Sodium-ion batteries have started to appear in cars and home storage

I hope it's on the way, but I don't think the Pioneer Na is yet a sign of this revolution. This detailed review didn't leave me in a hurry to go get one, anyway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoZ_g_MShTw

The idea is not that Na-Ion batteries are better than LFPs, they are not. The main goal is to make them dirt cheap.

It seems that $15 per kWh of storage should be achievable with them. At this price, it's trivial to install enough grid-scale storage to completely move off fossil fuels in more southern areas.

The idea with really cheap batteries is that they don't need good energy density. You just swap them every so often and put the one you aren't using in the charging rack. You could even carry your own reserve energy with you!

> California batteries are constantly going up in flames.

What is the fraction of California batteries that went up in flames during the last year?

We used to have swappable batteries in virtually all of portable electronics. You could even get them in a rechargeable accumulator format. Virtually all of portable electronics has integrated batteries.

Sodium ion batteries are typically safer than lithium ion batteries. They operate safely over a wider range of temperatures, and have reduced risk of self-combustion.

Yeah but AAs suck, and the newer more advanced batteries all have different voltages and require different charge circuitries so it’s hard to create a new standard for them.

Most boosters never provide lifecycle & toxicity statistics b/c it tends to run counter to their utopian narratives. What is the typical lifecycle & toxicity profile for these batteries?

Those are lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide batteries in your example, not sodium.

I’m not sure what your point is? All batteries are bad? Oil is good? What?

It is always the case that custom configurations have advantages over other configurations. But standards give a good trade off between performance vs having a large ecosystem. Integrated batteries just add to the e-waste problem.

Why do you think AA suck ? It’s the chemistry, not the standard size, voltage or swappability right? 18650 and 21700 also have those assets. Some modern devices let you swap 18650.

That and there's an incentive to try to lock customers into your particular battery ecosystem.

It’s all depends on device size and required capacity. AA is not a bad choice for many cases. And there are other replaceable batteries with higher capacity e.g. 18650.

Most modern devices have an integrated 3.7v Lithium battery so standardisation should be possible but I see no market forces for this - devices with short lifespan (limited by a non-replaceable battery) are more profitable.

Yeah, yeah. Care to provide a list of burned batteries?

My understanding is that it's a poor form factor for lithium ion - which operates at higher voltages, and thus needs an extra voltage regulator to step them down to 1.5V if you're packing them into the AA format (adding cost, reducing capacity, & introducing conversion losses.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYF1CXZPng

constantly = once

Every chemistry outputs a different voltage and requires different charge controllers. So sure we could have created a standard lithium size but it would have just locked us in to one chemistry again which will eventually be obsolete. 18650s are also too bulky for most applications. Usually you want flat rectangles. Another benefit of the proprietary batteries is they can completely fill the space available rather than being constrained by the standard.

I like that you made a post complaining about people not sourcing their claims and then eight minutes later made a post declining to source your particular claim

> I don't really do research for random internet strangers

They weren’t asking you to do research for them, they asked if you had done research for yourself.

Link is right there. You're welcome to recover whatever stats are interesting to you instead of asking strangers to do free work.

I have all the data I need so let me know when you gather the relevant lifecycle & toxicity stats on your end.

There will be another one in less than 6 months¹. How much are you willing to bet?

¹https://newenergyrisk.com/battery-fires/

You already admitted that you would have to do research to back up your claim. Like if you had the data you wouldn’t need to “do research” to post it.

The information requested does not exist in the link you posted.

I said I don't do free work for strangers on the internet but like I said, let me know when you do your own research. It will be a much better use of time than wasting more keystrokes in this thread.

That's odd. I wonder why they wouldn't provide that information.

Exactly, you would have to do research to answer the question. You haven’t done it for yourself, so why should you do it for a stranger?

Which question would that be? The one about lifecycle & toxicity or percentage that goes up in flames every few months?

The lifespan of the devices I own is generally limited by security patches not by batteries.

