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GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage

207 points by rbanffy 3mo ago

SubiculumCode 3mo ago
I want to replace my Lithium home battery, and what I really want to do it to move to one of the new sodium ion batteries..e.g like the one CATL is supposed to have at some point? Anyone have a good idea when these will be available for consumers?
- XorNot 3mo ago
  Why would you replace it? That asset likely has at least 10 years in it if you already have it.
  - syntaxing 3mo ago
    Probably operating temperature and safety.
- rapsey 3mo ago
  Why? You also need to replace your inverter in that case.
- hunterpayne 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - xbmcuser 3mo ago
    What bullshit are you spouting sodium batteries are safer and do not have the same thermal runway concern that lithium batteries do.
  - rcxdude 3mo ago
    What? All the data suggests that sodium ion batteries are safer than lithium ion batteries: it is harder to set them into thermal runaway and they are less violent when they do so.
  - chewbacha 3mo ago
    Pretty that’s just not true. Sodium ion batteries are less energy dense than lithium ion and are not prone to dendrite formation. They are also more thermally stable and less likely to do thermal run away reactions. Also, since they are less energy dense they don’t store the same potential energy. You are probably thinking of metallic sodium batteries which are completely different.
  - Aboutplants 3mo ago
    You have this flipped backwards
  - bearfood 3mo ago
    You must work for a LiPo company. This is the opposite of truth. Sodium doesn't behave like lithium at all. The chemistry is very different. Imagine if table salt had an exo reaction in water
  - icehawk 3mo ago
    > This is bad in that when the battery malfunctions, the energy is released at 30x the rate Got a study you can link about that?
- cyberax 3mo ago
  Na-Ion batteries are not practical for home storage right now. They have a much higher voltage range compared to LFP batteries, so regular inverters and chargers will not work reliably. Nothing insurmountable, but the supply chain is just not here. Na-Ion cells are great for grid-scale storage because they potentially can go down to something like $20 per kWh. But bulk LFP cells are already at ~$60 per kWh, so their cost is not really a deciding factor anymore.
- syntaxing 3mo ago
  Bluetti has a small battery pack for now. I think the options for consumers will balloon once CATL mass produce sodium ion cells. Solix/anker, jackery, ecoflow, etc all use CATL cells already.
- cbg0 3mo ago
  Probably in a year or so. CATL is expecting about 1GWh deployment by the end of the year and has contracts to deliver ~7GWh in Europe next year, so they're clearly ramping up production towards the end of this year.
tootie 3mo ago
> Peak Energy is buying its commercial cells via contracts with Chinese suppliers So really just assembly and sales then. I suppose it's a good start and maybe if business takes off they can figure out their own cells.
- Brybry 3mo ago
  Yeah, I had questions when Kurt Kelty was saying that Peak's battery was "kicking butt" after the article said Peak is still building their battery factory and currently buys its cells from China. Is GM testing Peak's cells or some Chinese company's cells?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- nine_k 3mo ago
  Chinese companies started similarly 25-30 years ago.
TwiztidK 3mo ago
My company operates two Jupiter Power owned LFP batteries in the MISO market. Each of them draws .5 - 2MW constantly for the HVAC system. If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.
- wlesieutre 3mo ago
  Not an expert, but from what I read the expectation is for sodium ion batteries to get substantially cheaper than lithium, mainly due to material cost. Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.
  - Aboutplants 3mo ago
    I’d love a shed sized battery sitting on the corner of my property if it could give me 5-7 days of power.
    - zx8080 3mo ago
      It's called diesel fuel.
    - rsyring 3mo ago
      That would you pay for that shed size battery?
      - SturgeonsLaw 3mo ago
        Depending on just how much more cost effective sodium battery tech gets, that might not be a questionable proposition
      - AussieWog93 3mo ago
cyberax 3mo ago
Keep in mind, we could have had local Na-Ion battery production in the US. The company producing them needed about $5m of bridge loans, with products already sitting in warehouses awaiting the UL certification. This company got sold for scrap.
- petcat 3mo ago
  your comment would be more interesting if you actually provided any details at all
  - cyberax 3mo ago
