I had an early EV with only 80 miles of range, and found it extremely useful for most in town travel and commuting. Now that EVs are pushing ~400 miles range at about 300Wh/kg, assuming sodium is about half that (from what I've seen), you'd still get a respectable 100-200 miles in a car. For me, and I imagine a lot of people, that would be totally acceptable if it means lower cost, and batteries that effectively last forever without replacement.
We’re undergoing a Cambrian explosion of battery chemistries at the moment. Other startups, such as From Energy is scaling up production of Iron Air batteries in West Virginia, which will be an order of magnitude cheaper than lithium ion and will provide grid scale power [1]. North Harbour Clean Energy Promised to build a manufacturing facility in Australia to build Vanadium Flow batteries, which have very high charge cycle in their lifetime and can store energy for longer durations [2].
The advantage with Sodium Ion is that, although energy densities are lower than Lithium Ion, it could still be used to power mobile devices and electric vehicles.
[1] https://www.wesa.fm/environment-energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-02/vanadium-redo...
This is truly one of those "it begins" moments.
The article touches on it - but the news goes well beyond the battery. Li ion batteries come with significant geopolitical baggage beyond simple cost.
The situation is well summarised by the graph on this page. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/chart-countries-produ...
"Mostly from Australia and Chile" seems like the opposite of baggage, that sounds like about the best you could hope for in a global commodity, so many of which come from unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries.
Yes, I know that China does most of the refining/assembly, but that has little to do with the chemistry. "Building new Na-ion capacity outside China" is probably even harder than "building new li-ion capacity outside China."
Let's unpack it then.
You've stated:
"Mostly from Australia and Chile" seems like the opposite of baggage, that sounds like about the best you could hope for in a global commodity, so many of which come from unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries.
So let's break it down with some facts (all easily searchable.)
(1) The graph states that Australia is the largest producer of Lithium, and states that of their exports, 90% goes to China.
(2) Australia exports the majority of its lithium. (https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/insights-australian-exports-...)
(3) Lithium ion batteries are currently reliant on Cobalt for their cathode.
(4) The DRC (Congo) is the largest producer of Cobalt, then Indonesia, then Russia.
"seems like the opposite of baggage ... unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries"
From (1) and (2) we can see that the world is dependent on China for the only viable battery option for a range of modern applications. Thus the claim that this isn't baggage is not supported. Secondly China is also considered an adversary of the USA, by the USA. Thirdly the claim that this does not involve unstable/conflict regions is also not supported due to (3) and (4).
Part two: you've also stated the below:
"Building new Na-ion capacity outside China" is probably even harder than "building new li-ion capacity outside China."
While this is a baseless comment, let's look at it anyway:
(5) The article is specifically about the commencement of mass production of Na batteries in the USA.
That already refutes the core premise of your statement, but let's follow it further.
(6) The article notes that unlike Li batteries, the materials are trivially sourced domestically.
That's an important difference from Li batteries, and significantly boosts the viability of competitive production in the USA (and other countries outside of China).
Good analysis, until you got here:
While this is a baseless comment, let's look at it anyway:
It's not baseless. This is a golden boy startup, blessed with save the Earth kudos and highly subsidized. The DOE spun this outfit up in 2020 with $19M. Michigan and Whitmer have fast tracked the one, modest, token plant, delivered the tax breaks and signed the contracts for a sodium battery power facility in the state. VC money chased after all this as you would expect.
Those are all temporary or one-time goodies. This is heavy industry and at some point all the love goes away: the subsidies go away, the exemptions go away. Then the foreign competitors steal your tech and undercut you.
At that point you have a choice: fail, or build out where labor is cheap, workers are disposable and regulators are just low-cost party agents, and use your position as US company to readily import your foreign made products.
Notice how none this has anything to do with what raw materials are involved or battery chemistry. It's not about those things. It never has been. The fact that the US has large reserves of sodium is not a factor: filling a ship with sodium and sending it to some foreign plant being only the most obvious thing to do.
At that point you have a choice: fail, or build out where labor is cheap, workers are disposable and regulators are just low-cost party agents, and use your position as US company to readily import your foreign made products.
Why are any of us okay with humans being "disposable" anywhere on Earth?
I think is just the way of the world. Not saying it's right but it's just reality. I come from a place where people kill and do horrible things for 10 dollars a day to build the same battery with maybe a 10 percent drop in quality. I doubt anyone in the US would be willing to work for that comparative advantage or something at play. How would you ensure that doesn't happen? Making everyone equal via something like Marshall Plan type thing is considered Marxist rhetoric I doubt it would be viable right? Plus there's the issue of competing nations
Uplift labor and human rights movements everywhere so they can retain self-determination but still extinguish the hellscape of exploitation that we have currently.
We don't need anything top-down.
I understand there would be challenges with doing that, but I like to think a better world is possible and it starts with respecting others' humanity.
The no further regulation option is people looking for the “made in …” on goods and not buying from certain countries. Then invoke Milton freedman.
I'm not interest in a "no further regulation" option. I just don't think anyone in our country should dictate what other countries do. That's what I meant by top-down.
If other countries want regulations and labor rights, hell yeah.
1. Trends in mass production are moving -away- from China.
2. China was not deemed an adversary when it become the prima supplier of Li batteries.
3. The USA is perfectly capable at locking out competition the same way China did, why? Because national security.
The assumption that all new battery technology will end up being produced in China is naive, and baseless.
Also let's pay attention to the article, since it already outlines a number of reasons that I've merely highlighted.
Lithium Ion rely on cobalt nickel, but LFP do not, and also do not have the thermal runaway problems that lithium ion batteries do. This is close to being a solved problem.
LFP batteries are also lithium ion batteries, just a different kind.
Lithium isn’t problematic on its own. They can take enough of it from the Salton Sea without any mining.
I want to note the lithium there is not from the Salton Sea itself, but from geothermal brines in the rock under the sea. The area is a place of active volcanism so the brines are quite hot and have dissolved many interesting minerals.
Why did you spend 200 words arguing for the premise of my second point? Usually one spends time arguing against your opponent but ok, sure, I'm glad we both prefer refining and manufacturing in friendly countries.
[the commencement of mass production of Na batteries in the USA] refutes the core premise of your statement
How so? This plant is one tiny step on a very, very long road. I'm glad to see it happen, but extrapolating the outcome of a race from the first few steps would be incredibly foolish. China can build Na-ion too, so the question becomes whether the difference in chemistry creates an advantage for one party or another.
unlike Li batteries, the materials are trivially sourced domestically
So China can cut out the only part of the supply chain that leans towards the US sphere of influence, while the US gets a discount on shipping? This isn't the own you think it is.
Could have done without the first paragraph. :) I wouldn't be excited to have either Australia (supply locked up by China) or Chile (read anything re: politics last 5 years) as my sources. the general thrust that youre being flippantly dismissive to the point of shading instead of illuminating is correct. (requires discussion about new battery chemistry supply chains to only discuss lithium-ion (??) and specifically only lithium, and Chile and Australia)
Could have done without the first paragraph. :)
Sure, let's turn down the temperature.
youre being flippantly dismissive to the point of shading instead of illuminating
Let's turn down the temperature.
I wouldn't be excited to have either Australia ... or Chile ... as my sources
China is even less excited than you are to have Australia and Chile as their sources. Eliminating a small pain from the USA and a big pain from China gives a net benefit to China, so it's weird to see it advertised as a net benefit for the USA.
That said, raw material availability isn't the limiting factor here. We probably shouldn't even be discussing it.
requires discussion about new battery chemistry supply chains to only discuss lithium-ion (??)
That's the alternative Na-ion has to beat. We could build lithium refining and manufacturing capacity in the US sphere of influence. Evaluations of any new technology should compare it to the best available alternatives, yes?
Australia (supply locked up by China)
What's that based on? Australia exporting most of it to China doesn't prove anything except that China is a major trading partner for Australia. If the problem is securing lithium for the US, then 1) the US could buy more (Lithium is sold for cash, not given away), or 2) it could set up more mines in Nevada (which has a ton of lithium, and would have lower transport costs to boot).
(3) Lithium ion batteries are currently reliant on Cobalt for their cathode.
Some kinds are. Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries are not.
Glad you mentioned this. Any conversation about batteries and minerals that mentions cobalt but not LFP is severely lacking.
Yep, that's predicted to be about 40% of the battery market by the end of this year.
And while what's happening in Africa with respect to conflict mining is nasty, it's worth pointing out that that this is a solvable social issue. A lot of battery and car companies are under a lot of pressure to not have conflict minerals in their supply chains.
Also, cobalt and lithium mining are a drop in the ocean compared to other forms of mining. Is it more sad when children are used to mine cobalt than when they are mining coal, iron, or copper? The reason nobody really talks about that is not that it's not happening but because the people raising issues about cobalt mining are being highly selective. People dying deep underground in coal mines is a regular thing that gets reported in the news occasionally. Some of those people are minors. Mining simply is unhealthy and dangerous. And it mostly happens in places where there is not a whole lot of attention to workplace safety; or indeed the age of the workers.
Never mind that conflict cobalt is also used in the oil and petrochemical industry. Which of course also uses oil at a ginormous scale. And never mind that nobody cares where that oil comes from or how it is produced. Or the ecological damage done to the environment producing and transporting it. E.g. Nigerian oil has had its fair share of social and ecological issues over the years. I remember there were some protests but Shell's market share never really suffered a lot.
Cobalt in batteries is fine if it is sourced responsibly. And it can be recycled when the battery eventually reaches its end of life.
China doesn't have largest Li deposits. It's a hub area. Perhaps THE hub area for industrial goods.
You didn't really refute GP's point.
Unfortunately I don’t accept “because I said so” as a counterpoint.
All that is a lot to unpack, but ever since I saw University of Santa Clara use one of these batteries, I have been interested: Yes, ALL your points are both well taken and accurate. The DRC is a disaster in many ways:
https://www.cecc.gov/events/hearings/from-cobalt-to-cars-how...
Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) has been ramping for a decade, with "no cobalt" as a selling point. It's not huge in the US, but it is in China.
https://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/en/blog/themen/batterie-update...
Also, there are very large and as-yet-untapped lithium deposits in the US, not to mention a burgeoning recycled lithium supply chain.
Unless you are from those places. Ie few years ago we visited Salar de Uyuni, biggest salt flat in the world, properly amazing place. And one of the biggest deposits of lithium. Any form of mining (and you know in Bolivia it won't be eco-friendly unless miracle happens) will destroy at least some aspects of it. And there are massive plans.
Now sure not that many species of animals/plants will be affected compared to say some rainforest location, but it still pains me to even imagine it. If it will bring good jobs to the locals then at least some good locally will be achieved, but thats not always the case.
No animals/plants live on arid salt-flats. They pile the lithium salts and let it dry before carting it away. What changes if they also use the sodium?
"Lithium Mining Is Leaving Chile’s Indigenous Communities High and Dry (Literally)
As the metal fuels the clean tech boom, companies race to mine the Atacama Region. At stake: fragile ecosystems, scarce water resources, and ancient ways of life."
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/lithium-mining-leaving-chiles-i...
If you do industry in a place teeming with life, people try to stop it because you're harming lots of living things. If you do industry in a desolate place, people try to stop it because you're harming the few rare species that can survive there.
