Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

newatlas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 396 posts

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#151

Post by LargeWu »

_yb2s wrote: post #81
alemanek wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#152

Post by LoganDark »

xaellison wrote: post #98
_yb2s wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Even today's charging can be severely lacking, imho

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#154

Post by LoganDark »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #141
chabons wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#155

Post by pfdietz »

davedx wrote: post #150
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #33

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 charg…

> 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 batte…

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.

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#156

Post by throwitaway222 »

proee wrote: post #144
throwitaway222 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#157

Post by pfdietz »

quitit wrote: post #146
jdewerd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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 tha…

> (3) Lithium ion batteries are currently reliant on Cobalt for their cathode.

Some kinds are. Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) batteries are not.

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#158

Post by EasyMark »

gpm wrote: post #101
xaellison wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i doubt if the batteries can handle the type of surge output as the superchargers require.

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#159

Post by jdewerd »

silisili wrote: post #133
alemanek wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

#160

Post by kayodelycaon »

pixl97 wrote: post #118
holoduke wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Post reply on HN