“cool, let me know when mass production starts.”
(“to the best of my knowledge, that is now, immediately.”)
HiNa opened a 1 GWh sodium-ion battery factory in December 2022. Since then, both BYD and CATL have opened huge sodium-ion battery factories.
Comment on The Sodium-Ion Battery Revolution Has Started
melfie@lemy.lol 3 weeks ago
While Sodium-Ion sounds legitimately promising, we’ve all read so many articles about “revolutionary new battery tech” over the years that the default response is “cool, let me know when mass production starts.”
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
davidagain@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yup. BYD’s 30GWh/year means 1kwh/second!
I can’t resist cancelling the units even though it doesn’t actually make sense because it’s a capacity not a volume, as it were, but that’s a 3.6kw factory!
Krelis_@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
3.6 MW even. :)
3.6 kW is what a 50cc internal combustion engine typically produces
davidagain@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Here’s my working. There are about 31.56 million seconds in a year, and so
30 GWh/year ~ 31.56 GWh/year = 31x10^9 Wh / year
= 31x10^9 Wh / 31x10^6 s = 10^3 Wh/s = 1 kWh / s = 3600 kWs / s = 3.6 kwI used the duckduckgo autocalculator just now, and 30/31.56*3.6 is about 3.4, so it’s much closer to 3.4kW.
(It’s not power output, it’s manufactured storage output. I think of it as like a factory that produces 3.4 litre capacity jugs per second, but they’re not jugs, they’re actually batteries.)
If these were sold at lithium ion prices, that would net them about 120*3.4 USD/s, or roughly 1.5 million USD/s.
Or to calculate another way, they could make a 120kWh battery, (which would give a family car a range in the region of 450 miles), every two minutes.
OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Did you read the article? This isn’t about a research paper that talks about theoretical lab experiments. Sodium batteries are in real world application right now. Mainly in China and South America.
You can buy sodium batteries from AliExpress. It’s been available for a while. I was thinking about ordering a few but I ended up spending my hobby budget elsewhere. There’s no economies of scale yet for sodium battery tech. You can get the battery but there is zero electronics available for it. Mainly you’d have to design your own charger and battery management modules. That’s out of my pay grade. I’ve been waiting for Chinese engineers to mass produce such things.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
You can buy sodium batteries from AliExpress.
You can buy a lot of bullshit from AliExpress.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
they’re actively manufactured for consumers, and cheap and available enough to be relatively competitive with lithium ion on there
OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There’s a world that exists outside of your bubble. It’s real. No matter how much you bury your head in the sand.
rcbrk@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
you’d have to design your own charger and battery management modules
Just searched for “Sodium-ion BMS” on Aliexpress:
screenshot of aforementioned search’s results, showing listings for sodium-ion bms boards for AU$10~AU$40 or soAdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
i hope isdt releases a firmware update for the q6 nano for that if RC sodium ion packs become available.
although afaik energy density per volume and weight isn’t quite there yet
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
The sub is about technology, not industry. Also, look at the advances in battery technology in the last 30 years. There have only been 3 notable technology advances in the last 40 years from a consumer perspective, but there have been significant advances within each of those major technology changes, resulting in Wh/kg increasing by 6 to 10 times and $/Wh dropping about 99%.
If you want to hear about things that could happen or are about to start happening in industry, this is the right community. If you want to know what you can buy tomorrow, try Amazon.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
resulting in Wh/kg increasing by 6 to 10 times and $/Wh dropping about 99%.
And yet, a Tesla model S costs $10,000 more than 2012.
Soup@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Tesla, the company run by a nazi capitalist and which has a value so inflated it’s amazing it hasn’t imploded under its own weight, raises it’s prices and you’re blaming batteries? You do know that every saving a corporation makes goes towards profits and that they never lower their prices as long as people are buying(and even then, they refuse to most of the time)?