The more important issue to consider is: What is the global effect? In this case lithium mining means cheaper electric vehicles, which reduces demand for petroleum. Petroleum extraction & combustion is far more harmful to the environment, so this is a net win.
Cobalt, however, which is used in common lithium battery chemistries, is mostly sourced from the DRC (Congo), much of it under terrible conditions: forced labour, child labour, and rampant environmental degradation. The book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives [1] is a real eye-opener if you haven’t read it. Fascinating and deeply disturbing.
Since 2022, the majority of EVs manufactured have no cobalt in their batteries. Most manufacturers use lithium iron phosphate chemistry (LFP), which is cheaper and safer than NMC or NCA. The cobalt-based chemistries are only used in higher performance vehicles, where LFP's lower energy density becomes a problem.
Not yet. At least in the US the only LFP EVs available right now (Spring 2024) are certain models of the Ford Mustang Mach-E and the standard range Tesla Model 3. This may change over the coming months.
I'm talking about fraction of vehicles, not fraction of different models available.
The chart is about production but does it omit the real story by implying scarcity? There are huge amounts in the US; here are two:
https://www.techspot.com/news/100117-potentially-world-large...
https://www.unilad.com/news/lithium-white-gold-lake-californ...
PS, here's another: https://www.mainepublic.org/2021-10-25/a-1-5-billion-lithium...
I'll be slightly sad if McDermitt is opened for mining, because some of the most beautiful petrified wood on the planet comes from that hill. My family has been collecting and selling it for a few decades now.
Lesser energy density is a pretty big caveat that can readily make or break the commercial viability of this technology. How big of a difference compared to lithium ion is the energy density?
Density doesn't really matter for stationary grid storage, where even slightly lower battery costs can easily outmatch higher space requirements.
Given the stated use cases of the post I responded to was electric vehicles and mobile devices, my response was framed in terms of that. Consumer devices - especially phones - famously prioritize battery life.
They also prioritize price, especially at the low end. If sodium batteries are significantly cheaper, it will be used to produce low cost devices.
What?
Smart phones are famously high-margin devices. What do you mean "prioritize price"? Not for most smart phones.
There's a few billion people who can't afford the latest model iPhone or Google Pixel device each year
And that's a pretty big caveat! Helpful framing to highlight who'd be most likely to benefit from this.
Even though I could easily afford an iPhone or Pixel my daily driver is a $150 Android phone. Due to the low margins of the manufacturer it's actually a very usable device.
there are a lot of smartphones sold for low end markets like India and China. most of the worlds phones, actually.
not everyone lives in California and makes a million a year
There are already batteries cheaper than lithium ion batteries, but they are not in low-end phones, because a low-end lithium ion phone battery is still only a few dollars.
It matters, but only as much as shipping costs matter.
Energy density for cars doesn't matter as long as it's above a certain minimum that lets the cars travel ~500km (~300 miles).
Once they reach that number, car companies mostly care about cost - higher energy density reduces the weight of the car, which lowers the material costs of the rest of the car, but a big reduction on the cost of the battery does effectively the same thing. Ideally they want a dirt-cheap battery that's also high capacity, but then so does everyone.
Interesting. Is there a public spreadsheet or similar summarizing the most important properties of these new battery types? It takes forever to just research one of them in enough depth to understand their basic properties, and I’d like to compare many.
DOE puts out comparison papers at times, but I haven't looked in a while.
"The energy density of sodium ion batteries is low.It is only 100-150Wh/kg, while the energy density of lithium energy is 120-180Wh/kg. This means that for batteries of the same size, sodium-ion batteries can store much less energy than lithium-ion batteries.Jan 2, 2024"
https://www.dnkpower.com/will-sodium-batteries-replace-lithi...
That's 20% less, not "much less".
Furthermore, we're decades into lithium optimization, and sodium is yet quite young. Being within 20% so early in the game is remarkable!
Depends on where you get your numbers:
“The density of sodium batteries is still relatively low, between 140 Wh/Kg and 160 Wh/kg, compared to lithium-ion battery’s 180 Wh/Kg–250 Wh/Kg.”
Depends on whether you're talking about a single battery cell or a pack.
which will be an order of magnitude cheaper than lithium ion
Maybe. But take a lot of these cost claims with a giant pinch of salt: TCOE/TCOS at scale is what matters and we won’t have any real idea what that will be while most of these battery chemistries are still pre commercialization.
That being said the cambrian explosion is very encouraging. Just good to temper optimism sometimes.
Source: I talk to grid battery developers for my business
The issue with iron-air batteries is their lower charging/discharge current. So they focus on a different storage niche: week-scale storage. Storage at different timescales can coexist and work together on a grid, since the mismatch of supply and demand, when viewed as its Fourier transform, has components at multiple different timescales.
Another issue is round trip efficiency. Iron-air, I believe, is somewhere at 50-60% (you lose almost half of the energy that you pump in).
While LFP and the Sodium battery mentioned in the title, is 95-97%.
True, although for a battery system with a given economic lifespan, the "cost of inefficiency" is inversely proportional to the average storage time. So, it's 7x less important for weekly vs. daily storage.
Just good to temper optimism sometimes.
Sure. But is it really? Like in what way is it good? I see a lot more “tempering” than I do breathless optimism. Is any serious person in a position to do something meaningful with the batteries falling prey to hype that needs to be tempered?
"take a lot of these cost claims with a giant pinch of salt"
That was funny.
"The advantage with Sodium Ion is that, although energy densities are lower than Lithium Ion, it could still be used to power mobile devices and electric vehicles."
It already does.
"Chinese automaker Yiwei debuted the first sodium-ion battery-powered car in 2023. It uses JAC Group’s UE module technology, which is similar to CATL's cell-to-pack design.[84] The car has a 23.2 kWh battery pack with a CLTC range of 230 kilometres (140 mi)"
The car has a 23.2 kWh battery pack with a CLTC range of 230 kilometers (140 mi)
23.2 kWh achieving 140 miles range sounds unrealistic. For example the 57kWh model 3 has a range of ~260 miles.
Why?
The energy consumption seems to be even a bit better than of the model 3
"with energy consumption approaching 10 kWh per 100km."
So roughly half capacity equals roughly half range - sounds about right to me (23.2 kWh are the same avaiable energy, whether sodium or lithium).
The advantage with Sodium Ion is that, although energy densities are lower than Lithium Ion, it could still be used to power mobile devices and electric vehicles.
There is an insightful comment by AtlasBarfed: Keep in mind sodium ion and LFP are much safer and don't require nearly as much cooling and management systems as nickel-cobalt chemistries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363603
Read the whole comment, it is pretty detailed and explains why the lower density of Sodium Ion doesn't matter as much as people think.
It's a point that's easily overlooked. Battery density only matters in vehicles that need to be small or light (like a sports vehicle or a plane). In a truck, sacrificing a few tons for some batteries is not that big of a deal. What matters more is the price of those batteries. As those prices come down, demand will go up by a lot. That's happening right now. It's been happening for a few years now.
Bloomberg NEF actually ran an interesting article a few weeks ago suggesting that we'll have all the batteries we need to electrify all road traffic: https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt...
They are tracking all the companies and investments involved with battery production and one of their claims is that new battery production is going to outstrip demand in the next few years. That will likely mean significant price drops for batteries. And it also means that companies outside of China may be struggling to become cost competitive.
There is also an iron air battery project in Minnesota: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/02/10/rusty-batteries-cou...
Lower capacity in the same form factor, but inputs are common and cheap as dirt and will be able to do the hard work of supporting grid scale battery storage. We've learned that there are many applications that do not need to capacity of lithium.
Even if it isn't as high-capacity, a longer-lasting and safer battery over a thinner smartphone isn't a _bad_ trade-off, specially considering chips and screens get more efficient. This might have more market than stationary batteries.
But who wants a fat smartphone with lower battery life? Smartphones are where people want as much energy density as possible. Smartphones are also expensive devices with a relatively small battery, so it makes sense to add a few dollars for more energy density. Also most smartphone manufacturers are very much into planned obsolescence, so much that countries are starting to legislate, they don't really want long lasting batteries, especially not if it compromises the user experience.
There could be a market for power tools, where having more batteries of lower capacity for the same price can be desirable.
Also maybe for hybrid vehicles.
Personally, I wouldn't mind a fatter phone. It actually might be easier for me to hold. I've never seen the appeal of phones so thin I could shave with them.
never seen the appeal of phones so thin I could shave with them
For people who wear slimmer-fitting clothing, this matters. Also, it’s more about the weight: you want a phone light enough that holding it up isn’t tedious.
I suppose. Then again, so long as it's not so heavy as to cause pain, I think there would be a least some market for such devices. I thought the Steam Deck would be prohibitively heavy to use for it's weight, but the ergonomics made up for much of that.
If I use the steam deck for more than a couple of hours then I feel it in my wrists the next day. I still love the steam deck but it could go on a diet.
(There are lighter alternatives, but I bought the steam deck specifically to financially support Valve's Linux gaming efforts)
This should be nicely solved with something like the xreal glasses. Lie the deck down and have the display right in front of your eyes regardless of how you hold the input device.
Sadly, there's no way to use those glasses while also charging. I'd buy one instantly if there were a readily available solution for that.
This isn't playing out in reality though.
10 years ago we already had the tech for smaller phones (and yes the battery life was fine, 1-2 days typical). Just check out any flagship from the 2010-2015 era, e.g. https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9500_galaxy_s4-5125.php
If people actually care about slim, light phones... why has almost every company stopped making them?
If people actually care about slim, light phones... why has almost every company stopped making them?
It’s not the sole factor. But ceteris paribus, most consumer prefer a thinner, lighter phone.
The appeal is about being able to slide easily into pants pockets (esp. front pockets) without creating big uncomfortable tight bulges.
Not as much of an issue with loose men's chinos, but definitely an issue with standard slim men's jeans, as well as with a slimmer-cut chino.
And if you want to see if a fatter phone is easier to hold, that's what cases are for. You don't need them to make the phone fatter.
In reality, most thin phones aren't all that thin anyways once people put a protective case on them, as many (most?) people do.
this is why purses were invented. If you go out in public pay attention to visible phones sticking out of pockets and what sort of person that belongs to.
I just commented on this last night, in fact. Wife's phone half out of her pocket, and it's a smaller iphone than my brick of a 1+, but my phone sits midway down my thigh in my pocket.
I make no judgement on the pants people wear (or don't).
"…smartphone manufacturers are very much into planned obsolescence,…"
E-waste laws at some point will become inevitable, so planned obsolescence will be under scrutiny. Devices will have to have a minimum design life etc. Moreover, user-replaceable batteries—whether long life or high capacity—are likely to be mandatory as a result of such legislation.
My old Nokia used to have a replaceable battery which also served as the back of the phone, a quick release button meant the battery could be replaced within seconds.
Manufacturers can't use the argument that it can't be done because it was common practice with Nokia 20 years ago. Nowadays more modern design practices will make that even easier to implement.
Manufacturers can't use the argument that it can't be done because it was common practice with Nokia 20 years ago. Nowadays more modern design practices will make that even easier to implement.
The problem is water resistance. Your old Nokia (except the indestructible 3310) was dead if you managed to let it fall into water, most phones up until the end of the headphone jack had the same problem - and secure-boot stuff has made it virtually impossible to recover data if the phone doesn't boot up any more.
