risk gets overlooked.
Agreed.
The main thing about LFP is people (stupidly) shove them in a basement or enclosed space because they are "safe".
But the "safe" part is that they outgas hydrogen when in thermal runaway, which, combined with enclosed spaces like basements (where people often have gas heaters or ....), is .... a super super bad idea.
Ironically, in this situation, sodium-ion is worse than LFP in almost every conceivable way - the gas is more flammable, toxic, etc.
People who think sodium-ion is "safer" are being sold a bill of goods.
> the gas is more flammable, toxic, etc
There are many alternative materials for the cathodes of sodium-ion batteries and for now the industry has not settled on one of them as being the best.
The safety properties depend on the cathodic material. The vented gas can be toxic only for one class of materials (Prussian blue analogs) and IIRC none of the currently existing commercial sodium-ion batteries uses this kind of cathodes.
For the other cathode types, the vented gas is hydrogen exactly like in almost any kind of battery, and it is equally flammable for all kinds of batteries.
In the article linked above, the conclusion was that for one kind of cathodic materials, which perhaps is the one used in most currently existing sodium-ion batteries, the risk of damaging the battery by overcharging and the risk of thermal runaway (assuming that the battery management system fails to prevent these), are slightly higher than for LFP but lower than for other lithium-ion batteries.
On the other hand, mechanical damage by puncturing the batteries is less dangerous than for any lithium-ion batteries.
These conclusions are not definitive about sodium-ion batteries, because other cathodic materials will behave differently, and there is still a lot of experience to gain with sodium-ion batteries, so it is certain that the cathodic materials used in 2030 will not be the same as today.
There is also the possibility of releasing hydrogen cyanide during a runaway event for some variants too
That can happen only for the sodium-ion batteries that use 1 of at least 5 possible classes of cathodic materials, i.e. Prussian blue analogs, and it seems that none of the currently existing commercial sodium-ion batteries uses this kind of cathode.
Isn't a better/safer solution than Li or Na is for the industry to switch to solid state?
Sodium batteries will only continue to get cheaper. Cost parity now, but probably closer to 1/2 the price in a few years as production ramps up.
I thought the main advantage in comparison with LFP is the lower price(long term) and better sub-zero performance?
Nope. Almost all batteries I see for LFP have heaters for them at too low temps (around freezing 0C/32F). Where as sodium ion can discharge at -25C
Discharging is not the issue with LiPo4 or other lithium tech. They can work up to negative temperatures without any issue. They can go down to -20°C (-4°F).
The problem is charging the battery at negative, as this damages the internal structure. So you need to heat up the battery (aka, you discharge by warming up heating elements), until you hit the right point. And then you can charge up, what will create heat and thus allow for non-damaging charging.
Some even have a fun trick, where if your going to a EV station with your car (end point route on your build in sat nav). They can start to pre-drain the battery if its really too cold, to warm up the batteries even more. So by the time your at the charger, the batteries are on temperature. I forgot what brand did it that way, seen that feature years ago.
What is different is that Sodium-Ion batteries can charge from negative (i think it was -10°C), as they do not suffer from the same damaging effect.
Nearly all EVs now do "battery preconditioning" when on the way to a charger. They would be pretty unusable without, I know one person had a model that didn't have it (this was a few years back) and he could barely pull more than 10kW in winter from public chargers, vs 100kW+ in summer at the exact same chargers.
Tesla do this if they know they're navigating to a charger.
There's a yttrium-containing variety of LFP that's supposed to work better at lower temperature (down to -45 C). But yttrium itself is quite expensive ($35/kg).
LFMP variant of LFP with added magnesium mostly solved this. Presently it is not as long-lasting as LFP so is not suitable for home batteries, but it covers typical lifespan of a car and solves the issues with cold climate.
lithium batteries can usually discharge below 0C, it's the charging at sub-zero temperatures that kills them.
Lithium can discharge just fine at -25C without heaters.
Charging it at or around 0C will destroy it extremely rapidly due to electroplating of lithium.
Aren't sodium higher density (at least in terms of energy per weight) than LiFe?
Maybe you're right in terms of energy per volume. Sodium are very light weight in my experience.
No.
The ratio of the stored charge per mass is 23/7 = about 3.3 times higher for lithium than for sodium (7 and 23 are the atomic masses of lithium and sodium), and the voltage can be higher by around 10% for lithium, leading to an even higher energy per mass ratio.
Nonetheless, both sodium and lithium are only a small fraction of the mass of lithium-ion batteries and sodium-ion batteries, so the difference in stored energy per mass is much smaller than for the pure metals.
In practice that means that today LFP batteries and sodium-ion batteries have about the same energy per mass ratio (and similar prices), with both having a lower specific energy than the more expensive NMC lithium-ion batteries.
