49
votes
Sweden's Northvolt says new lithium-free sodium-ion battery is cheaper, more sustainable and doesn't rely on scarce raw materials
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- Title
- 'Breakthrough battery' from Sweden may cut dependency on China
- Authors
- Alex Lawson
- Published
- Nov 21 2023
- Word count
- 606 words
Important part:
160 Wh/kg as opposed to Lithium AA batteries at ~300 Wh/kg.
Otherwise a potato would meet all those criteria.
Still seems like there’s use cases where this could replace lithium batteries right? There’s plenty of devices and gadgets that spend most of the time on chargers and don’t actually need super long battery performance. Cordless vacuums (and robot vacs) and a whole host of kitchen gadgets come to mind.
Agreed, this could be a boon for anything that isn't too size constrained like home energy storage or grid storage. Assuming it can be produced cheaply.
This was immediately what jumped to my mind. I could easily find space for a home battery the size of a hot water heater. That would even probably be overkill for the size of my systems. Overly detailed description of what I want, in case any readers have a lead for me to chase.
I have about 10kw-effective of old solar panels and a 10kw generator. I would love an affordable smart battery system that would charge up to about 80% capacity during the day (selling excess to the grid). Then either conserve to cover future usage or sell off throughout the night depending on weather forcast. When there is high periods of generation during the summer, you want to have ample charging headroom in case you get an emergency shutoff signal from the grid.
And I'd want to have some charging headroom in the winter if the generator needs to kick on so that no excess generation is wasted (generator won't kick on unless grid is offline). Having batteries would reduce dependence on generator...but generator can run indefinitely which is kind of important in a fully electrified home during the winter.
Streetcars also can use batteries just to get them through small stretches where they can’t hang overhead wires for whatever reason.
Plus for renewable and nuclear energy there’s a huge need for batteries to smooth out power consumption (since peak usage doesn’t line up with the most productive times to generate power). They’re not especially space constrained, so if it’s cheaper this would be a better option for them. Maybe not as good as clever solutions like pumped hydro or using excess power to pull a cart full of rocks up a slope and sending it back down when you need the energy back, but on the menu of options.
160Wh/kg now. Lithium battery density has improved a lot over the last few years - less than 20 years ago 160Wh/kg would have been world-leading for Li-ion - so it seems reasonable to assume there's a lot of optimisation for this new chemistry.
Although I can't find anything saying this battery is production ready, just that they've validated the capacity. There's a new battery tech in every other lab but it's all vapourware until it ships in meaningful volumes. Whatever did happen to those zinc/air cells from a few years back?
Good points! Another article says that Northvolt wants these batteries to enter production in 2024. That’s them saying it, not an independent source.
While I'm sure there is room for optimization, lithium is more reactive than sodium and no amount of optimization will change that.
Edit: To be clear, I'm no chemist, I just want to be realistic. Half the energy density sucks but like others have said, I'm sure there will be use cases. Even cars wouldn't be too bad if the cost is cheap enough.
My (fairly limited!) understanding is that some of the design of lithium battery cells is to do with avoiding various reactions because ever enthusiastic lithium does like to trash electrodes. Sodium's marginally more relaxed approach to electrochemistry should make things somewhat easier on that front. Na+'s is a pretty chunky boi compared to a lithium ion and that does impact the kinetics of the intercalation but I'm not sure that matters too much.
Caveat being it's been a long time since I did much chemistry and my interest in battery tech is purely as an enthusiastic layperson so I might be completely off track!
Important to note that this isn't a breakthrough in battery technology in general, it's a breakthrough for Northvolt specifically. Which doesn't make it any less good news, of course!
CATL had 160Wh/kg sodium batteries in production a couple of years ago and out in the world doing battery stuff. They claim to have 200Wh/kg sodium batteries on the verge of mass production. If production batteries are at 200Wh/kg right now, you can be pretty sure there are labs doing 250Wh/kg or more already. Northvolt's problem isn't catching up with lithium, it's catching up with China.
It's a bit unclear exactly what is currently happening but CATL say they have a deal to put their sodium batteries into Chery EVs this year
But you're right the really exciting application of sodium batteries is grid storage and grid storage doesn't care much about energy density. Make a (very) cheap, safe battery at ~150Wh/kg and your main problems are going to be building them fast enough and finding somewhere to put all the money. Current sodium battery production isn't scaled enough yet to make significant savings but give it a few years.
On the transport front, after driving an EV exclusively for almost two years now I'm starting to come around to thinking that (at least for most people in the UK/EU) cars just don't need huge batteries with ~400 mile ranges. Especially if you can charge them in the same amount of time as it takes to have a wee and buy a cup of tea, and it looks like charging speeds with Na+ cells should be in that ballpark.
Energy density is only a limiting factor for portable products. Battery technology like this could change the world of grid energy storage.
I think consumers are more aware of portable devices, including cars, but the majority of energy use is industrial or household in origin. A pivot away from fossil fuels requires more and better storage to cope with fluctuating generation and demand levels, so indeed these applications could benefit from extremely cheap batteries, even if they aren’t optimally energy-dense. It’s not like this is an order of magnitude difference anyway… 160 Wh/kg is pretty good.
In transportation, these less dense storage batteries can still come in handy for charging electric vehicles because that charging infrastructure is part of the grid.
Especially when combined with the more intermittent renewable energy sources. What's the harm in having a large storage-container-sized battery at every solar plant? Or wind turbine array? Hell, sodium is so abundant and cheap that every mid-sized city could have a few dedicated sodium batteries just to hedge against blackouts.
As always, cost is really the only limiting factor when discussing solutions like that. If we can make dirt cheap large scale batteries we stand a very good chance at decarbonizing our electrical grid in the coming decades.