The advantage with Sodium Ion is that, although energy densities are lower than Lithium Ion, it could still be used to power mobile devices and electric vehicles.

[1] https://www.wesa.fm/environment-energy/2024-02-19/weirton-fo...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-02/vanadium-redo...

Yes, I know that China does most of the refining/assembly, but that has little to do with the chemistry. "Building new Na-ion capacity outside China" is probably even harder than "building new li-ion capacity outside China."

You've stated:

>"Mostly from Australia and Chile" seems like the opposite of baggage, that sounds like about the best you could hope for in a global commodity, so many of which come from unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries.

So let's break it down with some facts (all easily searchable.)

(1) The graph states that Australia is the largest producer of Lithium, and states that of their exports, 90% goes to China.

(2) Australia exports the majority of its lithium. (https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/insights-australian-exports-...)

(3) Lithium ion batteries are currently reliant on Cobalt for their cathode.

(4) The DRC (Congo) is the largest producer of Cobalt, then Indonesia, then Russia.

>"seems like the opposite of baggage ... unstable regions, conflict regions, or outright adversaries"

From (1) and (2) we can see that the world is dependent on China for the only viable battery option for a range of modern applications. Thus the claim that this isn't baggage is not supported. Secondly China is also considered an adversary of the USA, by the USA. Thirdly the claim that this does not involve unstable/conflict regions is also not supported due to (3) and (4).

Part two: you've also stated the below:

>"Building new Na-ion capacity outside China" is probably even harder than "building new li-ion capacity outside China."

While this is a baseless comment, let's look at it anyway:

(5) The article is specifically about the commencement of mass production of Na batteries in the USA.

That already refutes the core premise of your statement, but let's follow it further.

(6) The article notes that unlike Li batteries, the materials are trivially sourced domestically.

That's an important difference from Li batteries, and significantly boosts the viability of competitive production in the USA (and other countries outside of China).

> While this is a baseless comment, let's look at it anyway:

It's not baseless. This is a golden boy startup, blessed with save the Earth kudos and highly subsidized. The DOE spun this outfit up in 2020 with $19M. Michigan and Whitmer have fast tracked the one, modest, token plant, delivered the tax breaks and signed the contracts for a sodium battery power facility in the state. VC money chased after all this as you would expect.

Those are all temporary or one-time goodies. This is heavy industry and at some point all the love goes away: the subsidies go away, the exemptions go away. Then the foreign competitors steal your tech and undercut you.

At that point you have a choice: fail, or build out where labor is cheap, workers are disposable and regulators are just low-cost party agents, and use your position as US company to readily import your foreign made products.

Notice how none this has anything to do with what raw materials are involved or battery chemistry. It's not about those things. It never has been. The fact that the US has large reserves of sodium is not a factor: filling a ship with sodium and sending it to some foreign plant being only the most obvious thing to do.

Why are any of us okay with humans being "disposable" anywhere on Earth?

We don't need anything top-down.

I understand there would be challenges with doing that, but I like to think a better world is possible and it starts with respecting others' humanity.

If other countries want regulations and labor rights, hell yeah.

And while what's happening in Africa with respect to conflict mining is nasty, it's worth pointing out that that this is a solvable social issue. A lot of battery and car companies are under a lot of pressure to not have conflict minerals in their supply chains.

Also, cobalt and lithium mining are a drop in the ocean compared to other forms of mining. Is it more sad when children are used to mine cobalt than when they are mining coal, iron, or copper? The reason nobody really talks about that is not that it's not happening but because the people raising issues about cobalt mining are being highly selective. People dying deep underground in coal mines is a regular thing that gets reported in the news occasionally. Some of those people are minors. Mining simply is unhealthy and dangerous. And it mostly happens in places where there is not a whole lot of attention to workplace safety; or indeed the age of the workers.

Never mind that conflict cobalt is also used in the oil and petrochemical industry. Which of course also uses oil at a ginormous scale. And never mind that nobody cares where that oil comes from or how it is produced. Or the ecological damage done to the environment producing and transporting it. E.g. Nigerian oil has had its fair share of social and ecological issues over the years. I remember there were some protests but Shell's market share never really suffered a lot.

