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lots of exciting battery developments in general, especially if donut labs by some miracle is not a fraud.

it was a bit worrying as there was somewhat of a stagnation in battery chemistry, but having non toxic/dangerous battery storage is going to make off-griding so much more attractive.

technically speaking, if every household had solar panels and batteries it would not only be cheaper than the grid it would also have complete independence from oil fluctuations, weather disasters and centralization.

now if you combine that with electric cars that charge off your off-grid system and transition to eletric appliances instead of something like gas the benefits keep stacking all while being pretty much net neutral post manufacturing.

As an owner of household solar panels, there are weeks, sometimes even months with very little solar products, especially during the colder months.

While I don't regret getting them, they are absolutely not good enough to be the only solution.

I think if energy storage is cheap enough and solar panel pricing continues to go down (especially with this new tech) a time where you can have 10 days of reserve and 50%+ overproduction is not that far away IMO. Small 2-3 floor apartments especially can benefit from a mini local grid, each roof + shared land is a lot of sun real-estate.

It doesn't have to be perfect a generator with ~7 days of fuel can go a really long way for any kind of low solar activity event. 7 days of fuel is roughly half the size of the generator.

At the end of the day it's math, figure exactly what is needed, if it works out then great, if not, continue waiting.

yeah solar is largely geographic dependent

however in the southern hemisphere - solar is a win .

Southern hemisphere receives roughly the same amount of sunlight as northern.

Solar is a win everywhere with a sunny weather.

I have had a set of panels on my roof for years, but I think going off grid is overrated unless it becomes drastically cheaper than being on grid.

Grid level batteries are going to be a more efficient way of using the same materials to achieve a particular level of supply. It's just at the moment there's a "competency arbitrage" where infrastructure is way slower than building it yourself.

I can attest that. I installed panels on my house, they are not enough to cover my electrocity needs, let alone gas (heating). Even if it would be enough to cover electricity needs, the cost was (upfront) more than the equivalent of the next 20 years in bills.

To be fair, many of the costs are because of high demand (artificial, because the gov. mandates it to be installed) and lots of work to be integrated in the national grid. But as things are right now, it not economically convenient (at least where I live) and for what I have heard, in other places is not much different.

People just don’t realise how energy intensive a manufacturing economy is.

Which is fine if your fantasy includes offshoring all of that and shipping the finished products in to the local market.

Which, no matter how you slice it, has to be more energy intensive than manufacturing locally.

The globe looks radically different when presented in transport-energy-cost-distance.

Bulk container ships are crazy efficient. It makes more energy sense for a nation like France to trade with the eastern US than it does with Hungary.

They’re crazy efficient because they use bunker fuel and have zero legal requirements because they all flag up as a country with no laws.

I’d like to add construction materials to the list of energy intensive products. Glass, bricks, rockwool and cement.

nothing stops them from also using swarms of solar panels on their roofs to at minimum offset the energy needs, localized power plants to save on transmission costs, raw high voltage power.

Hetzner does this!

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if every household had solar panels and batteries

High density housing is unlikely to be compatible with that.

Also rental dwelling owners and people with limited economic resources tend to be less likely to make those kinds of capital investment.

> High density housing is unlikely to be compatible with that.

To the level of total energy independence? Indeed. But even an apartment can get some PV.

There's even PV specifically designed for renters in apartments.

> Also rental dwelling owners and people with limited economic resources tend to be less likely to make those kinds of capital investment.

Not so: https://www.lidl.de/p/tronic-balkonkraftwerk-860-wp-800-w-to...

As per my first line, 800 W is not going to be total energy independence.

But it's €249, cheaper than all but the cheapest phones.

In the best case, it can pay for itself in the first year; though obviously a north-facing apartment gets almost nothing from it.

They are not forced to make those kinds of capital investments if they're unable - they'd be no worse off than today. Those who do get cheaper electricity (in lieu of whatever they could've otherwise spent that capital on).

However, it's the onus of the gov't (regional or federal) to create the investment needed for large, industrial scale solar and battery storage. That's what taxpayer money should be spent on.

> they'd be no worse off than today.

They will, assuming the people that went off grid stop paying for it. As fewer people pay for it the costs per capita grow

The cost of the grid has already been paid for. Upgrades to the grid has a higher per-capita cost, if there's fewer people paying for those upgrades today.

But they're not worse off, because the upgrades are better. For them to be worse off, the upgrades they pay for has to be worse than what they got today.

Maintenance costs money as well.

yah, this is more for low density/mid density housing, I am sure the roots of 2-3 floor apts should be more than enough to sustain it as energy needs of apartments are lower to begin with. They can also bleed them into parking lots and have cover from the sun.

