Every week with the “miracle battery!” headlines. This has been going on for ages and I’m sick of it.
What is the catch?
What do they do with the Chlorine though?
Sodium Ion already does 5000+ cycles. Adding Vanadium is not a scalable material. It is very expensive. 400 cycles steady is not useful information because it needs to do much more. They didn’t state a wh/kg density. This is probably not a viable research vector, but “big Vanadium” has proposed a rental model to make Vanadium more scarce for other applications. Flow batteries (a fuel cell with tanks of electrolytes) provides an ultra easy way of recycling/selling the vanadium for traditional uses. Battery rental that forces returning it could be viable.
Man this title reminded me of an old animation involving iPhone and some Android phone, lemme go find…
The part about transforming into a jet and flying you to an island reminded me of the title.
I can only hope these can actually hit commercialization, unlike most new battery technologies that never leave the lab.
Yes, because battery technology stagnated years ago…
Oh wait
Wow! Thanks for sharing that data. I had no idea.
Weird, I didn’t know Lithium-Ion batteries were still in the lab. I thought for sure we were using those already. I thought the batteries in the labs were various solid-state batteries like graphene or like this sodium-ion battery, where there’s been a rise in patents around it but not a lot delivered
There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently.
LFP sits in the low cost marker while NCA is the highest performing of the mass market batteries, and NMC is somewhere in between.
Sodium might be coming for LFP’s low cost position, and is already beginning mass production (some Chinese manufacturers expect those models to hit the road in a few months).
If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn’t making it into mass produced products today, you’re just not paying attention.
Great response, people just love to parrot easy dismissals without looking and the sheer magnitude on innovation and commercialisation going on in this sector
Well all those graphs show is that the cost of batteries has gone down and that as a result electric cars contain more batteries and therefore more range. It doesn’t actually show that the individual battery capacity has increased.
The third graph that indicates battery performance vs battery chemistry doesn’t really show incremental improvement it just shows general improvement but there’s plenty of battery chemistries that are worse than pre-existing ones.
@Warl0k3@lemmy.world The hero we need!
Shhhh…we’re having a bullshit feel good moment…
It doesn’t really dispute it, though. Lithium-ion has seen a lot of improvement, yes, because it’s already a giant industry; other battery chemistries have a hard time breaking through because they require entirely different processes to manufacture.
I’m still rooting for it, but it’s not really the same thing.This too is false, great progress has been made on for instance solid state batteries.
You can’t buy anything with solid state batteries yet, and when you can, they will cost a fortune.
Some progress is being made, but it hasn’t seen large-scale adoption yet. Which is the point, as I read it.
It takes time to scale production and even more time to adopt a new technology.
It takes time to scale up production, CATL is already building factories for it:
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html
On April 21, 2025, CATL unveiled three groundbreaking EV battery products at its inaugural Super Tech Day: The Freevoy Dual-Power Battery, Naxtra - the world’s first mass produced sodium-ion battery
These press releases are weekly. Naxtra will be 30% cheaper, but also bigger and heavier. The problem here is the damn periodic table, someone should change it.
TBF, there are a lot of “battery breakthroughs” that turn out to just be hot air. Battery technology has made tremendous progress though and there is still a lot of room for improvement.
There actually is not a lot of room for improvement. Highest energy will still be limited to lithium chemistry because of the periodic table.
That’s a limit on gravimetric energy density. There are plenty of other parameters that can be improved.
hot air.
No, that’s a different type of battery.
No, this is Patrick.
All that data says is batteries got cheaper so they are putting more of them into cars. Also 100 to 300 wh/kg is in labs. No explanation why it went from 175 to 100 Wh/kg 08-10.
We’ve had 3 major changes in battery chemistry in the last 45 years. Energy density, lifespan, cost, and dangerous materials have all generally improved. We also have 2 new battery technologies in the process of becoming generally commercially available. Also, batteries went from 500 mAh batteries about the size of your smartphone to 3000 mAh as a minor component of that same smartphone, about an order of magnitude in energy density.
No explanation? You might want to get checked for color blindness
I can only hope one day people will stop repeating reddit clichés
Desalinating water might be the best part. Usually, solar power has the downside of needing storage and desalination has the downside of big energy requirements. If you can do both at the same time, it’s a big win for dry climates with lots of sun
There is also the issue with the salt by itself in desalinisation. If it’s removed with water, you have to deal with that stuff. Table salt is really cheap and there is plenty of offer, so you can’t really economically clean it enough and package it for human consumption or industrial use. So what usually happens is that they dump it back at one moment or another. And that is a hard pollution, and can lead to dead zones around the desalinisation plants if not managed well enough. Being able to add it in a high demand product such as batteries takes all those hurdles away
I need a shit ton of salt in winter for my road. But for how long?