Water resistance and non-sealed phones don't really mix, unless you're going for really bulky things like the CAT lineup or Samsung's Active Tab series.
I don't know where this myth came from but there are many smartphones that are water resistant and with a user replaceable battery. One of the first in the mainstream was the Motorola Defy, there is also the Samsung Galaxy S5. Neither were particularly bulky. Interestingly the Galaxy S6, which followed the S5 was neither waterproof nor has a removable battery. I currently have one of the very few remaining smartphones with a removable battery (Galaxy XCover 7) and it is water resistant. It is a bit bulky (because it is rugged) but no more than the average phone when you add a case.
Sealing a battery compartment in a way that doesn't hinder replacement is a solved problem, they do it to diving watches that are actually waterproof at depth, not merely water resistant.
And phones cannot be completely sealed. That's why none are really waterproof (and warranty doesn't cover water damage). The biggest issues are speakers and microphones, getting the sound through and keeping the water out requires some compromises. Then there is the port(s), SIM tray, buttons, barometer,... By comparison, a battery cover is easy.
I don't know where this myth came from but there are many smartphones that are water resistant and with a user replaceable battery.
They do exist, but usually (at least for Samsung and CAT, I owned both brands) come at the cost of flimsy backplanes that come loose when falling and/or are prone to break off the tiny snaps when you need to access the SD/SIM card or battery.
I actually find these Samsung "flimsy" backplanes really great and not actually flimsy. I never broke these tiny snaps even though it sometimes feels like they will. I have broken snaps many times while opening devices but not those from Samsung backplanes.
For me, that they come loose when falling is actually a feature. The energy of the fall has to go somewhere, and having that back cover and sometimes battery fly off means that energy is not dissipated elsewhere where it could be more damaging.
"Sealing a battery compartment in a way that doesn't hinder replacement is a solved problem,"
Right, splash resistance through to full hermetic sealing is well developed engineering, so it's a non issue. That's not to say one has to go to extremes for a phone. For example, there's no reason why a phone cannot be constructed in a modular fashion where the key electronics is essentially sealed against the ingress of moisture and its peripheral connections, jack, mic, speakers, battery connectors are part of the case.
For maintenance, simply snap out the electronics and put it in a new case. Similarly, jacks are easily made waterproof with connections going through hermetic seals. Diaphragms on mics and speakers can actually be part of the seal and so on. Compromises can be made to suit the circumstances, and none of this is complicated manufacturing.
Making phones more robust against the environment makes sense, it would not only extend their life but dovetail neatly into Right-to-Repair laws—laws which I reckon will eventually become inevitable.
Phone manufacturers will be dragged kicking and screaming but they've already had it too good for too long at customers' expense.
Are they safer? Sodium is also very highly reactive.
Otherwise agreed, I'm very happy with form factor of 5-10 year old phones.
The battery made by the company mentioned uses an aqueous electrolyte construction which is theoretically safer from what I read, but I don't know if it can be made small for a portable.
The fact it supports more cycles and tolerates a broader temperature range than Lithium counts points towards safety too. Lithium isn't happy above like 30 Celsius, which a fast charging portable device can _easily_ reach.
Lithium isn't happy above like 30 Celsius, which a fast charging portable device can _easily_ reach.
Sounds pretty bad for people living in warmer climates then, as they tend to be above 30 celsius anyway. ;)
Sounds pretty bad for people living in warmer climates then, as they tend to be above 30 celsius anyway. ;)
As a data point, the ambient temperature right now where I live is 33°C. I just walked home from a quick grocery trip a couple of blocks away. And that's not an atypical temperature (at least for the warmer months of the year; we're supposed to be in the colder months now, but the climate's been all wonky lately).
If my phone's battery didn't like ambient temperatures above 30°C, it would have failed long ago. There's no air conditioning in the street.
It doesn't fail abruptly, but it doesn't achieve optimal performance either. It has pretty strict optimal temperature range, something like 10C to 30C.
NaCl is pretty safe. ;)
My cardiologist doesn't think so :(
Low NaCl in a human body is also really bad.
Depends on the quantity and who you ask what the safe level is ;)
Since na-ion cells are available on aliexpress, youtubers already did puncture tests, and indeed they did not catch fire.
Seems like sodium is better "hidden" in the cathode/anode so it won't react witth the air so quickly as lithium when battery innards are exposed.
Were they actually sodium batteries? Maybe they were fraudulently labeled Li-ion.
Also it's my understanding that neither sodium batteries nor li-ion batteries have metallic sodium/lithium in them (besides small amounts which build up in heavily used li-ion cells or something).
They have specific discharge curve which would be too much effort to fake.
Here's Natron's page about safety: https://natron.energy/our-technology/safety
I don't think the battery is a big block of pure sodium. That would be unsafe.
The battery electrolyte contains sodium ions, but the same is true of salt water and Gatorade.
I think the industrial source of their sodium is sodium hydoxide, a common industrial feedstock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hydroxide
For iPhones, at least, I believe that period was when they were thinnest (the iPhone 6 is the thinnest one, 2014).
I believe sodium here is always in the oxidized +1 state, like the lithium in Li-ion batteries. It's not present as a metal. The things being oxidized/reduced are transition metals in one or more electrodes.
One of the claimed benefits of sodium based batteries, that I remember from the press statements of CATL, is that they don't burn, even when you but them in a fire. The also should work in a wider temperature range, which is especially interesting for cold regions.
In the article it says, that they are using a "patented Prussian blue". Isn't CATL also using Prussian blue in their first generation sodium batteries?
Well I think for as amazing as this technology is, we probably don’t need it in a cellphone.
If customers were supportive of this trade-off, why would we not already see companies exploring it with LTO batteries?
Not only that:
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.
So you take up more space, but the storage system is better in every other way (agility, conflict mineral free, longevity, cost). Feels like this puts a nail in the coffin of fossil generation.
Edit: Assuming 1 cycle per day, that is a lifetime of ~137 years. More aggressive cycling is still very favorable.
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.
From everything I've read about existing Lithuum battery storage, this is already their strongpoint. Is it helpful to be 10x faster that the current speed?
Absolutely.
Instead of stopping to charge my car for half an hour (up to 80%), I can stop for 5 minutes?
Sign me up.
yes, enormously helpful, if true (no figures are given, and they may be comparing to low-power lithium-ion batteries instead of high-power ones). an equally valid way to say '10 times faster discharge rate' is '10 times higher power for the same capacity' or '10 times higher power density'
there are available li-ion batteries with a charge and discharge rate of '15c', which is to say, 1 hour ÷ 15 = 4 minutes. they are used in drones. (there are some advertised as '30c' but i suspect those are maybe just a fraud? like the notorious amazon million-lumen flashlights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceA5xL6ggEw) if they really reach '150c', you could discharge 10% of the battery in 2.4 seconds, which is closer to a firework rocket engine than a conventional battery. but, a rocket engine that you can recharge 50000 times
a charge rate of '150c' would mean you could charge the battery halfway in 12 seconds, and there are a lot of scenarios where that would be useful
you could imagine '150c' batteries displacing much larger supercapacitors from many uses, rather than displacing conventional batteries. the number given in the article of 70 watt hours per kilogram is, in si units, 250kJ/kg. if you divide that by the 24 seconds implied by '10 times faster than lithium-ion' you get a power density of 10.4 kilowatts per kilogram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_density says supercaps are in the 15 kilowatts per kilogram range. quadcopter drone electric motors are typically in the neighborhood of 4–5 kilowatts per kilogram, so this would make the drone battery much smaller than the motor instead of bigger
more likely, though, it's a press release lie, where they're saying something that's technically true (there are lithium batteries with a '1c' charge and discharge rate, which have higher energy density than the higher-powered ones, and their batteries reach '10c', i.e., 6 minutes) but creates a false impression of something that would be a huge breakthrough if it were true
Change rates of lithium batteries are a huge negative compared to pumping gasoline
For grid storage, it's unclear if faster charge/discharge matters.
We ended up sizing our batteries to meet wattage demands for our appliances. I wish we had ~ 2x as many kWh as we do. Anker has a home battery whose main selling point is that you can add kWh without adding peak wattage.
For use in vehicles, faster charge rates are a big win. Faster discharge probably doesn't matter much for cars (0-60 times are already ridiculously low). They might for drones / planes though.
I can't think of many things where a 10x improvement in its strongest important metric wouldn't be useful? I imagine dumping a lot of current into something very quickly and recovering it 50k times would be pretty useful in bursty workloads-- industrial processes, solar-powered gates and lifts, alarms, ignition systems, etc. And that's just gravy considering the real selling point is being made from commodity materials. Even if they're too heavy or something for electric cars, it would be great if it was a viable replacement for lead-acid car batteries.
It’s also significantly heavier by weight.
Do you mean heavier per energy capacity, or am I misinterpreting "heavier by weight"?
Yeah.
Unless he means that a pound of lead is heavier than a pound of feathers.
No big deal if you set it on the ground and never move it!
Which again, is basically a non-issue for grid-scale storage.
These aren't for laptops or cars.
Though they seem to trying to increase energy density, so they can become for cars. But not there yet.
The challenge with interpreting statements like this is that there isn't just one lithium battery chemistry in widespread use, and even within a single chemistry the detailed structure of the anode and cathode can greatly change both achievable charge/discharge rates and longevity. For example, compared to the most commonly available energy-storage-optimized NMC cylindrical cells, LTO cylindrical cells charge and discharge at rates up to 10x faster, and have an estimated lifetime of tens of thousands of cycles... in exchange for have half or less of the energy density. Which is to say, depending on the exact details of the sodium cells being discussed, it's extremely likely that their entire performance envelope is achievable today with some combination of NMC, LFP, and LTO cells; although they may yet prove to have a cost advantage.
Hopefully we can continue to lower the power requirements of our every day items and the lower capacity of these batteries will become less of an issue.
Lowering the power we use, is the only realistic goal.
I wear an Apple Watch. On my wrist, is a small, Lithium-ion battery, that contains a great deal of power.
That power is trickled out, over time.
If it were to all release at once, I'd no longer have a left hand.
Packing all that energy into smaller and smaller form factors, increases the risk; no matter what tech we use.
Energy is energy. When it comes out quickly, we call those "explosions."
One little point I want to clarify is that if your Apple Watch battery did indeed short and none of the protections against shorts worked, you'd likely just have a burn on your wrist. 309mAH isn't all that much energy assuming a full charge.
I once bridged a ~2,500mAH 18650 battery that was in my bag when my keys created a circuit between the anode and the cathode. The result was a small fire inside my bag that was quickly stamped out. Now, if I'm carrying batteries capable of dumping a lot of current quickly, I use cases.
What excites me most about this new battery tech is home and commercial backup energy storage that's much 'greener' and cheaper than lithium. There is a lot of space in rural and grid settings, so the density of Li-Ion isn't really needed.
most, and i do mean most 18650s have a circuit board in the endcap that manages the charging and discharging, so a dead short will generally cause that board to heat up and let out smoke. If you did manage to actually short an 18650 (it's not difficult, remove the plastic on the outside and jam a flathead in between the positive cap and the battery body, where the insulator is), it doesn't just "make a small fire, easily stamped out".
if you'd like i can go dig out a 26650 that i have where i dropped it and the board part popped off; but i am sure there are websites with pictures already.