    Sorry, I accidentally cut off the last paragraph when posting. The company was Natron Energy: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/natrons-liquidation-shows-why-the-us-isnt-ready-to-make-its-own-batteries/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/natrons-liquidation-shows-...
    - formerly_proven 3mo ago
      Germany is currently liquidating their high-performance lithium-ion battery maker. Western industrial policy is indistinguishable from malicious interference.
      - subscribed 3mo ago
        That's quite staggering. First shutting down working and safe nuclear power plants in favour of coal, then that. At this rate I start wondering who actually makes this policy, at most turns exposing the country more to the energy markets issues and making them more reliant on OPEC and Putin.
        formerly_proven 3mo ago
        If you look back at the last 30-40 years german industry was often at the leading edge of emerging technologies, e.g. different types of renewable energy (especially wind and solar), automation, robotics, machine learning and so on, advanced ADAS, and to a lesser degree with batteries and EVs (though broadly competitive with lots of investment). It's just that they get backstabbed the shit out of them by politics. Who then turn around and act all pikachu at the job losses. I don't think there is any other country which had this many opportunities and leads into high-growth and ultra-high-growth industries and made sure none of them panned out. That's not bad timing or bad luck, it's systemic. Maybe the US's conversion into a petrostate?
cramer4next 3mo ago
Its a failure in the U.S. because the bet is on solid state batteries. Personally I won't take the EV plunge until they have those. The only exception for me to not wait would be the 10k BYD car. At that price point and it lasted 3 years i'd be happy.
- otterley 3mo ago
  This is for grid storage, not EVs.
  - cramer4next 3mo ago
    The article is about grid storage, but grids can also use solid state and battery tech is shared between different usecases. My point was where the bet is. QuantumScape is a good example as it entered into agreements with opertors for their battery tech. Good article on solid state for the grid: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/
    - adrian_b 3mo ago
      The solid-state batteries with lithium do not have any significant advantage for having a solid electrolyte, but their advantage is in having an anode made of pure lithium, instead of lithium intercalated inside some electrode material. This greatly increases the energy density, which is very important for a mobile application, but this has little importance for stationary applications, where not the energy per mass or per volume is important, but the energy per dollar. Moreover, for stationary electric grid applications, besides the cost, the lifetime is extremely important. As mentioned by others, the companies which provide electric energy want lifetimes of the order of 30 years, which can be ensured with sodium batteries. For now, the main factor that has prevented the use of the lithium batteries with solid electrolytes is the short lifetimes. There are good chances that we will see cars with lithium batteries with solid electrolytes, but I do not believe that such batteries will ever be used for high-energy stationary applications.
- hunterpayne 3mo ago
fenestella 3mo ago
[flagged]
throwaway27448 3mo ago
Surely this will just be Chinese hardware with a "made in America" label slapped on it. I can't fathom why anyone would allow GM of all companies to get any contracts
- thelastgallon 3mo ago
  This is the same story everywhere. Nobody has the know-how or the deep ecosystems needed to do these things. India has a "made in India" mandate which is hilarious. >80% of solar panel (polysilicon, ingots, and silicon wafers) is from China. Situation is worse with batteries and EVs. Tata, which has been making vehicles for quite some time doesn't have any clue how to make EVs and is building an entire plant with a Chinese company (Chery). Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....". In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm: 1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah. 2) When its impossible to compete: China is security threat, we can't allow them. But we'll import most of it (80 - 90% of components) and still put our label. Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).
  - tock 3mo ago
    Huh Tata is the best selling EV manufacturer in India. Their new Chery tieup is utilizing the Freelander architecture from the Chery and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) joint venture in China instead of a pricier internal or JLR roadmap. Remember they own JLR. This is for their new premium EV line.
  - adithyareddy 3mo ago
