JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, unveiled the first mass-produced EV with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density than lithium-ion, its lower costs, simpler and more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performance could help accelerate mass EV adoption.
This is awesome news. Not because of the car, but because it builds the supply lines for an alternative battery chemistry.
People have been using lithium-ion batteries for home and grid storage, which is nuts if you compare it to other battery types. Lithium is expensive and polluting and only makes sense if you’re limited by weight & space. Cheaper batteries, even if they’re bigger/heavier, will do wonders to the economics of sustainable electricity production.
Compared to other battery chemistry types using lithium makes tons of sense.
Lead acid type batteries like sealed and AGM are cheap but not power dense and do not offer the same discharge ability that lithium offers without damaging the battery (AGM fixes this but it’s still an issue). Some lead acid batteries require continuous maintenance and vent toxic gasses which may be an issue depending on your encloser.
Nickel cadmium batteries solve a lot of issues that lead acid batteries are plagued with however they suffer from moisture intrusion issues causing self discharge. Nickel cadmium also suffers from memory effect which may completely ruin pour battery depending on your use. The elephant in the room with nickel cadmium is that it’s banned in some countries including the European union due to how toxic cadmium is.
Now with lithium, it’s a very energy dense battery which means you need less batteries to meet a capacity or you can fit more capacity into an encloser. There isn’t any electrolyte or water maintenance you need to worry about. You can discharge and recharge as you wish with minimal damage. Really the only downsides is that they do not like charging in the cold, are just as toxic as cadmium, and are much much much more expensive.
I agree that older commercialized battery types aren’t so interesting, but my point was about all the battery types that haven’t had enough R&D yet to be commercially mass-produced.
Power grids don’t care much about density - they can build batteries where land is cheap, and for fire control they need to artificially space out higher-density batteries anyway. There are heaps of known chemistries that might be cheaper per unit stored (molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and solid state batteries based on cheaper metals), but many only make sense for energy grid applications because they’re too big/heavy for anything portable.
I’m saying it’s nuts that lithium ion is being used for cases where energy density isn’t important. It’s a bit like using bottled water on a farm because you don’t want to pay to get the nearby river water tested. It’s great that sodium ion could bring new economics to grid energy storage, but weird that the only reason it got developed in the first place was for a completely different industry.
I find it interesting that, on a post about sodium ion batteries, your comment completely excludes them
The original comment was about lithium and their popularity for backup power. Sodium ion batteries are so new that you can’t purchase them yet (blueitte supposedly released the NA300 but I can’t find any in stock and it’s no longer on their site).
It wouldn’t be fair to compare a chemistry you cannot purchase and which it’s strengths and weaknesses haven’t been tested outside of controlled laboratory testing.
You can buy them right now, there’s more links in the 18650masterrace subreddit, but here’s just one:
https://srikobatteries.com/product/sodium-ion-18650-1250mah-50a-rechargeable-battery/
However good luck finding a BMS that works for it’s particular voltage range, don’t think AliExpress has any yet.
I haven’t seen any posts from those diy type folks experimenting with them yet. Sodium ion cells just became available within the last few months or so.
Fair point - I’m not really that good with the physical sciences personally so apologies for my ignorance
Probably because they’re new and the parent comment specifically referred to the cheaper, less energy dense battery types.
What about nickle-metal hydride?
Seems like some pretty big and numerous downsides lmao
Not just that, we don’t have enough lithium deposits atm to build enough lithium evs to last more than a few decades if we act smart (which we generally do not).
Yes, just what we need is more vehicles on the road that weigh as much as a tank but accelerate like a Ferrari. I’m sure that won’t cause any problems.