For now, sodium-ion batteries are very new, so they are still a little more expensive than LFP, but eventually they will be significantly cheaper.
Already now, they have important advantages, so there are applications for which they are preferable even when still more expensive, e.g. where it must be possible to charge them at very low temperatures or where it must be possible to discharge them completely.
No, sodium batteries are less energy dense.
Honestly, yes, re energy density. I hadn’t seen home batteries in-person until a couple of years ago. I was surprised by how small they could actually be (still with a decent capacity). I’d totally trade some of that for chemistry with a less… catastrophic failure mode, and I don’t even have a big house, even for non-US standards.
Not speaking one way or the other on sodium ion’s properties specifically. I see from sibling comments that it’s not straightforward.
yeah, I am waiting to replace my home battery for the safer sodium option whenever it becomes possible. I keep hoping.
Are you in the US?
Yup
I’m hopeful that sodium batteries are going to come down in cost quickly, but if you can find a provider like Base Power or similar where it’s heavily subsidized, there’s a small upfront fee, and they can provide you the economic benefits until sodium batteries reach favorable economic success criteria, that’s a shim until you can replace that with sodium batteries you own outright at a favorable price. You’d have to model what you can get today with a sodium chemistry versus what you can get on offer from one of these battery service providers.
It’s fundamentally a modeling exercise in the forward economic returns curve in the context of your energy needs. Lithium battery lease today as a power purchase agreement (potentially), and then swapping out for a purchased and owned sodium battery pack when the cost hits the right price. It’s always harder to predict the future the further out you attempt to predict, and this technology state of the art is moving very rapidly.
The promising thing with sodium ion batteries is the ingredients are cheap (~$20/kwh) and abundant so although they are still quite expensive currently there's a lot of scope for prices to drop and volumes to go up over time as manufacturing increases. You don't really get the good prices until they overdo production and have a bit of an excess.
I switched the 12v lead-acid batteries on my EV to the 12v Lithium from OHMMU. Best upgrade I've done. I recently saw that they now offer 12V Sodium, and their warranty now went up to 3 years on the sodium, from 1 year. They have new data on its robustness.
Why? What do you notice? I was told the 12v fail in a few years and it will be swapped out at the 3rd year service and every few years there after for about $100. I will probably never see it as it three big bolts under the passenger seats that I have no interest spending my Saturday removing. What does this upgrade get you?
Byd dolphin, Thailand prices for above
I did this with a Polaris Ranger EV that had 8x12v Lead Acid in a 2x4 configuration that produces 48V. Instead of going with more 12V batteries, I switched to two 48v BigBattery LiFePO4. In doing so, I dropped the weight by about 600-700 lbs. I use it in very hilly terrain so that weight makes a huge difference to me.
Additionally, the original batteries were not sealed and required maintenance. Each battery has two ports which need to be filled individually. On top of those ports are supports/braces and wires in an already inconvenient space.
I'm so happy to not have to deal with refilling those batteries anymore. That alone made the conversion worth it to me. Also, lead-acid doesn't necessarily last longer. The new (LiFePO4) batteries have lasted about as long already and (knock on wood) seem to be doing fine. Maybe it's because I don't have to top them off with distilled water?
I couldn’t believe how light those 12V lithiums were. Same form factor as the lead and I could pick it up with one hand easily.
Yeah, such a big difference. I had a similar choice with a skid steer and the lithium version adds weight into the rear of the machine in order to stay useful.
Yep!
Tossed the lead-acid battery in my DR-Z400S motorbike, put a LiFePO4 in. The weight and mass placement difference was so significant that I had to re-set the suspension sag.
My DR-Z400S dual-sport motorcycle is like… 140kg?, kind of tall and narrow for a motorbike. The lead-acid battery is placed sort of high on a sort of fulcrumy point over the rear suspension. It's a very real difference. Didn't expect this dramatic a difference.
My guess: With all the telemetry and processing that continues to happen in modern cars, if you leave an EV parked for a longer time, the 12V battery will be discharged faster.
So having higher capacity 12V at the same size and only slightly more expensive might help?
My reading is avg at 13.8V. The battery also has Bluetooth which allows me to monitor cell health and discharge.
> three big bolts under the passenger seats that I have no interest spending my Saturday removing.
I’m not familiar with BYD but yes you need some mechanical aptitude to change the 12v battery yourself.
Premature failure of 12V lead-acid batteries remains a persistent complaint among EV owners and is a recurring frustration. Just go to any EV forum. The traction battery will not top it off either when parked for extended periods.
Lithium batteries generally tolerate periods of inactivity better than lead-acid batteries. The OHMMU batteries are also “smart enabled”, see their website.
Just imagine:
ALL the money that flew into "Fossil & Co" throughout the last, lets say, 50 or 60 years, including all implicit fundings, like state-building-streets or universities-masters-engineering-focus-ICE, all the money for lobbying, all the money for all the (counter)campaigns (from ALL sides), and all that money....
