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.
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.
