Hey hey
We saw a USB pack similar to this released by a Japanese company earlier this month.
If these prove to be as viable as they appear to be, the age of oil is over, because as interesting as these may appear for vehicles, mobile-ish electronics (read, they aren’t great in terms of energy density), where they’ll shine is immobile grid scale or structural scale or immobile device scale storage.
Your oven might end up with a bank of these. Your fridge. An air conditioner. A heat pump. A power wall for your house that holds 4 days worth of electricity. These have way way way higher cycle reliability than their lithium counter parts. They’re good for something like 5x-10x as many cycles. But they are heavier per unit energy. But they degrade slower.
I’m trying to not get to hyped but the bits of news of these getting into consumer technology is extremely heartening. The biggest and frankly, only middling issue, with renewables is where to stick the energy in the between times. Grid scale or microscale storage is the answer, but honestly, lithium hasn’t been a great technology for that. Its good enough to get started, but the cycle time isn’t great and the consequences of failure are high. Lithium fires arent nothing to fuck with.
As far as I know, these sodium batteries basically can’t catch fire the way lithium can. There is no thermal runaway potential.
They don’t consume (as much) hard to get, planet destroying minerals like lithium or cobalt.
They’re very young, but even in these first generations, are coming in price competitive with lithium comparables. Remember how expensive lithium was in its first generations?
We’ve already spent a few decades setting the world up to run on lithium batteries. Sodium should be a drop in replacement.
Appliances that don’t depower when unplugged sound like an incredibly bad idea.
Refrigerators could use a battery backup. AC also.
Sure, but that’s usually done through a UPS cabinet, not on an individual device level.
Therr is a use case for battery refrigerators. Getting vaccines to remote areas, outdoors prople could ise them, etc.
Only if you like humans
Yet we love devices that keep their power with them.
Curious.
Adding batteries to a device has one advantage: portability. It also has mutiple disadvantages: batteries add weight, add design complexity, and make it more difficult to fully shut off power in an emergency.
Major household appliances aren’t portable, and are subject to failure modes where you really do want to cut all the power right now and make sure it stays that way. Thus, the disadvantages of adding batteries directly to an appliance outweigh the advantages.
A power wall using this new battery tech would be great, though.
A couple things, and to be clear I’m really narrowly focused on appliances/ immobile applications. I don’t think these heavier batteries are quite yet ready for things like phones, drones, scooters, EV’s.
I think specifically this battery technology addresses your issues directly.
Firstly, there are actual reasons why current battery technologies are not allowed to be used in specific indoor applications, and that is thermal runaway (effectively your third criticism). Generally, LiPO’s are not legally allowed for use in permanently installed indoor environments. The reason why is thermal runaway.
Here is a video of an idiot puncturing a lipo cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzBFCufUDq0
Here is a video of an idiot puncturing a sodium cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ya_ls1zkA
Spot the difference? Its the fire. The only reason we don’t currently have LiPO’s acting as stores of power for current technology is that you DO NOT WANT lithium fires to happen indoors. A sodium battery will explode (see idiot A). But it will not catch fire and will not create a thermal runaway situation.
Secondarily, appliances are already heavy. Adding weight for something like a battery isn’t an issue because you don’t need to move the thing very often. The amount of additional design complexity is small, and something we’ve basically already solved in so many ways. We don’t need the portability we would need for a vehicle or cell phone.
Thirdly, I think the complexity is trivial. Complexity hasn’t stopped producers from adding what amounts to a small computer to everything from a refrigerator to a tea kettle where literally a simple switch would do.
Appliances have potentially serious failure modes that don’t involve battery fires. (We had one here a couple of weeks ago, which would have flooded out our basement if I hadn’t been able to cut power to the pump involved.) Being able to cut the power completely and instantly is not negotiable for a lot of appliances. I wasn’t even taking battery fires into consideration when I wrote about failure modes—I was talking about things that already happen to plug-in appliances right now.
Yes, the added weight and complexity are likely not all that significant here, but they’re sufficient that, even without the power-cutting issues, they outweigh any benefit of attaching a battery to the appliance directly. It’s just not a particularly useful idea when you get pretty much the same benefits with none of the downsides by incorporating the batteries into the building’s power system separately.
I think there is more to structure level battery support that you might consider which highlights why appliances with batteries could catch on faster.
I don’t need a permit to get an ac that has it’s own battery pack. The overhead and total investment (let’s say 500 for a basic AC and 1k for one with batteries) is far far lower.
You aren’t wrong at all with your current critisism. I’m just at saying that I think the benefits to end users are sufficiently high and the barriers low enough well see wide scale adoption of in appliance batteries fairly soon l.
Easily rectified by adding a physical cutoff.
Imagine if we started seriously investing in battery tech at the time the combustion car was invented and hadnt stopped since. We would still have been limited by not having computers for simulation for a long time, but we could probably have gotten to the current level like 20 years ago.