Cobalt in batteries is fine if it is sourced responsibly. And it can be recycled when the battery eventually reaches its end of life.

> [the commencement of mass production of Na batteries in the USA] refutes the core premise of your statement

How so? This plant is one tiny step on a very, very long road. I'm glad to see it happen, but extrapolating the outcome of a race from the first few steps would be incredibly foolish. China can build Na-ion too, so the question becomes whether the difference in chemistry creates an advantage for one party or another.

> unlike Li batteries, the materials are trivially sourced domestically

So China can cut out the only part of the supply chain that leans towards the US sphere of influence, while the US gets a discount on shipping? This isn't the own you think it is.

What's that based on? Australia exporting most of it to China doesn't prove anything except that China is a major trading partner for Australia. If the problem is securing lithium for the US, then 1) the US could buy more (Lithium is sold for cash, not given away), or 2) it could set up more mines in Nevada (which has a ton of lithium, and would have lower transport costs to boot).

Sure, let's turn down the temperature.

> youre being flippantly dismissive to the point of shading instead of illuminating

Let's turn down the temperature.

> I wouldn't be excited to have either Australia ... or Chile ... as my sources

China is even less excited than you are to have Australia and Chile as their sources. Eliminating a small pain from the USA and a big pain from China gives a net benefit to China, so it's weird to see it advertised as a net benefit for the USA.

That said, raw material availability isn't the limiting factor here. We probably shouldn't even be discussing it.

> requires discussion about new battery chemistry supply chains to only discuss lithium-ion (??)

That's the alternative Na-ion has to beat. We could build lithium refining and manufacturing capacity in the US sphere of influence. Evaluations of any new technology should compare it to the best available alternatives, yes?

Now sure not that many species of animals/plants will be affected compared to say some rainforest location, but it still pains me to even imagine it. If it will bring good jobs to the locals then at least some good locally will be achieved, but thats not always the case.

The more important issue to consider is: What is the global effect? In this case lithium mining means cheaper electric vehicles, which reduces demand for petroleum. Petroleum extraction & combustion is far more harmful to the environment, so this is a net win.

It already does.

"Chinese automaker Yiwei debuted the first sodium-ion battery-powered car in 2023. It uses JAC Group’s UE module technology, which is similar to CATL's cell-to-pack design.[84] The car has a 23.2 kWh battery pack with a CLTC range of 230 kilometres (140 mi)"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery

23.2 kWh achieving 140 miles range sounds unrealistic. For example the 57kWh model 3 has a range of ~260 miles.

The energy consumption seems to be even a bit better than of the model 3

"with energy consumption approaching 10 kWh per 100km."

So roughly half capacity equals roughly half range - sounds about right to me (23.2 kWh are the same avaiable energy, whether sodium or lithium).

They are tracking all the companies and investments involved with battery production and one of their claims is that new battery production is going to outstrip demand in the next few years. That will likely mean significant price drops for batteries. And it also means that companies outside of China may be struggling to become cost competitive.

There is an insightful comment by AtlasBarfed: Keep in mind sodium ion and LFP are much safer and don't require nearly as much cooling and management systems as nickel-cobalt chemistries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363603

Read the whole comment, it is pretty detailed and explains why the lower density of Sodium Ion doesn't matter as much as people think.

not everyone lives in California and makes a million a year

Once they reach that number, car companies mostly care about cost - higher energy density reduces the weight of the car, which lowers the material costs of the rest of the car, but a big reduction on the cost of the battery does effectively the same thing. Ideally they want a dirt-cheap battery that's also high capacity, but then so does everyone.

While LFP and the Sodium battery mentioned in the title, is 95-97%.

Sure. But is it really? Like in what way is it good? I see a lot more “tempering” than I do breathless optimism. Is any serious person in a position to do something meaningful with the batteries falling prey to hype that needs to be tempered?

Solid commuter car but not too annoying on the rare roadtrip.

But, I am guessing grid frequency regulation use cases are going to make these too expensive for a car for a long time.

So the peak would be the same, but if there were too many customers then sort of like at a busy gas station people would be waiting for a spot rather than waiting for charging to complete.