...WHAT IF we would have spent all of this money instead on Battery Research and all this Renewable Energy stuff?
Where would we be today on techdev curve? ;-) ;-)
We would probably be dramatically farther behind in the Materials Research conducted by the chemical companies underlying the fossil fuels industry, which has itself been necessary to the improvements in battery & semiconductor technologies we are now enjoying. Polyimides don’t invent themselves!
“What If?” history is fun, but there are always Tradeoffs.
So, Material Science research progress wouldnt have been possible without burning all the stuff for decades in all types of combustion engines? :-D
Where do you think the fancy metallurgy for a modern combustion engine came from?
Is the oil industry the secret benefactor of more breakthroughs? That’s some steelmanning.
You have it entirely backwards: Oil is refined to create feedstock chemicals for everything from beauty creams to jet engine ceramics to lithography intermediates to hydrogenated oils and decaffeinated coffee. It is these new and inventive uses which have continuously increased demand for the raw resources and driven research.
Since WWII where Germans mastered production of fuel from coal oil is not necessary for feedstock. China is ramping up using coal to produce methanol and other precursors for its chemistry industry. Then Teraform startup managed to produce methanol via CO2 capture from atmosphere using solar batteries.
So in alternative world where oil would not be available coal will serve its role. The only big difference would be less geopolitical tensions as coal is much more evenly distributed.
And in yet another alternative where even coal is not available something like modern civilization will still be possible but the path to it will be entirely different.
Already tens of thousands of years before learning to use fossil coal, humans learned how to make charcoal from wood.
This can be considered as the first method for extracting an almost pure chemical element from its compounds.
While in the beginning charcoal was used mainly for non-essential activities, like drawing, eventually charcoal was the reducing agent required for smelting metals from their minerals, first lead, then copper, then many others. Without charcoal, humans would have remained in the "stone age".
Without fossil coal, anything that is made from coal can be made from charcoal, except that this requires a lot of additional energy (for making first the charcoal; but with modern technology it is not necessary to pass through charcoal; carbon dioxide can be reduced to substances like methanol or formaldehyde or passing through syngas to hydrocarbons, which can feed other chemical processes).
Hard to imagine being farther behind than a static page with no services.
I'd love to see a 'manhattan project' to get off of oil, in any way possible eg batteries or algae-produced diesel, whatever works, for geopolitical purposes.
This was the original mission of the Department of Energy…
In a very concrete way China has basically been running it. It's given us EVs, a massive PV cost reduction, cheap hydropower, cheap wind power, lots of battery cost reductions, and perhaps even enhanced competitiveness in the nuclear market. Also modern high speed rail which is readily fueled by non-ICE methods.
Algae diesel would be amazing.
Honestly not really. Insolation energy is not that high, and photosynthesis tops out at around 10% under best conditions, and that's energy out the end of photosystem (solar cells are pushing 30% and perovskite might go to 40 or 50%), so doesn't take into account inefficiency in your sugar (much less hydrocarbon) conversio. The care and feeding of algae is annoying, they grow really slowly so contamination is a constant problem, and they self-shade, so the suface area to volume of growth conditions must be high. And a high surface area means awful evap problems... The list goes on
None of those things change the fact that you're growing your own diesel, which is really cool
Well we could just use the original manhattan project. Nuclear works, it is just expensive.
Exactly the same as today.
Ungodly amount of money was spent on battery research since 1945, at least $100-150B since 2000 alone. Every combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte was tried, tested and evaluated. We got silver-zinc, Ni-Cd, NiMH and finally Li-Ion batteries as the result.
Do you have some links or stats here?
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22858
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-rise-of-lithium-ion-bat...
Early Li-ion battery tech was developed by none other than Exxon itself (in second link)
So there wont be never any progress in that field if we pour hundreds of billions per decade into research of this field instead of sending it to the middle east and buying oil?
I cant believe this esp. since CATL is reporting on a regular base new innovations. Im a layman here but if I think about the 3-digit amount of USD that Europe alone is spending on imports of oil, it seems unlikely that this money couldnt be spent on research batteries?
Same with solar: 20 years ago, 1 Wp was about 3-5 EUR, today its 7ct. This wouldnt have been possible if research wouldnt have been massivly accelerted.
We would have inefficient and polluting engines, leaded gasoline, steam engines burning coal, no high performance plastics, and probably more even wars around oil and gas and slower economy leading to less resource to fund battery research...
I mean, batteries and solar panels are cool, but thinking about the future doesn't mean we should forget the present. The advance we could have gotten by diverting funding away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and batteries is to balance with the damage caused by using outdated fossil fuel technology before the transition.