    You're not wrong, but this is the economic and industrial strategy model for how countries build complex manufacturing capabilities from scratch. Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen. You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output. By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable. India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized. There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.
m463 3mo ago
> a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent Doesn't matter for cars, but I think that's pretty good/important for grid storage.
- zdragnar 3mo ago
  Lithium batteries in cars are usually at least that good already. Most of the efficiency lost is in converting back and forth between AC/DC between the grid and the motors, and the rest in the auxillary features such as heating and cooling the cabin.
  - m463 3mo ago
    sorry, probably should have quoted the entire thing: > The batteries are showing a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent, a significant 2 to 3 percent better than LFP. (“Round trip” refers to the amount of energy a battery discharges, relative to the amount used to charge it). I think for cars, the efficiency probably doesn't matter that much. If it costs $1.03 per kwh instead of $1.00 per kwh, or 103 miles vs 100 miles, no car owner will care. But grid storage is all about efficiency.
    - Dylan16807 3mo ago
      > But grid storage is all about efficiency. Is it? Isn't there usually a very large price ratio between when grid batteries are charged and discharged? Like charging at 5 cents and discharging at 25? In that situation a couple percent of inefficiency is nothing special, just a small cost.
- aitchnyu 3mo ago
  Series hybrid cars which do fuel->electricity->motion are unacceptably inefficient and flopped at sales. Will sodium make them viable? My reckless googling says LFP batteries in vehicles has roundtrip efficiency of 80% and sodium has 95%.
log-removal 3mo ago
Hardware-speech synthesis.
adrianwaj 3mo ago
“You need to keep an LFP cell at 25 °C, give or take, or it will rapidly degrade” so LFPs have to be heated and cooled - not difficult to solve but it does add cost and complexity to a battery, something Sodium-Ion doesn't require. But looking at the discharge profile of Sodium-Ion [1], then a 24v stable output would need about 48v at 100% battery charge and that means cost and complexity on the input and output sides to keep a steady voltage over the discharge cycle. LFP have a much flatter discharge curve but it's a much greater concern with Sodium Ion. Sodium Ion is also criticized for its lifetime cycle degradation. LTO (Lithium Titanate) batteries hit the sweet spot between both chemistries and are used in electric buses, but I still like Sodium batteries for their environmental considerations. Wouldn't it be great to somehow harvest power from the temperature swings between night and day in arid regions? Also large changes between sea level and cruising altitude. I know black tourmaline and certain lithium compounds being pyroelectric generate power upon temperature change due to mechanical stress, which instigates piezoelectricity. "If the goal is maximum electrical energy generated per degree shift, single-crystal PMN-PT (Lead Magnesium Niobate–Lead Titanate) is currently the top-performing synthetic material." [2] [1] https://hackaday.com/2025/10/30/why-sodium-ion-batteries-are-terrible-for-solar-storage/ https://hackaday.com/2025/10/30/why-sodium-ion-batteries-are... [2] https://share.gemini.google/0wylEwjLUcOL https://share.gemini.google/0wylEwjLUcOL
- amluto 3mo ago
  LFP’s flat discharge curve is actually kind of annoying: it makes it quite difficult to measure the state of charge of a cell. BMSes mostly need to track the SoC by counting coulombs, and balancing a series of cells may be challenging unless the SoC to reach the steeper part of the curve. Meanwhile, most serious applications have power conversion circuitry, so a variable voltage may not be much of a problem. The low-end “12V” LFP packs without real BMSes or power conversion that sort of pretend to be lead-acid batteries in RVs and such are awful designs and work pretty poorly, and their “24V” and “48V” cousins are not much better. It’s true that Na-Ion may not be an easy drop-in replacement. That being said, some people are working on Na-Ion as a lead-acid replacement for car starter batteries (and for low voltage systems in EVs), and they have a lot of potential in this application. (LFP doesn’t have adequate not temperature performance and lead-acid sucks for many reasons.)
ryzvonusef 3mo ago
