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

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

#351

Post by brnt »

tedd4u wrote: post #309
karmajunkie wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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.

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

#352

Post by rini17 »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #249
rini17 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#353

Post by elihu »

kube-system wrote: post #341
bufferoverflow wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#354

Post by elihu »

theendisney wrote: post #308
elihu wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

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

#355

Post by pfdietz »

donny2018 wrote: post #342
pfdietz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#356

Post by jillesvangurp »

YeBanKo wrote: post #331
jillesvangurp wrote: post #17

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.

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

#357

Post by mulmen »

robocat wrote: post #348
mulmen wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transm…

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.

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

#358

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

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.

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

#359

Post by salad-tycoon »

AustinDev wrote: post #276
genewitch wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ea…

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.”

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

#360

Post by jillesvangurp »

pfdietz wrote: post #157
quitit wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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