Li-ion cells are available in AA- and AAA-scaled sizes, e.g. 14500, 10440, plus fractional sizes that can be shorter or longer for the same diameter. If we wanted to not glue batteries into devices, we very well could, but that would make it harder to force purchase of a new device when the consumable component inside it fails.

Most contrarians fail to compare their detractions against alternatives such as "maintaining the status quo". Maybe batteries with hazardous chemicals in solid state form inside solid housings aren't particularly net-negative by comparison to most existing casual energy storage alternatives such as internal combustion, at least to most laypeople?

They are better in cold and have higher charge rates. Eventually (10-20years) they’ll be cheaper than LFP. All while 15% lower volumetric density.

if YOU make a claim, you need to provide proof. simple as. anything else is a logical fallacy or malicious argument :)

I think very few manufacturers are optimizing for that. The move to integrated batteries for most portable electronics happened when the price of the battery plus charging ICs became lower than putting in a battery holder. Doing battery holder is currently simply more expensive, design is more complex putting it together is more complex. The cost are not intuitive, you can get 10+ microcontrollers for a price of a single physical on-off switch.

A circuit that accepts the voltage range of lithium ion is probably 90-100% of the way to accepting a range of cell chemistries. And you can put in a half cent identifier chip to say what the charging voltage is.

I don't think the technical difficulties are the problem here.

I agree that we could use standardized lithium-or-similar batteries in a ton of devices.

But please don't exactly match AA/AAA sizes. That will cause much more harm than good.

You can just admit you exaggerated a lot.

You make a claim without a source and refuse to back it up when asked, yet you are doubling down on your confidence in the initial statement. There's an interesting discussion to be had, but this is not it.

There are several factors to be considered: the actual risk of older and newer systems, the impact, how to mitigate a fire and avoid the worst consequences, and weighing against the alternatives. Especially the latter is somehow always absent in denialist narratives. However, when the alternative is basically heating the planet into a dystopian hellscape, we may accept some negatives of any kind of technology that doesn't put our whole existence at risk.

We need to be real about the downsides yes, but let's also be real and accept we don't have any choice but push forward.

Here is my 1 minute AI powered 'research' btw:

"The fire risk for battery plant storage is not a single, universally agreed-upon percentage, but available data suggests a low and decreasing risk, especially for properly maintained and installed systems. For example, one study found the 2023 risk for home battery systems to be \(0.0049\%\), while another source reports a \(97\%\) drop in large-scale system failures between 2018 and 2023. The risk is influenced by factors like manufacturing quality, installation, and maintenance."

Doesn't seem all that alarming yet.

Swappable proprietaries are still better than not swappable at all. For my previous phone I managed to order an external charger and several replacement batteries.

Na-Ion batteries are better than LFPs when considered the temperature range between 0C and 0f. In this [0] review, prof hobo demonstrates this is the only reason to by Na-Ion (right now).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoZ_g_MShTw

For me, this limitation applies only to my phone. I have plenty of other wireless devices and deliberately prefer devices that can use AA batteries. One reason is that I don't have to manage the multitudes of internal batteries as much and I need only 1 battery charger with batteries always ready to go. And obviously, battery going bad won't make my device useless (My DS4 controller's internal battery went bad in about a year. So I'm sticking with xbox controllers.)

The $15/kWh is misleading as it's only the cost of the raw materials.

They also produce much less harmful combustion products when they do catch fire.

This whole conversation with measurablefunc has been like seeing somebody get asked for a dollar, loudly yelling “And get a job?!” and then spending an hour trying to convince everyone in the room that they’re Bruce Wayne. I love this website.

Edit: or like seeing somebody get asked for a cookie and then saying “And go to the store? And buy sugar? And eggs? And flour? And drive home and bake them?! Hell no!” and then saying “obviously that meant I have a ton of cookies in my house right now”

Chinese devices have standardized on taking 18650 "3.7V" cells for this purpose.