But yes, the future of electricity depends entirely on eco friendly, sustainable and cheap batteries. Its just a matter of time.
batteries didn’t make much sense in the past because where do you take the electricity from? combusting coal to generate electricity to charge your car is not much better than just combusting oil directly. now, we have solar. that changes everything.
You could have totally built small scale water and wind power a few decades ago. Also solar was already viable 15 years ago and would have been cheap af if it had been scaled up to “economy of scale” levels. For example Germanies solar capacity was already at 1/5th of todays level 15 years ago. That was without any huge subsidies and the panels and feed in returns were not great either. We could have easily been at todays level in terms of solar 10-15 years ago if the lobby for it was as powerful as the coal/gas/nuclear lobby.
When I was in grade 9, in 1977, my science teacher told us about his solar panels. He was projecting that they would pay off the investment in about 20 years. How much better must that be now (and we are talking about Ontario, Canada, hardly the best place for solar power)?
This site is slow af to load a measly pdf so im gonna add this screenshot. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
“Current” are the numbers from 2004, anticipated is probably realistic for what we have now. This calculation is not for private installations tho, because those get much less money for each kWh. With huge scale commercial installations 2-3 years is probably realistic. For private installations its still like 10 years for it to pay back its cost. Depends heavily on you local weather and electricity buy/sell prices ofcourse.
Right now we’re seeing lots of roofs start to show damage and leaks from rooftop solar. The industry is going to have to figure out a better way because people won’t be happy about the trade of cheap electricity for expensive roof work. It can be done well, but these companies that pop up and install panels as cheaply as possible are going to screw things up.
With tiled roofs its honestly not so bad. As long as the installation hooks and overall kit you have is good ofcourse. It took me and my friend like 2-3 days of hopping around on the roof with little prior experience. Before we closed it up we had someone professional attest it which cost a tiny fraction of what letting them install it would have cost.
But i generally agree, there are lots of shitty companies for both equipment and installation that just rip you off.
Also, solar thermal generation was viable a hundred years ago, but nobody invested in it.
Sad this never got refined like it deserved for small scale.
Photovalic solar was invented in 1954 and has been readily available since the 1960’s. In 1963 Japan was powering a lighthouse with it. And Solar One was operational in 1982.
If we gave a rat’s ass about solar at the time we easily could have done it also.
Where from? The grid, maybe?
We have been investing in battery tech for centuries. It is a hard problem and there hasn’t always been a path forward. Engines are much easier, but we are near the end of where we can go with them according to the laws of physics. (too bad, liquid fuels are such a great energy dense solution)
Sodium ion batteries don’t have the energy density of lithium ion batteries. Yet. If they manage to mass produce energy dense sodium ion batteries, then yes, it would be amazing.
Them not being capable of thermal runaway is the big game changer imo. They explode, but don’t catch fire in doing so.
They can be charged below 0*C, too. No need to redirect lots of current to heating the batteries during charging like with Lithium.
It just seems like almost all very reasonable upsides.
100% agree. These along with induction charging roads are what puts EVs over the line in terms of average distance per charge.
Sodium is also far easier to get, no mines involved. This might be closer to the era of 89¢ gas.
I don’t agree with induction roads. Its simply not necessary and makes roads far more complicated to build and maintain.
just batteries is plenty.
OK, well let’s see how it plays out in 20 years and see where things go.
I don’t think you need to wait any years. This is happening right now.
Batmaaaan
Whoever thought hina is a typing error, you are not entirely wrong.
It a business named hina and they sit in china…
They don’t have to brag about it, sheesh.
oh they do, it’s a great invention after all.
They should sell a charger called “ba” and then a two pack called “banana” and a four pack called “bananana”
And they could sell a solar panel pack called a rama!
Bananarama
mAh Na mAh Na
Tooo tooo, rooo tooo tooooo.
Obviously they’re not as efficient as lithium-ion because the atom size of sodium is bigger than lithium. However lithium is scarce, sodium is everywhere. While it’s not so effective for small devices, they’re fine for big battery storages. If true, being able to charge in 25 minutes is great.
They’re far more useful as stationary power supplies, so really, it doesn’t matter much in most cases that it can fully charge in even 2 hours.
It depends how much power they can dump in 1 second. If more or the same as lion tech stacks then they will be viable for EVs.
Another thing. Fast charging stationary power might be important for a distributed power grid. Currently one of the problems in some implementations is that excess power from clients cant even be accepted. Fast charging storage might be important for accepting large excess coming in from the grid.
It’s not for any of the above. Grid systems will have many batteries and not need excessively fast charge/discharge rates. Evs still can’t really use them because they’re simply too heavy for the energy density. Longer range evs already need beef8er suspensions and chew through tires from the weight. Going even heavier with even larger batteries isn’t very feasible compared to the alternatives.
Matt ferrall has talked about these batteries before… If your interested in learning more about them first segment is about these batteries…
Ah, yes. Made in The Land of 1000 Electrodes