They are not going to get the sodium from desalination, they will mine it because it’s cheaper.
and more pure
I can’t imagine it’s doing this at a rate that will make a big impact on water supply, I suspect this is one of those things they throw in just to have a good headline.
and boats.
Sodium ion batteries have less energy density as opposed to Lithium ion (100-150 WH per Kg instead of 150-250). I’m curious how much these “wet” batteries improve that. The article doesn’t say.
Nonetheless, even if it’s not the new battery for your car, it could be useful as energy storage for the grid, storing green (solar) energy for the night, and desalinating seawater at the same time.
There is a branch of battery research that is only focused on grid storage. It’s the last piece to make solar and to a less extent wind unbeatably affordable.
In a home solar setup, batteries are the other half of the cost and have not fallen as fast as the cost of the panels themselves, the other half of the cost. For fully off grid setups, they quickly become the main cost.
My very uneducated understanding is that sodium batteries can be produced virtually anywhere.
Not every battery application needs to maximize energy density, so sodium batteries are good where that is the case.
I also did not read about sodium ion batteries characteristics versus lithium ion, so there might also be other use cases where sodium ion batteries are better.
Exactly this, there’s a huge market for energy storage, where cost, power and cycle life matter way more than size and weight. And Na-ion can be produced in countries that do not have access to lithium mines, making transport less of an issue and countries more self-sustaining.
Hilarious…all of these batteries are coming out of one country because only one country is doing serious R&D.
And instead of charging them, you can drink them! Unlike Lithium Ion batteries, which you have to chew.
We hear about a new battery chemistry like every week. Do most never get to commercialization?
No, that’s why we use the same batteries Voltaire did on his frogs.
They mostly these articles are showing new avenues for research. Most are deadends usually due to issues with production/scalability.
Sodium Ions batteries are coming to market, however the issue is that Lithium Ion are just improving faster and making it harder for Sodium Ion batteries to compete.
Unless other situations where the established technology wins due to inertia, sodium ion batteries have two benefits that make them interesting regardless:
Firstly, they are safer. A punctured sodium ion battery doesn’t catch fire, which massively simplifies safety design. That makes them very attractive for certain scenarios, especially ones where density is a secondary concern. That in turn means they get further development money instead of withering on the vine.
Secondly, they require fewer hard-to-obtain materials, which makes them attractive from a strategic perspective. This one should be less important than the safety factor but it’s also relevant.
I’m pretty sure we’ll actually see wet sodium cells in the wild if they are actually practical. Sodium ion tech is already being commercialized and if this brings it within the same ballpark as lithium ion then it becomes a very interesting choice for vehicles due to instant crash safety gains.
They also perform better in the cold making them a better choice for EVs in cold regions. This is why I think CATL saw the videos of cars getting killed by cold and pulled the trigger on retooling even with the lithium price crash.
Not to mention from a human rights perspective, it’s not just easier to obtain sodium than lithium but also more humane.
There is an industry for ethically-sourced materials, and even if this doesn’t completely replace lithium it can still significantly reduce the amount needed to meet demand, which can also encourage more ethical practices in that supply chain too, such as sourcing it from areas with stronger labor laws.
One in ten of chemistries in the lab work in real world conductions. One in ten of those are cheap enough to consider production. One in ten of those can scale up to mass manufacturing. Most research works like that. You have to keep going until you hit jackpot.
Its that way with many technologies. The lead time on such research is long enough that market factors alter the viability by the time it is ready to get commercialized.
Quite often innovations from prototype technology can be transplanted into existing tech for part of the benefit, without having to build new production capacity. So the new technology does not commercialised, but the learnings from it does.
R&d on these I’m guessing takes a little while. And it greatly depends on what niche they fill. Like the poster above said these might have lower density. For applications that move, that’s not usually good. How sensitive are they to hot and cold? That could necessitate thermal management.
They have slightly lower density right now, but there is work to increase the density, and it could very well get up to about 210wh/kg which would put it directly on par with current lithium ion batteries. So it could replace the low end of the EV market without any significant change except for a reduction in price by a lot.
probably too expensive and inefficient. LI-ion is pretty efficient compared to NA-ION.
Li-ion technology has huge factories behind it, so economies of scale apply here. The first Na-ion battery factories have just started, so everything is more expensive to manufacture on a small scale. However, the ingredients are cheaper and easily available. Once they ramp up production, we can make a fair comparison between the two.
I have a feeling LIBs are going to be more expensive, but they won’t disappear since high energy density is very handy in mobile applications like cars and phones. NIBs are probably going to end up being a lot cheaper, which should make them a popular option in all the less demanding applications, like grid energy storage, kitchen scales, and anything in between.
the strategy of retaining crystal interlayer water yielded a specific capacity of 280 mA h g−1 at 10 mA g−1, one of the highest capacities reported for SIB cathodes in literature.
