8 ms·

First anode-free sodium solid-state battery

352 points by givinguflac 2y ago

jonplackett 2y ago
Hoping this is a genuine breakthrough, but expecting the first comment to point out some important thing this battery can’t do in the real world…
- vikramkr 2y ago
  It's a publication from a research group on a new approach they're working on. The more interesting question if there are any aspects of this that could make it unexpectedly easier to translate to the real world lol. The abstract ends with "This cell architecture serves as a future direction for other battery chemistries to enable low-cost, high-energy-density and fast-charging batteries" - it's important fundamental research and exploration. At some point universities should really rethink how they do PR around research - at the least try and tamp down on headlines that read like something out of some grifter startup instead of a research lab
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  At a very very high level, whenever you hear solid state battery technologies that sound kind of g whiz, a fundamental skepticism you should have is that it seems to be easy to make a really investor-targeted small cell Solid state battery. Most of the lithium-based solid state battery companies that we heard about in the hype cycle: All had really good looking high cycle, high density solid-state batteries that were basically you know the size of a watch battery. But they never could scale. And that I mean they just couldn't make the large size battery that modern EVS use. And they also couldn't seem to scale production in any sort of married form factors of batteries in use in the world. Nevertheless this seems very very promising.
popol12 2y ago
Na4MnCr(PO4)3 Chromium is 5 times more abundant than Lithium in earth crust (0.01% vs 0.002%). Better, but not that much ? "Regular" sodium-ion batteries with prussian blue has, it seems, the great advantage of not using any scarce elements. It would be nice to have a comparison between this solid state chemistry and the regular one.
- fbdab103 2y ago
  Not sure it is a 1:1 equivalent, but this site[0] claims global chromium production is at 41 million metric tons while lithium is 180,000 metric tons. So, the supply chain already exists. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/598320/mine-production-of-chromium-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/598320/mine-production-o...
  - Teknomancer 2y ago
    Chromium mining is crucial for the steel production industry because chromium is a key ingredient in the production of stainless steel. We've been hunting and mining it for a LONG time now. Stainless is important to so many preexisting industries, such as new construction, automotive, aerospace, and household appliances. Consequently, there have been shortages in the availability and mining of chromium and this has directly impacted the production capacity and quality of stainless steel in the recent market. Seems solid-state battery production will be in competition with these industries and I would hedge a bet that Stainless Prices will go high in the coming decades as a reflection of the pinch on chromium.
    - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
      Are there any alternative steel alloys that aren't used now for cost reasons that we'd see if there was a spike in chromium prices?
      - silisili 2y ago
        AFAIK there's no stainless steel without chromium. There are alternatives, like galvanizing or powdercoating. I think if the price of chromium spiked enough, you'd just see more things move on to different materials. More aluminum, titanium, brass, bronze, etc. There are a lot of things made of stainless that don't necessarily have to be, simply because it's cheap and good enough.
      - mastax 2y ago
        During WWII Germany had limited access to chromium and cobalt so they developed alternative metallurgy for their engines etc. I know they nickel plated their cylinder bores. I’m sure there’s more detail available somewhere.
jfengel 2y ago
I don't know much about electricity but surely an anode is necessary for electrons to flow? Sayeth Wikipedia, "Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged." Ok. I'm still not entirely clear on it but it makes some kinda sense.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Yea, it also confused me - "anode-free" suggests there is no anode, and to best of my understanding a battery needs two electrodes so there will be a circuit for the current to flow. The full Wikipedia quote is: "An anode-free battery (AFB) is one that is manufactured without an anode. Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged." It's sort of like "serverless" ;)
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I think the way to understand it is that there isn't a special layer in the battery foil for making the anode. It's all chemically the same. I mean, with the server-less analogy, it is sort of like the fact that you don't manage the creation and destruction of the VM, someone (something) is though.
    - philistine 2y ago
      Serverless is a buzzword for the executive class. You’re telling me I could run my code AND fire all the employees managing my servers!
      - merlindru 2y ago
        Serverless has become "you provide a function that handles request/response, we run and scale it on our infra" You essentially only handle business logic, not the "serving" part of the server, but IMO it's not a buzzword. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because I want control and fear lock-in, but there's real meaning behind it, no?
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
alex_young 2y ago