from what I've heard, the problem with moving sodium from lab to manufacturing is that all the industrial processes and machinery have been setup for lithium and the factories are reluctant to invest in entire new sodium setup for not much benefit for them; lithium works perfectly well and is in fact the superior product, why switch? Lithium prices have faced a massive crash, so there is no cost penalty for them anymore. Sodium's cost benefit isn't that significant now, and while other technical benefits exist, the question remains, is it worth it to setup an entire new factory from scratch for that marginal benefit?
- ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
  Sodium batteries use a relatively similar process to lithium, so I'd say overall that has sped up their adoption in manufacturing. But the economics part is true, people looked to sodium as lithium prices went high and then enthusiasm cooled as they dropped again. However they now seem to be passed that slump and the long term benefits seem enough for sustained investment. It helps that the wider market is growing. You can keep your lithium battery factory and use your know how to set up a new sodium battery factory and aim to sell both to slightly different markets for the life of a factory.
- adrian_b 3mo ago
  In TFA it said that the US company that was shut down (Natron) pursued a solution quite different from lithium batteries (with an organo-metallic electrode), which may have been a reason for their failure. On the other hand the 2 Chinese companies that now make sodium batteries "rely on sodium iron pyrophosphate (NFPP) cathodes, which are chemically and structurally similar to lithium-iron phosphate in an LFP battery". This similarity probably enabled them to reuse much of their existing fabrication lines for LFP batteries. It is unavoidable that in the long term the cost of sodium batteries will be much lower than of any lithium batteries. That would have been enough for their adoption for stationary uses, but their much greater temperature range (which allows operation and charging at -40 degrees, both Celsius and Fahrenheit) and their longer lifetime are enough to make them replace lithium batteries in certain applications even without the price advantage. Lithium batteries will always be used in mobile applications, because they will continue to have a better energy per weight ratio, but for high energy stationary uses and for vehicles in cold climates it is likely that they will be mostly completely replaced by sodium batteries.
hgomersall 3mo ago
I've been pondering the question of what happens if you change the design requirements to say, 20 charge/discharge cycles in total, then use it over seasonal timescales. Can you get the price so low that you can scale up enough battery storage to buffer a whole season?
- tim333 3mo ago
  I don't think anyone's cracked that yet. There was a YC startup trying to do stuff with iron oxide. (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/gigantic-form-energy-battery-google-minnesota https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/gigantic-form...) And proposals using aluminium but again not in action. Also zinc air https://inc42.com/startups/sthyr-energy-aims-to-tame-169-bn-energy-storage-market-by-switching-from-lithium-to-zinc/ https://inc42.com/startups/sthyr-energy-aims-to-tame-169-bn-... the trouble is it's easy enough to propose such things but hard to be economically competitive with existing solutions. My guess is sodium ion will get cheap because the ingredients are cheap and there's a lot of money going into mass production which will bring the cost of that down over time. There's an ancient non electrical seasonal solar storage practiced in Austria and such places where they grow tree and then chop them into logs for the winter but it's a bit labour intensive.
  - hgomersall 3mo ago
    I've been thinking about Polysulphide-Air for this. There are certainly engineering questions, but on the face of it it looks like it might be tractable. I think the trick is to view it like a winter base-supply, and treat it like a power station that runs when solar is less.
- vitally3643 3mo ago
  Even if you have an entire season's worth of capacity, your inputs and outputs still cycle per-day. You're still cycling charge and discharge every day, you're just doing it in a very small band within the overall capacity. This still causes wear on the battery, and it can be better or worse depending on chemistry. The only way to get around that is if you disconnect all inputs, throwing away all the excess solar/wind power and supply exclusively from battery for the entire season. There's no real benefit apart from like a standby power supply for a cataclysmic event where all other power sources including the sun become nonviable. You just won't ever use the full capacity of the battery, so most of the resources to build it will be wasted.
011110 3mo ago
[dead]

