Great, yet another new battery revelation that will never come to market. Why is this? Why do we constantly hear of these amazing, technical advances, but yet we never see any of it come to market?
- Lithium-Sulfur Batteries
- Solid-State Batteries
- Sodium-Ion Batteries
- Aluminum-Ion Batteries
- Silicon Anode Batteries
- Magnesium-Ion Batteries
- Lithium-Air Batteries
- Zinc-Air Batteries
- Flow Batteries
- Graphene-Based Batteries
Na4MnCr(PO4)3
Chromium is 5 times more abundant than Lithium in earth crust (0.01% vs 0.002%). Better, but not that much ?
"Regular" sodium-ion batteries with prussian blue has, it seems, the great advantage of not using any scarce elements. It would be nice to have a comparison between this solid state chemistry and the regular one.
Not sure it is a 1:1 equivalent, but this site[0] claims global chromium production is at 41 million metric tons while lithium is 180,000 metric tons. So, the supply chain already exists.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/598320/mine-production-o...
Chromium mining is crucial for the steel production industry because chromium is a key ingredient in the production of stainless steel. We've been hunting and mining it for a LONG time now. Stainless is important to so many preexisting industries, such as new construction, automotive, aerospace, and household appliances. Consequently, there have been shortages in the availability and mining of chromium and this has directly impacted the production capacity and quality of stainless steel in the recent market. Seems solid-state battery production will be in competition with these industries and I would hedge a bet that Stainless Prices will go high in the coming decades as a reflection of the pinch on chromium.
Can you recover chromium from stainless steel?
We're already recycling pretty much all the steel we can, so yes, but it's already factored into the global steel supply chain.
Yes, through electrochemical means. It's not super energy efficient though, it'd be much better to not put it into steel in the first place if you want to make batteries out of it.
Are there any alternative steel alloys that aren't used now for cost reasons that we'd see if there was a spike in chromium prices?
AFAIK there's no stainless steel without chromium. There are alternatives, like galvanizing or powdercoating.
I think if the price of chromium spiked enough, you'd just see more things move on to different materials. More aluminum, titanium, brass, bronze, etc. There are a lot of things made of stainless that don't necessarily have to be, simply because it's cheap and good enough.
During WWII Germany had limited access to chromium and cobalt so they developed alternative metallurgy for their engines etc. I know they nickel plated their cylinder bores. I’m sure there’s more detail available somewhere.
I went on a ride through the internet and saw some figures that lithium production would need to increase by 40X by 2040.
But that's still only 7.2 million tons/year.
I feel like the where are we going to get the lithium and but what about the environmental costs arguments to be kind of weak when you look at actual production numbers and compare the costs with other resources we consume.
The difference in their geochemistry is substantial so even if chromium isn't technically that much more abundant, it's significantly easier to mine.
The Gibbs free energy of formation for chromium oxides and chromite is much more negative than for lithium-bearing minerals so Cr compounds are thermodynamically favored to precipitate out of melts and solutions, forming minerals with high concentrations that then get pushed up by other processes. Li+, with its lone valence electron, just doesn't form strong bonds or highly stable mineral phases in comparison. On top of that the diffusion coefficients for Cr species in magmas and rocks are generally orders of magnitude lower than for Li. Cr gets locked into crystal structures early and stays put, while Li keeps migrating and diffusing in the form of water soluble minerals. There's also a whole biogeochemical cycle for Cr involving microbes that can concentrate it in sediments.
This is why I've been interested in the Graphene Aluminum batteries from GMG for so long. They are producing graphene in bulk without having to mine it. Aluminum is already extremely abundant as well.
I'm very optimistic because these solve so many battery issues at the same time, heat, rapid charge, sourcing.
Oh wow this is great technology. (Also surprised that it's driven by the UQ/rio-tinto. Hopefully GMG will learn from the failures of Tritium on the business side of things (as they are from similar stock))
Another difference is that chromates are wildly toxic...