Lithium extraction is also environmentally damaging, whether from the … brine extraction that pumps massive amounts of water to the surface to dry. That’s a bit of a stretch. Pumping water to the surface of a dry lakebed far from most life and letting it evaporate is pretty low on the environmental impact scale from mining. I wonder how that compares to sodium extraction.
- s0rce 2y ago
  I thought the issue with evaporative brine projects was mainly the water use in generally water scarce areas. There are direct extraction technologies that are better. Sodium you can just let the ocean evaporate in ponds, although this destroys wetlands (see for example a bunch of these around the SF Bay, some being restored to their native state).
  - alex_young 2y ago
    With lithium they are pumping deep water up to the surface, not adding any. The water holds the lithium and is part of a massive ancient aquifer.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    Lithium is also extracted via ocean water evaporated in ponds. You do need a bed with a high concentrated amount of lithium near the ocean, those are not uncommon.
    - Taniwha 2y ago
      Of course doing that you get far far more sodium .....
  - bredren 2y ago
    Right, I recall a question of native populations with limited access to water and then water shows up suddenly but for extracting the lithium.
  - jimkleiber 2y ago
turblety 2y ago
Great, yet another new battery revelation that will never come to market. Why is this? Why do we constantly hear of these amazing, technical advances, but yet we never see any of it come to market? - Lithium-Sulfur Batteries - Solid-State Batteries - Sodium-Ion Batteries - Aluminum-Ion Batteries - Silicon Anode Batteries - Magnesium-Ion Batteries - Lithium-Air Batteries - Zinc-Air Batteries - Flow Batteries - Graphene-Based Batteries
- Tagbert 2y ago
  Some discoveries founder in the stage of figure out how to go from a science experiment to a process to manufacture actual batteries. Sometimes there are technical or economic issues that prevent commercialization. Most of the research on this has only started in the last 10 years or so and it does take time to work out the kinks. Even within the common Lithium-ion batteries, there have been constant improvements but it’s easy to miss the changes over time. “Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose” https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Did you know Tesla Megapacks have declined in price by 44% over the past 14 months? Sometimes the changes become very visible.
    - philistine 2y ago
      Seriously for real? Why did the price of the cars not drop accordingly? Curious.
      - manquer 2y ago
        They have ? Tesla has made aggressive price cuts in the last year or so . Yes, partly it was to simulate demand, but they can only afford to do so because of their costs going down. Tesla has not been spending on a lot of new models recently , but they have been spending heavily on making them cheaper and better. Rivian, ford GM and every other non Chinese car manufacturer has been loosing money per car expect Tesla for a reason
ksec 2y ago
Doesn't tell me anything about Energy Density, Volume, or Recharge Cycle.
- catapart 2y ago
  From the article: it was tested only to 100 cycles. So this is experimental and a product version won't be available for a year or (likely) longer. And as products naturally niche into longevity, weight, capacity, and other categories, those metrics will become relevant at that point. Until then, it's just experimental results with metrics relevant to previous experimental results.
- GlibMonkeyDeath 2y ago
  "demonstrates a new sodium battery architecture with stable cycling for several hundred cycles" So nowhere near enough for grid storage (depending on their definition of "stable".) The plot shows ~400 Whr/kg and ~800 Whr/L densities. For grid storage that is fine. The paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01569-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01569-9 is unfortunately behind a paywall. We will see. Battery technologies live or die on whether the nasty, complicated surface reactions are truly reversible over discharge cycles at the sizes needed to be practical...
  - gpm 2y ago
    400 Whr/kg is competing for the highest energy density applications that can run on rechargeable batteries. Things that fly. Cars. Not grid storage. I mean if it was otherwise suitable for grid storage it's not a downside obviously, but at those energy densities it can be inferior in terms of cost and/or cycle life and still be commercially viable in other significant markets. Not to mention this is research, it doesn't have to directly result in a commercially viable product.
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  These monthly breakthrough announcements are getting annoying. Seems that "several hundred cycles" was good enough to publish this one.
shahidkarimi 2y ago
[dead]
christkv 2y ago
My main interest with these kind of batteries is little to no fire hazard
- BelmonduS 2y ago
  Can you check how sodium reacts with water or humidity?
  - mperham 2y ago
    Strawman. No one is talking about pure sodium.
  - Salgat 2y ago
    This is why we are very careful when we use table salt.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    The lithium batteries are not more flammable than other batteries because of the lithium, but because most of them use organic electrolytes instead of water-based electrolytes. A discharged sodium or lithium battery does not have metallic sodium or lithium. Fully charged sodium or lithium batteries contain the sodium or lithium as metals, which would react in a similar way with air or water, if the battery would be cut to expose them to the environment.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  There are already varieties of lithium batteries with little (LFP) to no (LTO) fire hazard. LFP is cheap, too, which is a nice bonus.