Fortunately these batteries have "an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles". Also, since there aren't super-dangerous elements in them, they should be much easier and cleaner to recycle/renew - especially with the giant recharge-station-scale ones' we're talking about, which could be designed specifically for that.

Battery-backed charging stations are already common, because it allows use of cheaper grid interconnection, and use of cheaper off-peak or renewable energy.

Especially because the station would want to have multiple cars worth of energy stored, which means the load is divided among more cells and they don't have to work nearly as hard.

However, as more and more generation capacity shifts to renewable sources that by design have very small (wind) to zero (solar) inertia, there will be a requirement to build out frequency stabilizer units like the Tesla unit in Hornsdale, Australia [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve

Also I'd say the inertia in a normal wind turbine doesn't count because it's not tied into the grid frequency.

That's why the UK grid has been building some "high-inertia synchronous compensators", and a 2019 outage showed that it's urgently needed.

One way to reduce initial costs is not to electrify the whole length but to have, say, one mile of electrified road per every ten miles of highway. To get unlimited range from that 1:10 ratio, you need the vehicles to have batteries capable of absorbing power 9x faster than the vehicle uses it to maintain highway speeds.

I could see EVs having a large lithium ion pack and, if this technology is really that good, a smaller sodium ion battery to act sort of like a capacitor to smooth out intermittent charging.

I could also see low-capacity-high-power-density batteries being used in hybrids, though those need to be able to sustain high discharge rates as well as high charge rates, and I don't think the article mentioned discharge rates.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-f...

Overhead cables are simpler and cheaper, but not easily compatible with cars (which would need a comically tall pantograph to connect to the cables).

(Induction is a third option, but it's not really viable except in certain special cases because it's way more expensive, can't deliver as much power, and tends to be less energy efficient.)

Electrifying highways may sound expensive or complicated, but consider what the alternatives are. We could stick with fossil fuels. The U.S. burns about 4 million barrels of gasoline and about 4 million barrels of diesel a day, most of which is used to push cars and trucks around. That's not simple or cheap, we're just accustomed to the cost.

Another option is we switch to EVs and rely on big batteries for range. That kind of works, but battery manufacturing scale isn't there. It's also kind of wasteful to have a substantial portion of the vehicle weight being batteries. It means cars and trucks are heavier than they need to be, and they can haul less cargo.

If we could get to the point where, say, someone could drive coast-to-coast without ever having to stop to charge with only 30 or 40 kwh battery, that would be huge. It would reduce EV costs dramatically, it would reduce average vehicle weight, and you might even get better performance.

(This wouldn't completely eliminate the need for some long-range vehicles for areas not served by electrified highways, but for most uses it should be fine.)

If we combine a modern EV with 100 year old tram technology, you get the ability for a car to charge itself when travelling on roads that have a compatible system of overhead power lines. Having a huge pantograph on top of the car is kind of impractical, but powering cars from underneath via power rails embedded in slots in the road, like a full-sized version of those toy slot cars that used to be popular, is another option that's been tried on some roads in Sweden.

Where people are more likely to need the extra charge is on the long country roads between major cities. Probably a high priority could be on the major highways going into and out of cities, as those are the roads people are likely to use for long daily commutes.

Think of it like modern SLC backed QLC flash storage. As long as the usage profile fits inside of the cache, it runs as though the entire system is cache.

If it's just the former, the slow steady march of EV mindshare might solve your needs before the "L4" super-fast-charging battery. I am starting to see L2 chargers pop up in apartment parking lots, for example. IMO, "always charged" is significantly more convenient than short stops at a station, so it would still be desirable in a world where "L4" batteries and stations were common.

Keep in mind that EVs charge unattended, so you only spend a minute plugging in, and can leave to get a coffee, etc.

We would have walked to a nearby restaurant if needed.

There are setups that have their max rated power per dispenser (“pump”), and halve it if two cars are plugged in to the same dispenser at the same time. Good chargers can do 300kW. If that splits to 150kW it’s not too bad - maybe 5 min slower, rather than double. That’s because the max speed the car can take is a curve, and that only flattens the peak.