Chromates are very rare in natural minerals and they’re mostly an industrial intermediate compound. Chromite is the common mineral converted to metal chromium for incorporation into alloys so the chromates are limited to the factory. Most other Cr bearing minerals contain chromium oxides.
Other industrial lithium intermediates are also toxic, as is the concentrated brine it’s often extracted from. Since it’s concentration is so low, most lithium extraction is pretty nasty.
Chromium is also being looked at for resistive thermal storage, due to the stability properties you mentioned. Doped chromia (Cr2O3) bricks act as both thermal storage elements and resistive heating elements up to 1800 C.
This is now my favorite hacker news comment
What are the processes for recovering Chromium (Cr) when recycling batteries after a few hundred cycles?
Is it Trivalent, Hexavalent, or another form of Chromium?
Chromium > Precautions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium#Precautions
Lithium has atomic number 3 and, along with Hydrogen and Helium, was present (at a much lower level) in the early universe. The Earth's crust contains about 20-70 parts per million (ppm) of lithium. It may be tedious to extract, but it is not like we will ever run out.
prussian blue
I recognized this as a paint color but didn't know this part. Fascinating substance, this was a very interesting Wikipedia rabbit hole:
Lithium has actually dropped in price by 80% over the last two years, so this part of the article is (currently) wrong:
“ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million.
This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent prices skyrocketing, putting the needed batteries further out of reach.”
Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2024/02/lithiu...
Yes, and conflate "totals" with proven reserves while failing to mention that people aren't really actively looking for more reserve as aggressively. But this is a PR piece for the University for which the standard problem is to magnify both the problems it avoid as well as the impact it produces.
But at its core, an anode free battery has a lot of desirable properties which make this engineer feat notable. Perhaps the most important is that the materials are readily available in a number of countries which could source their own raw materials to produce batteries. They also do not fail exothermically[sp?] when cell integrity is breached, that makes them a better battery for cars than the current Lithium ones.
So the next bridge to cross (and one so many battery breakthroughs fall down on) is what is the cost to produce batteries at scale. If, as we read yesterday they can get them down to $1/kWh then you'll be seeing a whole lot of these.
Just a side note, most quotes I got from companies installing solar panels on my roof ranged between $3/kWh to $4/kWh.
Two months ago I got 6.8kW installed on my house for $13,000CAD. Some of that was DIY, but I just bought the whole system retail.
So just under $2 CAD/kW installed and running - inverter, licensed electrician and permits, everything. (That's under $1.50 USD/kW)
The panels are now cheaper than when I bought them too :)
Where did you get the kit from?
I've been considering it, and I figured $2 CAD/kW is the 10-year break even point for me, which would be amazing since you can get a 10 year interest free loan for it.
I googled around for a while, and found pioneersolarenergy.com. Super helpful, good shipping price, etc.
As well as the 10 year interest free loan check if your province has any rebates. The "Greener Homes" grant gave me $5k (So I only have $8k on the loan). It just made 1000 kWh in June, I'm super happy.
$13,000 / 6.8kW = just under $2,000/kW. Or did you mean W?
Sorry, you are right, $ per Watt.
Your units are wrong, kw not kwh. And your decimal place is wrong, the going rate is around $3 per watt.
And I'm not sure how you were trying to relate that to battery storage.
I believe the person you responded to was talking about battery storage for solar set ups.
There is zero chance right now of any battery storage being in the $3/kwh range. Even in the manager-of-the-battery-factory-took-some-home-for-cost situation.
That would be one of these [https://www.amazon.com/LiFePO4-Battery-Perfect-Applications-...] for $3, if we were only talking batteries. No MPPT or line chargers, etc.
That’s about what the plastic and internal bus components are going to cost for that battery, with no actual battery internals.
