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Northvolt develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion battery validated at 160 Wh/kg
- anovikov 3y agoI believe it when i see it at volume.
- XorNot 3y agoHonestly depends on cycle life is the thing. I believe anything can be made at volume: whether it is depends on whether it's actually genuinely useful enough when you do - hence a lot of the quiet "revolutionary" things which go away (because actually, all the other trade offs eliminate the revolutionary bit).
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoIt's coming, by 2025 (French) https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/batteries-sodium-ion-une-premiere-mondiale-dont-nous-sommes-tres-fiers https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/batteries-sodium-ion-une-pre...
- farialima 3y agoit's actually shipping ! Leroy Merlin (the French "big box" home improvement chain) is selling a electric screwdriver that use sodium-ion battery, seems to be working well: (French) https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/outillage/outillage-electroportatif/visseuse-et-tournevis-electrique/visseuse/tournevis-sans-fil-dexter-sodium-3-6-v-0-7-ah-86650845.html https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/outillage/outillage-elec... doesn't seem to be many in stock - it's only available at some stores - but seems to be victim of its success
- anovikov 3y agoI don't mean sodium batteries. I mean anything at all from Northvolt. So far it seems to be more of "give us a lot of taxpayer money and we will say a lot of bs that will give you a lot of votes" kind of business.
- pelorat 3y agoNorthvolt builds and ships lots of batteries.
- goodSteveramos 3y agoAnd no sodium batteries
- anovikov 3y agoI struggle to find any delivery stats at all. How many MWH/GWH were delivered in 2022? in H1 2023? There are usually only declarations of future production capacity. Anyone can do that.
- yrro 3y agoAccording to https://www.epectec.com/batteries/cell-comparison.html https://www.epectec.com/batteries/cell-comparison.html, 160 Wh/kg is about the same density as Li-po and Li-ion. This battery chemistry is attractive in that it's made from common materials & is more stable/safer than Lithium. The press release doesn't say, so I assume it's not competitive in energy density per litre so I assume not. Wikipedia has a comparison table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#Comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#Comparison but no idea how accurate/up to date it is.
- boxed 3y agoSodium is extremely plentiful, while lithium is not.
- zizee 3y agoI had thought that this was not a huge win, as lithium is fairly cheap, and not a large portion of the overall cost of a battery. However, my research taught me I was incorrect. Lithium is worth about $40k per tonne, or $40 per kg. A Tesla power wall 2 is about 150kg, if half of that is lithium, then the lithium alone is worth $2.3k. Powerball costs about $9.5k, so the lithium is a fair portion of the cost. https://www.thisoldhouse.com/solar-alternative-energy/reviews/tesla-powerwall-cost https://www.thisoldhouse.com/solar-alternative-energy/review... https://www.statista.com/statistics/606350/battery-grade-lithium-carbonate-price/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/606350/battery-grade-lit... Note, I know raw lithium carbonate is not stuck directly into a battery, just spitballing with the little bit of learning I just did.
- passwordoops 3y agoAlso right now about 70% of all lithium comes from only two places (Chile, Australia). Iron and sodium are pretty much everywhere so this potentially eliminates at least one supply bottleneck
- raducu 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NewJazz 3y agoNorthvolt’s first generation of sodium-ion cell is designed primarily for energy storage, with subsequent generations delivering higher energy density opening opportunities to enable cost-efficient electric mobility solutions. It isn't competitive on the Wh/L front, it seems.
- wg0 3y agoFull of adjectives. More cost efficient, more this and more that but no mention how much more and more to what exactly. Now the articles "This could be in your next EV sooner than you think." would be already being composed and YouTube videos being edited.
- perlgeek 3y agoI share your frustration. Nothing about charge cycles, and "safety at high temperatures" is less interesting than an actual operating range specification.
- gniv 3y agoHere's an article from June with more details about the current status of sodium-ion batteries (in China): https://carnewschina.com/2023/06/07/lei-xing-is-catls-sodium-ion-battery-ready-for-prime-time/ https://carnewschina.com/2023/06/07/lei-xing-is-catls-sodium... Note that CATL also claimed 160Wh/kg two years ago, but what they will actually be making will probably be closer to 120.
- LeanderK 3y agofinally some battery innovation from europe. Makes one hopeful that we will continue to play a role in the battery energy/automotive space in the future.