However, for the 18-min charging the biggest gotcha is the temperature. In Hyundai/Kia it requires the battery to be at 20-25°C. That’s easy in the summer. In the winter the charging speed can drop as low as 80kW.

I still have a gas vehicle but I never want to use it for long trips.

So on a road trip that I only wanted to charge twice for, one of the stops didn't work. Oh, and on the way back we had to wait for access to the faster charger. Maybe not so overblown.

That system also allows you to participate in oil futures as an end user, not to mention it lets you keep your generator up and running for a very long time.

Downside is, modern e10 gasoline tends to adsorb water from the air over time, so fuel isn't stable long term. Most guys doing this are running diesel cars/gensets for that reason.

The model is, go to a truck depot with a 300 gallon trailer, fill up trailer and truck, park the trailer at home. Then fuel the truck off the trailer until it needs to be filled again, repeat. Do understand that, you can get a larger tank, but anything over 1000 gallons requires a placard/permit to haul around. That's in a single tank, so, in theory, a legal length 5th wheel trailer could have multiple tanks under that and be compliant. If you want the tanks attached to a vehicle itself, the maximum size is 150 gallons, hence why semi trucks have multiple fuel tanks that are smaller than that.

Really the only difficulty is finding a place nearby that is willing to sell that much fuel to an individual.

Either way, people forget about this, because if you have any sort of power generation, doesn't matter the method, if you go over capacity, you have brownouts/blackouts/grid failure/etc. What is deployed now, for the most part, is sufficient genset capacity to ramp into peak load, and most of it is under-utilized the majority of the time. Batteries eventually pay for themselves because of this, as they allow for peak load handling in addition to allowing generating capacity to stay online and remain profitable outside of peak load events. It really is revolutionary.

More or less, gridscale batteries are what dams/reservoirs were to water systems, and if you consider the impact of us as a species being able to save water for later use at-will, the promise we're looking at is going to really change the way we live.

Not sure I follow here. Can you elaborate?

Are you saying the the demand for sodium batteries for power grid backup is going to be high vs supply such that they're not going to make it into cars anytime soon? Isn't one of the Chinese EV makers starting to use sodium batteries?

Having said that - if we can get cheap and safe batteries installed within the charging stations, this would make for an awesome improvement

A lot of people tend to think of the ideal charging station as a gas station, where lots of cars go to quickly add range. But gas stations have large capacity because of their disadvantages. Ideally if they were safe, cheap, and compact, wouldn't you want gas stations everywhere? I'd love to have a gas station at home, in every parking garage, and at every scenic viewpoint on the road. The reason we don't have that is because gas stations emit toxic vapors and have giant tanks of combustible liquid. They need tanker trucks to regularly refuel them. Charging stations don't have those problems, which is why you can make them much smaller and put them almost anywhere. You don't even need a grid connection. Solar + batteries works in places where land is cheap.

Needs say 720kW delivery for those two minutes (need higher if counting inefficiency losses).

Note that Tesla 's V3 Superchargers provide a maximum of 250kW. I've assumed a 30kWh battery charged to 24kWh (80%), because the spec for a new Nissan Leaf is 59kWh battery for 385km driving range.

But I am definitely not expert on this.

You are almost certainly not charging from 0->100%. It's probably more like 10%->90% which gives you 32kW to charge. We currently have 350kW chargers on the market, they'd do that in ~6 minutes.

At some point trying to get 2 minutes vs 6 minutes is just silly nit picking.

One caveat is, depending on your workload, you might put only 25% of the time on the ICE per mile driven (since most short trips would be electric). I.e. if an ICE car runs the engine for 2,500 hours per 100,000 miles, a plug-in hybrid might only have run the engine 500-600 hours at 100k miles.

And honestly, the ICE itself isn't very heavy -- nothing compared to a battery -- and as I said elsewhere, maintenance hasn't been an issue in the 5 years I've had mine. Oil change every 2 years (or more if you use the ICE a lot... I don't), that's it.

The heaviness argument is especially baffling to me. Carrying around a 60kWh battery pack that you only use for road trips is way heavier and less efficient. Most drivers are not using their whole battery pack in daily use, so it's just stupid expensive dead weight, much heavier than an ICE you use occasionally.

