America's First Sodium-Ion Battery Gigafactory Announced. Cost: $1.4 Billion (msn.com)
- Reference: 0175437497
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/11/09/0414255/americas-first-sodium-ion-battery-gigafactory-announced-cost-14-billion
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/lithium-ion-batteries-have-ruled-for-decades-now-they-have-a-challenger/ar-AA1tq7J2
> Last month, sodium-ion battery manufacturer Natron Energy [2]announced it would open a "gigafactory" in North Carolina that would produce 24 gigawatt hours of batteries annually, enough energy to charge 24,000 electric vehicles. But sodium-ion batteries are still early in their development compared with lithium-ion, and they have yet to hit the market on a massive scale.
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> "It's unlikely sodium-ion could displace lithium-ion anytime soon," said Keith Beers, polymer science and materials chemistry principal engineer at technical consultancy firm Exponent... The biggest limitation of sodium-ion batteries is their weight. Sodium weighs nearly three times as much as lithium, and it cannot store the same amount of energy. As a result, sodium-ion batteries tend to be larger. Jens Peters, an economics professor at the University of Alcalá in Madrid, said the energy density could be improved over time in sodium-ion batteries. But, he added, "what we found out so far in our assessments is that it is not a game changer."
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> Sodium-ion batteries are touted to be the environmentally friendly alternative to their lithium-ion counterparts, thanks to their raw materials. Sodium, iron and manganese are all abundant elements on the planet, so they require less energy to extract and cost less... Sodium-ion batteries also last longer than lithium-ion ones because they can withstand more charge cycles, said Wendell Brooks, co-CEO of Natron Energy. "Our product can have millions of cycles," said Brooks, "where lithium-ion would have three to five thousand cycles and wear out a lot faster...." Sodium-ion batteries aren't the best fit for smartphones or electric vehicles, which need to store lots of energy. However, one advantage is their low cost. And they could be a good candidate in situations where the size of the battery isn't a concern, like energy storage. "When something is built out to support grid or backup storage, it doesn't need to be very dense. It's staying put," Beers said.
Natron will invest nearly $1.4 billion in the factory "to meet the rapidly expanding demand for critical power, industrial and grid energy storage solutions," according to [3]their announcement .
"Natron's high-performance sodium-ion batteries outperform lithium-ion batteries in power density and recharging speed, do not require lithium, cobalt, copper, or nickel, and are non-flammable... Natron's batteries are the only UL-listed sodium-ion batteries on the market today, and will be delivered to a wide range of customer end markets in the industrial power space, including data centers, mobility, EV fast charging, microgrids, and telecom, among others."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/lithium-ion-batteries-have-ruled-for-decades-now-they-have-a-challenger/ar-AA1tq7J2
[2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240815622233/en/Natron-Energy-Announces-Plans-for-1.4-Billion-Giga-Scale-Sodium-Ion-Battery-Manufacturing-Facility-in-North-Carolina
[3] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240815622233/en/Natron-Energy-Announces-Plans-for-1.4-Billion-Giga-Scale-Sodium-Ion-Battery-Manufacturing-Facility-in-North-Carolina
charge those cars w/ capacity! (Score:3)
> it would open a "gigafactory" in North Carolina that would produce 24 gigawatt hours of batteries annually, enough energy to charge 24,000 electric vehicles
swing... and a miss. by the author/editor.
The units match up, but this sentence really got away from them.
In any case, i guess these would be nice for home storage
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed, but the units don't even line up. If you think of this as - we'll put the batteries at supercharger stations so we can charge cars from solar power when it's dark -, then 24GWh is enough to charge 240,000 cars where a car is 100KWh (most are smaller but some are getting there and that number makes the calculation easy...)
Re: (Score:2)
Home storage, and grid scale storage. But you need to get solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing ramped up as well, and develop deep water turbines.