dtx1 2y ago
> with stable cycling for several hundred cycles. So an order of Magnitude less than useful batteries.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Typical lion cells are only rated for 500-1K cycles too.
- ytpete 2y ago
  Does the paper say they don't have stable cycling beyond a few hundred cycles? Or just that they only tested up to a few hundred cycles, and it was stable all through the range they had time to test so far? Big difference between those two.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
Why file a patent in UC San Diego
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Grayson Deysher - the author of the paper and the experiment - is a PhD candidate at UCSD (go tritons!)
gpm 2y ago
Preprint of paper here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/api-gateway/chemrxiv/assets/orp/resource/item/6557e156dbd7c8b54b7aefa5/original/an-anode-free-sodium-all-solid-state-battery.pdf https://chemrxiv.org/engage/api-gateway/chemrxiv/assets/orp/...
xyst 2y ago
One will hope this becomes commercially successful and the dirty process of creating and building lithium batteries goes away completely. Hope we become less dependent on China and other countries with shady labor practices (ie, child labor, minimal to no safety regulations).
- kobieps 2y ago
  Yeah I've seen too many of these overhyped academic announcements that never make it commercially because they overlooked some small but critical aspect of manufacturing. Production is HARD Disclaimer: I really hope these batteries make it.
kordlessagain 2y ago
[flagged]
Workaccount2 2y ago
Can't wait for this to never go further than this single published paper.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  Yeah don’t have your hopes up, but Shirley Meng is well known battery researcher, it’s not complete vaporware.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    The thing is that researchers just have to come up with stuff that works, not stuff that is viable.
jti107 2y ago
pretty cool...but when it comes to batteries what matters is scale and total cost. it doesnt matter if the elements are cheaper, are you introducing a product that is significantly better or cheaper that the current status quo (see the rise of LFP)? can you use existing factories and manufacturing techniques or do you need to invent or build those. we've started hearing about solid state batteries about 15 years ago and we still dont have any at a big enough scale. if solid state batteries do takeoff it will probably takeoff first in electric aviation and supercars which can hide the cost due to a more expensive products and the need for higher density
quinnharley 2y ago
[dead]
ec109685 2y ago
Lithium has actually dropped in price by 80% over the last two years, so this part of the article is (currently) wrong: “ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million. This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent prices skyrocketing, putting the needed batteries further out of reach.” Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2024/02/lithium-prices-in-free-fall-implications-for-clean-energy-transition-in-the-private-sector https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2024/02/lithiu...
- dev_tty01 2y ago
  Yes, interesting article and battery design, but the university PR folks certainly overplayed the "problems" with lithium. Not unusual.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
  it's a mere correction, it's still higher than pre-covid
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  Yes, and conflate "totals" with proven reserves while failing to mention that people aren't really actively looking for more reserve as aggressively. But this is a PR piece for the University for which the standard problem is to magnify both the problems it avoid as well as the impact it produces. But at its core, an anode free battery has a lot of desirable properties which make this engineer feat notable. Perhaps the most important is that the materials are readily available in a number of countries which could source their own raw materials to produce batteries. They also do not fail exothermically[sp?] when cell integrity is breached, that makes them a better battery for cars than the current Lithium ones. So the next bridge to cross (and one so many battery breakthroughs fall down on) is what is the cost to produce batteries at scale. If, as we read yesterday they can get them down to $1/kWh then you'll be seeing a whole lot of these.
bilsbie 2y ago
It seems more happens in these anodes than in the electrolyte. How’s that possible?
Sparkyte 2y ago
Good the abundance of sodium and its stable state is going to give us a huge potential for power storage. I have so many potentially spicy pillows in my house I'll be glad to have it swapped for sodium any day.
m3kw9 2y ago
Is this very specific to sodium state battery?
system2 2y ago
Realistically, when are we going to see a consumer grade lithium battery replacement?
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  2040. There is a lot of investment in lithium batteries that needs to earn profits first.
  - zizee 2y ago
    Cars are already shipping with Sodium based batteries, and you can buy the cells yourself on Alibaba https://electrek.co/2023/12/27/volkswagen-backed-ev-maker-first-sodium-ion-battery-electric-car/ https://electrek.co/2023/12/27/volkswagen-backed-ev-maker-fi... https://www.alibaba.com/premium/sodium_ion_battery/--------------------------------G.html https://www.alibaba.com/premium/sodium_ion_battery/---------...