Even at 2-3 stories, I'm skeptical that there's enough roof surface area to provide enough solar panels to individually cover the electrical use of all the inhabitants. Many 2-3 story apartment buildings don't have parking lots at all - and it's a common pro-density urbanist political project to remove the requirements to build one, because it discourages car use and also makes projects cheaper - but even if they did, a small apartment also means less surface area for solar panels over the parking lot. And once you're in a building with multiple households, that means that the solar panels - and the amount of energy every individual household draws from them - has to be managed communally. I'm glad I don't have to justify the power use of my home server to a group of my neighbors concerned about managing a common resource, and just pay my power bill to the de-facto-monopoly state-regulated electric utility company.

You would be surprised how little power european households consume, but we do have central/gas heating so the math doesn't always work out perfectly. 100-200W for lights/tv/fridge, oven/induction/kettle for 2h ~2000W a day. That's something the solar panels can most definitely handle, of course this is on case by case basis. I consume 300W at idle as I have a home server :)

Apartments have walls too, but we're getting into a territory where it might start becoming ugly.

Can put panels on walls too.

If the local climate can support going off-grid then batteries makes absolute sense.

The problem starts when you need the grid for some amount of the year or in periods over several years. As consumer we would like to pay 10% of an annual electrical bill if we can produce the remaining 90% ourself. The grid however want to have be paid for investments in power plants and transmission, and to them, costs associated with consumption is only one part of the bill. If the customer consume less energy, and the costs in infrastructure is the same or greater, then they will continue charge the consumer for the full year. In that scenario, you may only consume 10% but your bill will remain at close to 100%. As a consumer one could decide to go without those 10%, but that in itself can be dangerous or expensive, in which case paying 100% may still be rational.

>technically speaking, if every household had solar panels and batteries it would not only be cheaper than the grid

Absolutely not, economies of scale. To say nothing of the cost incurred when an issue appears with your installation (lightning strike, water damage, etc) would be much higher.

The problem is that the grid doesn’t really get economies of scale.

Just the grid is often up to 50% of people’s electricity bills, cutting that out is a massive saving.

I think we might see a future where the grid becomes smaller. Still utility scale but skip the continental transmissions and instead run a local city scale grid with renewables, storage and a chemical based carbon neutral backup.

"it would also have complete independence from oil fluctuations..." Indeed. A foreign country can't turn the sun off. And yet Trump.

(Pardon me if you live in another country. I'm starting to wish I did.)

Technically, you can turn off the sun with a nuclear winter. But in that case your main problem would be starvation anyway.

It's batshit crazy that the most powerful and influential person in the world dismisses the above (practical, clinical and irrefutable) as "a green scam" and people go along with it. We do so at our peril on so many levels.

"weather disasters "

Solar does seem to be influenced by those, though. So before battery storage is really, really cheap and plenty, for off grid situations I do would prefer backup gas as well.

(can also be produced locally: https://www.homebiogas.com/shop/backyard-systems/homebiogas-...)

Having some natural gas purely as a secondary emergency heat source is well worth it IMO.

having a military grade generator (can pick up decomissioned ones for pretty cheap) as a backup still works.

I was thinking just high heat output gas logs. Heat source, you can cook on them and it's not loud.

It might not be needed though if you have a battery generator and enough solar panels.

But if you have a BBQ with propane and the sun didn't shine for many many days that should be sufficient.

Your comment is ambiguous; in the event that anybody is interpreting this as "use your propane BBQ to heat your house" don't do that. You are highly likely to get a first-hand experience of CO toxicity.

Interesting that the script has flipped, now china is leading breakthroughs and hardware startup culture is perpetuating frauds

It's surprising how far there is from discovery to production for these kinds of things. It's 14 years ago now that I designed the front cover for Advanced Energi Materials[1] wherein my friend described his similar discovery of the incredible properties of LiMnO4 with Carbon Nanotubes. Even though he had it working with measurable improvements in the 20-40x range he said it would take 10-20 years to reach a state for mass production.

[1] https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aen...

I wasn't surprised the least. But I am also a hardware guy. Going into production with such new technologies means first making aure it is even feasible for mass production and long term use. There are ways to speed up these tests, but if you need a battery to last 10+ years, you will only be able to speed it up by so much — especially if it is new experimental tech.

If it is, there are probably multiple intermediate small scale experiments and then the tooling and production line technology might still need to be developed as well. Someone in a lab making a theoretical discovery is not the same as something making sense commercially in the slightest.

I understand charge time is a concern, but it is'nt the theoretical limitation of really any battery technology. From the computing parlance it's embarrassingly parallel. More, smaller cells allows for more current => faster charge times. theoretical limitations: energy density, number of cycles economics limitation: material and manufacturing costs. infrastructure limitations: grids to power these charge rates at scale Sodium Ion is promising because it drastically lowers the material cost. Cheap batteries can help solve the infrastructure problems as energy reservoirs, but I am more or less not swayed by the fast charge time break through. I can show doubling charge time with some AAs.