Solar panels have indeed become much cheaper, although it is important to distinguish between energy "provided" and energy "stored." Which why the combination is so important. It is often great to look at solar in terms of a "solar day" which is defined as the hours during which the panels deliver peak capacity. On my house, there is about 6kW of solar panels, and under optimum productions they produce for 5 hours in a day, so a total of 30kWh. What gets to the house or the grid is reduced by efficiency losses and the difference between performance under "standard test conditions"[1] and what is actually their environment. My house reliably produces just over 5kW at its peak or about 25kWh in a solar day.
In California, if you are tied to the grid as my system is, you are still at the mercy for how much the power company will credit you for power you generate vs charge you for power you consume. That has been a source of argument hear for the last 20 years. With sufficient local storage, you can completely disconnect from the grid and that removes this pricing power of the power company over your energy production. Something I hope to do within the next 5 years.
[1] This is sort of the MPG equivalent rating for solar panels, good for comparing panels to other panels but bad for guessing how much power they will produce for you.
Bloomberg NEF is actually making the point that we're heading for battery oversupply next year: https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt...
Not just by a little bit, but by a huge margin. They are predicting prices will come down and that especially new, costly batteries will have a hard time competing with the more established manufacturers dropping their prices.
We'll make more batteries in the next few years than we have ever made. Production is growing from slightly below 1 twh/per year to multiple terawatt hours per year. Bloomberg NEF puts demand for next year around 1.6 twh/y and is tracking 7.9 twh/y of investments related to new factories. Not all of those will get built but that's a lot of capacity and lithium demand. Yet prices are dropping, as you pointed out. That's because there's plenty of lithium and we don't have a shortage anymore.
Despite a lot of lithium being in places like Chile and Bolivia, Australia is actually the top producer of it. Chile is about to loose its number 2 position to China: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-worlds-largest-l...
All this is of course before you start considering battery chemistries that don't use lithium. Sodium ion is looking pretty good right now. No lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc. And used for some cheap cars and grid storage already. Especially for grid storage, lithium based batteries aren't necessarily the most obvious thing to use.
Why does a surplus of battery production exist when we have such a pressing need for grid level storage?
If the "oversupply" does occur, it would likely be temporary due to limits on the quantity that can be deployed per year. Grids in the US at least have very long interconnection queues. The technical and regulatory challenges that are limiting the deployments are being worked on.
Aside from that, prices can only dip for so long because investments were made assuming a specific price. Too much production means that prices go down and the investment becomes unprofitable which is only sustainable for so long - producers will either go out of business or cut back on production to lower their burn rate (at which point prices will go back up). Basic supply/demand curves tend to ignore the impact of pricing on investment. Larger suppliers might keep prices lower to try to acquire more market share but even they don’t have unbounded ability to run a loss forever and more importantly they’ll have a limited amount of capacity anyway which will cause prices to go back up anyway as the rest of the market cuts production.
Yeah. Prof Meng talking about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAJSH_raW8&t=858s
Are the figures wrong, 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million? If not, surely sodium will be easier to obtain, in the long run.
Yes, interesting article and battery design, but the university PR folks certainly overplayed the "problems" with lithium. Not unusual.
it's a mere correction, it's still higher than pre-covid
I don't know much about electricity but surely an anode is necessary for electrons to flow?
Sayeth Wikipedia, "Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged."
Ok. I'm still not entirely clear on it but it makes some kinda sense.
The other thing is how is that a benefit?
Why should I be excited that "it creates its metal anode the first time it is charged"?
I mean this question in ELI5-fashion not in a disparaging one.
Better energy density, since there is no permanent anode structure needed. See chart "b" from the article
cheaper to manufacture with less parts, since anodes are usually an expensive part made from expensive materials and are hard to manufacture
The two replies here don’t really get at _how_ it’s better: it’s because you don’t have material in the battery that exists simply to be an anode. In effect, it’s more efficient by weight.
Yea, it also confused me - "anode-free" suggests there is no anode, and to best of my understanding a battery needs two electrodes so there will be a circuit for the current to flow. The full Wikipedia quote is: "An anode-free battery (AFB) is one that is manufactured without an anode. Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged."