I didn't know this. I was wondering why it was such a tame event given the maximum discharge rate of those batteries.
I was walking out of my building with a group of folks after work and some woman said, 'Excuse me sir but there is smoke coming out of your bag'.
“Pardon my intrusion, you may already know this and I hate to be a bother, but you appear to be on fire.”
Well, shorting out is a fairly realistic scenario, as opposed to a flash-boom, but it is still a relatively slow release.
I was really talking about how much energy potential is stored in batteries. In batteries, the energy is generally stored as potential chemical reactions, so it isn't realistic to have a flash-boom.
Supercapacitors, on the other hand, may have more of a boom potential.
If it were to all release at once, I'd no longer have a left hand.
Well, super interesting.
At first I doubted because the apple watch has very little energy, then I looked it up. Turns out the biggest ones have 2Wh worth of power. Doesn't seem like much until you consider that 2Wh is roughly 6000J. Bullets are launched in the neighborhood of 1000J.
Not really sure how much further there is to go.
We've already got LED bulbs, heat pumps, and energy-efficient appliances.
Washers and dryers still have to spin and agitate. Dishwashers still have to shoot jets of water. Ceiling fans still need to move air.
And with the switch to electrification (cars, stoves, dryers, hot water heaters) electricity usage will increase, fortunately, to replace polluting gasoline.
So I think future technological progress really is going to come down to increased battery capacity, not decreasing energy usage.
Ultimately, the simple fact is that solar power isn't generated at night.
I mean on the small scale where the object has a built in battery. On the scale your talking about, large sodium batteries on the grid to store power for renewables makes sense.
Jevon’s paradox says that will just lead to more energy usage.
We will end up with an LLM live training on your watch.
cheap as dirt
There are lots of things left to make grid battery storage cheap.
As well as the cells needing to be engineered to be cheaper, there are lots of changes to the battery packs that can be made, together with changes to inverters.
For batteries, I'd like to see research into less consistent manufacturing and higher failure rates. Current packs the entire pack is unusable if just one cell fails in a way that leads to lots of heat production. If pack balancing circuits had the ability to take a cell or a parallel group of cells 'out of circuit' while still using the rest of the pack, then battery lifespans could be dramatically increased and it would be possible to manufacture cells far cheaper.
For inverters, we should go for a direct-to-10kV inverter process. No transformers. At 10kV, currents are far lower and therefore wires can be far thinner (and cheaper).
Consider making batteries ~15kV too - that reduces by ~30% the amount of expensive silicon needed, together with big reductions in copper costs, at the expense of extra design effort for much higher voltage batteries. At these higher voltages, you'd either use oil cooling, or you'd have ~10 separate coolant loops, one at each ~1500 volts of potential.
While it would be neat to build batteries that handle manufacturing defects akin to a CPU with 4 cores but 3 useable, I suspect the additional complexity, wiring, and circuitry is limiting. Batteries today are almost (or actually?) a commodity. Detecting and simply replacing the entire battery is probably cheaper and easier at grid scale.
The wiring and complexity isn't very much - you simply need a contactor that can 'short' the offending set of cells. It only needs to close once, so can simply be made from a spring and meltable material. And you need ~100 of these per 400 volt battery.
Beyond that, all the complexity is in software. Software needs to monitor cell voltages and currents to detect a self-heating cell. Software then needs to stop balancing that cell up (ie. let it discharge). At the moment the cell voltage hits zero, software needs to close the 'short' across the cell, permanently taking it out of the circuit.
This design might occasionally prevent charging the entire battery for a few minutes during this process. Specifically, when a cell is midway through being taken out of circuit, it can only be discharged, and would be dangerous to recharge.
But a few minutes of downtime per year seems acceptable to me.
It'll be a good day when we can finally ditch lead acid.
Grid storage is dominated by $/kWh.
For land and sea transport it's mostly volume/kWh.
For electric aircraft it's kg/kWh.
50 Thousand Cycles would make replacing batteries unnecessary for almost all usecases. I would love such a battery in an electric bike. Max Range would be quite limited compared to a Lithium Version but with 10x discharge capacity and functionally unlimited life you could make a beast of a commuter e-bike.
50000 Cycles would realistically mean you can charge the bike every day for a hundred years
The first generation will work like that.
Then they will introduce various defects into the manufacturing process to decrease the lifespan (and they'll say it's cost) and the batteries will last 10 years max. Maybe 15 if you're lucky.
Why so cynical
I mean, look at what was done to lighting. There are some original Edison bulbs that still work, yet you'd be lucky to get a year out of a modern incandescent. Same thing happened to LED bulbs.
There are some original Edison bulbs that still work, yet you'd be lucky to get a year out of a modern incandescent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
Same thing happened to LED bulbs.
Because LED Bulbs cook your LEDs and are stupid design. Get a permanent LED fixture with decent passive cooling and they will last for decades. Adapting LEDs into the same Plug as Incandescent lighting just does not work.
I've actually found that LED bulbs have only gotten more and more reliable over time. I used to have to replace them regularly but I haven't had one fail in several years now. And permanent LED fixtures are the stupid design. Who wants to do electrical work every time your light fails because of a power surge/lightning strike/capacitor going bad/whatever?
I don't know where you are from but here in Germany Surges/Lightning Strikes that damage equipment are so rare that I can't remember it ever happening to me in my lifetime. And Replacing a fixture if it eventual fails after decades is just not that hard. I did it in my Appartment and I only shocked myself twice, so it's very doable.
I stand corrected.
Want the experience of a lightbulb from 100 years ago right now? Buy a 220v lamp and use it in a 110v circuit. It will be much dimmer, a lot more orange/yellow, and last for decades.
The tradeoff with conventional light bulbs is efficiency vs. lifetime. This is not the usual planned obsolescence it is made out to be, you are actually getting more efficient bulbs that way.
The market for cost effective grid batteries is gigantic. There is no need to self sabotage.
You can build such a bike today with LTO cells, which are commonly rated at 5,000 - 25,000 cycles (depending on manufacturer) to 80% of nameplate capacity. You'll compromise on range, of course; but in the worst-case corner (extremely low temperature outside, high current draw rate) the comparison to at least LFP is pretty favorable, and you're within a factor of 2x or 3x of NMC throughout the envelope.
Honestly after a quick google search I'm not convinced LTO Cells are applicable for that use case. Best I found on a quick search is 80wh/kg and at a low voltage and good enough but not great discharge capacity. Even in the electrical bicycle range that's just not enough to be practical, let alone competitive.
LFP at it's peak gets you there but it's also not a great experience. The Battery needs to be too large to get you enough current to be enjoyable.
That's why the 10x (even a 3x would do it) in discharge capacity is what get's me excited. That's enough that you can use only a few cells but with enough output to be a nice experience, just with short range.
80 Wh/kg beats the 70 Wh/kg of the cells discussed in the article, which was the benchmark for your proposal. Voltage doesn't really matter at all for this; you just end up with a few more cells in series (though it's admittedly awkward if you're targeting ~56 V max as the top of SELV where most single-chip BMS ICs top out at 18s). And even though most common LTOs are only rated for 10C, they're rated to do that below 0°C, in which domain they absolutely crush the ratings of LFP cells -- for LFP, you end up sizing for temperature unless you're looking at summer riding only. Admittedly you're not going to match 40 C LFP and NMC pouch cells with a cylindrical cell, and I'm not aware of anyone currently making LTO pouch cells; but I do think it seems unlikely that the sodium cells that are the subject of this article bring any really new capabilities to the domain of ebikes.
In industry trade magazines I'm seeing references to automotive batteries that would be good for half a million miles. Typical US driver would take 40 years to drive that far.
Also seeing that companies are serious about actual production of solid state batteries. Which have twice the energy density. I don't see cost numbers but might be those are actually cheaper just because there is less mass to manufacture.
Hopefully long term, this can help us dismantle unnecessary high voltage transmission lines, and let people trickle store power at 48volts and discharge it at 110 through inverters.
Hi Voltage transmission lines are completely necessary. Running on 48V would require ridiculously large cables over any significant distance. Is there a reason you want to "Dismantle" high voltage transmission lines? They are the greatest invention since sliced bread.
edit: Sliced bread was invented in 1928, and the first high voltage transmission line was apparently tested in 1889. Therefore my statement needs revised to be historically accurate.
I imagine the idea they were proposing is ~most energy being locally generated, 48v should be fine from solar panels to batteries.
But I can't see that working on denser cities, or factories, or less sunny climates.
This is what I'm referring to.
Houses mostly, the reason we need such high voltage is because someone can turn on an oven and consume 5kw. But that oven only runs for 1 hour, or more averagely, 30 minutes. So in the context of 200kwh battery systems at EVERY house, and inverters at every house, that oven can easily run off the inverter, and the house would never need to pull down heavy wattage from the grid. In this scenario, the grid's variability goes down dramatically, thus, reducing the voltage requirements... Instead every house would have small solar and a trickle feed of, lets say 800w-1kw consistently during the day.
Additionally, for places that have a shit-ton of sun, can do much better with microgrids and generators.
Understood, but even if you are trickle feeding thousands of small houses with say 1kw(max) each, that still requires Megawatts of power. 1k*1k=1M. Therefore, you still need high voltage transmission lines to move this power from the source.
Currently most houses have a instantaneous load requirement of 100kw (some much higher) which means your transmission line size / load requirements are going down 100 fold. That effectively allows us to "dismantle unnecessary high voltage transmission lines". Yes there will still be high voltage lines, (and even the lines that go right up to your property are typically 1000 volts or more, which qualifies for "high voltage")... but such a future of inverters and batteries would still reduce most of the infrastructure.
Look, I'm not wrong about this, it just would require all houses to have their own inverters and batteries. I'm not saying this is GOING to happen, I'm just saying the requirements on the grid would be so damn small that having a PG&E would be hilariously expensive in this possible future. Instead you would have microgrids and much smaller scale power companies.
If you all want to keep paying $1 per kwh (2026 pricing) by all means don't push for this kind of infrastructure change. If people want $0.01 per kwh again, this is the way to do it. At this point we're mostly paying for PG&Es infrastructure that makes sense in today's batteryless world. We don't have to keep paying that price. There are different futures and more competition possible.
Large single family homes have 400A 1Ø 120/240V service, which is 96 kW peak or 76.8 kW for NEC's definition of continuous. Most have 200A service or smaller, which is half that.
What load do you imagine causes "most" homes to exceed 100 kW, and "some much higher"?
Currently most houses have a instantaneous load requirement of 100kw
What for? If I were to run a heat pump, car charger, oven and electric shower all at the same time that would be about 25kw
If anything, we should be running 1MV+ transmission lines to conserve copper and/or aluminum.
Why would it? Moving these batteries would be more work than having transmission lines and we still need long distance power.
There is a reason why pipelines are popular even though we have the capability to move oil using normal transportation.
So, with about 10.000 kg of these in my basement (2MWh capacity), I should be mostly self-sufficient? Nice! (4MWh electricity usage per year, with solar panels producing slightly more)
Why would you need storage for half of your annual electricity usage to be self-sufficient? It seems like you could achieve that with far, far less battery, perhaps combined with slightly more solar.
Our panels produced a mere 60kWh in december. We've got 6 months where we use more than we produce. Storing 50% was a quick estimate as for what we'd need. Anybody got better numbers for that?
