China Leading the Way With Rechargeable Sodium Batteries – NYT

[bonami2]

Quote

China’s EV battery giant CATL says it can use sodium cells in a single EV battery pack and that it is now prepared to mass produce these such battery packs, the report said, noting that most of the 20 sodium battery factories planned or being built around the world are in China

[bonami2]

China Leading the Way With Rechargeable Sodium Batteries – NYT

WWW.ASIAFINANCIAL.COM

---

China's expertise in chemical refining and production could see it lead a shift to rechargeable batteries that...

 

[Andrew]

I believe this is the first time the NA-ion batteries are going to be used outside of a lab, so it's going to be pretty interesting to see how they perform. It's not just cars that could make use of them either.

 

In lab testing, Na-ion batteries are less power dense(375Wh/L vs 600Wh/L), slightly less efficient (92% vs 95%) but are half the price ($77/kWh vs $137/kWh) of Li-ion. They're also less likely to catch on fire when damaged and they can handle significantly more cycles, so long term from the lab testing, they do seem to be able to make up the power density issue over time.

 

There's also the added benefit of sodium being almost twice as dense lithium. I don't know how well this translates over to the batteries themselves, but if it does scale with the mass, there is potential to either have batteries that are half the size and have roughly the same energy, or batteries that are the same size as current Li-ion but have almost double the energy.

[bonami2]

@Andrew Saw a post about Renault car brand that already had a car with those battery ready for production. I can't tell if those a rumor or truth.

 

if they can get a 20y battery life with at least 300-600 mile range it will be mile ahead of lithium.