352 points by givinguflac 2y ago

Hoping this is a genuine breakthrough, but expecting the first comment to point out some important thing this battery can’t do in the real world…

vikramkr 2y ago
It's a publication from a research group on a new approach they're working on. The more interesting question if there are any aspects of this that could make it unexpectedly easier to translate to the real world lol. The abstract ends with "This cell architecture serves as a future direction for other battery chemistries to enable low-cost, high-energy-density and fast-charging batteries" - it's important fundamental research and exploration. At some point universities should really rethink how they do PR around research - at the least try and tamp down on headlines that read like something out of some grifter startup instead of a research lab
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
At a very very high level, whenever you hear solid state battery technologies that sound kind of g whiz, a fundamental skepticism you should have is that it seems to be easy to make a really investor-targeted small cell Solid state battery. Most of the lithium-based solid state battery companies that we heard about in the hype cycle: All had really good looking high cycle, high density solid-state batteries that were basically you know the size of a watch battery. But they never could scale. And that I mean they just couldn't make the large size battery that modern EVS use. And they also couldn't seem to scale production in any sort of married form factors of batteries in use in the world. Nevertheless this seems very very promising.

popol12 2y ago

Na4MnCr(PO4)3 Chromium is 5 times more abundant than Lithium in earth crust (0.01% vs 0.002%). Better, but not that much ? "Regular" sodium-ion batteries with prussian blue has, it seems, the great advantage of not using any scarce elements. It would be nice to have a comparison between this solid state chemistry and the regular one.