207 points by rbanffy 3mo ago

I want to replace my Lithium home battery, and what I really want to do it to move to one of the new sodium ion batteries..e.g like the one CATL is supposed to have at some point? Anyone have a good idea when these will be available for consumers?

XorNot 3mo ago
Why would you replace it? That asset likely has at least 10 years in it if you already have it.
- syntaxing 3mo ago
  Probably operating temperature and safety.
rapsey 3mo ago
Why? You also need to replace your inverter in that case.
hunterpayne 3mo ago
[flagged]
- xbmcuser 3mo ago
  What bullshit are you spouting sodium batteries are safer and do not have the same thermal runway concern that lithium batteries do.
- rcxdude 3mo ago
  What? All the data suggests that sodium ion batteries are safer than lithium ion batteries: it is harder to set them into thermal runaway and they are less violent when they do so.
- chewbacha 3mo ago
  Pretty that’s just not true. Sodium ion batteries are less energy dense than lithium ion and are not prone to dendrite formation. They are also more thermally stable and less likely to do thermal run away reactions. Also, since they are less energy dense they don’t store the same potential energy. You are probably thinking of metallic sodium batteries which are completely different.
- Aboutplants 3mo ago
  You have this flipped backwards
- bearfood 3mo ago
  You must work for a LiPo company. This is the opposite of truth. Sodium doesn't behave like lithium at all. The chemistry is very different. Imagine if table salt had an exo reaction in water
- icehawk 3mo ago
  > This is bad in that when the battery malfunctions, the energy is released at 30x the rate Got a study you can link about that?
cyberax 3mo ago
Na-Ion batteries are not practical for home storage right now. They have a much higher voltage range compared to LFP batteries, so regular inverters and chargers will not work reliably. Nothing insurmountable, but the supply chain is just not here. Na-Ion cells are great for grid-scale storage because they potentially can go down to something like $20 per kWh. But bulk LFP cells are already at ~$60 per kWh, so their cost is not really a deciding factor anymore.
syntaxing 3mo ago
Bluetti has a small battery pack for now. I think the options for consumers will balloon once CATL mass produce sodium ion cells. Solix/anker, jackery, ecoflow, etc all use CATL cells already.
cbg0 3mo ago
Probably in a year or so. CATL is expecting about 1GWh deployment by the end of the year and has contracts to deliver ~7GWh in Europe next year, so they're clearly ramping up production towards the end of this year.

tootie 3mo ago

> Peak Energy is buying its commercial cells via contracts with Chinese suppliers So really just assembly and sales then. I suppose it's a good start and maybe if business takes off they can figure out their own cells.

Brybry 3mo ago
Yeah, I had questions when Kurt Kelty was saying that Peak's battery was "kicking butt" after the article said Peak is still building their battery factory and currently buys its cells from China. Is GM testing Peak's cells or some Chinese company's cells?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
nine_k 3mo ago
Chinese companies started similarly 25-30 years ago.

TwiztidK 3mo ago

My company operates two Jupiter Power owned LFP batteries in the MISO market. Each of them draws .5 - 2MW constantly for the HVAC system. If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.

wlesieutre 3mo ago
Not an expert, but from what I read the expectation is for sodium ion batteries to get substantially cheaper than lithium, mainly due to material cost. Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.
- Aboutplants 3mo ago
  I’d love a shed sized battery sitting on the corner of my property if it could give me 5-7 days of power.
  - zx8080 3mo ago
    It's called diesel fuel.
  - rsyring 3mo ago
    That would you pay for that shed size battery?
    - SturgeonsLaw 3mo ago
      Depending on just how much more cost effective sodium battery tech gets, that might not be a questionable proposition
    - AussieWog93 3mo ago

cyberax 3mo ago

Keep in mind, we could have had local Na-Ion battery production in the US. The company producing them needed about $5m of bridge loans, with products already sitting in warehouses awaiting the UL certification. This company got sold for scrap.

