this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Grid storage only. But still cool
More grid storage means more capacity for renewables.
Exactly. Renewables plus grid storage is the way to ditch fossil fuels
You say that as if solving grid storage wasn't one of the most important problems humanity faces right now.
You will almost certainly see sodium-ion in cars. The Na batts already manufactured have a similar Wh/kg to Li batteries in EVs today. That's because Li has progressed further, and it takes a few years for new batteries to go into actual EVs. Manufactures don't necessarily use the top of the line batts, either, for cost or availability reasons.
If you feel a VW id.4 or a Hyundai Ioniq has sufficient range right now (or could have sufficient range if charging infrastructure was a better), then an Na batt will also be good enough. It'll also be cheaper. Those cars come off the assembly line with Li batts that are similar to the 160 Wh/kg that Na batts out of CATL were doing in 2021.
I admire your optimism and I hope you're correct. At least with the little "city commuters" it probably even makes sense. But lithium battery tech also continues to improve -- so catching up with 2021 is great, but the goalposts keep moving.
There will be an absolute limit coming from physics and chemistry, and lithium is a smaller, lighter ion. In the theoretical limits, it will absolutely be the winner.
But from a practical perspective, if Na-ion becomes light enough and (more importantly) cheap enough, it will probably win the economic game in the longer term.
Plus we can make Na-ion batteries in-situ elsewhere in the solar system without having to first finding concentrations of lithium -- so high tech space industry stuff will likely more towards Na-ion, which will fund some development.
Goalposts keep moving, but perhaps not in a useful way. A 10,000 Wh/kg battery would be amazing, but EVs will get along fine with 160 Wh/kg. Especially if they're cheap and made of abundant materials.
We're desperately in need of low-cost grid storage for all our high capacity renewables. Especially down in spots like Texas, where wind energy will send prices into the negatives for a few hours a day, then natural gas collusion jacks prices up into the quadruple digits, an industrial scale battery system would flatten the price curve.
I concur. The problem with Texas is that regulators and legislators are in the pockets of said natural gas companies. So it's very likely to occur in the places that don't need it before it occurs in Texas. Get on it, Vermont! ;)