BYD / Denza z9 gt claim 10-70% in 5 mins, 97% in 9 mins. With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results? I don't know enough about this space to know if I am missing something here, but would love to know because something about this feels more exciting than i think i am grasping. anyone know?

This article is about a sodium-ion battery which is a different chemistry to the one BYD claimed those results on (that was LFP).

Sodium-ion is exciting because it has the potential to have less degradation over time, much less sensitivity to cold and less reliance on rare earth metals. Could also end up significantly cheaper. However it has struggled to reach the same energy densities and so hasn’t been practical thus far.

This seems like a big step towards it being a practical technology choice for certain models, if it bears out.

What sodium ion lacks in energy density, it actually partially gains back in the reduced need for cooling. The same properties that make it work across a larger temperature range also mean that you don't need a lot of (or any) cooling/heating to condition the battery. That means less weight is used for that and less energy is needed for running a heat pump.

Another thing here is that volumetric density matters more than weight density in cars. Space comes at a premium and while weight affects efficiency somewhat, it pales in comparison to aerodynamics and rolling resistance. The difference between the best and the worst cars on the road is at least 3x. You have some heavy, brick shaped, monstrosities that barely do 1.5 miles per kwh and then you have some cars with low drag coefficient that easily do 5-6 miles per kwh. Even swapping tires can add meaningful range. Weight reductions help a bit but the difference between the best and worst energy densities on a 60kwh battery is probably 1-2 big passengers in terms of weight.

Peak energy makes sodium ion batteries for energy storage. Their pilot batteries are deployed in a desert. High temperatures during the day, freezing temperatures at night. They use only passive cooling without any moving parts (fans, pumps, etc.). Aside from that being impressive, that also lowers maintenance cost because it reduces the amount of stuff that actually needs servicing.

Sodium ion gains back volume because it doesn't need cooling. At the cell level, they are worse but at the pack level, it starts looking pretty decent. Anyway, there are multiple sodium ion batteries on the road now in China. It's practical right now. The rest is just the widening technology gap the US and EU have with China. We'll just have to wait a few years for local manufacturers to catch up. Some models with these batteries will probably start making it to the EU in the next two years or so.

"Sodium-ion is exciting because..."

Well it is exciting, but not for the reasons you think. More like a Michael Bay movie exciting...there is nothing practical about this design. Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off. Pure Na-ion probably isn't viable and certainly isn't viable in a car. Maybe mixing in some Na into the Li-ion to stretch the small amount of Lithium but even then you are significantly increasing the volatility of the battery.

This isn't a practical step, its an act of desperation from people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.

> Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off.

People say the same thing about Li-ion batteries yet they have proven to be significantly less likely to catch fire compared to ICE vehicles [1].

> people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.

I'm very curious to hear why you think this. If nothing else, the 'situation' with the Strait of Hormuz would seem to have shown the importance of energy independence achieved through large scale electrification. Individually, I couldn't go back to an ICE car or even garden tools, they're worse in every way.

1. https://www.mynrma.com.au/open-road/advice-and-how-to/unders...

>People say the same thing about Li-ion batteries yet they have proven to be significantly less likely to catch fire compared to ICE vehicles [1].

Isn't the nasty thing about lithium fires not how likely they are, but how difficult they are to put out, as well as how hot they burn?

Yep. Let it burn is currently the high bit of fire fighting protocol for EV fires used by local fire services.

It's only a matter of time before an EV catches fire after crashing into a building and a bunch of people die because the fire couldn't be put out.

Wouldn't they just chain the burning car and pull it out of the building?

Anyone who thinks this should give it a try.

I'm not really sure what you think the difficulty is. A firefighter in fire protection gear hooks the burning car with a large metal chain, the other end goes to the fire truck, tow truck or winch, the car comes out of the building.

20.7 million EVs were sold in 2025 alone. When is this going to happen exactly?

Is your argument that if it hasn't happened already then it can't happen?

No.

Yes.

If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data.

If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with yours.

For a sobering look at the reality of electric vehicle fires, including his involvement in some original research, you can’t go passed StacheD:

https://youtube.com/@stachedtraining?si=rMfvXq_GFa1hT5ra

I went in and played a few videos. I'm not sure if anything in there is "sobering" to me (as an EV owner), all the incidents that he shows make sense and the physics are easy to understand.

He seems to be pretty knowledgeable about battery and EV architecture and the stated facts and numbers seem solid, but it also sounds like he takes great care not to scare away his flock of EV-hating idiots.

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Just because you state your opinion confidently, does not mean you are correct. For example, as of 2024, there are 30 billion kilograms of proven reserves of lithium, more than enough to replace every single one of the 1.5 billion ICE cars in the world with an electric car. Please focus more on getting the facts right, and less on speculating about the character of other commenters in an overemotional manner.

> Na is 30x the volatility of Li.