We might eventually get back there; maybe the EU will do for e.g. hand tool batteries what they have done for phone chargers and mandate an interchangeable standard.

> Which question would that be?

Probably the questions about all the batteries you claim are burning. The ones that you read earlier and then said that you can answer.

“I would have to do research to find a list of batteries that burned and the percentage of the batteries that burned and I do not want to do that research”

“I already did the research and have a list of burned batteries and know the percentage of them that burn but I will not share it until you research it and give your findings to me”

“With all this talk of ‘what batteries burned’ and ‘the percentage of the batteries that burned’ I have completely lost track of what anyone wants to know re: my statements about all of the batteries that I claimed are burning”

Actually came across this video independently a couple of days ago, and having never come across this gentleman before it was enough to convince me that his analysis is of negligible value of the "beg the conclusion" variety.

To wit, in his review he-

-dismisses environmental concerns with Li

-dismisses safety concerns with Li

-dismissed geopolitical concerns with Li availability. Something something "environmentalists!" (shakes fist at clouds) like with the environmental concerns.

-dismisses economic advances of Na

And then the overwhelming focus of his review is that if you deep freeze the battery, it charges slowly. This becomes the foundation of his criticism. Only firstly it's a self solving issue -- the battery warms as it charges -- but in most situations the battery will be in a heated (or will be self-heating) scenario and at an ideal temperature.

I'm no Na booster, and it seems like an incremental improvement in various dimensions for certain scenarios, but that video adds extraordinarily little value to the space.

Your mixing of units is baffling, almost nobody knows both Celsius and Fahrenheit. For the rest of us:

-18°C to 0°C

0°F to 32°F

18650 are everywhere from hand tools, drones and vapes to Teslas and scooters. High energy per cell (up to 3600 mAh * 3.7V ~= 13Wh) and fairly cheap

I disagree with your conclusion about the video even as I think Na is an incremental improvement. I think the video hits solidly on why the Bluetti Na Pro product is not yet a good overall product. I still think it's promising (and I think the reviewer does too). I can see why you think he's dismissing environmental/safety/geopolitical concerns. But I don't think so; I think he's simply taking the perspective of what's the best product for someone who needs to live with this as a primary power pack that they use. Obviously, someone could weigh the concerns that you mention higher than the functionality of the power pack. But reviewing it in the context of performance doesn't equate to a dismissal of those, IMO.

The article claims CATL have given bulk cell pricing at 19$/kWh.

That still leaves an Additional overhead due to power electronics and assembly but all in all it's a pretty impressive development.

My mother bought a flash light with non-rechargeable batteries. That type of product is basically destined to be thrown away on day one.

I knew what 0°C is in °F since I know the °C to °F conversion rate, but my European self isn't able to assign any actual reference to that, which made it kinda useless to me :)

How often do you receive security patches for your Bluetooth speaker? A cordless drill? Cordless vacuum cleaner? Cordless shaver? Sex toys...

And you can admit you are uncritically supporting technology w/o understanding its safety & toxicity b/c it seems "cheap".

Data is readily available. You can do your own research or pay someone to figure it out for you if you can't.

You are welcome to follow the relevant the links & reach your own conclusions.

Those facts seem hallucinated so you should follow your own advice & post the actual sources.

Buddy the way it works when you don’t know something is you just say that you don’t know it. We all know that you don’t know how many batteries burned or what fractions of them both.

You are trying to do the “get the internet to do your homework for you by posting the wrong answer” Reddit meme trick but being so incredibly off putting that it isn’t working. Nobody is going to do your research for you because everyone can tell that’s what you’re asking them to do.

Almost nothing lets you replace the cells individually though. They seal them in a pack which requires buying a replacement proprietary pack.

I don't recall throwing one of those out because of the battery either.

That's true for smartphones (I had bad experience with Android from 2 big vendors which stopped updates around end of sales date) but many other battery powered devices don't need regular security patches.