Cities are breathable now thanks to all the progresses modern engines have made. They will be even more breathable with zero emission cars, but I prefer to wait a bit more in these conditions than waiting a bit less in a smog filled city.
So progress is in burning fossils because otherwise we cant >get it<?
Progress is in doing more work with less impact. Burning fossils more efficiently and burning less of them because we have an alternative are both progress.
We might have shaven off ~10 years from the current timeline.
Batteries are only a part of the equation. Practical EVs were enabled not just by Li-ion batteries but by IGBTs. And semiconductor development moved about as fast as possible.
And then there's a gulf between lead-acid batteries and Li-ions. I think only NiMH batteries would have been a reasonable midpoint, and even they would have been impractical for full EVs.
That was fast. CATL is only now ramping up Naxtra production and it's already approaching price parity with LFP. This is early validation of the cost curve predictions for this chemistry.
Most of this is destined for stationary storage that would likely have used lithium-based chemistry instead, or not been built-out at all. Every GWh of capacity sodium offsets is a GWh that isn't supplied by lithium, so demand for higher-value battery chemistry should be lower, and take prices with it. Good news all around.
I've probably drunk too much kool-aid somewhere else, have always assumed sodium-ion batteries are already cheap and it's just trying to beat LFP in terms of energy density...
mere cost parity seems kind of disappointing. I thought the main selling point (other than low temp) was supposed to be that it was cheaper.
Its Moorelike curve has just started.
CATL sodium and ProLogium solid state are the only legit "safe" batteries made.
LFP and NMC are, sadly: ubiquitous, dangerous, and normalized. LFP entering thermal runaway produce hydrogen gas that requires continuous igniters to burn off and burns/smolders for days to weeks.
You make it sound like battery fires are very common. This just isn't the case. Especially LFP battery fires are pretty rare. They are considered very safe at this point. And the flip side of things burning slowly is that the energy gets released over a long time. People walk away from most EV fires. Annoying for the fire men to deal with but mostly just because it involves a lot of waiting. A petrol car fire is over by the time they get there mostly. Once the petrol tank catches fire, it' not going to take long.
Just remember, the most frequent cause (by far) for fire trucks to get called out is vehicle fires. Whatever you may think of battery safety, if you are fine with being in or around a fuel bomb on wheels and still worry about battery fires, you might be a bit confused about risk assessment. EV fires make the news. Petrol cars on fire generally don't because it's such a common event.
Most modern LFP batteries are actually pretty hard to set fire to. It's something battery makers exploit by subjecting their batteries to all sorts of abuse (shooting them, hammering nails through them, throwing them off buildings, etc.) to demonstrate how safe they are. Whereas a petrol car fires can (and frequently do) result in people dying. Combustible fuel just isn't designed to not combust.
Cars burning is a popular plot point in movies. Probably not that realistic but they burn so pretty. A slowly smoldering Tesla is a lot less exciting. In general, EVs are underused in action movies even though they'd be a lot better performing in a car chase. Petrol cars are much more dramatic. They make noise. They explode. They struggle to start when they need to or when it is cold. Or they run out of fuel and stutter to a halt. Or you set them on fire to dispose of a body. Easy success for a director. Realism in movies is of course not a thing. But exploding Teslas is a bit of a hard sell.
Every day, there's another news story about it... Just let me know when we can actually buy it. It's getting boring already.
https://www.bluettipower.com/products/sodium-ion-battery-pio...
https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-sodium-ion-battery.html
Weren't they supposed to be cheaper?
"error establishing a database connection"
Sodium powered data center
You sound a bit salty.
No need to be so caustic about opinions. =3
> approximately $200/kWh for LFP batteries
Huh?
Automotive grade are like 50 and storage ones are like 30.
Can someone confirm these prices because sounds a whole lot of BS or article not saying something (i.e. dancing around TCO).
Likely includes the whole system (pack, BMS, inverter, cabinet, installation) rather than only the cells. In any case, sodium will take a few years until the scale is large enough to offer any cost advantage over fairly optimized and cheap LFP these days.
Yeah I call BS on this. It’s of course will get cheaper, but only so much - ingredients that are cheaper is like 30% of the battery. All while LFP is mature tech that’s also getting cheaper.
It doesn’t even add up on pack cost. Tesla’s NCM packs are like $14k brand new which adds up to $186 per kwh.
Alternative site which is still up
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/11/06/sodium-ion-batteries-...
I think submitted article isn’t from a legitimate news source. The overall headline about what CATL said about cost parity is valid, but someone ran an LLM over the original source and embellished it into a long article with a bunch of made up numbers.
Ok, we've changed to that from https://ievchina.com/energy-storage/catl-sodium-battery-cost... above. Thanks!
https://web.archive.org/web/20261106230147/https://ievchina....
Main site seems to be down. This archive link still works