Elemental sodium is reactive. Ionic sodium is not, lest you blow up your dinner. Furthermore, the lithium part of a Li-ion battery isn't the flammable part, the electrolyte is.

> If you want to replace FF there is exactly one solution, that's nuclear.

You're proposing to... replace vehicular internal combustion engines with nuclear reactors?

> Stop acting like you care about this issue. You have never cared enough to learn about it, so until you do, stop spreading misinformation about how physics works.

It's wild for you, in particular, to take such a weirdly aggressive stance here. Zero basis in reality, just virtue signaling.

> Just like you (at the moment) are acting like you don't care if people die in fires.

There is nothing in my comment that could possibly be interpreted as meaning I don't care about people dying in fires.

> If you want to replace FF there is exactly one solution, that's nuclear.

We're talking about batteries, so I'm not sure how this is relevant unless you want reactors in cars?

> Stop acting like you care about this issue. You have never cared enough to learn about it, so until you do, stop spreading misinformation about how physics works.

I made a single, sourced, claim in my comment and didn't mention physics once?

> Too bad there isn't enough Li for everyone to have one.

Could this be why companies are looking at alternatives? Either way, this claim really should be provided with a source.

Sodium ion batteries seem roughly as fire prone as LFP - which is to say, no particularly?

What are you going on about?

> We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.

Not even close. We electrify more and more as tech improves. Do you really think people were using electric leaf blowers in the 1970s?

I ride an electric scooter to work. An older friend of mine saw this, and reminisced about how he rode a gasoline-powered scooter to work 20 years ago in the early 2000s, and how he had to deal with the fact that it was loud and smelled of gasoline. I'm sure it was possible to buy some kind of electric scooter then, maybe even one that would've worked for his commuting needs. But I'm not surprised that lithium ion battery tech got significantly better over those 20 years, such that when I bought my scooter last year it didn't even occur to me to look and see if there was something gas-powered I could've bought.

> Pure Na-ion probably isn't viable and certainly isn't viable in a car.

You're saying: https://insideevs.com/news/786509/catl-changan-worlds-first-... ?

I see no charge rate numbers so there is no way to compare. however, these sodium batteries are cheaper, do not require lithium, and are operable at lower temperatures of -20C/-4F. Sounds like a bit of a win and opens the door for battery options in cars.

And the fire safety risks are significantly reduced (thermal runaway is much harder). They can also be transported and stored completely discharged, something not done with lithium ion batteries because of it degrades them much more than regular usage.

The sodium-ion batteries are said to work satisfactorily down to -40 Celsius = -40 Fahrenheit.

-20 Celsius just happens to be a temperature for which a retention ratio was specified in the parent article, and not the limit of the operation range.

Operating at -40 is one thing, charging at -40 is another.

I have no idea how true this is, but the press releases claimed that both most of the capacity is retained down to -40 and that the charging speed is proportionally retain down to -40, and that this is the meaning of the operational range.

Right, good to know.

When you're at a charger you can easily spare the 3-4% of battery capacity it takes to heat the pack by 40C. Less if you use a heat pump.

How many people let their ICE engine block get that cold?

For -40, the anecdote for combustion engines used to be that in Siberia you turn on the car's engine in november and off in march.

For -20 though, it can happen each year in 4 season temperate climates and north of that.

i would have imagined that charging at -40 is easier than operating at -40.

> With a range of ~1000km this seems to crush these results

The 1000km range likely has more to do with the efficiency of the drivetrain and the aerodynamics of the car more than the battery tech. kWh is an absolute value that is fungible and the Denza has a 122.5 kWh battery pack, which means its getting 5mi/kWh. For perspective my Rivian R1S gets ~350 miles on a 135 kWh pack which is about 2.5mi/kWh (so about half that)

The only part of the battery tech that could affect range is the weight. Sodium batteries are typically much heavier than Li-on. I believe the Denza uses LFP, which means it's likely somewhere else on the car that they're gaining improvement in the range - not from the battery tech. That being said, the battery tech definitely affects the charge/discharge rates.

> The only part of the battery tech that could affect range is the weight.

Weight is a pretty low factor for cars, sub-percent (aging wheels did a comparison using a pickup empty versus loaded with a pallet of shingles, though with a more efficient vehicle the influence of weight probably shows up more).

Energy density (amount of energy per unit of volume) is a much bigger factor than energy specificity (amount of energy per unit of mass), it means you can either cram more energy in the same volume for more range, or have a lower vehicle with better aero.

That's true.

> The only part of the battery tech that could affect range is the weight.

Doesn't the charging speed affect how much regenerative braking can be done? If you have to stop fast enough or the battery is sufficiently hot/full/etc. then one that can't charge as fast requires more of the energy to be lost.

Not really, even at “low” charging speeds you have more than enough braking.

Braking is the reverse of accelerating so the rate is about the same for the same acceleration (positive or negative).