petcat 3mo ago
your comment would be more interesting if you actually provided any details at all
- cyberax 3mo ago
  Sorry, I accidentally cut off the last paragraph when posting. The company was Natron Energy: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/natrons-liquidation-shows-why-the-us-isnt-ready-to-make-its-own-batteries/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/natrons-liquidation-shows-...
  - formerly_proven 3mo ago
    Germany is currently liquidating their high-performance lithium-ion battery maker. Western industrial policy is indistinguishable from malicious interference.
    - subscribed 3mo ago
      That's quite staggering. First shutting down working and safe nuclear power plants in favour of coal, then that. At this rate I start wondering who actually makes this policy, at most turns exposing the country more to the energy markets issues and making them more reliant on OPEC and Putin.
      - formerly_proven 3mo ago
        If you look back at the last 30-40 years german industry was often at the leading edge of emerging technologies, e.g. different types of renewable energy (especially wind and solar), automation, robotics, machine learning and so on, advanced ADAS, and to a lesser degree with batteries and EVs (though broadly competitive with lots of investment). It's just that they get backstabbed the shit out of them by politics. Who then turn around and act all pikachu at the job losses. I don't think there is any other country which had this many opportunities and leads into high-growth and ultra-high-growth industries and made sure none of them panned out. That's not bad timing or bad luck, it's systemic. Maybe the US's conversion into a petrostate?

cramer4next 3mo ago

Its a failure in the U.S. because the bet is on solid state batteries. Personally I won't take the EV plunge until they have those. The only exception for me to not wait would be the 10k BYD car. At that price point and it lasted 3 years i'd be happy.

otterley 3mo ago
This is for grid storage, not EVs.
- cramer4next 3mo ago
  The article is about grid storage, but grids can also use solid state and battery tech is shared between different usecases. My point was where the bet is. QuantumScape is a good example as it entered into agreements with opertors for their battery tech. Good article on solid state for the grid: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/
  - adrian_b 3mo ago
    The solid-state batteries with lithium do not have any significant advantage for having a solid electrolyte, but their advantage is in having an anode made of pure lithium, instead of lithium intercalated inside some electrode material. This greatly increases the energy density, which is very important for a mobile application, but this has little importance for stationary applications, where not the energy per mass or per volume is important, but the energy per dollar. Moreover, for stationary electric grid applications, besides the cost, the lifetime is extremely important. As mentioned by others, the companies which provide electric energy want lifetimes of the order of 30 years, which can be ensured with sodium batteries. For now, the main factor that has prevented the use of the lithium batteries with solid electrolytes is the short lifetimes. There are good chances that we will see cars with lithium batteries with solid electrolytes, but I do not believe that such batteries will ever be used for high-energy stationary applications.
hunterpayne 3mo ago

fenestella 3mo ago

[flagged]

throwaway27448 3mo ago

Surely this will just be Chinese hardware with a "made in America" label slapped on it. I can't fathom why anyone would allow GM of all companies to get any contracts

thelastgallon 3mo ago
This is the same story everywhere. Nobody has the know-how or the deep ecosystems needed to do these things. India has a "made in India" mandate which is hilarious. >80% of solar panel (polysilicon, ingots, and silicon wafers) is from China. Situation is worse with batteries and EVs. Tata, which has been making vehicles for quite some time doesn't have any clue how to make EVs and is building an entire plant with a Chinese company (Chery). Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....". In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm: 1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah. 2) When its impossible to compete: China is security threat, we can't allow them. But we'll import most of it (80 - 90% of components) and still put our label. Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).
- tock 3mo ago
  Huh Tata is the best selling EV manufacturer in India. Their new Chery tieup is utilizing the Freelander architecture from the Chery and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) joint venture in China instead of a pricier internal or JLR roadmap. Remember they own JLR. This is for their new premium EV line.
- adithyareddy 3mo ago
  You're not wrong, but this is the economic and industrial strategy model for how countries build complex manufacturing capabilities from scratch. Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen. You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output. By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable. India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized. There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.

