I’m so desperate for home battery using sodium batteries. Safer and lower temperature it can operate at. Low energy density but I don’t care for home battery.
There's a yttrium-containing variety of LFP that's supposed to work better at lower temperature (down to -45 C). But yttrium itself is quite expensive ($35/kg).
Discharging is not the issue with LiPo4 or other lithium tech. They can work up to negative temperatures without any issue. They can go down to -20°C (-4°F).
The problem is charging the battery at negative, as this damages the internal structure. So you need to heat up the battery (aka, you discharge by warming up heating elements), until you hit the right point. And then you can charge up, what will create heat and thus allow for non-damaging charging.
Some even have a fun trick, where if your going to a EV station with your car (end point route on your build in sat nav). They can start to pre-drain the battery if its really too cold, to warm up the batteries even more. So by the time your at the charger, the batteries are on temperature. I forgot what brand did it that way, seen that feature years ago.
What is different is that Sodium-Ion batteries can charge from negative (i think it was -10°C), as they do not suffer from the same damaging effect.
Nearly all EVs now do "battery preconditioning" when on the way to a charger. They would be pretty unusable without, I know one person had a model that didn't have it (this was a few years back) and he could barely pull more than 10kW in winter from public chargers, vs 100kW+ in summer at the exact same chargers.
I want to have viable replacements for all the old school lithium ion battery packs so that I won't wonder when the day will come that one of the many we have will experience thermal runaway while nobody is around to deal with it. IMO a world where we no longer worry about spontaneous battery fires can't happen soon enough.
CATL has demonstrated much better safety for their sodium EV batteries, but home and energy storage packs are more likely to be made of standard 18650 cells like the one in the video.
Battery voltages are dependent on chemistry, or, standard electrode potentials of metals used. It can't be configured like way past fractions of volts. And Li has about the highest potential among metals, which is kind of the point of using Li. Which means straight swapping NMC cells with any substitute will cause overcharging. Maybe there are cell configurations that could work in series packs, but it can't be simple swap-ins.
There will probably never be a battery that can power your home but can be used without any kind of worry.
The right thing is to place the battery in a way that you don't have to worry abut the fire, not to expect a high-density battery to be perfectly safe.
LFP batteries are pretty safe. Look up some videos of demonstrations. You can cut them in half with a metal knife and nothing happens besides the loss of capacity, and I suppose the knife heats up from the short-circuit current as well.
I don't know what kind of chemistry shenanigans are going on to make that happen, but it's impressive.
LFP batteries are quite a bit safer than the LMN or NMC batteries. The sodium batteries are more stable than LFP I think but I'm not sure how much longer and if that matters too much for home battery usage.
Honestly, yes, re energy density. I hadn’t seen home batteries in-person until a couple of years ago. I was surprised by how small they could actually be (still with a decent capacity). I’d totally trade some of that for chemistry with a less… catastrophic failure mode, and I don’t even have a big house, even for non-US standards.
Not speaking one way or the other on sodium ion’s properties specifically. I see from sibling comments that it’s not straightforward.
ALL the money that flew into "Fossil & Co" throughout the last, lets say, 50 or 60 years, including all implicit fundings, like state-building-streets or universities-masters-engineering-focus-ICE, all the money for lobbying, all the money for all the (counter)campaigns (from ALL sides), and all that money....
...WHAT IF we would have spent all of this money instead on Battery Research and all this Renewable Energy stuff?
We would probably be dramatically farther behind in the Materials Research conducted by the chemical companies underlying the fossil fuels industry, which has itself been necessary to the improvements in battery & semiconductor technologies we are now enjoying. Polyimides don’t invent themselves!
“What If?” history is fun, but there are always Tradeoffs.
Hard to imagine being farther behind than a static page with no services. Oh wait there's one service, someone injected a hijacking script pretending to be our free host.
You have it entirely backwards: Oil is refined to create feedstock chemicals for everything from beauty creams to jet engine ceramics to lithography intermediates to hydrogenated oils and decaffeinated coffee. It is these new and inventive uses which have continuously increased demand for the raw resources and driven research.
We might have shaven off ~10 years from the current timeline.
Batteries are only a part of the equation. Practical EVs were enabled not just by Li-ion batteries but by IGBTs. And semiconductor development moved about as fast as possible.
And then there's a gulf between lead-acid batteries and Li-ions. I think only NiMH batteries would have been a reasonable midpoint, and even they would have been impractical for full EVs.
I'd love to see a 'manhattan project' to get off of oil, in any way possible eg batteries or algae-produced diesel, whatever works, for geopolitical purposes.
Honestly not really. Insolation energy is not that high, and photosynthesis tops out at around 10% under best conditions, and that's energy out the end of photosystem (solar cells are pushing 30% and perovskite might go to 40 or 50%), so doesn't take into account inefficiency in your sugar (much less hydrocarbon) conversio. The care and feeding of algae is annoying, they grow really slowly so contamination is a constant problem, and they self-shade, so the suface area to volume of growth conditions must be high. And a high surface area means awful evap problems... The list goes on
Ungodly amount of money was spent on battery research since 1945, at least $100-150B since 2000 alone. Every combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte was tried, tested and evaluated. We got silver-zinc, Ni-Cd, NiMH and finally Li-Ion batteries as the result.
We would have inefficient and polluting engines, leaded gasoline, steam engines burning coal, no high performance plastics, and probably more even wars around oil and gas and slower economy leading to less resource to fund battery research...
I mean, batteries and solar panels are cool, but thinking about the future doesn't mean we should forget the present. The advance we could have gotten by diverting funding away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and batteries is to balance with the damage caused by using outdated fossil fuel technology before the transition.