It’s really only if the battery is extremely close to full that this is a potential issue, and that’s assuming the manufacturer either has little to no buffer, or didn’t take this in account and won’t regen into (some of) the buffer.

> Braking is the reverse of accelerating so the rate is about the same for the same acceleration (positive or negative).

If the battery is hot and you want to accelerate, increasing the 0-60 time from 3 seconds to 10 seconds isn't a problem for ordinary usage. If the battery is hot and you want to stop, increasing the stopping time isn't acceptable so the car is going to use the friction brakes instead.

Sodium-ion batteries will always be heavier than the best lithium-ion batteries, but for now they have the same energy per kilogram with LFP batteries.

So they have 2 essential advantages over LFP, retention of capacity to much lower temperatures and their cost will become significantly lower when their production technology will be more mature, because they not only do not use lithium, but they also do not use other expensive substances, e.g. nickel or cobalt.

Ok, but the Rivian R1S is a particularly inefficient EV (2-2.5 mi/kWh = 31-25 kWh/100 km). 12.5 kWh/100 km is efficient but not outlandishly so considering these are likely CLTC ranges, which are higher than WLTP which are higher than EPA, and the car in question is not in fact a dumptruck.

The range claims depend on the size of the battery pack. The Denza has a larger pack than what is quoted in the article. Also, the Chinese CLTC range ratings are overly optimistic with 1000km CLTC being ~820km WLTP or ~700km EPA.

Economy of scale is an engineer's wet dream: the biggest of everything (And a fit with the bureaucrat's dream of a bigger budget). Move fast and break things says the opposite. Set up the production line to make one small one, and the next one better. Repeat. This is a far better approach with developing tech, and applies to power provision. The challenge is to get a market for the early versions when we all know the next will be better. Saying LiPo suck, and Chinese Tech is bad? Just part of the PR sales pitch to get us to try the better alternative. I'd bet on non rechargeable mag-air batteries made with sea water and off peak wind power myself :-)

"CATL’s “Naxtra” sodium-ion batteries achieve an energy density of up to 175 Wh/kg, the company said, putting it on par with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries."

Useful, but not a "breakthrough" in energy density. More like another good low-end option.

Isn’t the benefit that it is durable and has much higher charge/discharge amperage limits?

A battery that can charge as fast as you can pump electricity into it, as many times as you want opens up a lot of possibilities.

E.g. a car that has a 200 mile range and a 5 minute charging time is way more useable than a car with 300 miles of range that takes an hour to charge.

I've driven a car that had about a 200 mile range (small fuel tank) and it's annoying on a long drive, given that you don't want to push it to the extreme but start looking for a fuel stop somewhere around 1/3 tank remaining. So you end up stopping to refuel every 2-3 hours. Still better than a 1-hour recharge every 300 though.

Sodium is a lot more abundant than lithium. Scaled up this could be a breakthrough in battery cost per kWh.

lithium cost $22/kg. 1 KW/h is 0.2kg lithium in 5 kg of batteries that costs $100 retail on AliExpress. So it isn't about lithium price. It seems that just manufacturing and delivering a 1kg of low-mid-complexity stuff comes about $20/kg. (just for example - a car weights 1000-2000kg and costs $30K)

Amusingly, $20 to $30 per kilogram is about what we pay for groceries here in Australia from the supermarkets when averaged over a few bags of mixed items.

USD / kg?

huh? shipping 10t of metal via ocean to europe is ~3k if you want it fast, less if it's batched with other deliveries. (I would know. I've purchased some)

>> low-mid-complexity stuff

> metal

One of these things is a manufacturing input (metal), where as the other (stuff) is a manufacturing output.

Steel mills are on a different scale altogether. And anyway, the wholesale price of steel to manufacturing industry is around the $2.50 / kg mark for plate and hot rolled sections, but you have to be buying it by the hundreds or tonnes up qualifying for those prices.

either the OP is a poorly worded statement or I lost the plot, we're talking about shipping cost here? the price of lithium is a very big factor for battery pricing?

The benefits are cold performance, durability and potentially price in the future.

I still remember in 2016 when Elon Musk made a big announcement about his "acqui-hire" of the Dalhousie University EV battery research team led by Dr Jeff Dahn. There was much fanfare and announcements of million-mile batteries and 3% increase in energy density every year. Moving on from miracle batteries to Thai rescue to Hyperloop tunnels and presently to data centers in orbit.

We was an electronic music producer in-between and a pro-level gamer. Let's not forget these achievements, either.

Elon is a fraud but Jeff Dahn and Dalhousie are legit.

Lithium batteries have been increasing in density at about twice that rate for the last decade. And million mile LFP batteries are available, NCM is nearing that benchmark.

All credit to the people who actually research and build them which is not Elon, since Tesla don't even produce the majority of their own battery usage.

Just remember, the US Na-Ion battery startup died last year with _products_ _in_ _warehouses_ just because it couldn't get a UL certification. All it needed was a bridge loan.