These numbers are easy to compute myself. For the 6 months my panels did not produce enough electricity, we used a total of 2.1MWh from the grid. So my 50% guestimate was actually spot on :)
Well there you go :)
If you have the land for it, you might find it mildly more cost effective to ground-mount solar panels at a steeper angle to optimize for wintertime production, which would allow you to shrink the battery. Installing 10000 kg of batteries in a home isn't something likely to ever be super easy.
i use between 1 and 2 MWh a month... Do you live underground and not have anything electronic? 1000KWh is 1MWh. I guess if one has all natural gas appliances and no need for air conditioning it's possible to get down to 333KWh a month.
i have owned and ran computers that used more than that a month, for goodness' sake.
Between 1 and 2 MWh per year isnt that unusual.
For example in Germany the average per person per year is 1.3MWh.
that's 100KWh per month, which is ~3KWh per day. that's the equivalent of leaving a 100W incandescent bulb and a 100W equivalent LED bulb on for 24 hours a day.
You're telling me that the AVERAGE usage in germany is 1.25 incandescent bulbs 24/7?
my LAPTOP uses more power than that!
This is a family of 5 in the mid-Europe. We don't use electricity for heating or cooling, and we're still burning gasoline to drive around. These are pretty normal numbers around here.
I don't think it's feasible to store your summer excess long term like that. It would be cheaper to add more panels to produce enough power in the winter and having enough battery capacity to last you a few days in case of bad weather.
Sodium-ion compliments Li-ion in the marketplace. Each battery variation is better suited for various niches. eg Sodium is a better fit for stationary storage. Though CATL and others are using sodium for down market vehicles too, which should free up Li-ion capacity for other use cases.
To reach net-zero 2050, we'll need an installed base of 2 terawatts of battery storage. Annual production is ~30 gigawatts. (IIRC.) So mfgs will still continue to scale up and make as many Li-ion (eg LFP) batteries as possible.
--
Also exciting are the misc thermal solutions just now starting their own cost-learning-curves. Advanced geothermal (generation and storage), box of rocks (heat batteries), geothermal heat pumps (commercial and residential).
Global battery making capacity is now around 1 TWh/year.
Thanks. I'm confusing both myself and the conversation. I probably (mis)took the terawatt figure to be the cumulative installed amount. And some quick forraging didn't set me straight. (Any helpful links?)
Being just a simple bear, I want both a burn down chart for (human) GHG pollution and "burn up" chart depicting our progress towards our glorious renewable energy net-zero future. (Turrible names, I know, esp wrt climate crisis, but I don't know what else to call them.)
Add some milestones, if we want to get fancy.
As you can see, I struggle to make sense of the whole domain. And I'm sure I'm not alone.
I actually understated it. Global battery manufacturing capacity last year was 2.6 TWh.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-...
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.
This is good... only for the US. The world doesn't need another industry where US solely is a monopoly.
Most countries in the world don't have their own cobalt or nickel mines, so it's good for all those countries too.
The article is written from a US point of view.
Most other countries also have access to the relevant materials, since most countries are not landlocked.
Sodium battery production may pair nicely with desalination plants.
I think the article was saying that these batteries are buildable with easy-to-find materials for anyone, USA included. I don't think there's anything in them that can only be found in the United States.
I remember seeing a post on HN a few years back where a professor at MIT figured out how to make a battery out of more abundant materials.
Does anyone recall this post or have a link?
Ambri? They've been making very slow progress.
The difficulty of operating devices for prolonged periods at very high temperature is not well appreciated.
They've been out of the labs for a while. CATL has been producing sodium ion batteries for a few years already. They are used in some of the cheaper cars there. But nice to see more companies getting sodium ion to production.
Is there any car with sodium batteries sold in the US? I am ok with cheap, 100-mile range small sedan that I can commute in and charge overnight.
Probably not or not yet. Import tariffs are keeping a lot of the cheap cars out of the US. And part of their low price comes from not being assembled in the US where labor is relatively expensive. There might be some models coming in via Mexico in the next years as several Chinese manufacturers are starting to build factories there.
But if that's what you are after, get yourself a nice second hand Nissan Leaf or similar. With the older ones, you might have to replace the battery. But that's not the end of the world in terms of cost. Some of the older ones are selling well below 10K$. A battery replacement would set you back 3-5K$. But it would also increase the resell value of the vehicle. And with a good battery, these things can last a long time.
Sodium is quite plentiful, and it doesn't need mining. Sodium batteries, if competitive, would be quite a revolution.
I was under the impression that sodium is produced from salt, which is mined.
It's also just extracted from the sea. And where salt is mined, the environmental impact is minimal.
We haven't seen a weight-based energy density figure from Natron itself, but a 2022 article from Chemical & Engineering News put its sodium-ion batteries at 70 Wh/kg, around the very bottom of the sodium-ion energy density scale. That aligns well with the company's stationary-only business plan, as sodium-ion batteries being pursued for potential mobility use have more than double that density. CATL showed a 160 Wh/kg sodium-ion battery in 2021 and has plans to increase that density over 200 Wh/kg to better meet the needs of electric vehicles.
CATL’s sodium batteries were more than twice as dense three years ago
Energy density isn't a particularly interesting target for stationary energy storage applications. I'd assume that they just aren't optimizing much for it (yet).
Yes, but since the US is becoming extremely protectionist/nationalist with its energy infrastructure, the only relevant bit from this story is that this production is occuring entirely within the US.
Though it is good news that this company can produce much denser batteries in the future!
Big if cheaper - which is the crux of the issue.
LiFePO4 loses money in every analysis of putting in a home battery I've done: if sodium is more common, the question is does that meaningfully reduce the price of the battery.
if sodium is more common
What. Of course sodium is more common. Hundreds of times more common. You can get it from the sea, salt lakes, and salt mines. You buy it all the time in the form of table salt. It's crazy cheap by comparison to lithium, and just crazy cheap, really (though it wasn't always crazy cheap).
the question is does that meaningfully reduce the price of the battery.
Battery manufacture isn't rocket science. The cost of raw materials weighs heavily.
Also: safety, and raw materials that can be sourced anywhere.
Nice to see sodium battery production scaling up.
I remember a 60 Minutes segment some time back on batteries made out of saltwater and dirt. They would be ideal for grid scale batteries, because although the energy density of those batteries is low, that's irrelevant because very large batteries could be cheap and easy to make. The batteries don't have to be portable.
This is what baffles me about Li batteries for grid use. Using high energy / weight is very costly and completely irrelevant for grid batteries.
This is what baffles me about Li batteries for grid use
It's not super baffling when you realize the other properties of Li make it way better than pretty much anything currently on the market (the important part).
Li has amazing cycle life with a wide operating range. Li like LFP and LTO have insane cycle life. Pair that with the superior capacity and the fact that Li doesn't have problems like the memory effect and it quickly starts to become apparent why it dominates grid storage.
There's simply not been a better available rechargeable battery tech on the market. Sodium will change that.
The cycle life is not an issue with a battery made of seawater and dirt, because dirt is - cheap as dirt! Capacity comes from making an arbitrarily large such battery - it's not like it has to fit into a car.
Really excited to see that the battery is entering production. Feels like every year we hear about new batteries in the lab that are "2x-5x as efficient as Lithium ion" but they never seem to actually hit production.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/tech/engineers-created-revolutionary-b...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/05/13/ev-ran...
Na batteries are going to be a huge deal. Assuming everything pans out with manufacturing, this will be a game changer for grid storage. Natural gas likely won't be cheaper than doing a battery plant which will be a big deal for peaker plants.
Zero dependency on China is a pretty significant bonus.
Huh. I just checked. Swiss-based company Arxada supplies the (battery grade) prussian blue that Natron uses. Though I didn't quickly determine where it's actually made. Probably UK.
Are we still a ways out on being able to buy these for consumer use? Looks like most of the sales partners are industrial/commercial use. Couldn't dig up anything on their site about home use.
All of the initial production from this plant is spoken for. Part of the deal that secured the funding, exemptions, fast-tracking, tax breaks, etc. is a big public utility battery facility in the state (MI).
Keen to see these enter the hobby market as well.
Not super keen on yoloing DIY with lithium but sodium seems a bit safer
Most diyers are using LFP at this point and that’s considered quite stable. a smaller group try to reuse old ev batteries and those are generally considered more risky because of the runaway effect that’s possible- which still seems relatively low. regardless, more stable chemistries are always welcome and i agree with others that the discharge recharge and cycles would be amazing!
do these batteries burn in a mostly uncontrollable way like lithium ion?
No, they are not flammable. Here's a datasheet for one of their products (from the Wayback Machine, because this link is now dead on their website -- maybe resource moved and not indexed yet):
https://web.archive.org/web/20230402215314/https://natron.en...
Highlighted points include:
Nonflammable Chemistry & Construction
UL9540A ‘Champion’ rated nonflammable with no thermal runaway under any condition
Safe and Fault Tolerant: No Fire or Explosion During
- Heating
- Overcharge
- Short Circuit
- Nail Penetration
Inspired by Breaking Bad no doubt.
Exciting stuff!
How does it compare to lithium if a battery is punctured or exposed? More or less toxic / flammable?
It seems like these could have some great advantages for use in sailboats, both house and propulsion (weight matters a lot less in a bit). The fire safety, rapid recharge (from engine), and higher power than lead-acid are pretty great. What am I missing?
I'm so excited about this. Cratering the price of batteries for solar arrays will be a huge benefit for solar homeowners.
China is already scaling their sodium battery production from MWH plants to GWH plants. The US has the largest sodium reserves in the world. In depth interview about sodium batteries with a professor that has researched sodium chemistries for a decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAJSH_raW8
Great video about sodium batteries (including solid state) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAJSH_raW8
This is a great entrepreneurial story too. Colin began this company out of his PhD research at Stanford a decade ago. A long, steady grind and finally out to production. Kudos to him and his team - a very rare accomplishment, and inspiring to see.
uh... you could buy them for at least a year now from Chinese productions - prices started high and were at maybe 3x of similar sized lifepo4 cells about 2 months ago when I grabbed 2 for experiments.
I could see sodium ion being a good use case for cars even.
I just did a little perplexity search and it seems that lithium ion is maybe 50% more energy dense than sodium ion. So instead of a 300 mile car, I could get a 200 mile car that can charge 10 times faster, and has a longer lifespan battery. That’s a trade off that doesn’t sound bad to me
If I'm reading this page[1] correctly they are playing fast-and-loose with the power-density numbers. Compared to Li-Ion shows 4x the power-per-Wh, but is about 1/4 the energy density, so the power density (in Watts/g) is about the same as Li-Ion?
[edit]
That page links a data-sheet that claims ~500W/kg which is much better than LFP, I couldn't find any reliable numbers for NMC, but I suspect its more than half of that?
Is this battery's design patented or a secret? If patented, what is the lifetime of the patent? If not, how easy will it be for others to replicate?
So I re-ran my battery spreadsheet on this, and the short version is: if the claimed reduction in cost of 1/3rd current LiFePO4 can be achieved - at retail (so I just knocked my LiFePO4 figure down to 33%) can be achieved...oh my does that change the economics. In a "the repayment period of installing peak-shifting capacity at my house would be under 2 years, and the lifetime yield would be 50% on the installation cost".