- xxs 3y agoThe Li-Ion and 2019 Chemistry Nobel prize went jointly to a British, American and Japan citizens. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019 was awarded jointly to John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino "for the development of lithium-ion batteries" [0] [0]: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2019/summary/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2019/summary/
- LeanderK 3y agobut nobel prizes are usually for basic research a long time ago and the battery-electric automotive revolution is relatively recent development, where applied research and bringing new batteries to market is more important
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lnsru 3y agoNo. Because there is no difference who makes an interior or motors or battery anymore. There is no real difference in BYD dolphin, Kia eNiro and VW ID.3. Except price maybe. Internal combustion engine was once the differentiator. And it’s gone.
- nine_k 3y agoThere may be little difference in the finished device. But there is a big difference in the logistics, securing a steady supply, political complications that may interfere with that, etc. On the supply side, there is a difference in expertise and jobs.
- LeanderK 3y agoi think battery tech can be a real differentiator
- konstantinua00 3y agoShin, this is 7th week in the row you've shown new battery invention to the class --- but honestly, what's the deal with same-y headlines about batteries? can we have articles that actually keep observing these technologies as they progress after being invented?
- romanovcode 3y agoExactly. Where can I actually BUY these batteries that would fit to AA, AAA etc..
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xxs 3y agoRetrofitting is =dumb=, like very dumb. The nominal voltages are different to begin with. However not that only - retrofitting in general is not a bright idea: case in point LEDs into E27/E17 incandescent fixtures.
- benj111 3y agoWhy not? In the case of bulbs you could get a better form factor, but no one's doing that, they're just using non replaceable bulbs. Batteries. Are you going to get rid of your TV just so you can use a different battery chemistry? There have been various chemistries available in AA. Would you rather we have even more battery sizes to keep track of?
- xxs 3y ago> Why not? B/c the LEDs require a driver which runs on DC [the better case is constant driven], the space constraints are too high and there is not enough room for heat dissipation which in the US kills the driver (as running on 110/120AC is less efficient), and in Europe it tends to kill the LEDs because they get to be overdriven, but the driver dissipates less heat. The power factor on all them tends to be atrocious, usually 0.5phi. They tend to quite noisy, esp. when it comes to EMF. In short there is not enough space to have a decent LED driver along with enough space for heat dissipation for the LEDs (usually only 15%, being generous, of the energy will be emitted as light. The rest is heat, so if you see 8W of LED, more than 6.5W is just heat) Pretty much almost all LEDs you can buy in a retrofit case are almost guaranteed to be overdirven to show better numbers and be 'brighter'. Near ceiling larger fixtures can be designed for LEDs. They tend to have an actual 15-30k hours lifespan. Dimming the LEDs is the next atrocity, esp. when it comes to chopping the sine wave. The LED dirvers have to work with the chopped sine wave and detect how much it has been chopped to reduce the current or the PWM. About the AA(A) and the TV. I can control the TV w/ bluetooth and an app but I find that incovenient. However NiMH nominal voltage is 1.2V which fits the 1.5 of the alkaline batteries. It's good enough already. So yes, it takes different chemistry unless the remote controls provide built-in step-up/step-down converters, effectively variable operational voltage.
- bagels 3y agoI'm interested in $/kWh, that is the most limiting factor for cars.
- dathinab 3y agovolume/kWh also matters for car use-cases (but especially for less high end cars not as much as kg/kWh) $/kWh is mainly affected by: material cost, manufacturing cost, cost of safely using it (e.g. shielding but also e.g. fire insurances), replacement cost (lifetime, frequency of repairs, needs full replacement for repairs?, refurbish-ability etc.) As far as I can tell the material and safety cost should be much and somewhat cheaper, the manufacturing cost is hard to say but initially is likely more expensive as it's a new process and the durability and refurbish-ability are probably major points which will decide weather it's competitive in the vehicle market or not.
- maven29 3y agoWill Volume/kWh really matter if they use the battery also as a major structural component? Doesn't skateboard chassis require structural reinforcement even at the cell level?
- dathinab 3y agoIt can because even "skateboard chassis" have limited volume. For high end e-cars the maximal reach tends to matter a lot, even if for some buyers it only matters in advertisements. For less high end cars they often anyway compromise on range so it might not matter as much but then in many places (which are not in the US) having small cars matters a lot to a point that sometimes e.g. typical SUVs might not be usable _at all_, and I mean EU style SUVs not US style SUVs (through most times its just very inconvenient). And small cars mean little space for batteries (potential only 50% of the space). Lastly there are some aspects of different styles of "skateboard chassis" having different usable volumes for battery cells. And some especially save and refurbishable chassis designs come with the penalty of having a bit less volume to use. So the answer is very dependent on the context.