And the government did nothing.

>And the government did nothing.

Why didn't a private investment company, even venture capital, extend them a bridge loan? It seems like the type of technology that could have decent returns in licensing fees.

I ask this question because it seems odd to someone in the software world so flooded with startups that the government would be expected to intercede on behalf of a startup.

To a first approximation, an inability to get UL certification means a product failed to demonstrate compliance with well established safety expectations…technically it means the insurance industry will not treat it as ordinary risk.

The ramifications range from inability to obtain product liability insurance for manufacturers, the voiding of general liability for users, and the fire marshal shutting down places where the system is installed.

Keep in mind that new products get listed under new standards developed by manufacturers all the time. But only when the new standard demonstrates ordinary safety.

The simplest likely explanation is that vc did not believe the technology was worth betting on.

Yes I remember this story, and something like this was the case - the product's readiness and market viability was overstated, and the company has been tossed around between investors for quite a while.

In this case, Natron was focused on energy-storage for data centers, a sector which is ordinarily a prime recipient of government intervention.

While this article is about cars, there is another Chinese company that offers 50 MWh sodium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage.

While for cars sodium-ion batteries will never reach the energy per kilogram of the best lithium-ion batteries, for stationary use it makes absolutely no sense to use lithium batteries, because sodium batteries will become much cheaper when their production will be more mature, so they should always be preferred to lithium batteries.

Even for cars, sodium-ion batteries have a second advantage besides price, they retain their capacity and their charging speed down to much lower temperatures than lithium-ion batteries, so they will be preferred in cold climates.

Apparently, there were shenanigans from investors/creditors. So the company got quietly carved up instead of going through a bankruptcy auction.

I'm looking forward to the eventual investigational report.

BTW, the company was Natron Energy.

Decent returns aren't enough for a risky investment, they need to be spectacular returns.

The benefit to the country as a whole is potentially large, but most of it wouldn't show up as profit for the company itself. I'm sure it would do quite well if it was successful, but the benefits to car manufacturers and to having this sort of technology on-shore would not translate into monetary returns on private investment. That's the sort of thing government intervention is good for.

Starting to think that the American century of humiliation meme was prophetic.

One could argue that in that case, doing nothing was very much a choice.

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake"

Which company?

Think not,'what can my country do for me?', but, 'How can I further enrich Trump'

note that the quoted 170Wh/kg is about the same as currently available LiFePO4 cells and half that of the best available NMC cells

Another better battery bulletin

Not really.

This is not about research articles, but it is advertising already existing commercial products.

There are a handful of competing Chinese companies, which have launched during the last few months greatly improved batteries, both for cars and for stationary energy storage, removing the main complaints against such batteries, like charging times, loss of capacity at low temperatures and use of materials that might become scarce.

Guys!!! Important!!! Don't buy or lease an EV now!! Battery breakthrough is coming! Your car will be obsolete trash in two weeks tops! Buy ICE car instead! Stable investment!

It is a slightly weird experience trying to buy an EV as they genuinely do get significantly better very quickly. It's like buying a computer in the 90s or a phone in the 00s.

People posting claims about EV charging time should be required to also post the size of cable required. And the grid capacity needed to provide their fast charging at a typical 8-bay charging site.

The grid capacity depends only on the number of charged cars, not on their charging speeds.

The latest high-power chargers made in China that achieve the 5-minute charge times have their own batteries for providing the charge power, so they take from the grid only the average power, not the peak power.

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could a charging site have a buffer of fast charging batteries?

Yes, but have you ever seen 8 queues of cars, about 8-10 cars in each, at Sams Club or Costco buying gas? You'd need a awful lot of battery buffer to keep up with that kind of demand. At some point you'd deplete the batteries and be stuck with charging at whatever rate the grid connection could deliver.

First, that exact situation simply doesn't have an equivalent in the EV world. Quite a lot of people should be able to charge elsewhere (at home, at work, on the street).

Second, wow, I live in Europe and I have never seen 64+ cars queueing at a single station. If I saw 15, I'd be wondering what the hell happened.

Lots of people (apartment dwellers) cannot charge at home. Charging at work or on the street is still a very uncommon option here (USA).

With EVs, most of your charging should be done at home, with fast charging mostly just existing for trips.

I know not everyone can charge at home (especially if you live in an apartment), but the solution to that is pretty straightforward and a lot more convenient compared with trying to scale up fast charging to match petrol stations.

I don't know what chemistry exactly these cells are using, but in sodium-ion batteries, prussian blue analogs as they are called are common anode materials. Overcharging these cells can lead to a release of hydrogen cyanide gas, notoriously known as Zyklon B.

It has damped my enthusiasm for perusing it as a potential future home energy storage solution.

Do you have any link for the claim that overcharging can produce cyanide?