m463 3mo ago

> a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent Doesn't matter for cars, but I think that's pretty good/important for grid storage.

zdragnar 3mo ago
Lithium batteries in cars are usually at least that good already. Most of the efficiency lost is in converting back and forth between AC/DC between the grid and the motors, and the rest in the auxillary features such as heating and cooling the cabin.
- m463 3mo ago
  sorry, probably should have quoted the entire thing: > The batteries are showing a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent, a significant 2 to 3 percent better than LFP. (“Round trip” refers to the amount of energy a battery discharges, relative to the amount used to charge it). I think for cars, the efficiency probably doesn't matter that much. If it costs $1.03 per kwh instead of $1.00 per kwh, or 103 miles vs 100 miles, no car owner will care. But grid storage is all about efficiency.
  - Dylan16807 3mo ago
    > But grid storage is all about efficiency. Is it? Isn't there usually a very large price ratio between when grid batteries are charged and discharged? Like charging at 5 cents and discharging at 25? In that situation a couple percent of inefficiency is nothing special, just a small cost.
aitchnyu 3mo ago
Series hybrid cars which do fuel->electricity->motion are unacceptably inefficient and flopped at sales. Will sodium make them viable? My reckless googling says LFP batteries in vehicles has roundtrip efficiency of 80% and sodium has 95%.

log-removal 3mo ago

Hardware-speech synthesis.

adrianwaj 3mo ago

“You need to keep an LFP cell at 25 °C, give or take, or it will rapidly degrade” so LFPs have to be heated and cooled - not difficult to solve but it does add cost and complexity to a battery, something Sodium-Ion doesn't require. But looking at the discharge profile of Sodium-Ion [1], then a 24v stable output would need about 48v at 100% battery charge and that means cost and complexity on the input and output sides to keep a steady voltage over the discharge cycle. LFP have a much flatter discharge curve but it's a much greater concern with Sodium Ion. Sodium Ion is also criticized for its lifetime cycle degradation. LTO (Lithium Titanate) batteries hit the sweet spot between both chemistries and are used in electric buses, but I still like Sodium batteries for their environmental considerations. Wouldn't it be great to somehow harvest power from the temperature swings between night and day in arid regions? Also large changes between sea level and cruising altitude. I know black tourmaline and certain lithium compounds being pyroelectric generate power upon temperature change due to mechanical stress, which instigates piezoelectricity. "If the goal is maximum electrical energy generated per degree shift, single-crystal PMN-PT (Lead Magnesium Niobate–Lead Titanate) is currently the top-performing synthetic material." [2] [1] https://hackaday.com/2025/10/30/why-sodium-ion-batteries-are-terrible-for-solar-storage/ https://hackaday.com/2025/10/30/why-sodium-ion-batteries-are... [2] https://share.gemini.google/0wylEwjLUcOL https://share.gemini.google/0wylEwjLUcOL

amluto 3mo ago
LFP’s flat discharge curve is actually kind of annoying: it makes it quite difficult to measure the state of charge of a cell. BMSes mostly need to track the SoC by counting coulombs, and balancing a series of cells may be challenging unless the SoC to reach the steeper part of the curve. Meanwhile, most serious applications have power conversion circuitry, so a variable voltage may not be much of a problem. The low-end “12V” LFP packs without real BMSes or power conversion that sort of pretend to be lead-acid batteries in RVs and such are awful designs and work pretty poorly, and their “24V” and “48V” cousins are not much better. It’s true that Na-Ion may not be an easy drop-in replacement. That being said, some people are working on Na-Ion as a lead-acid replacement for car starter batteries (and for low voltage systems in EVs), and they have a lot of potential in this application. (LFP doesn’t have adequate not temperature performance and lead-acid sucks for many reasons.)

ryzvonusef 3mo ago

from what I've heard, the problem with moving sodium from lab to manufacturing is that all the industrial processes and machinery have been setup for lithium and the factories are reluctant to invest in entire new sodium setup for not much benefit for them; lithium works perfectly well and is in fact the superior product, why switch? Lithium prices have faced a massive crash, so there is no cost penalty for them anymore. Sodium's cost benefit isn't that significant now, and while other technical benefits exist, the question remains, is it worth it to setup an entire new factory from scratch for that marginal benefit?

ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Sodium batteries use a relatively similar process to lithium, so I'd say overall that has sped up their adoption in manufacturing. But the economics part is true, people looked to sodium as lithium prices went high and then enthusiasm cooled as they dropped again. However they now seem to be passed that slump and the long term benefits seem enough for sustained investment. It helps that the wider market is growing. You can keep your lithium battery factory and use your know how to set up a new sodium battery factory and aim to sell both to slightly different markets for the life of a factory.
adrian_b 3mo ago
In TFA it said that the US company that was shut down (Natron) pursued a solution quite different from lithium batteries (with an organo-metallic electrode), which may have been a reason for their failure. On the other hand the 2 Chinese companies that now make sodium batteries "rely on sodium iron pyrophosphate (NFPP) cathodes, which are chemically and structurally similar to lithium-iron phosphate in an LFP battery". This similarity probably enabled them to reuse much of their existing fabrication lines for LFP batteries. It is unavoidable that in the long term the cost of sodium batteries will be much lower than of any lithium batteries. That would have been enough for their adoption for stationary uses, but their much greater temperature range (which allows operation and charging at -40 degrees, both Celsius and Fahrenheit) and their longer lifetime are enough to make them replace lithium batteries in certain applications even without the price advantage. Lithium batteries will always be used in mobile applications, because they will continue to have a better energy per weight ratio, but for high energy stationary uses and for vehicles in cold climates it is likely that they will be mostly completely replaced by sodium batteries.

hgomersall 3mo ago

I've been pondering the question of what happens if you change the design requirements to say, 20 charge/discharge cycles in total, then use it over seasonal timescales. Can you get the price so low that you can scale up enough battery storage to buffer a whole season?

tim333 3mo ago
I don't think anyone's cracked that yet. There was a YC startup trying to do stuff with iron oxide. (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/gigantic-form-energy-battery-google-minnesota https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/gigantic-form...) And proposals using aluminium but again not in action. Also zinc air https://inc42.com/startups/sthyr-energy-aims-to-tame-169-bn-energy-storage-market-by-switching-from-lithium-to-zinc/ https://inc42.com/startups/sthyr-energy-aims-to-tame-169-bn-... the trouble is it's easy enough to propose such things but hard to be economically competitive with existing solutions. My guess is sodium ion will get cheap because the ingredients are cheap and there's a lot of money going into mass production which will bring the cost of that down over time. There's an ancient non electrical seasonal solar storage practiced in Austria and such places where they grow tree and then chop them into logs for the winter but it's a bit labour intensive.
- hgomersall 3mo ago
  I've been thinking about Polysulphide-Air for this. There are certainly engineering questions, but on the face of it it looks like it might be tractable. I think the trick is to view it like a winter base-supply, and treat it like a power station that runs when solar is less.
vitally3643 3mo ago
Even if you have an entire season's worth of capacity, your inputs and outputs still cycle per-day. You're still cycling charge and discharge every day, you're just doing it in a very small band within the overall capacity. This still causes wear on the battery, and it can be better or worse depending on chemistry. The only way to get around that is if you disconnect all inputs, throwing away all the excess solar/wind power and supply exclusively from battery for the entire season. There's no real benefit apart from like a standby power supply for a cataclysmic event where all other power sources including the sun become nonviable. You just won't ever use the full capacity of the battery, so most of the resources to build it will be wasted.

011110 3mo ago

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