Not quite right (Score:2)
24GWh of annual capacity. Typical EV uses maybe 2000kWh. So that would be 12 million EVs, not 24,000. Except Na ion doesn’t work well for most EVs yet
Re: (Score:2)
24GWh/2k kWh = 12k, not 12 million. k to M to G
24 GWh/year implies enough batteries to produce 24 GW for 1 hour made in 1 year, not that that is the amount of energy you can feed through the batteries in a year.
Given that typical battery capacity of EVs is around 100kWh, I'm getting 240k EVs worth of production per year.
They are expected to charge EVs though in the sense of not being installed in cars (more like 60kWh limited range EVs in that case, due to the lower energy density), but being installed near
Re: (Score:1)
> Typical EV uses maybe 2000kWh.
My EV uses 80kWh to fully charge from 0 to 100%.
People typically drive about 40 miles/day. At 0.25 kWh/mile, that's 10 kWh needed for an overnight charge.
24GWh is enough capacity to charge 2.4 million EVs daily.
2000 kWh may be what an EV uses in a year, but comparing that number to the storage capacity of the annual production of batteries is meaningless. EVs charge every day, not once per year.
Re: Project will be canceled (Score:1)
Trump never said that. He is against outlawing ICE cars, as in CA. If electrics get better and solve the charging infrastructure problems, then ICE will die a slower natural death. ATM, for large parts of the US, hybrids are better.
Re: (Score:2)
Elon and Donald are BFFs, and Elon is in the grid storage business.
If sodium batteries mean more profit, Elon will be all over it.
Re: (Score:3)
And if Elmo gets in between that asshole and his money, then will get screwed. He has no commitments to anyone that cannot be broken for a price. He has no friends because he needs no friends. He's quite like Voldemort in that respect.
Re: (Score:2)
Tesla makes lithium batteries. They sell grid-level systems based on lithium batteries because economies of scale and larger sales volumes lower prices and that makes his cars cheaper to make. (Not necessarily cheaper to buy , peasant...)
Grid storage sodium batteries would be a direct threat for Elon's business. He may or may not try to directly interfere, but I can't see him going out of his way to advocate for it - there's no incentive for him to do so.
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:3)
The whole point of banning sale of new ICE cars is so they DON'T have a slow natural death. Countries want them to be rid of them as quickly as possible and have set a date to focus minds on that objective. And we can see from all the bullshit and FUD from the auto & oil industries that they don't like this one bit.
Re: (Score:1)
> Countries want them to be rid of them
"Countries" don't want anything. Specific people want them, and at least in America, those people just got voted out of office.
The Democrats need to learn a hard lesson: Nudging with incentives works better than shoving with mandates.
Disclaimer: I drive an EV.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would you believe anything he says?
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If only there was a market for batteries that isn't "electric cars".
A market where energy density isn't a problem, where "cheap" and "number of charge cycles" dominates.
eg. Energy storage for solar farms and grid balancing - something that can have a huge impact on CO2 emissions.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that is where sodium ion batteries will be most useful. They're not as energy dense as lithium ion which is a problem for cars, but not really a problem when they're sitting on a patch of land. But I think there will be lots of applications for these kinds of battery and anywhere you see lithium batteries right now could potentially be sodium instead.
Re: (Score:2)
Despite the press hype, sodium ion hasn't proven itself able to beat li-ion in price per kWh (bulk grid energy storage), either.
Chinese grid LFP cells last I saw were down to $44/kWh at a cell level in China, though $60/kWh at port in the US, and the cell level isn't at all the same as the final-product level. Sodium ion has a long way to go to get to that point. And indeed, it certainly wasn't helped by - at the time when all this hype and investment about sodium ion was going on - lithium was in a price
Re: (Score:2)
(Also, it probably doesn't matter with respect to this plant what happens with the choice of anodes, cathodes, and electrolytes, because this is surely just a cell manufacturing plant which doesn't include production of those materials on-site, and just imports them, and will by and large pretty much look like a li-ion cell manufacturing plant, just with alumium for both electrode foils rather than copper for the anode)
Re: (Score:2)
That's probably where these will first see deployment. The question is, can they meet potential market demand producing "24 gigawatt hours of batteries annually"?
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He can't if private investors are involved.