I want an ICE-less future as much as the next person, but it kinda pisses me off how EV purists who actually knew very little about the Voltec drivetrain basically got that product killed off. Emissions on roads would be drastically reduced if vehicles were switched to that model (which is not a PHEV like the other junk hybrids, but more of a range-assisted EV) without the very high cost and weight of large battery packs. Very much a "best is the enemy of the good" situation.

I'd like about 10kWh more in my Volt, and 6kW charging. Other than that, perfect car.

For the BMW i3 which is another series hybrid with more range, it seems 60% of owners think the engine isn’t worth it, but the rest love having the engine. There is no in between.

The original i3 had 80 mile range, the second generation 120, and the last 150. From what I saw in researching by the time the range was up to 150 the BEV only folks were loudest.

Sure, they are always going to be more complex than a full electric but good gasoline cars are don't have any huge maintenance costs for a good long while.

The most maintenance on this car ever has just been the breaks, because like most EVs, they're prone to corroding because they don't get used as much due to regeneration.

The "ICE is a maintenance problem" thing is honestly kind of a bogus argument borne out by people's hunches, rather than reality. Most reliable vehicle I've ever owned, and, yeah, I am about 95% electric only on it.

Other systems, think Volvo, pop the EV bits in the back of the car and replace where the drive shaft used to be with batteries. That seems like a decent trade to me as well. Still have a transmission, but at least it's not purely additive.

AND one man's added complexity is another's redundancy. If the charging module goes bad in a hybrid, you can still drive. Or if you run out of gas.

All that said... I still prefer EVs to hybrids. Do one thing, do it well, I say!

You don't even need to limit it to the lower end models with Subaru. The top trim Outback and Ascent have a CVT these days. If you want an automatic transmission in your WRX, same thing - a CVT. Anyway, you're not wrong.

Transmissions are complex but so are a lot of things. Internal combustion engines are more complex than transmissions.

Pages in a shop manual are a proxy for the complexity of service, not of the component itself.

Modern ICE are also extremely complex. Turbo systems, sensors, air management, heat management, the list goes on.

So yeah, a modern transmission is complex but a modern ICE isn’t simple. By comparison they’re very similar in terms of complexity, the ICE possibly being even more complex.

I don't disagree with your posts greater point, but I disagree with this.

There is an endless amount of variable complexity in the engineering behind friction materials, actuation styles, the control systems within the computer control, the material selections.. the list goes on.

I mean entire branches of metallurgy were more or less founded in the pursuit of finding stronger alloys for gearbox work. entire branches of metrology were developed for the sake of gearbox failure analysis -- there is a lot of complexity.

It's stupid to get into a pissing contest between engines and transmissions, they're both astoundingly complex.

But all those costs are correlated with engine hours, in a hybrid used most of the time for commuting, ICE engine hours would be really low

Suppose 90% of your miles are electric. After you've put 250K miles (400K km) on the car, you've only got 25K miles (40K km) on the engine. Rarely do you have significant engine trouble at that mileage.

Also, the engine design can probably be simplified if it's just acting as a generator. You don't need a turbo to provide extra bursts of power. Nor things like variable valve timing for good performance across a wide range of RPMs. Maybe you could even use an air-cooled engine like old VW Beetles and Porsches.

That said, they certainly have tow-behind generators, and they're certainly available for rent, it's just without modification you'd have to stop in order to charge. I've seen people with a model X doing exactly this out in the desert. Seemed to be an ok solution honestly, because they were camping and had genset power for camping needs, assuming of course that the whole electricity while camping thing is something you're into.

Only other thing is that it is consuming more oil now so needs topping up every few thousand miles.

I know the Chevy Volt had an all-electric power train, and the ICE is purely a generator that dumps power into the electrical system, and the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid has a dual power train, but I wasn't able to find a concise list of which hybrids have taken what strategy.

I apologize for forgetting the benefits of parallel hybrid systems, but i know there are some, including needing a smaller ICE, all things equal.

For climate control, they are nearly identical to a gas Toyota.