All I could find. This isn’t a statement about capacity(?) Units are wrong(?)
Its worth noting how preliminary this research is. Currently these “batteries” are just jars with chemicals.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2025/TA/D5TA05128B
https://www.rsc.org/suppdata/d5/ta/d5ta05128b/d5ta05128b2.mp4
Fairly sure those units are milliamp•hour per gram which makes sense for energy density.
mAh/g (milliamp-hours per gram) is essentially still a measurement of capacity, but in terms of current instead of power.
We can do a little dimensional analysis here to translate between them. Power = Current x Voltage, so you’d multiply this (Current x Time)/(Weight) value by the nominal voltage of the cell to get to (Power x Time)/(Weight).
Phone batteries are often specified in units of Current*Time (e.g. milliamp-hours), but I’m not completely sure why. I think it has to do with voltages being standardized for certain types of cells, so the only real variable in the battery capacity is the current.
Edit: rearranged some ideas to make more sense
multiply this (Current x Time)/(Weight) value by the nominal voltage of the cell to get to (Power x Time)/(Weight).
This is the part that annoys me. The nominal voltage could vary between different batteries. 200Ah/g means different capacity for a 6v battery verses a 48v battery. I’m guessing battery scientists are using standardized nominal voltages for these tests or are seeing the same Ah/g capacity at different voltages (that I may have simply missed in the paper because I skimmed it and I don’t claim any deeper knowledge on battery research)
I’m not completely sure why
I think it’s marketing
5000 mAh is much a bigger number than 19 Wh and marketing loves huge numbers
Kinda like BMW did with the i3.
In 2013 Tesla was selling a model with a 60 kWh battery so BMW had the genius idea to install a 20 kWh battery BUT refer to it as “60 Ah” battery.
Tesla introduced the 90 kWh battery? BMW responds with a 94 Ah battery (28 kWh)
Newest Tesla has 100 kWh battery now? BMW has 120 Ah battery (38 kWh)
“See? Higher number!”, says the marketing
And in order to have a comparable range number they had to implement heavy weight reduction techniques like using carbon fiber for the body, negating any cost saving from the smaller battery AND giving the owner a total loss after small collisions as it shatters instead of bending
That’s an incredibly longwinded way of saying “mahh Tezlur burns three times as much ‘clean coal’ per mile as a commie BMW, yee-haw”.
Finally a new one!
It was too quiet during the whole last year. But before, we had about 2 revolutionary new battery technologies every week.
Would you prefer researchers to not publish results?
Would you prefer
Not at all!
I like serious publications very much, and I was also well humored by all these shoutings about revolutions…
I prefer the media not mindlessly overhype scientific publications.
No but I’d prefer if journalists didn’t take the results of one experiment in the lab and write headlines about how cars will now have a 10,000 mile range and charge in 4.2 seconds and last for 75 million cycles
I don’t think any of the mistrust from other comments in this thread is directed at researchers - it’s directed at the usually-sensationalised reporting. The “I’ll believe it when I see it” comments are because journalists have cried wolf too many times so now the headlines are just background noise.
The photo choice is a big one that always bothers me with these articles.
Article photo. https://www.sciencedaily.com/images/1200/aqueous-batteries.webp
Actual lab setup. https://www.rsc.org/suppdata/d5/ta/d5ta05128b/d5ta05128b2.mp4
ok but this specific source is quite sober
well maybe, but that’s exactly what crying wolf does. You hear “twice the enrgy density” so many times that you stop believing it, even if one day it really is true.
If my car battery’s energy density had doubled every time I read a headline saying that a new battery tech will double energy density, it’d now have more energy storage than the sun.
spoiler
edit: assuming 6x10^43j energy capactiy in the sun and 3.6x10^8j (100kwh) in my car, it’d take 116 energy-doubling articles :)
Well, the downside of this not being a 4x game is that sometimes research doesn’t pan out, and you don’t know which ones until after you’re done.
Yeah I’ll take this seriously when it enters commercial service.
i’ll take 10 please.
What are you gonna do with your 400 charge cycles?
Charge cycles tend to improve as technology and processes improve. Other sodium ion batteries started out similarly limited in cycles and have since basically matched lithium ion.
deleted by creator
It’s already ionized e.g. NaOH.
The compound, called nanostructured sodium vanadate hydrate (NVOH), delivered far stronger results when used in its hydrated form.
I think the real breakthrough will come when we will be able to make powerful microbatteries.
I think there were some nuclear button
1W0.1mWdecade-long50-year batteries, from China if I recallIf only they could build say…a 15W nuclear battery that can last 50 years, THAT would be something. Enough for a very low-power smartphone, one who’s CPU is clocked down so that it can’t drain energy too fast. And ruggedized as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
Not a new idea, although I don’t think that particular isotope has been used before.