It's sort of like "serverless" ;)
I think the way to understand it is that there isn't a special layer in the battery foil for making the anode. It's all chemically the same.
I mean, with the server-less analogy, it is sort of like the fact that you don't manage the creation and destruction of the VM, someone (something) is though.
Serverless is a buzzword for the executive class.
You’re telling me I could run my code AND fire all the employees managing my servers!
Serverless has become "you provide a function that handles request/response, we run and scale it on our infra"
You essentially only handle business logic, not the "serving" part of the server, but IMO it's not a buzzword. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because I want control and fear lock-in, but there's real meaning behind it, no?
The anode is the part of the battery that ions flow to when charging the battery. To save weight as much as possible, you can imagine a case where the anode is only the ions that moved to the anode. This is what "anode-free" means. When the battery has charge, there will be some sodium metal as the anode. When the battery is fully discharged, there will be no anode, because the sodium has moved into the cathode.
Lithium extraction is also environmentally damaging, whether from the … brine extraction that pumps massive amounts of water to the surface to dry.
I thought the issue with evaporative brine projects was mainly the water use in generally water scarce areas. There are direct extraction technologies that are better. Sodium you can just let the ocean evaporate in ponds, although this destroys wetlands (see for example a bunch of these around the SF Bay, some being restored to their native state).
Lithium is also extracted via ocean water evaporated in ponds. You do need a bed with a high concentrated amount of lithium near the ocean, those are not uncommon.
Of course doing that you get far far more sodium .....
Hmm, i assume desalination could get the sodium out and also give us fresh water, maybe another incentive for desalination.
Right, I recall a question of native populations with limited access to water and then water shows up suddenly but for extracting the lithium.
With lithium they are pumping deep water up to the surface, not adding any. The water holds the lithium and is part of a massive ancient aquifer.
There are several issues with brine extraction, including intensive water usage, and atmospheric pollution (the extraction releases e.g. sulphur dioxide).
I agree it’s a little overstated, but regardless, Sodium and Chromium are much simpler to use.
This is a good overview on some of the environmental impacts: 'Environmental impact of direct lithium extraction from brines' (2023) in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, PDF: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-022-00387-5.pdf
Doesn't tell me anything about Energy Density, Volume, or Recharge Cycle.
These monthly breakthrough announcements are getting annoying. Seems that "several hundred cycles" was good enough to publish this one.
Eh, we start with 100 cycles and then someone has an idea and we go to 1000 and so on. Interesting times we live in.
Even at 100 cycles it’s likely cheaper for some applications - i.e. helicopters.
"demonstrates a new sodium battery architecture with stable cycling for several hundred cycles" So nowhere near enough for grid storage (depending on their definition of "stable".)
The plot shows ~400 Whr/kg and ~800 Whr/L densities. For grid storage that is fine.
The paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01569-9 is unfortunately behind a paywall.
We will see. Battery technologies live or die on whether the nasty, complicated surface reactions are truly reversible over discharge cycles at the sizes needed to be practical...
400 Whr/kg is competing for the highest energy density applications that can run on rechargeable batteries. Things that fly. Cars. Not grid storage.
I mean if it was otherwise suitable for grid storage it's not a downside obviously, but at those energy densities it can be inferior in terms of cost and/or cycle life and still be commercially viable in other significant markets.
Not to mention this is research, it doesn't have to directly result in a commercially viable product.
Research deals with theory. Not everything in research is immediately practical. Lots of engineering, tweaking, and testing goes into market-ready products. This announcement is an achievement for science, not a consumer-ready product.
Research deals with theory.
There is research that deals only with theory, but empirical research deals with practice, even if not always pragmatics.
From the article: it was tested only to 100 cycles.
So this is experimental and a product version won't be available for a year or (likely) longer. And as products naturally niche into longevity, weight, capacity, and other categories, those metrics will become relevant at that point. Until then, it's just experimental results with metrics relevant to previous experimental results.
