from Hacker News

Northvolt develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion battery validated at 160 Wh/kg

by Phenomenit on 11/21/23, 8:50 AM with 314 comments

• by sylario on 11/21/23, 11:08 AM

  This summer a French company started to sell sodium ion battery power tool in a major hardware store.

  National French research agency announcement: https://www.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/batteries-sodium-ion-une-pre...

  The power tool : https://www.leroymerlin.fr/produits/outillage/outillage-elec...

  Unfortunately, all I could found about the Wh/kg efficiency was an article about the same company saying they were currently able to build cells at 90Wh/Kg in 2017.

  Nevertheless, it's not a promise, it's a product currently on sale.

• by yrro on 11/21/23, 9:51 AM

  According to https://www.epectec.com/batteries/cell-comparison.html, 160 Wh/kg is about the same density as Li-po and Li-ion. This battery chemistry is attractive in that it's made from common materials & is more stable/safer than Lithium. The press release doesn't say, so I assume it's not competitive in energy density per litre so I assume not.

  Wikipedia has a comparison table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#Comparison but no idea how accurate/up to date it is.

• by konstantinua00 on 11/21/23, 10:25 AM

  Shin, this is 7th week in the row you've shown new battery invention to the class

  ---

  but honestly, what's the deal with same-y headlines about batteries? can we have articles that actually keep observing these technologies as they progress after being invented?

• by torginus on 11/21/23, 10:44 AM

  What are the advantages of sodium batteries?

  Since batteries involve the migration of ions between electrodes, the much larger size of sodium ions means that the resulting batteries will be both less dense and have less charge cycles than their lithium counterparts, due to the higher volumetric electrode deformation during charging.

  This makes them suboptimal for both grid and mobile applications, and the only use case I can see for them is making very cheap disposable stuff, which does not bode well for the environment.

• by chrsw on 11/21/23, 12:00 PM

  There's another thread going on HN right now about limiting the charge of Li-ion batteries to 20%-80% of thier capacity. Do batteries based on Na-ion chemistry have this limitation/recommendation?

• by LeanderK on 11/21/23, 10:22 AM

  finally some battery innovation from europe. Makes one hopeful that we will continue to play a role in the battery energy/automotive space in the future.

• by photochemsyn on 11/21/23, 4:19 PM

  Original research article this development appears to be based on was published in 2015 is available on sci-hub, just paste the title in:

  Rhombohedral Prussian White as Cathode for Rechargeable Sodium-Ion Batteries

  It's notable that it was an ARPA-E funded project and some of the research was done at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. It's more applied research than basic research as they were specifically looking for a setup that would work with existing battery manufacturing technology.

  > "Compared with previous work, the high Na concentration in the new material overcomes the sodium-deficiency problem. We show that it could be directly assembled into a full cell with a hard carbon anode. This is critical for the scalable sodium-ion battery manufacture that is compatible with the current lithium-ion battery infrastructures."

  Interesting timeline: from publication of research result to commercial development to deliverable product, ~8 years. Now, would a VC fund think that was a decent turnaround time - I really don't know, any opinions?

• by xbmcuser on 11/21/23, 11:53 AM

  China is going to bring into production from this year a lot of sodium ion batteries. For me the weight and density of the batteries is not as important as recharge cycles and cost as that would price out more carbon producing electricity generation

  https://carnewschina.com/2023/11/20/sodium-ion-batteries-are...

• by kaliszad on 11/21/23, 11:49 AM

  This is a good development, but it falls really short of the almost 3.5 kWh that would be possible to achieve with sodium metal fuel cell. Such device is described in the expired patent US3730776A (copy available here: https://orgpad.com/file/DrCoHGH6xJJqraDeusqrtS?token=D6S5Bow...) A similar device producing electrical current can be constructed in a garage.

• by wg0 on 11/21/23, 9:56 AM

  Full of adjectives. More cost efficient, more this and more that but no mention how much more and more to what exactly.

  Now the articles "This could be in your next EV sooner than you think." would be already being composed and YouTube videos being edited.