- h7KP4 3y agoHeadline number (160Wh/kg) is the same as CATL achieved in mid-2021 with Na-Ion chemistry [1] [1] https://www.catl.com/en/news/665.html https://www.catl.com/en/news/665.html
- torginus 3y agoWhat are the advantages of sodium batteries? Since batteries involve the migration of ions between electrodes, the much larger size of sodium ions means that the resulting batteries will be both less dense and have less charge cycles than their lithium counterparts, due to the higher volumetric electrode deformation during charging. This makes them suboptimal for both grid and mobile applications, and the only use case I can see for them is making very cheap disposable stuff, which does not bode well for the environment.
- kzrdude 3y agoSodium is easier to find
- torginus 3y agoYeah, but lithium isn't exactly rare either.
- raverbashing 3y agoActually not at the rates we're predicted to use it, no And yes Sodium is fine for most applications where it can be a little heavier (grid uses, maybe cars) which is where most of it is projected to be needed.
- jvm___ 3y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/s/Co4zeAhcmT https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/s/Co4zeAhcmT Here's how much of everything we mined in 2022. Lithium is bottom left corner just above Gold.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- sylario 3y agoThis summer a French company started to sell sodium ion battery power tool in a major hardware store. National French research agency announcement: https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/batteries-sodium-ion-une-premiere-mondiale-dont-nous-sommes-tres-fiers https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/batteries-sodium-ion-une-pre... The power tool : https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/outillage/outillage-electroportatif/visseuse-et-tournevis-electrique/visseuse/tournevis-sans-fil-dexter-sodium-3-6-v-0-7-ah-86650845.html?src=clk https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/outillage/outillage-elec... Unfortunately, all I could found about the Wh/kg efficiency was an article about the same company saying they were currently able to build cells at 90Wh/Kg in 2017. Nevertheless, it's not a promise, it's a product currently on sale.
- IgorPartola 3y agoThe entire product weighs 0.5 kg, and it is 0.7A at 3.6V. I assume the amp rating is really amp-hours, which would give it 2.52Wh. Figure the battery is half the weight of the tool, which would give it roughly 10Wh/kg.
- sylario 3y agoThe spec sheet on the store is confusing. It says : Intensity(Ah) Less than 1.5 Tension (V) 3.6 Amperage (Ah) 0.7 Edit : the box indicate 0.33 Kg, the 0.5 weight probably include the charger and other parts.
- masklinn 3y agoAccording to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775323011175 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787... the batteries Tiamat produces are 18650 format, 3.7V, 0.61Ah. The latter more or less matches the specs of the product. This would mean the product might have a single 34g battery with a specific energy of 68Wh/kg, and 135Wh/L. So low end of nimh. Which sounds somewhat reasonable, 10 (and around 20Wh/L) I don’t think you’d bother even going forwards with. Sadly I can’t find any teardown of the product, it’s all just press reprints. There’s a split view PDF (in the documents section), it doesn’t seem to show the battery but does not show a huge amount of space for it.
- boringg 3y agoWhats the ramp up ramp down time? How much energy throughput before degradation? Can we improve that density furthermore? Cost? If those are all good answers ostensibly some viable alternative.
- chrsw 3y agoThere's another thread going on HN right now about limiting the charge of Li-ion batteries to 20%-80% of thier capacity. Do batteries based on Na-ion chemistry have this limitation/recommendation?
- mmmwww 3y agoThats fairly good and typical i think. Lead acid and AGM batteries are not recommended to be below 50% of their capacity.
- kaliszad 3y agoThis is a good development, but it falls really short of the almost 3.5 kWh that would be possible to achieve with sodium metal fuel cell. Such device is described in the expired patent US3730776A (copy available here: https://orgpad.com/file/DrCoHGH6xJJqraDeusqrtS?token=D6S5BowrVNQ7fjm6hpxJS2 https://orgpad.com/file/DrCoHGH6xJJqraDeusqrtS?token=D6S5Bow...) A similar device producing electrical current can be constructed in a garage.
- nine_k 3y agoThe point is not energy density, or momentary power. The point is low price and immediate availability. There is a lot of solar and wind electricity wasted in the world because there's no economical way to store it. LiFePO4 batteries are > $100 / kWh, last time I checked; a practical powerwall costs like a small car, and is also a major fire hazard. We badly need cheap, non-toxic, non-flammable batteries we could deploy massively outside of cars, drones, and phones. The announced battery looks like something that may fit the bill.