fbdab103 2y ago
Not sure it is a 1:1 equivalent, but this site[0] claims global chromium production is at 41 million metric tons while lithium is 180,000 metric tons. So, the supply chain already exists. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/598320/mine-production-of-chromium-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/598320/mine-production-o...
- Teknomancer 2y ago
  Chromium mining is crucial for the steel production industry because chromium is a key ingredient in the production of stainless steel. We've been hunting and mining it for a LONG time now. Stainless is important to so many preexisting industries, such as new construction, automotive, aerospace, and household appliances. Consequently, there have been shortages in the availability and mining of chromium and this has directly impacted the production capacity and quality of stainless steel in the recent market. Seems solid-state battery production will be in competition with these industries and I would hedge a bet that Stainless Prices will go high in the coming decades as a reflection of the pinch on chromium.
  - YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
    Are there any alternative steel alloys that aren't used now for cost reasons that we'd see if there was a spike in chromium prices?
    - silisili 2y ago
      AFAIK there's no stainless steel without chromium. There are alternatives, like galvanizing or powdercoating. I think if the price of chromium spiked enough, you'd just see more things move on to different materials. More aluminum, titanium, brass, bronze, etc. There are a lot of things made of stainless that don't necessarily have to be, simply because it's cheap and good enough.
    - mastax 2y ago
      During WWII Germany had limited access to chromium and cobalt so they developed alternative metallurgy for their engines etc. I know they nickel plated their cylinder bores. I’m sure there’s more detail available somewhere.

jfengel 2y ago

I don't know much about electricity but surely an anode is necessary for electrons to flow? Sayeth Wikipedia, "Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged." Ok. I'm still not entirely clear on it but it makes some kinda sense.

drdaeman 2y ago
Yea, it also confused me - "anode-free" suggests there is no anode, and to best of my understanding a battery needs two electrodes so there will be a circuit for the current to flow. The full Wikipedia quote is: "An anode-free battery (AFB) is one that is manufactured without an anode. Instead, it creates a metal anode the first time it is charged." It's sort of like "serverless" ;)
- cogman10 2y ago
  I think the way to understand it is that there isn't a special layer in the battery foil for making the anode. It's all chemically the same. I mean, with the server-less analogy, it is sort of like the fact that you don't manage the creation and destruction of the VM, someone (something) is though.
  - philistine 2y ago
    Serverless is a buzzword for the executive class. You’re telling me I could run my code AND fire all the employees managing my servers!
    - merlindru 2y ago
      Serverless has become "you provide a function that handles request/response, we run and scale it on our infra" You essentially only handle business logic, not the "serving" part of the server, but IMO it's not a buzzword. I'm not a huge fan of it personally because I want control and fear lock-in, but there's real meaning behind it, no?
jdthedisciple 2y ago

alex_young 2y ago

Lithium extraction is also environmentally damaging, whether from the … brine extraction that pumps massive amounts of water to the surface to dry. That’s a bit of a stretch. Pumping water to the surface of a dry lakebed far from most life and letting it evaporate is pretty low on the environmental impact scale from mining. I wonder how that compares to sodium extraction.

s0rce 2y ago
I thought the issue with evaporative brine projects was mainly the water use in generally water scarce areas. There are direct extraction technologies that are better. Sodium you can just let the ocean evaporate in ponds, although this destroys wetlands (see for example a bunch of these around the SF Bay, some being restored to their native state).
- alex_young 2y ago
  With lithium they are pumping deep water up to the surface, not adding any. The water holds the lithium and is part of a massive ancient aquifer.
- cogman10 2y ago
  Lithium is also extracted via ocean water evaporated in ponds. You do need a bed with a high concentrated amount of lithium near the ocean, those are not uncommon.
  - Taniwha 2y ago
    Of course doing that you get far far more sodium .....
- bredren 2y ago
  Right, I recall a question of native populations with limited access to water and then water shows up suddenly but for extracting the lithium.
- jimkleiber 2y ago

turblety 2y ago

Great, yet another new battery revelation that will never come to market. Why is this? Why do we constantly hear of these amazing, technical advances, but yet we never see any of it come to market? - Lithium-Sulfur Batteries - Solid-State Batteries - Sodium-Ion Batteries - Aluminum-Ion Batteries - Silicon Anode Batteries - Magnesium-Ion Batteries - Lithium-Air Batteries - Zinc-Air Batteries - Flow Batteries - Graphene-Based Batteries