Their engineering is just that insanely conservative. They just make giant, absurdly understressed engines. You can pull a 2.5L 4cyl engine out of a Camry, designed to make 180 horsepower, replace only a few components, and make 400hp with the reliability you would normally expect from an engine built for endurance racing. They are super popular in drift racing leagues.

For example, my daily mileage averages about 5 miles. As an errand-runner, a 30 mile EV would be very practical. The huge benefit of this is a smaller and cheaper battery, and the biggie - much less weight. Much less weight leads to much less tire/brake wear and tire/brake dust pollution.

I'd still have a second gas car for the trips.

The average one-way commute for someone in the United States is ~28 miles. Most people would love your commute.

I worry that I’ll never see a compatible replacement battery with the tech though.

MBAs at car manufacturing companies will ensure that battery pack cost savings are NOT passed on to the consumer, don't worry about that.

We were supposed to hit $100/KWh on battery packs several years ago, but EV prices skyrocketed instead, despite literally being in the same plastic/aluminum shitbox where every car looks alike.

Cheap battery packs = higher margins for companies.

Also that’s just cell cost. It takes quite a bit to assemble a pack, plus profit margin.

p.s. I doubt that rumour, unless Hyundai really likes to milk their customers. Teslas largest packs are less than 20k. Small ones less than 10k (which is how much I save per year because power is cheap and gas is expensive here).

> Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002, and this is well within the range the grid can capably handle.

> In the US, the grid is equally capable of handling more EVs on the roads – by the time 80% of the US owns an EV, this will only translate into a 10-15% increase in electricity consumption.1

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...

That's ~= 15 light bulbs from the 1990's, or roughly 6 desktop PCs. I switched from incandescent to LED bulbs, and a desktop to a laptop, so that's almost enough to offset the EV's usage. Also, we have solar panels, and a house battery that can time shift our energy consumption.

The power grid also naturally grows from year to year. As more and more battery systems come online and are available to store and discharge power (your car, a household power backup system, solar, etc), the load on the grid will smooth out.

> Natron says its batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, a level of immediate charge/discharge capability that makes the batteries a prime contender for the ups and downs of backup power storage. Also helping in that use case is an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.

So you take up more space, but the storage system is better in every other way (agility, conflict mineral free, longevity, cost). Feels like this puts a nail in the coffin of fossil generation.

Edit: Assuming 1 cycle per day, that is a lifetime of ~137 years. More aggressive cycling is still very favorable.

These aren't for laptops or cars.

Though they seem to trying to increase energy density, so they can become for cars. But not there yet.

From everything I've read about existing Lithuum battery storage, this is already their strongpoint. Is it helpful to be 10x faster that the current speed?

We ended up sizing our batteries to meet wattage demands for our appliances. I wish we had ~ 2x as many kWh as we do. Anker has a home battery whose main selling point is that you can add kWh without adding peak wattage.

For use in vehicles, faster charge rates are a big win. Faster discharge probably doesn't matter much for cars (0-60 times are already ridiculously low). They might for drones / planes though.

there are available li-ion batteries with a charge and discharge rate of '15c', which is to say, 1 hour ÷ 15 = 4 minutes. they are used in drones. (there are some advertised as '30c' but i suspect those are maybe just a fraud? like the notorious amazon million-lumen flashlights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceA5xL6ggEw) if they really reach '150c', you could discharge 10% of the battery in 2.4 seconds, which is closer to a firework rocket engine than a conventional battery. but, a rocket engine that you can recharge 50000 times

a charge rate of '150c' would mean you could charge the battery halfway in 12 seconds, and there are a lot of scenarios where that would be useful

you could imagine '150c' batteries displacing much larger supercapacitors from many uses, rather than displacing conventional batteries. the number given in the article of 70 watt hours per kilogram is, in si units, 250kJ/kg. if you divide that by the 24 seconds implied by '10 times faster than lithium-ion' you get a power density of 10.4 kilowatts per kilogram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_density says supercaps are in the 15 kilowatts per kilogram range. quadcopter drone electric motors are typically in the neighborhood of 4–5 kilowatts per kilogram, so this would make the drone battery much smaller than the motor instead of bigger

more likely, though, it's a press release lie, where they're saying something that's technically true (there are lithium batteries with a '1c' charge and discharge rate, which have higher energy density than the higher-powered ones, and their batteries reach '10c', i.e., 6 minutes) but creates a false impression of something that would be a huge breakthrough if it were true

There could be a market for power tools, where having more batteries of lower capacity for the same price can be desirable.