- kaliszad 3y agoIf you want to store a lot of energy cheaply, the density (and power per volume/ area) is a killer property. The Castner process to electrolytically convert NaOH to sodium metal is known and was deployed at industrial scale even 100 years ago. The other direction, where you get energy by reacting sodium metal with water is described in the patent, which was reproduced successfully in a garage/ home workshop setting. It obviously worked for Lockheed. Btw. sodium has many desirable properties even in the metal form. You can store it quite efficiently on pallets probably just wrapped in some foil. You would be able to store more than 3 MWh on a single pallet. No battery can match that. It's more like a replacement for stationary diesel generators - but you can recycle the resulting sodium hydroxide solution back to sodium using renewable energy quite easily. Also sodium reacts with water so readily you could probably get stable current with just ~50 ms of delay, which on the grid would still be considered instantaneous. You don't need any expensive catalysts, spark plugs, pressure nothing. Just a thin film of water on a metal plate and some sodium to push against it.
- Uptrenda 3y agoAfter all the OpenAI stuff I've just started reading drama into all these head lines. Like I read this as: 'North Korea develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion...' I am expecting something to happen now... OpenAI literally broke my brain...
- xbmcuser 3y agoChina is going to bring into production from this year a lot of sodium ion batteries. For me the weight and density of the batteries is not as important as recharge cycles and cost as that would price out more carbon producing electricity generation https://carnewschina.com/2023/11/20/sodium-ion-batteries-are-real-in-china-byd-to-build-30-gwh-sodium-battery-plant/ https://carnewschina.com/2023/11/20/sodium-ion-batteries-are...
- jansan 3y agoThere are sodium ion batteries available at aliexpress. The claimed advantges (written in an unintentially comical way) are: - better safety - same number of cycles as LiFePo - much better capacity at low temperatures - protects environment (?) I would take that with a truckload of salt. Also, price is roughly 50% higher than LiFePo. On many product images there is an outdoor winter scenery. So performance at very low temperatures seems to be the main selling point.
- rootusrootus 3y agoLFPs do more cycles and are still cheaper. Sodium ion isn't going to make much of a dent in that market until the price can get below LFP.
- xbmcuser 3y agoYeah but prices wont have the same kind of fluctuations as lithium does because of demand and supply. And as manufacturing picks up economies of scale should start bringing the price down
- prawn 3y agoAre any of these developing battery chemistries likely to become very affordable to the point that future houses are built with cellar-sized batteries stored underneath them?
- Roark66 3y agoSo where is the catch? Because there is always a catch. It's either that it needs a tiny amount of extremely expensive ingredients (palladium?), or it requires extremely advanced manufacturing techniques? Or its both cheap and easy to make but the mass production makes way too many failures... There is always something... Therefore I'll believe it when I'm able to but such battery and fly my drone with it.
- EspressoGPT 3y agoThis. You need to take any battery-related news with a rather heavy grain of salt, especially when it comes to "solid state" or "sodium" headlines.
- lsaferite 3y ago> heavy grain of salt > "solid state" or "sodium" This made me chuckle a little. Thanks!
- ngrilly 3y agoThe catch is lower gravimetric energy density (Wh/kg). But sodium-ion is great for stationary energy storage, where gravimetric energy density doesn’t matter that much (unlike automotive, aviation, or handheld tools). Disclaimer: I’m a former Northvolter, but not involved in that program.
- masklinn 3y ago160Wh/kg is not super impressive in the first place, that’s the low end of li-ion although it is the high end of nimh. The energy density (energy per volume) is also unlisted so might not be great. For reference northvolt also lists lithium-metal batteries at 395Wh/kg, and they do list the density on that one, 797Wh/L. When they acquired the designer (cubert) back in 2021 they listed the possibility of exceeding 1000Wh/L by 2025 though I don’t know if that’s still in the plans (at the times the cells were only listed at 369Wh/kg as well).
- 1970-01-01 3y agoThis is just another announcement. The catch remains unchanged. Engineering all the details of anode, cathode, electrolyte packaging, and manufacturing scale still needs to meet and also prove itself in the real world.
- elzbardico 3y agoHave anyone noticed that most technological breakthroughs in fields that require hard physical sciences seem to come from foreign countries?
- ben_w 3y agoI don't know which country you don't consider "foreign", but even if you're in the largest one by population, 82% of the world is foreign.