Tagbert 2y ago
Some discoveries founder in the stage of figure out how to go from a science experiment to a process to manufacture actual batteries. Sometimes there are technical or economic issues that prevent commercialization. Most of the research on this has only started in the last 10 years or so and it does take time to work out the kinks. Even within the common Lithium-ion batteries, there have been constant improvements but it’s easy to miss the changes over time. “Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose” https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Did you know Tesla Megapacks have declined in price by 44% over the past 14 months? Sometimes the changes become very visible.
  - philistine 2y ago
    Seriously for real? Why did the price of the cars not drop accordingly? Curious.
    - manquer 2y ago
      They have ? Tesla has made aggressive price cuts in the last year or so . Yes, partly it was to simulate demand, but they can only afford to do so because of their costs going down. Tesla has not been spending on a lot of new models recently , but they have been spending heavily on making them cheaper and better. Rivian, ford GM and every other non Chinese car manufacturer has been loosing money per car expect Tesla for a reason

ksec 2y ago

Doesn't tell me anything about Energy Density, Volume, or Recharge Cycle.

catapart 2y ago
From the article: it was tested only to 100 cycles. So this is experimental and a product version won't be available for a year or (likely) longer. And as products naturally niche into longevity, weight, capacity, and other categories, those metrics will become relevant at that point. Until then, it's just experimental results with metrics relevant to previous experimental results.
GlibMonkeyDeath 2y ago
"demonstrates a new sodium battery architecture with stable cycling for several hundred cycles" So nowhere near enough for grid storage (depending on their definition of "stable".) The plot shows ~400 Whr/kg and ~800 Whr/L densities. For grid storage that is fine. The paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01569-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01569-9 is unfortunately behind a paywall. We will see. Battery technologies live or die on whether the nasty, complicated surface reactions are truly reversible over discharge cycles at the sizes needed to be practical...
- gpm 2y ago
  400 Whr/kg is competing for the highest energy density applications that can run on rechargeable batteries. Things that fly. Cars. Not grid storage. I mean if it was otherwise suitable for grid storage it's not a downside obviously, but at those energy densities it can be inferior in terms of cost and/or cycle life and still be commercially viable in other significant markets. Not to mention this is research, it doesn't have to directly result in a commercially viable product.
1970-01-01 2y ago
These monthly breakthrough announcements are getting annoying. Seems that "several hundred cycles" was good enough to publish this one.

shahidkarimi 2y ago

[dead]

christkv 2y ago

My main interest with these kind of batteries is little to no fire hazard

BelmonduS 2y ago
Can you check how sodium reacts with water or humidity?
- mperham 2y ago
  Strawman. No one is talking about pure sodium.
- Salgat 2y ago
  This is why we are very careful when we use table salt.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  The lithium batteries are not more flammable than other batteries because of the lithium, but because most of them use organic electrolytes instead of water-based electrolytes. A discharged sodium or lithium battery does not have metallic sodium or lithium. Fully charged sodium or lithium batteries contain the sodium or lithium as metals, which would react in a similar way with air or water, if the battery would be cut to expose them to the environment.
rootusrootus 2y ago
There are already varieties of lithium batteries with little (LFP) to no (LTO) fire hazard. LFP is cheap, too, which is a nice bonus.

dtx1 2y ago

> with stable cycling for several hundred cycles. So an order of Magnitude less than useful batteries.

userbinator 2y ago
Typical lion cells are only rated for 500-1K cycles too.
ytpete 2y ago
Does the paper say they don't have stable cycling beyond a few hundred cycles? Or just that they only tested up to a few hundred cycles, and it was stable all through the range they had time to test so far? Big difference between those two.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

Why file a patent in UC San Diego

alephnerd 2y ago
Grayson Deysher - the author of the paper and the experiment - is a PhD candidate at UCSD (go tritons!)