Also maybe for hybrid vehicles.

E-waste laws at some point will become inevitable, so planned obsolescence will be under scrutiny. Devices will have to have a minimum design life etc. Moreover, user-replaceable batteries—whether long life or high capacity—are likely to be mandatory as a result of such legislation.

My old Nokia used to have a replaceable battery which also served as the back of the phone, a quick release button meant the battery could be replaced within seconds.

Manufacturers can't use the argument that it can't be done because it was common practice with Nokia 20 years ago. Nowadays more modern design practices will make that even easier to implement.

The problem is water resistance. Your old Nokia (except the indestructible 3310) was dead if you managed to let it fall into water, most phones up until the end of the headphone jack had the same problem - and secure-boot stuff has made it virtually impossible to recover data if the phone doesn't boot up any more.

Water resistance and non-sealed phones don't really mix, unless you're going for really bulky things like the CAT lineup or Samsung's Active Tab series.

Sealing a battery compartment in a way that doesn't hinder replacement is a solved problem, they do it to diving watches that are actually waterproof at depth, not merely water resistant.

And phones cannot be completely sealed. That's why none are really waterproof (and warranty doesn't cover water damage). The biggest issues are speakers and microphones, getting the sound through and keeping the water out requires some compromises. Then there is the port(s), SIM tray, buttons, barometer,... By comparison, a battery cover is easy.

Right, splash resistance through to full hermetic sealing is well developed engineering, so it's a non issue. That's not to say one has to go to extremes for a phone. For example, there's no reason why a phone cannot be constructed in a modular fashion where the key electronics is essentially sealed against the ingress of moisture and its peripheral connections, jack, mic, speakers, battery connectors are part of the case.

For maintenance, simply snap out the electronics and put it in a new case. Similarly, jacks are easily made waterproof with connections going through hermetic seals. Diaphragms on mics and speakers can actually be part of the seal and so on. Compromises can be made to suit the circumstances, and none of this is complicated manufacturing.

Making phones more robust against the environment makes sense, it would not only extend their life but dovetail neatly into Right-to-Repair laws—laws which I reckon will eventually become inevitable.

Phone manufacturers will be dragged kicking and screaming but they've already had it too good for too long at customers' expense.

They do exist, but usually (at least for Samsung and CAT, I owned both brands) come at the cost of flimsy backplanes that come loose when falling and/or are prone to break off the tiny snaps when you need to access the SD/SIM card or battery.

For me, that they come loose when falling is actually a feature. The energy of the fall has to go somewhere, and having that back cover and sometimes battery fly off means that energy is not dissipated elsewhere where it could be more damaging.

Not as much of an issue with loose men's chinos, but definitely an issue with standard slim men's jeans, as well as with a slimmer-cut chino.

And if you want to see if a fatter phone is easier to hold, that's what cases are for. You don't need them to make the phone fatter.

In reality, most thin phones aren't all that thin anyways once people put a protective case on them, as many (most?) people do.

I just commented on this last night, in fact. Wife's phone half out of her pocket, and it's a smaller iphone than my brick of a 1+, but my phone sits midway down my thigh in my pocket.

I make no judgement on the pants people wear (or don't).

For people who wear slimmer-fitting clothing, this matters. Also, it’s more about the weight: you want a phone light enough that holding it up isn’t tedious.

It’s not the sole factor. But ceteris paribus, most consumer prefer a thinner, lighter phone.

(There are lighter alternatives, but I bought the steam deck specifically to financially support Valve's Linux gaming efforts)

In the article it says, that they are using a "patented Prussian blue". Isn't CATL also using Prussian blue in their first generation sodium batteries?

The fact it supports more cycles and tolerates a broader temperature range than Lithium counts points towards safety too. Lithium isn't happy above like 30 Celsius, which a fast charging portable device can _easily_ reach.