- elzbardico 3y agoin the context of most of HN, unless noted otherwise, I think it is safe to parse foreign country as 'national entities other than the US'.
- rootusrootus 3y agoIs John Goodenough not good enough for you? Too bad he has recently passed, though.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThis is about 0.5 MJ/kg compared to fuel which is closer to 50 MJ/kg ( or closer to 10 when normalizing to efficiency). ie this is why ev batteries need 20x the weight of gasoline at least to store similar amounts of on board energy.
- ifdefdebug 3y agoYet modern EV cars and ICE cars have similar range autonomy without carrying batteries worth 20x the weight of gasoline, due to the abyssal efficiency of combustion engines which produce mostly heat.
- hedora 3y agoIt is pretty close to a 20x difference, but they make up most of that on the lack of gas tank and engine, and lower range. (EV’s tended to weigh 600lbs more the last time I checked).
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoSomeone should build an EV that shreds the empty batteries and ejects them into the face of passing schoolchildren to lighten the load and better recreate the health and environmental impacts of ICE vehicles.
- est 3y agoexcept fuels burns only once and can't be recharged
- alkonaut 3y agoEVs don't need to store the same amount of energy as an ICE car though. Just enough to get as far would be more than enough energy. Twice the motor efficiency and the fact that ICE's don't regenerate fuel when breaking helps even it a bit.
- thelastgallon 3y agoFor stationary batteries, density (Wh/kg) and volume (Wh/liter) are not a concern, only Wh/$. These sodium-ion batteries can be deployed for grid connected storage (or home batteries like powerwall), freeing up Lithium for EVs.
- Andrew018 3y ago[dead]
- megaman821 3y agoIt is probably good to have a sodium battery industry to hedge against high lithium prices. For our current and projected needs there is probably enough lithium on earth. Here is a chart of what we mine https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-one-visualization-2022/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-...
- trebligdivad 3y agoWhy is 'Prussian white' a nice blue? (as shown in Northvolt's pic at the bottom)
- rootusrootus 3y agoBecause that's not Prussian white, it's Prussian blue. The white version is derived from the blue.
- havkom 3y agoNorthvolts PR department seems to historically be very sharp. In addition they seem to want to announce many things, like a co-operation to create batteries from wood (the wooden industry is large in Sweden so probably many very important people working at the top of those companies): https://northvolt.com/articles/stora-enso-and-northvolt/ https://northvolt.com/articles/stora-enso-and-northvolt/ In that light, I wonder how this press release should be interpreted.
- photochemsyn 3y agoOriginal research article this development appears to be based on was published in 2015 is available on sci-hub, just paste the title in: Rhombohedral Prussian White as Cathode for Rechargeable Sodium-Ion Batteries It's notable that it was an ARPA-E funded project and some of the research was done at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. It's more applied research than basic research as they were specifically looking for a setup that would work with existing battery manufacturing technology. > "Compared with previous work, the high Na concentration in the new material overcomes the sodium-deficiency problem. We show that it could be directly assembled into a full cell with a hard carbon anode. This is critical for the scalable sodium-ion battery manufacture that is compatible with the current lithium-ion battery infrastructures." Interesting timeline: from publication of research result to commercial development to deliverable product, ~8 years. Now, would a VC fund think that was a decent turnaround time - I really don't know, any opinions?
- acyou 3y agoBeware of battery technology announcements that only give a single parameter! They have usually made drastic tradeoffs in other areas in order to get the headline number. And we are left to only speculate. But, if the other numbers were great, they would have also stated them.
- kurthr 3y agoIt's still less than half Lion and not quite as good as current LiFePo or NMC. Hope springs eternal.
- kristjank 3y agoEven if it performs worse, the abundance of minerals required to construct this type of cell is a good news for sustainability, given we figure out how to recycle them. I imagine it should be easier, or at least less dirty than lithium.
- danans 3y agoAnother technology to watch is silicon anode Lithium-ion batteries (Amprius, Sila, Group 14) which have been demonstrated at 400-500Wh/kg. Matt Ferrell's Undecided Youtube channel just posted a video today going over that technology: https://youtu.be/YJ4pg_exdvs?si=kKNE-yY-Va9xMuBf https://youtu.be/YJ4pg_exdvs?si=kKNE-yY-Va9xMuBf
- s0rce 3y agoAnd Enovix
- staticelf 3y agoPretty cool, go sweden!
- dcow 3y agoThis is a fraction of the density of lithium ion. What’s the upside?