So if they can hit that sort of cost reduction...that's revolutionary for grid batteries.
What's the best way to invest in sodium batteries? Is there a publicly traded company that is helping Natron Energy bring this to market?
600 megawatts annually
No.
From the article it claims charge speed 10x that of lithium and 50,000 cycle lifetime. I don’t know about you but a EV that can go 150 miles and charge to 80% again in 2min would be super compelling to me.
Solid commuter car but not too annoying on the rare roadtrip.
But, I am guessing grid frequency regulation use cases are going to make these too expensive for a car for a long time.
I missed the 10x charge speed- that is a killer feature that more than makes up for the reduced range.
I wonder what that will mean for charging infrastructure that suddenly has to deliver 10x power to enable that. Not sure that sort of charging could be as ubiquitously placed as gas stations
Just have the same batteries in the charging station to smooth out power usage? Seems a lot cheaper and operationally less complex than a gas station.
This assumes that the same number of vehicles use the charging station. Lower charge times means potentially higher steady-state throughput.
Higher steady-state is mostly a good thing. You need to bulk up the power lines, but you're making good use of them and have lots of money to spend on them.
Having lots of money doesn't mean spending lots of money. Budgets often get cut for no good reason.
Okay, I mean I'm aware of that perfectly generic information but "sometimes management sucks" doesn't impact a feasibility analysis much. And this hypothetical station was already willing to spend on a lot on batteries.
i doubt if the batteries can handle the type of surge output as the superchargers require.
They easily do. Discharge rates are typically higher than charge rates. For stationary batteries it's all easier due to being able to have larger, more parallel batteries, and better cooling when weight is not a concern.
Battery-backed charging stations are already common, because it allows use of cheaper grid interconnection, and use of cheaper off-peak or renewable energy.
If the car batteries can handle some amount of power, batteries on the other side can handle the same amount.
Especially because the station would want to have multiple cars worth of energy stored, which means the load is divided among more cells and they don't have to work nearly as hard.
Those would need to get cycled a lot(many times per day). You might want one for your house if you wanted to charge quickly at home, but for charging stations, I think more realistically they'd have 10x less charging spots if each person was only there 1/10th the time.
So the peak would be the same, but if there were too many customers then sort of like at a busy gas station people would be waiting for a spot rather than waiting for charging to complete.
Fortunately these batteries have "an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles". Also, since there aren't super-dangerous elements in them, they should be much easier and cleaner to recycle/renew - especially with the giant recharge-station-scale ones' we're talking about, which could be designed specifically for that.
I had an engineering colleague who previously worked at a company that reconditioned Prius batteries. It involved cycling powe in and out of the battery several times. Where did all that power come from? Another battery.
Not that much, grids can and do deal with highly variable loads all the time, as all the heavy machinery involved in traditional power generation (=generators, gearboxes, axles, turbines) has a lot of inertia that buffers sudden changes.
However, as more and more generation capacity shifts to renewable sources that by design have very small (wind) to zero (solar) inertia, there will be a requirement to build out frequency stabilizer units like the Tesla unit in Hornsdale, Australia [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
Aren't batteries quite limited in their ability to provide synthetic inertia? Sure, they can respond on a second or tenth-of-second scale, but they don't provide the kind of instantaneous inertia you get from spinning rust. Inverters aren't exactly designed to just eat power surges, they'll instantly disconnect instead.
That's why the UK grid has been building some "high-inertia synchronous compensators", and a 2019 outage showed that it's urgently needed.
Can't you make them behave however you want with sub millisecond reaction time?
Advanced solar and wind inverters can also push back on grid changes to mimic inertia.
Also I'd say the inertia in a normal wind turbine doesn't count because it's not tied into the grid frequency.
Indeed the charging cables are already massive. Just need some superconducting cables.
Liquid cooled cables aren't too bad.
Megawatt charging system is big but doesn't seem unreasonable, and that gives you 5x the amps. In two minutes it can add 80kWh to an 800 volt battery, and the max voltage is 1250.
https://resources.news.e.abb.com/images/2023/5/12/0/Next_gen...
https://www.engineerlive.com/sites/engineerlive/files/ITM.11...
Unless they also use these batteries to store the charge. The batteries an be charged slowly like a capacitor.
Even today's charging can be severely lacking, imho
It just means the infrastructure gets the same cheap batteries as buffer.
My Model 3 already charges at 180kw. Are they saying cars built with these batteries will charge at 1.8Mw? How are they going to build charging infrastructure at that level?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40224937
Agreed, I just learned that the next formula for Formula E will eventually have charging stops. The spec will allow 5kwh of charge in 30 seconds, which is 10% SoC in their case. Pretty cool.
To take advantage of that charging speed, you have to supply 10x of charging power though.
10x of charging speed of Li-ion would be in megawatts per single charging device.
Sounds like their current strategy is stationary-only, i.e. not for use in vehicles, owing to the lower power density of sodium batteries. But that does not mean it's a problem that won't be solved in the future.
Compelling to me also, as a person who has shied away from EVs because of charging time annoyances. I'd gladly trade the mileage for charging speed every time. Getting excited for what's to come.
Is charge time important because you can't install a L2 charger at home / apartment to keep it "always charged" or because your usage pattern is too heavy duty for a 30 minute break every 200-300mi?
If it's just the former, the slow steady march of EV mindshare might solve your needs before the "L4" super-fast-charging battery. I am starting to see L2 chargers pop up in apartment parking lots, for example. IMO, "always charged" is significantly more convenient than short stops at a station, so it would still be desirable in a world where "L4" batteries and stations were common.
The latter, actually. I'd much prefer to stop for five minutes every 2 hours than 30 minutes every 4 hours.
The current state of the art is somewhere in between with 18 minutes per ~3 hours. It even helps to split charging into shorter sessions (2x 9 minutes), because batteries charge fastest when they're about 25% full.
Keep in mind that EVs charge unattended, so you only spend a minute plugging in, and can leave to get a coffee, etc.
How 'guaranteed' is that rate? I don't keep up with it like I probably should, but seem to often read that some chargers are outdated, and sometimes you have to 'share' if somebody else is charging nearby?
In the EU, there are Ionity and Fastned networks that can guarantee their chargers will be fast enough for this (>=250kW), and together they have a pretty decent coverage along major highways.
There are setups that have their max rated power per dispenser (“pump”), and halve it if two cars are plugged in to the same dispenser at the same time. Good chargers can do 300kW. If that splits to 150kW it’s not too bad - maybe 5 min slower, rather than double. That’s because the max speed the car can take is a curve, and that only flattens the peak.
However, for the 18-min charging the biggest gotcha is the temperature. In Hyundai/Kia it requires the battery to be at 20-25°C. That’s easy in the summer. In the winter the charging speed can drop as low as 80kW.
Last time we had to fast charge on the way to Yosemite, we had lunch at a strategically parked taco truck in the same lot (they even had a picnic table).
We would have walked to a nearby restaurant if needed.
I'd prefer shorter times on road trip charging, too. But I still ended up buying an EV because I only need road trip fast charging a few times a year, and now I don't have to carve out 20 minutes every couple weeks to go find a gas station and fill up. The overall time savings for me is significant.
I also think the roadtrip inconvenience is vastly overblown. Had an EV since 2018. It is our roadtrip car. It turns 12 hour roadtrips to 14 hour trips but if you plan around eating, it doesn’t extend any trip by much.
I still have a gas vehicle but I never want to use it for long trips.
In my only attempted road trip with my EV, the only charger available within any reasonable distance of our destination failed to charge the car due to a "firmware issue" that they had been aware of for quite some time but did not bother to fix. We were unable to charge there. Luckily, we had enough juice to make it back to the charging station at our halfway point by turning off the climate control.
So on a road trip that I only wanted to charge twice for, one of the stops didn't work. Oh, and on the way back we had to wait for access to the faster charger. Maybe not so overblown.
Yeah my concern with charging is more time and effort to get it to an open working charger than it is charge time.
It's very likely that we'll end up with tiered batteries in EV's before long. Some amount of the capacity will be fast charge/discharge, some amount of it will be capacity with slower charge/discharge with a higher density available.
Think of it like modern SLC backed QLC flash storage. As long as the usage profile fits inside of the cache, it runs as though the entire system is cache.
Fast charge speeds make electrified highways a more viable option. There are some projects in Europe using overhead lines (for trucks) or power rails embedded in slots in the road surface (usable by cars or trucks) so that vehicles can recharge while moving. Building a network of electrified highways is expensive though.
One way to reduce initial costs is not to electrify the whole length but to have, say, one mile of electrified road per every ten miles of highway. To get unlimited range from that 1:10 ratio, you need the vehicles to have batteries capable of absorbing power 9x faster than the vehicle uses it to maintain highway speeds.
I could see EVs having a large lithium ion pack and, if this technology is really that good, a smaller sodium ion battery to act sort of like a capacitor to smooth out intermittent charging.
I could also see low-capacity-high-power-density batteries being used in hybrids, though those need to be able to sustain high discharge rates as well as high charge rates, and I don't think the article mentioned discharge rates.
Charging private vehicles while they move sounds very complicated
Trolleybus is a technology from over 100 year ago.
Yes, but a primary advantage to private transportation is the ability to drive it in locations other than predefined routes in dense city centers.
I think the point they were making is that a suitable technology to deliver power to a moving vehicle has been around a long time, not that everyone should get rid of their cars and use trolleys.
If we combine a modern EV with 100 year old tram technology, you get the ability for a car to charge itself when travelling on roads that have a compatible system of overhead power lines. Having a huge pantograph on top of the car is kind of impractical, but powering cars from underneath via power rails embedded in slots in the road, like a full-sized version of those toy slot cars that used to be popular, is another option that's been tried on some roads in Sweden.
My point is that those solutions are impractical for any sort of widespread use.
This is one way to do it:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-f...
Overhead cables are simpler and cheaper, but not easily compatible with cars (which would need a comically tall pantograph to connect to the cables).
(Induction is a third option, but it's not really viable except in certain special cases because it's way more expensive, can't deliver as much power, and tends to be less energy efficient.)
Electrifying highways may sound expensive or complicated, but consider what the alternatives are. We could stick with fossil fuels. The U.S. burns about 4 million barrels of gasoline and about 4 million barrels of diesel a day, most of which is used to push cars and trucks around. That's not simple or cheap, we're just accustomed to the cost.
Another option is we switch to EVs and rely on big batteries for range. That kind of works, but battery manufacturing scale isn't there. It's also kind of wasteful to have a substantial portion of the vehicle weight being batteries. It means cars and trucks are heavier than they need to be, and they can haul less cargo.
If we could get to the point where, say, someone could drive coast-to-coast without ever having to stop to charge with only 30 or 40 kwh battery, that would be huge. It would reduce EV costs dramatically, it would reduce average vehicle weight, and you might even get better performance.
(This wouldn't completely eliminate the need for some long-range vehicles for areas not served by electrified highways, but for most uses it should be fine.)
imagine this!
Have short charging strips at traffic lights then prioritize lanes with cars that dont need much charge.
That's an option, though I think the amount of time cars spend at stop lights is so highly variable that it'd be hard to make that practical. Also, in-town driving is usually short range anyways. For that, having a 100 mile or even a 50 mile battery is plenty, and people can charge overnight at home. (And yes, ideally apartments ought to have EV charging stations.)
