> 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.
First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
121–130 of 135 posts
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .....
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#123Lithium 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…
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.
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#124Lithium 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…
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…
Why does a surplus of battery production exist when we have such a pressing need for grid level storage?
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
$13,000 / 6.8kW = just under $2,000/kW. Or did you mean W?
Sorry, you are right, $ per Watt.
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#128Hoping 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…
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.
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
#130My main interest with these kind of batteries is little to no fire hazard
Can you check how sodium reacts with water or humidity?
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.