I have never heard such a thing and all the articles that I have seen about overcharging concluded that such batteries are much safer during overcharging than other kinds of batteries, the worst case effect being battery swelling.

In normal conditions, even during overcharging there are no obvious chemical reactions that could produce hydrogen cyanide.

For instance, at

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.4c02915

it is said that cyanide release can happen only at temperatures above 300 Celsius degrees. Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions.

Sure

https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352152X2...

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.5c02345

Also understand, nothing bad happens under normal conditions. It's when the cell goes awry that bad things happen. 300C is easily obtainable by a runaway cell. I mean, short two ends of the battery together with a thin foil and see how quickly it hits 300C...

Also I'm not trying to fear monger, battery failures are very rare. But SIBs aren't totally free of scary failure modes.

Your links do not describe any problem that is inherent in the principle of such batteries.

They only warn against the danger of not taking care during fabrication to eliminate the moisture from the electrode.

If such low quality electrodes are made, they are prone to decomposition at lower temperatures than the well made electrodes, which have been dried sufficiently.

Similar risks of bad fabrication exist for any kind of batteries, like there were a few notorious cases of lithium-ion battery models that were prone to catch fire.

Moreover, in most applications of such batteries one must use short-circuit protections, so it should be impossible to overheat a battery by shorting its outputs. If that happens, not the battery is guilty, but whoever has designed a device without protections.

The point is that absolutely any kind of battery presents risks. Without short-circuit protections, any battery could cause a fire when shorted.

There is no reason to believe that sodium-ion batteries are less safe than lithium-ion batteries. On the contrary, it is very likely that sodium-ion batteries are safer, e.g. for not having a flammable electrolyte.

I'm sorry, do you actually know about batteries, or do you just casually read about them and now feel obligated to defend a point you tried to make?

The shorting which causes failure is internal, from manufacturing defects. Yes, it's rare. No, it's not something the end user can detect or short protection can stop. This is pretty basic knowledge...hence my questioning (and you totally wooshing on the foil shorting demonstration I pointed out...batteries internally use foil, the foil is what gets hot).

So you have to decide if you want your possible but very rare event to be a small fire or a hydrogen cyanide gas leak.

Also SIBs are a new tech, so who knows what the failure rate will actually look like. Or if CN will even be a concern, the chemistry for mainstream cells might be different.

I think it’s more that when you have 300C thermal runaway in a cell in your battery storage bank the release of toxic compounds is the least of your problems.

I work quite a bit with batteries and the fear of battery fires hunts me in my sleep, especially with lipos.

> Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions

Thank you for the reasonable chuckle I got from this understatement of the day.

By normal conditions I mean charging and discharging and even overcharging if the controller is defective.

Burning the battery is something that I define as not normal conditions.

Many plastics produce toxic fumes when burnt and many such plastics may be used in a car. Burning the battery is not the greatest risk of toxic fumes during a fire. If the fire is intense enough, any released cyanide might also be burned.

The battery heats itself in these failure modes.

Not to 300 Celsius degrees.

A battery of any kind can overheat with the output shorted or during excessive overcharging, but normally whenever a battery is used in a device there are protective devices that prevent such events.

If there are no protections, the designer is guilty, not the battery. Moreover, such risks are greater for Li-ion batteries, which have flammable electrolyte.

Na-ion batteries will replace Li-ion only in certain applications, like stationary energy storage, cars for cold climates and cheaper cars, while Li-ion will remain the choice for maximum energy per kilogram.

But it is weird to be concerned about the safety of Na-ion when that is certainly not worse than for Li-ion and most likely it is better.

Just adding to what others have already said — overcharging the cells is not something you're supposed to be doing. Overcharging even today's common Li-ion cells, i.e. those in your phone, vacuum, EV or home storage, will lead to comparably spectacular results.

Just wait until you find out about hydrogen sulfide from overcharged car batteries.

Also, I think HCN can be scrubbed by adding a special absorptive cap onto the battery.

Or you could just have the batteries in a separate enclosure away from your house. I think I would be inclined to do this anyway, certainly for Lithium batteries given the possibility of fire.

hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category. When you consider failure you have to consider what is the most catastrophic possibility and if that is “this battery silently kills people” then you dont make it.

Batteries with Prussian blue cannot kill people silently.

Cyanide could be released only at high temperatures, e.g. if the battery is opened and burned, not during normal operation, even if overcharging is not prevented, as it should.

The sulfuric acid from the traditional lead-acid car batteries is more dangerous than this.

We pipe methane into millions of homes. I don't think "this can silently kill people in the worst case" is enough to block something.

We also have to adulterate that methane with bitter smelling agents too warn people of the danger when there's a leak. The line into the house is also limited by a regulator to ensure the pressure is very low. If gas builds up in a battery, it's either going to leak out slowly or build up and leak out all at once.

Very much not an equal comparison.

What the other poster said about the risk of releasing cyanide during overcharging is not true.

