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Another one of these. Is this desperate astroturfing? Sodium ion is going into production at CATL and Gotion. It's GOING to be in EVs. Sodium Ion is happening.
by AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Another one of these. Is this desperate astroturfing?
Sodium ion is going into production at CATL and Gotion. It's GOING to be in EVs. Sodium Ion is happening. 160 wh/kg, 3000-6000 cycles. Stable. Good temperature range. I don't know any other way to emphasize this.
https://www.catl.com/en/news/665.html https://www.catl.com/en/news/665.html
This isn't a research paper, a clickbait headline. They are ramping up production for 2023. Not prototype cells looking for investors, etc. It's not a far flung announcement. This is "hey who wants to buy a shitton of these for a 300 mile range car?" call for sales.
And Lithium may be not really scarce, but you still need to find the sources, develop new sources, extract it, etc. Sodium is far more abundant than lithium. Like, 1000x more. As much as you want.
If it was January 2022 your comment would have weight. It doesn't now.
To emphasize, this means the 300 mile range (real not WLTP) sodium ion car that is fundamentally cheaper than an ICE. City cars for billions of people. No cobalt constraints, no nickel constraints, no waiting on lithium development. You're just waiting for the companies to make more production lines as fast as they can.
This is the beginning of the end for the ICE. There's no maybes or what-ifs or whatabout is there enough of this or child slave miners of that or we have to wait on South American government Z to allow Y.
Simply that this marks the point in history where you don't need to worry about feasibility of the switchover from ICE for 90% of commuter traffic. It's just a matter of time and scale, and ICE staring down the barrel of a drivetrain it can't economically compete with and still likely will drop another 50% in cost in the next ten years.
- tuatoru 4y agoI'll be watching with interest to see what happens at Reliance in India, with Faradion's sodium-ion batteries. India seems like an ideal market in that a cheap EV with a smallish sodium-ion battery represents a huge step up in mobility for many crores of Indian families. That's less true in Europe and North America. 1. https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/Reliance-buys-sodium-ion-battery/100/web/2022/01 https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/Reliance-buys-s...
- akimball 4y agoOutside of India, "crores" looks like a typo, rather than a quantifier.
- tuatoru 4y agoHandy spoken shorthand for 10,000,000 though. And I was talking about intra-India events.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoAgreed, if your goal is the 150-200 mile city car (as in kei-car like compact car), and it's $40/kwhr, wow will those be cheap to make. The "pseudo rocket equation" of EVs comes into play: small car, smaller battery to get usable range. So some behemoth Model S or X sized car in the US that needs a 100kwh pack to get 300+ miles needs 20kwh hours to get a kei car 150 miles. And of course e-bikes, e-mopeds, e-scooters, etc.
- HyperSane 4y agoTo really kill ICE you need to address the issue of charging in apartment buildings.
- tuatoru 4y agoCan easily be done with battery swapping stations, which are already a big thing in China. There are a lot of low-cost vehicles there that are designed around battery swapping, and one luxury car maker, Nio, also offers it. Nio is setting up shop in Europe and already has swap stations in Norway where EV penetration is high.
- HyperSane 4y agoWill the batteries be interchangeable between different car brands? I doubt it.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoDozens of different makes and models already use the gogoro system. Most of the world isn't allergic to standardizing like the US.
- HyperSane 4y agoWe are talking about the huge 100+ range batteries like in Teslas. I really don't see these being practical to swap.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNo. We're not. We're talking about practical charging ability for people in apartments. If a government is too incompetent to enforce charger installation in indoor parking of rentals, light pole and meter charging is impossible, and adding 1kW of solar panels to the car itself isn't sufficient for daily use due to weather, then simply adding 2 3.5kWh battery slots in addition to whatever internal battery the car has is a trivial way of adding 70km of range that can be swapped at a moment's notice. Your inability to imagine anything other than the laziest most spoiled american's habits (even when alternatives are easier) doesn't invalidate the huge space of other solutions. If all of those don't work for some reason, then just treating it like an ICE and usingthe 250kW fast chager is only an extra 15 minutes once every week or two.
- mlindner 4y agoThe conversation was about flow batteries. This doesn't look like a flow battery to me.