There’s correlation not equalling causation and then there’s whatever the hell this is. Like one of the final bosses of that logical fallacy.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
It’s not just Musk. All the legacy automakers switched fast to EVs because of the higher profit margins, and have been obfuscating the fact that at recent battery prices, EVs should cost less than ICE. To try and add value, they festoon the vehicles with pointless gadgetry and screens, which of course will all fail long before the battery. By Design.
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I’ll take out of context quotes for $100, Alex.
Those changes are over 40 years, only 13 years of which apply to your reference, and include only one component of a luxury vehicle. Also, the current base price for a Tesla Model S that it showed me was $150k. If we apply inflation to $140k since 2012 ($150k minus the $10k you said), we get a value of $197k. So, $47k cheaper in 2025 dollars.
I suppose you blame battery prices for why McDonalds costs more, too?
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
But Elon told us EVs cost more than ICE because of battery costs. There are hundreds less components in EV versus ICE, and there could be even less if they removed the pointless gadgetry. As for the McDonalds comment, which makes no sense, maybe loosen your ponytail elastic.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
look at EV prices in china for a more accurate depiction of the battery progress that is being made
apparently the government EV subsidy for outright purchases ended in 2022, but they’re good enough at the manufacturing now that EVs are still exceptionally cheap. 70-80% of world lithium-ion production also takes place in China, so it makes sense.
There’s a lot of reasons that I don’t like the Chinese government, but they have been doing a whole lot better than the rest of the world with investment into the future of technology from what I’ve seen. The number of top-rated CS and EE schools in China is doing a whole lot on its own.
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
Feels weird to gatekeep that - the des says ‘news or articles’ so an article about some ancient tech isn’t for this community?
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
The point is not about this particular article, but the general attitude of that comment, which boils down to “Why is there an article about a technological breakthrough that may never pan out in my community about technology?” I feel like these guys would have complained about Newton’s quaint ideas for a new way to use mathematics.
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
Oh, I see.
I was just commenting on ‘this community isn’t about industry’ bcs I didn’t quite understand that (but my comment was a bit unclear, should have added the quote I was referring to).
Psythik@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Fewer things irritate me more than someone who just hops straight into the comments without actually reading the article first.
melfie@lemy.lol 3 weeks ago
Yeah, your ire is justified. Total ADD move to start reading, have a thought pop in your head, then post without at least scanning the rest of the article to make sure you’re not posting something stupid.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Can buy them in relatively small quantities now online.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Yeah, I want to buy a car w/ reduced range at substantially lower prices, but I can’t do that right now. Give me a sub-$20k option to get to work and back and then I’ll get excited about the tech.
mr_strange@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Second-hand Nissan Leaf?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Right, used cars are feasible, I’m talking about new cars. A sub-$20k new commuter should be possible w/ sodium ion batteries.
davidagain@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Buying new cars is stupid. You wasted several thousand just by driving it out of the dealership. Let someone else do that and buy it a year later with low milage and ten grand off.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Those are very cheap, undervalued. I see them at US$4000 with 60,000 miles.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
What car anywhere is sub $20k?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The Kia Soul is just over $20k, but not EV.
The Nissan Leaf is about $30k, and a replacement battery is something like $5-10k, depending on size. That’s pretty close to that $20k target, and given that the Soul is around that $20k price, I could see a manufacturer getting a sodium-ion based EV with limited range (say, 100-150 miles) right around $20k.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I only pay attention if Dr. Goodenough’s name is somewhere in the ecosystem.
signalsayge@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
The article is literally about a mass produced $800 Sodium Ion battery that you can buy right now.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Because it’s an ad…you all know that,right?
MojoMcJojo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Did…did you want them to keep it a secret?
Soup@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It being an ad doesn’t change anything in an of itself. They’re correct in saying that there is a mass-produced, consumer grade product available. Unless that is a lie, or said product is complete trash, this solves the “call me it’s mass-produced” problem the original commentor has.
davidagain@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You don’t generally advertise things that you don’t mass produce, though.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Somebody gotta tell Silicon Valley about that.