You can go and buy sodium batteries already. They’re not competitive with Lithium ion batteries in many mobile applications, but very much competitive for everything where price is more important than size or weight.
Lithium has decades of research and industrial scaling behind it, it’s hard to break into that. But especially sodium is on a pretty good path to replace it in large scale storage applications.
Sodium-ion batteries have been in development since 1970s and the lithium-ion batteries have been in development since 1960s. Not much of a difference.
It’s not just the amount of time. The portable electronics market and the electric car market both settled on lithium batteries, which created a huge demand for that particular technology. Over the past 2 decades there has been a massive incentive to develop smaller, denser lithium batteries.
There may be interest in developing other battery technologies, but nothing like the amount of money and effort being spent on lithium batteries.
And before that there were several decades of massive incentive to develop smaller more powerful ICE engines.
Lithium probably has some room to grow, but it also has a lot of problems like volatility and materials sourcing. EV manufacturers have been searching for ways to make better/cheaper/denser batteries, not better/cheaper/denser lithium batteries. They’ve been actively searching for alternatives.
EV manufacturers have been searching for ways to make better/cheaper/denser batteries, not better/cheaper/denser lithium batteries.
Sure, it’s the lithium battery manufacturers that are invested in making better lithium batteries. Everyone has been buying their products for decades and they want that to keep happening, so they pour resources into research and development. And they have a lot of resources, because everyone has been buying their products.
Once a market settles on a particular technology it becomes self-feeding and tends to accelerate. It’s difficult for a competing technology to break in primarily because of momentum - it’s hard to catch up.
A device manufacturer might be interested in using a different battery technology, but if they have a whole design and production process already built around lithium batteries then it’s not just the battery that they have to change. It’s their logistics chain, on-device electronics, design theory and possible regulatory concerns. Changing an established system is expensive, so that has to be justified somehow.
I’m not saying that it can’t happen - I’m sure that it will eventually. What I’m saying is that in order for a different battery technology to really change the market and push lithium out, it will have to be significantly better (not just marginally better).
QuantumScape is currently building the mass production line for a solid state battery and has been sending prototypes out to their auto manufacturer clients for testing.
It takes around a decade to scale up a process. You’d be shocked at how long it takes to discover something, get investment, file patents, acquire licenses, construct facilities, manufacture the product, and sell to customers. And that’s what it takes to get to just the starting line of being in business.
I’ve been reading about battery breakthroughs for decades. And I remember when the latest in battery tech was alkaline, then Ni-Cd, then Li-Ion, and now LiPo. All of those have ended up in consumer products.
I don’t know in general. I was recently shopping for a UX 250h and I know they only just switched to lithium for the 2025 model with the nx name change.
Toyota switched the camry hybrid from NiMH to lithium for the 2020 model year.
In my head I meant hybrid cars on the road, not necessarily in new production.
LFP is actually a relatively old battery technology, it’s only now that the patent is expired that it’s starting to breakthrough (outside of China, they somehow got a license if I understand it correctly).
Also, the battery pack for a cell phone 30 years ago was about the same volume and weight of an entire smartphone, with a capacity of about 500 mAh. They are also far cheaper if you account for inflation.
Batteries have improved incapacity by about a factor of 10 and the cost per watt-hour has reduced by about 99% in the last 30 year. All without a single advancement in the technology, apparently.
I wouldn’t call it a single advancement but hundreds. The materials might be largely the same but manufacturing is huge. When you roll up some metal to make a battery then increasing the number of layers is a huge challange when they’re already tiny.
You might want to re-read the article. That quote was talking about lithium ion batteries.
This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent prices skyrocketing, putting the needed batteries further out of reach.
Lithium deposits are also concentrated. The “Lithium Triangle” of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia holds more than 75% of the world’s lithium supply, with other deposits in Australia, North Carolina and Nevada. This benefits some nations over others in the decarbonization needed to fight climate change.
“Global action requires working together to access critically important materials,” Meng said.
I know everyone wants to point out that she may be referring to the brutal colonialist exploitation that lithium ion battery technology rests upon - but the way the quote is placed and framed tells me instead that we are not being told everything about this “techno-miracle.”
The decarbonization of our power grid will thankfully not be up to a single technology, but a multitude which are all seeing development simultaneously. Solar is reaching for better efficiency and less harmful creation, batteries of all shapes, sizes, and concepts are popping up from everywhere. It feels more like a race now than a slow decline into uninhabitability.
Would be interested in seeing/reading more about it, don’t have/want the subscription to read the white paper. Just seems like it could be somewhat like mirrors where it’s important for the glass to be liquid at one point so there’s no distortions and a strong bond but then once it’s constructed it just sits there.
No batteries are ever anode free so you are right to call bullshit on this title …
Yet, what they meant was that, at the time of fabrication, there is no sodium at the anode side and only while charging the battery, sodium is deposited so creating the anode.
But that’s not what it’s really claiming. I don’t think this technology would even replace lithium ion, it would be better suited for power grid or data center storage.
Yup. Studies on sodium batteries has been going on for years. If they finally achieve good enough state this is big since lithium is limited and expensive while sodium is everywhere. However sodium batteries will never be effective as lithium batteries because of the atom size. Lithium is much smaller than sodium.
True, but this is solid state so it may be higher density than current Lithium based batteries. But it might not beat a hypothetical lithium solid state battery. On the other hand, sodium batteries today beat out lithium in many other ways than capacity, and if those things are true for solid state then as long as there is a big enough jump in capacity due to the solid state transition then I think sodium is going to be the go-to for most uses in the future.
Don’t actually know about density differences but I’m quite positive that sodium batteries will be used in many sectors because it will be much cheaper. Probably not on cars, maybe not on phones as well. It will be enough for all other small appliances I think.
Indeed, the fact that they filed a patent is also an indicator that this is not purely an experiment, but a tangible way forward. Let’s hope this can scale up quickly.
There’s a pile of battery patents that are all game-changing but when a company decides to make a dedicated factory that’s when you know shit is going down.
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