Sounds pretty bad for people living in warmer climates then, as they tend to be above 30 celsius anyway. ;)

As a data point, the ambient temperature right now where I live is 33°C. I just walked home from a quick grocery trip a couple of blocks away. And that's not an atypical temperature (at least for the warmer months of the year; we're supposed to be in the colder months now, but the climate's been all wonky lately).

If my phone's battery didn't like ambient temperatures above 30°C, it would have failed long ago. There's no air conditioning in the street.

Seems like sodium is better "hidden" in the cathode/anode so it won't react witth the air so quickly as lithium when battery innards are exposed.

Also it's my understanding that neither sodium batteries nor li-ion batteries have metallic sodium/lithium in them (besides small amounts which build up in heavily used li-ion cells or something).

There are lots of things left to make grid battery storage cheap.

As well as the cells needing to be engineered to be cheaper, there are lots of changes to the battery packs that can be made, together with changes to inverters.

For batteries, I'd like to see research into less consistent manufacturing and higher failure rates. Current packs the entire pack is unusable if just one cell fails in a way that leads to lots of heat production. If pack balancing circuits had the ability to take a cell or a parallel group of cells 'out of circuit' while still using the rest of the pack, then battery lifespans could be dramatically increased and it would be possible to manufacture cells far cheaper.

For inverters, we should go for a direct-to-10kV inverter process. No transformers. At 10kV, currents are far lower and therefore wires can be far thinner (and cheaper).

Consider making batteries ~15kV too - that reduces by ~30% the amount of expensive silicon needed, together with big reductions in copper costs, at the expense of extra design effort for much higher voltage batteries. At these higher voltages, you'd either use oil cooling, or you'd have ~10 separate coolant loops, one at each ~1500 volts of potential.

Beyond that, all the complexity is in software. Software needs to monitor cell voltages and currents to detect a self-heating cell. Software then needs to stop balancing that cell up (ie. let it discharge). At the moment the cell voltage hits zero, software needs to close the 'short' across the cell, permanently taking it out of the circuit.

This design might occasionally prevent charging the entire battery for a few minutes during this process. Specifically, when a cell is midway through being taken out of circuit, it can only be discharged, and would be dangerous to recharge.

But a few minutes of downtime per year seems acceptable to me.

I wear an Apple Watch. On my wrist, is a small, Lithium-ion battery, that contains a great deal of power.

That power is trickled out, over time.

If it were to all release at once, I'd no longer have a left hand.

Packing all that energy into smaller and smaller form factors, increases the risk; no matter what tech we use.

Energy is energy. When it comes out quickly, we call those "explosions."

I once bridged a ~2,500mAH 18650 battery that was in my bag when my keys created a circuit between the anode and the cathode. The result was a small fire inside my bag that was quickly stamped out. Now, if I'm carrying batteries capable of dumping a lot of current quickly, I use cases.

What excites me most about this new battery tech is home and commercial backup energy storage that's much 'greener' and cheaper than lithium. There is a lot of space in rural and grid settings, so the density of Li-Ion isn't really needed.

I was really talking about how much energy potential is stored in batteries. In batteries, the energy is generally stored as potential chemical reactions, so it isn't realistic to have a flash-boom.

Supercapacitors, on the other hand, may have more of a boom potential.

if you'd like i can go dig out a 26650 that i have where i dropped it and the board part popped off; but i am sure there are websites with pictures already.

I was walking out of my building with a group of folks after work and some woman said, 'Excuse me sir but there is smoke coming out of your bag'.

Well, super interesting.

At first I doubted because the apple watch has very little energy, then I looked it up. Turns out the biggest ones have 2Wh worth of power. Doesn't seem like much until you consider that 2Wh is roughly 6000J. Bullets are launched in the neighborhood of 1000J.

We've already got LED bulbs, heat pumps, and energy-efficient appliances.

Washers and dryers still have to spin and agitate. Dishwashers still have to shoot jets of water. Ceiling fans still need to move air.

And with the switch to electrification (cars, stoves, dryers, hot water heaters) electricity usage will increase, fortunately, to replace polluting gasoline.

So I think future technological progress really is going to come down to increased battery capacity, not decreasing energy usage.

Ultimately, the simple fact is that solar power isn't generated at night.