My main interest with these kind of batteries is little to no fire hazard
Can you check how sodium reacts with water or humidity?
Strawman. No one is talking about pure sodium.
The lithium batteries are not more flammable than other batteries because of the lithium, but because most of them use organic electrolytes instead of water-based electrolytes.
A discharged sodium or lithium battery does not have metallic sodium or lithium.
Fully charged sodium or lithium batteries contain the sodium or lithium as metals, which would react in a similar way with air or water, if the battery would be cut to expose them to the environment.
This is why we are very careful when we use table salt.
There are already varieties of lithium batteries with little (LFP) to no (LTO) fire hazard. LFP is cheap, too, which is a nice bonus.
Realistically, when are we going to see a consumer grade lithium battery replacement?
2040. There is a lot of investment in lithium batteries that needs to earn profits first.
Cars are already shipping with Sodium based batteries, and you can buy the cells yourself on Alibaba
https://electrek.co/2023/12/27/volkswagen-backed-ev-maker-fi...
https://www.alibaba.com/premium/sodium_ion_battery/---------...
Hoping this is a genuine breakthrough, but expecting the first comment to point out some important thing this battery can’t do in the real world…
It's a publication from a research group on a new approach they're working on. The more interesting question if there are any aspects of this that could make it unexpectedly easier to translate to the real world lol. The abstract ends with "This cell architecture serves as a future direction for other battery chemistries to enable low-cost, high-energy-density and fast-charging batteries" - it's important fundamental research and exploration.
At some point universities should really rethink how they do PR around research - at the least try and tamp down on headlines that read like something out of some grifter startup instead of a research lab
At a very very high level, whenever you hear solid state battery technologies that sound kind of g whiz, a fundamental skepticism you should have is that it seems to be easy to make a really investor-targeted small cell Solid state battery.
Most of the lithium-based solid state battery companies that we heard about in the hype cycle: All had really good looking high cycle, high density solid-state batteries that were basically you know the size of a watch battery.
But they never could scale. And that I mean they just couldn't make the large size battery that modern EVS use. And they also couldn't seem to scale production in any sort of married form factors of batteries in use in the world.
Nevertheless this seems very very promising.
Can't wait for this to never go further than this single published paper.
Yeah don’t have your hopes up, but Shirley Meng is well known battery researcher, it’s not complete vaporware.
The thing is that researchers just have to come up with stuff that works, not stuff that is viable.
One will hope this becomes commercially successful and the dirty process of creating and building lithium batteries goes away completely. Hope we become less dependent on China and other countries with shady labor practices (ie, child labor, minimal to no safety regulations).
Yeah I've seen too many of these overhyped academic announcements that never make it commercially because they overlooked some small but critical aspect of manufacturing. Production is HARD
Disclaimer: I really hope these batteries make it.
Why file a patent in UC San Diego
Grayson Deysher - the author of the paper and the experiment - is a PhD candidate at UCSD (go tritons!)
with stable cycling for several hundred cycles. So an order of Magnitude less than useful batteries.
Typical lion cells are only rated for 500-1K cycles too.
Is this very specific to sodium state battery?
pretty cool...but when it comes to batteries what matters is scale and total cost. it doesnt matter if the elements are cheaper, are you introducing a product that is significantly better or cheaper that the current status quo (see the rise of LFP)?
can you use existing factories and manufacturing techniques or do you need to invent or build those. we've started hearing about solid state batteries about 15 years ago and we still dont have any at a big enough scale. if solid state batteries do takeoff it will probably takeoff first in electric aviation and supercars which can hide the cost due to a more expensive products and the need for higher density
Preprint of paper here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/api-gateway/chemrxiv/assets/orp/...
It seems more happens in these anodes than in the electrolyte. How’s that possible?
Good the abundance of sodium and its stable state is going to give us a huge potential for power storage. I have so many potentially spicy pillows in my house I'll be glad to have it swapped for sodium any day.