Cities are breathable now thanks to all the progresses modern engines have made. They will be even more breathable with zero emission cars, but I prefer to wait a bit more in these conditions than waiting a bit less in a smog filled city.
I think submitted article isn’t from a legitimate news source. The overall headline about what CATL said about cost parity is valid, but someone ran an LLM over the original source and embellished it into a long article with a bunch of made up numbers.
I switched the 12v lead-acid batteries on my EV to the 12v Lithium from OHMMU. Best upgrade I've done. I recently saw that they now offer 12V Sodium, and their warranty now went up to 3 years on the sodium, from 1 year. They have new data on its robustness.
That was fast. CATL is only now ramping up Naxtra production and it's already approaching price parity with LFP. This is early validation of the cost curve predictions for this chemistry.
Most of this is destined for stationary storage systems that would likely have used lithium-based chemistry instead, or not been built-out at all. Every GWh of capacity sodium offsets is a GWh that isn't supplied by lithium, so demand for higher-value battery chemistry should be lower, and take prices with it. Good news all around.
Likely includes the whole system (pack, BMS, inverter, cabinet, installation) rather than only the cells. In any case, sodium will take a few years until the scale is large enough to offer any cost advantage over fairly optimized and cheap LFP these days.
Yeah I call BS on this. It’s of course will get cheaper, but only so much - ingredients that are cheaper is like 30% of the battery. All while LFP is mature tech that’s also getting cheaper.
It doesn’t even add up on pack cost. Tesla’s NCM packs are like $14k brand new which adds up to $186 per kwh.
I've probably drunk too much kool-aid somewhere else, have always assumed sodium-ion batteries are already cheap and it's just trying to beat LFP in terms of energy density...
CATL sodium and ProLogium solid state are the only legit "safe" batteries made.
LFP and NMC are, sadly: ubiquitous, dangerous, and normalized. LFP entering thermal runaway produce hydrogen gas that requires continuous igniters to burn off and burns/smolders for days to weeks.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 18.6 ms ] threadThe problem is charging the battery at negative, as this damages the internal structure. So you need to heat up the battery (aka, you discharge by warming up heating elements), until you hit the right point. And then you can charge up, what will create heat and thus allow for non-damaging charging.
Some even have a fun trick, where if your going to a EV station with your car (end point route on your build in sat nav). They can start to pre-drain the battery if its really too cold, to warm up the batteries even more. So by the time your at the charger, the batteries are on temperature. I forgot what brand did it that way, seen that feature years ago.
What is different is that Sodium-Ion batteries can charge from negative (i think it was -10°C), as they do not suffer from the same damaging effect.
Charging it at or around 0C will destroy it extremely rapidly due to electroplating of lithium.
CATL has demonstrated much better safety for their sodium EV batteries, but home and energy storage packs are more likely to be made of standard 18650 cells like the one in the video.
The right thing is to place the battery in a way that you don't have to worry abut the fire, not to expect a high-density battery to be perfectly safe.
I don't know what kind of chemistry shenanigans are going on to make that happen, but it's impressive.
Not speaking one way or the other on sodium ion’s properties specifically. I see from sibling comments that it’s not straightforward.
Maybe you're right in terms of energy per volume. Sodium are very light weight in my experience.
ALL the money that flew into "Fossil & Co" throughout the last, lets say, 50 or 60 years, including all implicit fundings, like state-building-streets or universities-masters-engineering-focus-ICE, all the money for lobbying, all the money for all the (counter)campaigns (from ALL sides), and all that money....
...WHAT IF we would have spent all of this money instead on Battery Research and all this Renewable Energy stuff?
Where would we be today on techdev curve? ;-) ;-)
“What If?” history is fun, but there are always Tradeoffs.
https://imgur.com/a/Fri5S4e
Hard to imagine being farther behind than that when it comes to nation-building.
Batteries are only a part of the equation. Practical EVs were enabled not just by Li-ion batteries but by IGBTs. And semiconductor development moved about as fast as possible.
And then there's a gulf between lead-acid batteries and Li-ions. I think only NiMH batteries would have been a reasonable midpoint, and even they would have been impractical for full EVs.
Ungodly amount of money was spent on battery research since 1945, at least $100-150B since 2000 alone. Every combination of anode, cathode and electrolyte was tried, tested and evaluated. We got silver-zinc, Ni-Cd, NiMH and finally Li-Ion batteries as the result.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-rise-of-lithium-ion-bat...
Early Li-ion battery tech was developed by none other than Exxon itself (in second link)
I mean, batteries and solar panels are cool, but thinking about the future doesn't mean we should forget the present. The advance we could have gotten by diverting funding away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and batteries is to balance with the damage caused by using outdated fossil fuel technology before the transition.
Cities are breathable now thanks to all the progresses modern engines have made. They will be even more breathable with zero emission cars, but I prefer to wait a bit more in these conditions than waiting a bit less in a smog filled city.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/11/06/sodium-ion-batteries-...
Most of this is destined for stationary storage systems that would likely have used lithium-based chemistry instead, or not been built-out at all. Every GWh of capacity sodium offsets is a GWh that isn't supplied by lithium, so demand for higher-value battery chemistry should be lower, and take prices with it. Good news all around.
Huh?
Automotive grade are like 50 and storage ones are like 30.
Can someone confirm these prices because sounds a whole lot of BS or article not saying something (i.e. dancing around TCO).
It doesn’t even add up on pack cost. Tesla’s NCM packs are like $14k brand new which adds up to $186 per kwh.
LFP and NMC are, sadly: ubiquitous, dangerous, and normalized. LFP entering thermal runaway produce hydrogen gas that requires continuous igniters to burn off and burns/smolders for days to weeks.