They can be charged below 0*C, too. No need to redirect lots of current to heating the batteries during charging like with Lithium.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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. 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.
walden@sub.wetshaving.social 4 weeks ago
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It just seems like almost all very reasonable upsides.
Aqarius@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Appliances that don’t depower when unplugged sound like an incredibly bad idea.
Geodad@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Refrigerators could use a battery backup. AC also.
Aqarius@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Sure, but that’s usually done through a UPS cabinet, not on an individual device level.
Geodad@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Therr is a use case for battery refrigerators. Getting vaccines to remote areas, outdoors prople could ise them, etc.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yet we love devices that keep their power with them.
Curious.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 4 weeks ago
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.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzBFCufUDq0
Here is a video of an idiot puncturing a sodium cell: 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.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 4 weeks ago
Easily rectified by adding a physical cutoff.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Only if you like humans
hansolo@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
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.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
hansolo@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
OK, well let’s see how it plays out in 20 years and see where things go.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I don’t think you need to wait any years. This is happening right now.
NightCrawlerProMax@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Them not being capable of thermal runaway is the big game changer imo. They explode, but don’t catch fire in doing so.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
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.