• by acyou on 11/21/23, 4:22 PM

  Beware of battery technology announcements that only give a single parameter! They have usually made drastic tradeoffs in other areas in order to get the headline number.

  And we are left to only speculate. But, if the other numbers were great, they would have also stated them.

• by h7KP4 on 11/21/23, 10:31 AM

  Headline number (160Wh/kg) is the same as CATL achieved in mid-2021 with Na-Ion chemistry [1]

  [1] https://www.catl.com/en/news/665.html

• by havkom on 11/21/23, 3:00 PM

  Northvolts PR department seems to historically be very sharp. In addition they seem to want to announce many things, like a co-operation to create batteries from wood (the wooden industry is large in Sweden so probably many very important people working at the top of those companies): https://northvolt.com/articles/stora-enso-and-northvolt/

  In that light, I wonder how this press release should be interpreted.

• by prawn on 11/21/23, 11:57 AM

  Are any of these developing battery chemistries likely to become very affordable to the point that future houses are built with cellar-sized batteries stored underneath them?

• by Roark66 on 11/21/23, 12:06 PM

  So where is the catch? Because there is always a catch. It's either that it needs a tiny amount of extremely expensive ingredients (palladium?), or it requires extremely advanced manufacturing techniques? Or its both cheap and easy to make but the mass production makes way too many failures...

  There is always something... Therefore I'll believe it when I'm able to but such battery and fly my drone with it.

• by bagels on 11/21/23, 10:26 AM

  I'm interested in $/kWh, that is the most limiting factor for cars.

• by mensetmanusman on 11/21/23, 2:18 PM

  This is about 0.5 MJ/kg compared to fuel which is closer to 50 MJ/kg ( or closer to 10 when normalizing to efficiency). ie this is why ev batteries need 20x the weight of gasoline at least to store similar amounts of on board energy.

• by thelastgallon on 11/21/23, 2:19 PM

  For stationary batteries, density (Wh/kg) and volume (Wh/liter) are not a concern, only Wh/$. These sodium-ion batteries can be deployed for grid connected storage (or home batteries like powerwall), freeing up Lithium for EVs.

• by danans on 11/21/23, 6:35 PM

  Another technology to watch is silicon anode Lithium-ion batteries (Amprius, Sila, Group 14) which have been demonstrated at 400-500Wh/kg.

  Matt Ferrell's Undecided Youtube channel just posted a video today going over that technology: https://youtu.be/YJ4pg_exdvs?si=kKNE-yY-Va9xMuBf

• by kristjank on 11/21/23, 4:28 PM

  Even if it performs worse, the abundance of minerals required to construct this type of cell is a good news for sustainability, given we figure out how to recycle them. I imagine it should be easier, or at least less dirty than lithium.

• by boringg on 11/21/23, 11:39 AM

  Whats the ramp up ramp down time? How much energy throughput before degradation? Can we improve that density furthermore? Cost?

  If those are all good answers ostensibly some viable alternative.

• by anovikov on 11/21/23, 9:18 AM

  I believe it when i see it at volume.

• by trebligdivad on 11/21/23, 2:47 PM

  Why is 'Prussian white' a nice blue? (as shown in Northvolt's pic at the bottom)

• by megaman821 on 11/21/23, 2:37 PM

  It is probably good to have a sodium battery industry to hedge against high lithium prices. For our current and projected needs there is probably enough lithium on earth. Here is a chart of what we mine https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-...

• by dcow on 11/21/23, 11:25 PM

  This is a fraction of the density of lithium ion. What’s the upside?

• by staticelf on 11/21/23, 10:55 PM

  Pretty cool, go sweden!

• by elzbardico on 11/21/23, 12:13 PM

  Have anyone noticed that most technological breakthroughs in fields that require hard physical sciences seem to come from foreign countries?

• by Uptrenda on 11/21/23, 11:53 AM

  After all the OpenAI stuff I've just started reading drama into all these head lines. Like I read this as: 'North Korea develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion...' I am expecting something to happen now... OpenAI literally broke my brain...