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

(cleantechnica.com)
160 points xbmcuser | 1 comments | 23 Oct 25 01:36 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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AnonC ◴[23 Oct 25 04:03 UTC] No.45678061[source]▶
I skimmed through the article. It talks a lot about sodium ion batteries and how major vehicle and transportation companies are getting into making and using these batteries. It also talks about the cost aspect, with sodium ion being cheaper than lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries.

However, there is no mention of this technology in consumer devices and gadgets like laptops, smartphones and tablets. I get that the site is about clean technology as a replacement for the currently more polluting technology. But I’m interested to see when these sodium ion batteries will appear in phones and laptops and what difference they may make to the cost, price, weight, performance, safety, longevity, etc.

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hn_throwaway_99 ◴[23 Oct 25 05:07 UTC] No.45678329[source]▶
As another comment mentioned, sodium ion batteries compete very poorly against lithium when portability is paramount.

But more on that point, it always struck me as bizarre that lithium was dominant in so many areas despite vastly different requirements. For home and grid storage, battery weight is almost immaterial, while it's a paramount concern in portable devices. I think it would be very surprising indeed if one chemistry performed best in all scenarios. Lithium became dominant primarily because it had so much research and supply chain maturity behind it, even if it was suboptimal for areas like grid storage. Glad to see other battery chemistries are getting more investment.

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1. lambdaone ◴[23 Oct 25 10:17 UTC] No.45680249[source]▶
You may see a mixture of sodium and lithium batteries in grid storage; one for providing very short-term grid stabilization of the order of seconds to minutes, the other for long-term large-scale storage, which is by far the largest application. Possibly both within the same battery farm.