Some discoveries founder in the stage of figure out how to go from a science experiment to a process to manufacture actual batteries. Sometimes there are technical or economic issues that prevent commercialization.
Most of the research on this has only started in the last 10 years or so and it does take time to work out the kinks.
Even within the common Lithium-ion batteries, there have been constant improvements but it’s easy to miss the changes over time.
“Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose” https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
Did you know Tesla Megapacks have declined in price by 44% over the past 14 months? Sometimes the changes become very visible.
Seriously for real?
Why did the price of the cars not drop accordingly? Curious.
The price of their cars did drop.
For example, look at the price of the Model Y over that time period.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221129054722/https://www.tesla...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240701220914/https://www.tesla...
They have ? Tesla has made aggressive price cuts in the last year or so .
Yes, partly it was to simulate demand, but they can only afford to do so because of their costs going down.
Tesla has not been spending on a lot of new models recently , but they have been spending heavily on making them cheaper and better.
Rivian, ford GM and every other non Chinese car manufacturer has been loosing money per car expect Tesla for a reason
Supply and demand
EOS Energy (zinc-bromide grid-scale batteries), just christened their first automated manufacturing line and have entered mass production.
They've been around forever, originally with zinc-air batteries. That must have failed somehow.
Does this comment have a purpose?
If they're still rolling out new manufacturing lines, they are clearly still kicking and have investors who believe they have a viable product.
Did they have to move on from one technology? I mean I've never heard of them before but if you say so, that's not really that surprising with how fast with battery technology is evolving.
Yes, it's that they have a history of promoting a technology that never arrived.
Use of bromine doesn't sound terribly practical.
Because the market is made up of selfish human beings. First they don't care for long term environmental consequences. If that is not enough, then they use fossil because their enemies are using, and not using it means getting destroyed today.
What this person said isn't even true, what are you talking about?
because the need for them has spiked resulting in an unprecendented level of R&D going into them in recent years? And R&D into tons of different approaches is a good thing, actually? And because it's frankly a young field of research? This is a publication from academia - of course they're trying new things! That's the entire point! That's their job!
The incessant press releases suck but PR people gonna PR.
Sodium-Ion is actually starting to ship. It's possible to buy 18650 cells. Not exactly competitive yet, but at least it's not vaporware.
One thing to note is that "coming to market" means being able to compete in the market.
And this is tough. There are only so many market niches, and if some competing technologies turn out to be better your product has no place.
This is the tragedy of engineering: most technologies, even technologies that "work", end up failing, because in any niche there can be only one winner. I'm sure if you've worked on new technologies you've experienced this, perhaps on every technology you've ever worked on.
Propaganda ? Someone has an agenda. /s
TBH, there are a lot of "news" with conditional: might, could etc. The sad thing is that they generate (spam) discussions on HN.
But hey, after all, maybe that's their purpose.
Umm, a good number of those have hit the market.
Graphene anodes are pretty bog standard at this point in LiPo batteries.
Magnesium doping has also found its way into high density NMC batteries.
Sodium-ion batteries are currently being manufactured by CATL and in the ramping up phase.
You aren't seeing them because the chemistry of these batteries is usually only called "lithium ion" or "Sodium Ion" the various other chemicals are thrown into a soup of special sauce to raise battery density, cycle life, charge speed, etc.
If you're only interested in technologies ready for imminent public distribution, you should probably ignore coverage about early research and check out press releases from battery manufacturers. If that's not good enough... try amazon?
One reason seems to be that lithium-ion batteries are nowhere near as expensive and difficult to manufacture as advocates of the other battery technologies seem to want us to believe. Basically, the other batteries don't come to market because there is no market.
And as the other poster suggests, quite a bit of R&D does make it into existing devices in one form or another. All of these technologies are worth exploring, but the notion that replacing present lithium battery tech is super urgent is not actually correct.