Where people are more likely to need the extra charge is on the long country roads between major cities. Probably a high priority could be on the major highways going into and out of cities, as those are the roads people are likely to use for long daily commutes.
Two minutes is about the amount of time it takes to fill my ICE car, so yeah, that'd be nice.
Yeah but do you have a gas station at home so it's "always full"? That's really nice ;)
You certainly can, provided you have a truck, and a DOT certified fuel trailer, and a transfer pump.
That system also allows you to participate in oil futures as an end user, not to mention it lets you keep your generator up and running for a very long time.
Downside is, modern e10 gasoline tends to adsorb water from the air over time, so fuel isn't stable long term. Most guys doing this are running diesel cars/gensets for that reason.
The model is, go to a truck depot with a 300 gallon trailer, fill up trailer and truck, park the trailer at home. Then fuel the truck off the trailer until it needs to be filled again, repeat. Do understand that, you can get a larger tank, but anything over 1000 gallons requires a placard/permit to haul around. That's in a single tank, so, in theory, a legal length 5th wheel trailer could have multiple tanks under that and be compliant. If you want the tanks attached to a vehicle itself, the maximum size is 150 gallons, hence why semi trucks have multiple fuel tanks that are smaller than that.
Really the only difficulty is finding a place nearby that is willing to sell that much fuel to an individual.
Is running a generator for long periods cost effective? If someone lived where the grid wasn't reliable, and could make the initial investment for all this fuel storage stuff, why not do solar?
Usually it's a backup thing, not a 24/7 thing. If you're really out in the sticks, solar/battery/genset is a very likely complete system. I know of a couple places way up north in Saskatchewan that have what amounts to a mining village running off a big portable genset backed up with batteries, and one of them I know was just on a very big genset, and they were able to pay for a battery bank by downsizing their generator significantly due to the disparity between peak load and average load. I'd share the article I read about it, but, in spite of my normally excellent google-fu, I've been unable to find it.
Either way, people forget about this, because if you have any sort of power generation, doesn't matter the method, if you go over capacity, you have brownouts/blackouts/grid failure/etc. What is deployed now, for the most part, is sufficient genset capacity to ramp into peak load, and most of it is under-utilized the majority of the time. Batteries eventually pay for themselves because of this, as they allow for peak load handling in addition to allowing generating capacity to stay online and remain profitable outside of peak load events. It really is revolutionary.
More or less, gridscale batteries are what dams/reservoirs were to water systems, and if you consider the impact of us as a species being able to save water for later use at-will, the promise we're looking at is going to really change the way we live.
"You mean I can't just drive the car? I need to think about how to find fuel for it every couple of days? And then I have to drive there and hope nothing explodes?"
Not sure I follow here. Can you elaborate?
Are you saying the the demand for sodium batteries for power grid backup is going to be high vs supply such that they're not going to make it into cars anytime soon? Isn't one of the Chinese EV makers starting to use sodium batteries?
Yeah I am thinking grid applications will take up most of the available supply for the next few years. That charge/discharge speed makes it perfect for helping to stabilize the grid, frequency regulation, as well as for replacing peaker plants. Lithium batteries are already being used for these two applications but I think these sodium batteries would be better.
Large scale grid project are planned years in advance so unlikely to eat up all the production as factories will need a constant demand source to clear inventory and have regular cash flow so I think home batteries like Tesla powerwall are going to have big boom soon specially as people getting paid less and less for their home solar output from the grid. If I am not wrong chinese largest battery manufacturers have started looking at home batteries as some car manufacturers were complaining about not enough demand for ev.
Depends on the production economics, how fast they scale, and what issues are discovered in real world use. There is some risk for everyone with new tech.
2 mins to charge a 40 kWh battery is 1.2 MW. I can't see that happening any time soon.
And I just don't think it's needed.
You are almost certainly not charging from 0->100%. It's probably more like 10%->90% which gives you 32kW to charge. We currently have 350kW chargers on the market, they'd do that in ~6 minutes.
At some point trying to get 2 minutes vs 6 minutes is just silly nit picking.
Just install an SMR at every gas station. Problem solved! :P
Needs say 720kW delivery for those two minutes (need higher if counting inefficiency losses).
Note that Tesla 's V3 Superchargers provide a maximum of 250kW. I've assumed a 30kWh battery charged to 24kWh (80%), because the spec for a new Nissan Leaf is 59kWh battery for 385km driving range.
Yeah we are for sure talking about the future here. There are already vehicles capable of handling 350kW chargers. Probably not too crazy to think that could double in the next decade.
But I am definitely not expert on this.
The main blocker with ev charge speeds now is the charging station capacity though, no?
Having said that - if we can get cheap and safe batteries installed within the charging stations, this would make for an awesome improvement
Most charging stations already have lithium batteries installed as a buffer for the grid, and those batteries tend to be safer designs since there's no weight/density penalty for fixed infrastructure. Sodium batteries would just make charging stations cheaper to build.
A lot of people tend to think of the ideal charging station as a gas station, where lots of cars go to quickly add range. But gas stations have large capacity because of their disadvantages. Ideally if they were safe, cheap, and compact, wouldn't you want gas stations everywhere? I'd love to have a gas station at home, in every parking garage, and at every scenic viewpoint on the road. The reason we don't have that is because gas stations emit toxic vapors and have giant tanks of combustible liquid. They need tanker trucks to regularly refuel them. Charging stations don't have those problems, which is why you can make them much smaller and put them almost anywhere. You don't even need a grid connection. Solar + batteries works in places where land is cheap.
This falls in line with a plug in hybrid being an excellent alternative to evs for most people. 30-50 miles of driving around town for work an errands, with an ICE for the occasional longer trip. Almost all driving will be electric without the charge anxiety.
My hesitation with hybrids is that I keep all the associated maintenance costs of an ICE engine. Now I have two power trains and energy systems to maintain instead of just one.
Well, hybrids sometimes get to replace the transmission with EV bits, like Toyota's system. Imagine an engine and exhaust system; now multiply the complexity by 100 and you have a modern transmission. Toyota hybrids (and GM/Chrystler/Honda) replace all that with a single planetary gearset, or with Honda, one clutch.
Other systems, think Volvo, pop the EV bits in the back of the car and replace where the drive shaft used to be with batteries. That seems like a decent trade to me as well. Still have a transmission, but at least it's not purely additive.
AND one man's added complexity is another's redundancy. If the charging module goes bad in a hybrid, you can still drive. Or if you run out of gas.
All that said... I still prefer EVs to hybrids. Do one thing, do it well, I say!
Modern transmissions can’t be two orders of magnitude more complicated than a modern ICE. If they are then I need to get into transmission design. An automatic transmission is basically just a series of planetary gears anyway. I would expect the marginal complexity between an ICE transmission and a hybrid transmission to be within a multiple of 2, but closer to parity. They’re both extremely reliable but an EV transmission (gearbox) will be even simpler.
I dunno, maybe 100x was an exaggeration, but not by much! Take a look at this transmission from 2007. They haven't gotten simpler. Lot's of cars are sporting 10-speeds these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_transmission#/media/...
The number of speeds is a function of the number of planetary gearsets. They’re just connected in series. More speeds isn’t more complex, it’s only a larger part count. By the time the transmission is computer controlled and has two speeds it’s as complex as it’s going to be.
Modern ICE are also extremely complex. Turbo systems, sensors, air management, heat management, the list goes on.
So yeah, a modern transmission is complex but a modern ICE isn’t simple. By comparison they’re very similar in terms of complexity, the ICE possibly being even more complex.
I don't disagree with your posts greater point, but I disagree with this.
There is an endless amount of variable complexity in the engineering behind friction materials, actuation styles, the control systems within the computer control, the material selections.. the list goes on.
I mean entire branches of metallurgy were more or less founded in the pursuit of finding stronger alloys for gearbox work. entire branches of metrology were developed for the sake of gearbox failure analysis -- there is a lot of complexity.
It's stupid to get into a pissing contest between engines and transmissions, they're both astoundingly complex.
I don’t buy that transmissions are somehow unique or even exceptional in motivating improvements in design and materials science. The ICE will benefit from the same improvements and has even more opportunities to utilize those improvements.
The thing that mechanically totals modern crap cars (think cheap Nissans and Subarus) is often the CVT. Ford and GM have transmission problems pretty often. GP is totally right that the planetary eCVTs actually make cars way simpler. Look at Ford's (horrendous reputation with small cars) hybrids from the 2010s, lots of them running around with 300k on the clock.
A CVT is even simpler than an automatic. They may be less reliable but not necessarily more complicated.
You don't even need to limit it to the lower end models with Subaru. The top trim Outback and Ascent have a CVT these days. If you want an automatic transmission in your WRX, same thing - a CVT. Anyway, you're not wrong.
Look at a workshop maintenance manual to get a rough idea. One car I had, about a third of the book was dedicated to the automatic transmission. Auto transmissions are very complex.
Yes, in a past life I rebuilt automatic transmissions so I am familiar with their complexity.
Transmissions are complex but so are a lot of things. Internal combustion engines are more complex than transmissions.
Pages in a shop manual are a proxy for the complexity of service, not of the component itself.
But how often do you have issues with the engine. My last 3 cars never had a single engine issues for at least 175.000 miles. Its very rare today to have big engine issues.
It's the powertrain that's far more apt to be the problem. Hence a plugin hybrid generator style should be far simpler than a system with both an ICE and electric powertrain.
I'm not actually sure how many plug-in hybrids go for an all-electric power train, versus a dual power train.
I know the Chevy Volt had an all-electric power train, and the ICE is purely a generator that dumps power into the electrical system, and the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid has a dual power train, but I wasn't able to find a concise list of which hybrids have taken what strategy.
parallel versus series hybrid. Series will have ICE generate and the only thing attached to the wheels is electric motors. Parallel (like the prius) the electric motor and the ICE are connected to the wheels. There are reasons for both, but freight trains in the US are series. In my opinion, series is probably the best, since you can engineer the ICE to be as clean and efficient as possible at exactly 1 RPM setting - making them last longer to boot.
I apologize for forgetting the benefits of parallel hybrid systems, but i know there are some, including needing a smaller ICE, all things equal.
For most Toyota hybrids they use a single planetary gear set to combine electric motors and a gas engine into a single unit. That's the entire transmission. It's far more efficient than bolting a generator on an electric car.
For climate control, they are nearly identical to a gas Toyota.
The funniest part is that the way Toyota hybrid powertrains work, if either the ICE or electric motor doesn't work, you cannot go anywhere. It's LESS systemically reliable than either a purely ICE or purely electric powertrain, and yet STILL Toyota hybrids are some of the most reliable cars you can buy.
Their engineering is just that insanely conservative. They just make giant, absurdly understressed engines. You can pull a 2.5L 4cyl engine out of a Camry, designed to make 180 horsepower, replace only a few components, and make 400hp with the reliability you would normally expect from an engine built for endurance racing. They are super popular in drift racing leagues.
Clearly you're not buying quirky over-engineered German cars loaded with exotic but mostly useless luxury features. They are well built and last forever, but typically require very frequent tinkering to keep them working.
That is just a meme without substance. The ongoing maintenance cost of a mature Japanese ICE drivetrain is negligible compared to the overall operating costs of the whole car. There is a reason why Toyota hybrids are by far the most popular cars for Uber drivers.