gpm 2y ago

Preprint of paper here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/api-gateway/chemrxiv/assets/orp/resource/item/6557e156dbd7c8b54b7aefa5/original/an-anode-free-sodium-all-solid-state-battery.pdf https://chemrxiv.org/engage/api-gateway/chemrxiv/assets/orp/...

xyst 2y ago

One will hope this becomes commercially successful and the dirty process of creating and building lithium batteries goes away completely. Hope we become less dependent on China and other countries with shady labor practices (ie, child labor, minimal to no safety regulations).

kobieps 2y ago
Yeah I've seen too many of these overhyped academic announcements that never make it commercially because they overlooked some small but critical aspect of manufacturing. Production is HARD Disclaimer: I really hope these batteries make it.

kordlessagain 2y ago

[flagged]

Workaccount2 2y ago

Can't wait for this to never go further than this single published paper.

dzhiurgis 2y ago
Yeah don’t have your hopes up, but Shirley Meng is well known battery researcher, it’s not complete vaporware.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  The thing is that researchers just have to come up with stuff that works, not stuff that is viable.

jti107 2y ago

pretty cool...but when it comes to batteries what matters is scale and total cost. it doesnt matter if the elements are cheaper, are you introducing a product that is significantly better or cheaper that the current status quo (see the rise of LFP)? can you use existing factories and manufacturing techniques or do you need to invent or build those. we've started hearing about solid state batteries about 15 years ago and we still dont have any at a big enough scale. if solid state batteries do takeoff it will probably takeoff first in electric aviation and supercars which can hide the cost due to a more expensive products and the need for higher density

quinnharley 2y ago

[dead]

ec109685 2y ago

Lithium has actually dropped in price by 80% over the last two years, so this part of the article is (currently) wrong: “ The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million. This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent prices skyrocketing, putting the needed batteries further out of reach.” Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2024/02/lithium-prices-in-free-fall-implications-for-clean-energy-transition-in-the-private-sector https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2024/02/lithiu...

dev_tty01 2y ago
Yes, interesting article and battery design, but the university PR folks certainly overplayed the "problems" with lithium. Not unusual.
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
it's a mere correction, it's still higher than pre-covid
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Yes, and conflate "totals" with proven reserves while failing to mention that people aren't really actively looking for more reserve as aggressively. But this is a PR piece for the University for which the standard problem is to magnify both the problems it avoid as well as the impact it produces. But at its core, an anode free battery has a lot of desirable properties which make this engineer feat notable. Perhaps the most important is that the materials are readily available in a number of countries which could source their own raw materials to produce batteries. They also do not fail exothermically[sp?] when cell integrity is breached, that makes them a better battery for cars than the current Lithium ones. So the next bridge to cross (and one so many battery breakthroughs fall down on) is what is the cost to produce batteries at scale. If, as we read yesterday they can get them down to $1/kWh then you'll be seeing a whole lot of these.

bilsbie 2y ago

It seems more happens in these anodes than in the electrolyte. How’s that possible?

Sparkyte 2y ago

Good the abundance of sodium and its stable state is going to give us a huge potential for power storage. I have so many potentially spicy pillows in my house I'll be glad to have it swapped for sodium any day.

m3kw9 2y ago

Is this very specific to sodium state battery?

system2 2y ago

Realistically, when are we going to see a consumer grade lithium battery replacement?

SoftTalker 2y ago
2040. There is a lot of investment in lithium batteries that needs to earn profits first.
- zizee 2y ago
  Cars are already shipping with Sodium based batteries, and you can buy the cells yourself on Alibaba https://electrek.co/2023/12/27/volkswagen-backed-ev-maker-first-sodium-ion-battery-electric-car/ https://electrek.co/2023/12/27/volkswagen-backed-ev-maker-fi... https://www.alibaba.com/premium/sodium_ion_battery/--------------------------------G.html https://www.alibaba.com/premium/sodium_ion_battery/---------...