should we take this with a grain of salt?
Na
It’s Cl…ear
😂
Definitely a geeky dad joke…. Which is the best kind.
So?
The tech involved seems plausible, it’s surprising no one has tried a mostly sodium battery with some lithium though. I hope something comes of it because it sounds like it makes a really good battery.
You can buy sodium batteries.
I am aware sodium batteries exist, this is a mostly sodium, hybrid lithium sodium battery. A new technology, according to them. That’s why I said I’m surprised no one has thought to put those two together specifically.
Yup. Sodium batteries are real. China is building more factories and converting LFP ones. 2026 is the big ramp up and prices should be going down the next couple of years.
There’s some BESS already online too.
If sodium even comes close it’s weird we didn’t try it first.
Edit: Although the article is actually about sodium-lithium hybrid batteries.
Sodium probably won’t replace lithium in mobile batteries: phones, laptops, ebikes, cars. Sodium is bulkier and less energy dense.
But, a world powered by environmentally friendly forms of energy will have peaks and troughs. Batteries could store grid power and work at night or when the wind isn’t blowing. There are already times in Australia where electricity is absolutely free because the sun is shining and solar cells are generating more energy than the grid needs. With enough batteries, Australia could presumably go 100% renewable.
Idk I’d rock an 80s style briefcase phone.
Could. But both the major parties are corrupted by the fossil fuel industry so there’s little chance.
Also the power companies would like artificially low supply to keep the prices high since most of them hold monopoly anyways.
Lithium is not scarce. The only issue with supply chains is China owns most of the lithium mines.
Also, the sodium batteries, while less energy dense, won’t ignite like Li. Good for home and utility storage, also they have many more cycles IIRC
Also while while i won’t hold my breath on if sodium becomes a thing this would kill two birds one stone by having some use for all the sodium created by water Desalination plants making them more sustainable to run as they could sell the sodium vs creating brine areas in the ocean that kill all the sealife.
Fingers crossed, friend.
It’s also insanely toxic, right? Like, disposing of it is a bit of an issue? I’m not super informed on all this but I’ve only ever read bad things about both mining it and disposing of it, though.
It’s actually used as a human drug for bipolar disorder.
So, not really comparable to arsenic or even lead, but also not harmless to ingest uncontrolled.
I remember some prof joked on their lecture, that they’ve been grilled once in EV industry after they presented the environmtal impact comparison between legacy car and EV that includes lithium mining, refinement, waste management cost and how many miles EV needs to offset such cost with its “green fuel” (spoiler: a lot). It was nearly decade ago and I don’t know their formula holds today, but it’s still plausible such negative externality being overlooked and remaining.
We crossed over. EVs are now universally more efficient to produce and use than gas cars and it’s not close. Something less than 10,000 miles on the vehicle.
The nice thing about batteries is that they can be recycled almost entirely in a closed loop cycle, so eventually we’ll reach a place where new batteries aren’t mined at all, but recycled from old
Idk how far into that we are currently, however there are recycling facilities kinda all over especially for ev batteries. They can also be reused for a while for other things, like home energy storage (like in place of a whole-house generator for blackouts if you are grid-tied, or solar storage for off-grid)
Mining it is also very challenging.