Total cost of ownership of a Toyota hybrid is less than many other entirely ICE cars lol
True. I think people just over-estimate the cost of an ICE drivetrain. Yes, they have thousands of parts. But they don't cost anything to build. It's Japan's whole thing. You can get an entire Prius long block engine in a crate delivered for $2k. This is about half the cost of 1 headlight assembly from a Model S. Cost is not about complexity, it is about scale.
You do, but at least repair costs should be low because typically you won't put very many miles on that engine.
Suppose 90% of your miles are electric. After you've put 250K miles (400K km) on the car, you've only got 25K miles (40K km) on the engine. Rarely do you have significant engine trouble at that mileage.
Also, the engine design can probably be simplified if it's just acting as a generator. You don't need a turbo to provide extra bursts of power. Nor things like variable valve timing for good performance across a wide range of RPMs. Maybe you could even use an air-cooled engine like old VW Beetles and Porsches.
I wish they'd just sell/rent little trailers with a charging engine on them you could take on long trips.
I know that tesla's won't allow you to drive while charging the car. It throws an error if it's plugged in, so, that's a no-go without significant hackery.
That said, they certainly have tow-behind generators, and they're certainly available for rent, it's just without modification you'd have to stop in order to charge. I've seen people with a model X doing exactly this out in the desert. Seemed to be an ok solution honestly, because they were camping and had genset power for camping needs, assuming of course that the whole electricity while camping thing is something you're into.
Just buy a toyota hybrid and have 0 worries to 200k miles then.
One of the fuel injectors died at 190k miles in my Prius, so not quite 200k. At 210k now.
Only other thing is that it is consuming more oil now so needs topping up every few thousand miles.
A lot of maintenance items simply don't exist in a modern full hybrid. Typically there is no accessory belt, no alternator, no starter. Filters, coils, spark plugs and engine oil will last longer since the engine doesn't run nearly as hot (usually it's "atkinson" cycle) and isn't used constantly.
And brakes last longer, since they aren't used nearly as much.
Taxi drivers like Prius cars because their maintenance costs are low, not just because they are really efficient.
I'd avoid any car with two powertrains, but there are systems that have an all electric powertrain with the ICE being used as a generator instead. It is a simplified system that, if designed correctly, can allow all battery or all generator to move the vehicle.
Other than spark plugs, belts, oil changes and other such consumables I don't remember having to do any engine maintenance on my cars for the last 10 years. Of course, it helps that I am buyer of boring Toyotas and Hondas.
But all those costs are correlated with engine hours, in a hybrid used most of the time for commuting, ICE engine hours would be really low
Some hybrids don't, they just have a very small engine that charges the battery.
I believe that most people with a plug in hydrid actually forget to plug the car in, so the car is almost never in electric.
That is... debatable. The study that showed that came out of Europe, where a huge percentage of cars purchased new are fleet vehicles, and not owned by individuals/families. Why would I plug a company car in when I pay my electric bill but have a corporate card for gas?
Yeah, they seem like a nice solution. The good plug-in EVs are still too new and expensive for me, so I had an old ICE vehicle and an old EV. They were both actually the exact same car model in the same color even, the ICE and EV versions of it.
I like the idea of a hybrid, but I need around 100 miles to make it worth the transition for me, otherwise I'll just go all electric or stay part of the problem. I still need the EVs to come under 30k to make sense, as that's the upper limit I set on vehicle cost for the present.
My first EV was a Volt which had only ~30 miles of EV range before it switched to gas. I bought it because I was EV curious but worried about range and I got a crazy cheap lease from GM. I drove it for three years and did a few short road trips. When I returned it, my total driving stats: 99% on electrons.
Hybrids get a bad rep. It makes for such a difference: knowing that you don't need to worry about that 1%.
The argument against hybrids that's always resonated with me is that you get the maintenance costs of a gasoline engine with the upfront costs of a battery. I've owned a Leaf and found it relatively trouble-free but never a hybrid. Am I just buying into FUD there?
It's easy to like plug-in hybrids (I do), but it does feel transitional. As you pointed out, you have the potential for higher maintenance costs, _plus_ during electric operation, you carry the weight of ICE, fuel, fancy transmission, etc. which makes electric operation less efficient. And vice versa, during ICE operation you have a big battery and motor to carry around, reducing fossil fuel efficiency. I guess you could add a boiler and coal hopper for tri-modal steam operation.
One caveat is, depending on your workload, you might put only 25% of the time on the ICE per mile driven (since most short trips would be electric). I.e. if an ICE car runs the engine for 2,500 hours per 100,000 miles, a plug-in hybrid might only have run the engine 500-600 hours at 100k miles.
In the Voltec drivetrain when the ICE is running the whole battery system is complimentary to it, not a detriment. It is precisely what allows it to be efficient. It uses an Atkinson cycle ICE for higher efficiency, and then uses the electric motor to augment locomotion, and the battery as a "buffer" with regen, etc. I rarely use the ICE mode, most of my driving is within range, but when I do, it's very performant and efficient, and hard to tell you're switched to combustion if it wasn't for the noise. It still drives mostly like an EV.
And honestly, the ICE itself isn't very heavy -- nothing compared to a battery -- and as I said elsewhere, maintenance hasn't been an issue in the 5 years I've had mine. Oil change every 2 years (or more if you use the ICE a lot... I don't), that's it.
The heaviness argument is especially baffling to me. Carrying around a 60kWh battery pack that you only use for road trips is way heavier and less efficient. Most drivers are not using their whole battery pack in daily use, so it's just stupid expensive dead weight, much heavier than an ICE you use occasionally.
I want an ICE-less future as much as the next person, but it kinda pisses me off how EV purists who actually knew very little about the Voltec drivetrain basically got that product killed off. Emissions on roads would be drastically reduced if vehicles were switched to that model (which is not a PHEV like the other junk hybrids, but more of a range-assisted EV) without the very high cost and weight of large battery packs. Very much a "best is the enemy of the good" situation.
I'd like about 10kWh more in my Volt, and 6kW charging. Other than that, perfect car.
I used to think of it as transitional too, but 1% net use isn't really. That is a level that seems sustainable to me, perhaps even competitive after you subtract the production impact of an equivalent battery pack.
I've had a Volt since 2018 and there's basically been almost no "maintenance" on the ICE. Just an oil change every two years. Maybe I'm due for a coolant flush or something, I dunno. It has 120,000km on it.
The most maintenance on this car ever has just been the breaks, because like most EVs, they're prone to corroding because they don't get used as much due to regeneration.
The "ICE is a maintenance problem" thing is honestly kind of a bogus argument borne out by people's hunches, rather than reality. Most reliable vehicle I've ever owned, and, yeah, I am about 95% electric only on it.
That's interesting, I always assumed the brakes would be MORE reliable because there's essentially no wear on the brake pads.
Haven’t own an EV but I have done lots of research.
For the BMW i3 which is another series hybrid with more range, it seems 60% of owners think the engine isn’t worth it, but the rest love having the engine. There is no in between.
The original i3 had 80 mile range, the second generation 120, and the last 150. From what I saw in researching by the time the range was up to 150 the BEV only folks were loudest.
Prius are pretty well known for being cheap to drive for a long while no?
Sure, they are always going to be more complex than a full electric but good gasoline cars are don't have any huge maintenance costs for a good long while.
True, but they win despite that.
Why do people need 200 mile range for an EV?
For example, my daily mileage averages about 5 miles. As an errand-runner, a 30 mile EV would be very practical. The huge benefit of this is a smaller and cheaper battery, and the biggie - much less weight. Much less weight leads to much less tire/brake wear and tire/brake dust pollution.
I'd still have a second gas car for the trips.
Most people do not want to have to own two cars.
If you rarely need to take long distance trips you can rent a car that does it.
There are a wide variety of cars to suit various needs. There's a large place for a lightweight 30mi EV. Especially for people who don't want to pay the huge premium for a 7x times more expensive battery.
I feel like you answered your own question here. Having two cars is pretty expensive, if nothing else you have to pay for insurance for both.
Driving around yesterday, I noticed that most houses have a 2 car garage. The ones with a 1 car garage always have one or two cars parked in the driveway. I see one car garage homes obviously renovated to make them two car, or a carport added on for the extra car.
This was a lower middle class area.
Citroen Ami would be great for you. There are now cars built for this type of thing.
The average one-way commute for someone in the United States is ~28 miles. Most people would love your commute.
Some people (including myself) only need cars for long-distance trips where air or train travel is not feasible, and for most people, even if their car is mainly a grocery-getter, psychologically, they want to know they can drive across the country with it.
We road trip with our Tesla ~5 times a year and I never want to own an ICE car again.
The problem lies on electric grid capacity. If we're phasing out fossil fuel powered transportation, we will have to upgrade massivelly electricity productions well as in grid capacity.
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...
The way I think about this is that I use an L1 charger at home that draws 1500 watts about half the time (on a normal day).
That's ~= 15 light bulbs from the 1990's, or roughly 6 desktop PCs. I switched from incandescent to LED bulbs, and a desktop to a laptop, so that's almost enough to offset the EV's usage. Also, we have solar panels, and a house battery that can time shift our energy consumption.
A modern fridge and washing machine are both vastly more efficient, too.
Switching overnight is a silly scenario, and I agree we shouldn't pay much attention there.
The power grid also naturally grows from year to year. As more and more battery systems come online and are available to store and discharge power (your car, a household power backup system, solar, etc), the load on the grid will smooth out.
100 mile range battery - that’s about 30kwh or a whopping $1500 worth of battery cells. ICE won’t be able to compete to this.
that much range currently costs about $6000 for a Nissan replacement. Rumors are a longer range current EV battery like in the Ioniq is $50k to replace.
I don’t expect replacements to drop in price.
Also that’s just cell cost. It takes quite a bit to assemble a pack, plus profit margin.
p.s. I doubt that rumour, unless Hyundai really likes to milk their customers. Teslas largest packs are less than 20k. Small ones less than 10k (which is how much I save per year because power is cheap and gas is expensive here).
MBAs at car manufacturing companies will ensure that battery pack cost savings are NOT passed on to the consumer, don't worry about that.
We were supposed to hit $100/KWh on battery packs several years ago, but EV prices skyrocketed instead, despite literally being in the same plastic/aluminum shitbox where every car looks alike.
Cheap battery packs = higher margins for companies.
Prices have already moderated a bit with slumping sales.
From the article, these are estimated at 70 Wh/kg. Pretty abysmal for EVs, but the trade-offs likely aren't too undesirable for home battery backups or utility-scale batteries.
From what I can gather, 160 Wh/kg is currently possible with sodium-ion, maybe even a bit more in the future.
I still drive a low ranged early EV (2012 Leaf) and it still works very well for me (we probably get about 35 miles of real range per charge.) I would be delighted if I could replace the battery with something like this.
I worry that I’ll never see a compatible replacement battery with the tech though.
It would be really nice if there were a battery technology that could charge 100 miles in a few minutes, even if that meant you would be constantly charging on longer trips.
The problem is that these batteries are much heavier.
In my experience the miles they advertise are no where near the reality. My Model Y has never given me 320 miles on a charge and it's not like gas stations where you can hit one up at the last moment, on a trip you gotta start finding a charger once you hit around 20-25% charge left.