Cyanide could be released only at high temperatures over 300 Celsius degrees.

During a fire, there are many other things in a car that can release toxic fumes easier than a sealed battery.

The methane is almost always piped in to be burned, and that can easily create odorless carbon monoxide. And the smell is not foolproof either. This does routinely kill people and we keep doing it. The jurisdictions that are banning it are doing so because of environmental reasons, not safety.

> hydrogen sulfide is not anywhere in the same category.

It has the same LD50 dose as HCN. It literally _is_ just as bad. It routinely kills people on oil rigs because in lethal concentrations it immediately shuts off your nose.

How often do you hear about people getting poisoned by it from lead-acid batteries?

Not precisely the same:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide - 107 ppm (human, 10 min)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide - 600 ppm (human, 30 min)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide - 4000 ppm (human, 30 min)

These are "LCLo" values from the databoxes on those pages. More easily comparable numbers may be around somewhere.

Hydrogen cyanide has the bonus of being mostly odorless too. Whereas hydrogen sulfide is distinctly bad smelling.

Apparently it only smells bad if you have non-lethal concentration.

The only people with any significant amount of lead acid batteries on their property are off grid types who typically store them away from their primary domicile as a fire safety precaution.

Fast charging a car/chemical weapon in your garage isn't terribly appealing.

If that battery is a chemical weapon then so is a big half-plastic box with ten gallons of gasoline inside.

Its metallic sodium. Its about 30 times more volatile than Lithium. We don't use metallic sodium for almost anything industrial because of this volatility. I assumed there would be some mixed Li-Na-ion batteries. A pure Na-ion battery is an explosive waiting to go off. Putting these in a car...seems rather like a poor choice unless you are a personal injury lawyer.

I doubt that it is metallic sodium, for the same reason why the rechargeable lithium batteries do not use metallic lithium electrodes like the non-rechargeable batteries.

During charge-recharge cycles, a metallic electrode is likely to be degraded quickly.

So it is more likely that the reduced sodium atoms are intercalated in some porous electrode, e.g. of carbon, while at the other electrode the sodium ions are intercalated in some substance similar to Prussian blue.

The volatility of sodium does not matter, because it is not in contact with air or another gas, but only with electrolyte.

This is incredibly misleading. It's not like there's a bunch of metallic sodium sitting in the battery waiting to react. It's a lot closer to a solid solution. Do you have a personal injury lawyer on speed dial for your table salt?

Your response is even more misleading than the misconception you're trying to correct. The complexes formed in (charged) lithium batteries are unstable and reactive in ways quite similar to the base metal. The salt molecule, in contrast, is pretty unreactive. Salt shakers don't catch fire if dropped.

Which complexes are reactive?

The substances similar with Prussian blue are very stable. During charge and discharge, the ionic charge of iron ions varies between +2 and +3 and the structure of the electrode has spaces that are empty when the charge of the iron ions is +3 and they are filled with sodium ions when the charge of the iron ions is +2.

Both states of the electrode are very stable, being neutral salts. The composition of the electrolyte does not vary depending on the state of charge of the battery and it is also stable.

The only part of the battery that can be unstable is the other electrode, which stores neutral atoms of sodium intercalated in some porous material. If you take a fully charged battery, you cut it and you extract the electrode with sodium atoms, that electrode would react with water, but at a lower speed than pure sodium, so it is not clear how dangerous such an electrode would be in comparison with the similar lithium electrodes.

Fine, now show a video of what happens if you pierce the Na-ion cell with something metallic. Because explosion doesn't even begin to cover what happens next in that situation. And you are suggesting that everyone should be 2 ft from such a cell, traveling at 60 mph, in all weather conditions. These things should be restricted to grid stabilization batteries and nothing else and you know it. Don't mislead people on such things.

Piercing a Na-ion cell is not good, but the effect is pretty much the same like piercing a Li-ion cell.

In both cells the electrode that stores alkaline metal atoms has high reactivity, but in both cases the reactivity is much smaller than for a compact piece of metal, so the reaction with substances like water would proceed much more slowly than in the movies when someone throws an alkaline metal in water.

If you pierce the cell, but the electrode does not come in contact with something like water or like your hand, nothing much happens, the air would oxidize the metal, but that cannot lead to explosions or other violent reactions.

The electrolyte of lithium-ion batteries is an organic solvent that is very easily flammable if you pierce the battery. The electrolyte of sodium-ion batteries is likely to be water-based, which is safer, because such an electrolyte is not flammable. It would be caustic, but the same is true for any alkaline or acid battery, which have already been used for a couple of centuries without problems.

Overall, sodium-ion batteries should be safer than lithium-ion batteries, so safety is certainly something that cannot be hold against them.

How much assumption we can make here that advanced AI systems, kinda like Google's Alphafold, but customized for chemistry, is helping accelerate such breakthroughs?