GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage

That means nothing without knowing the size of your facility though.

Are your batteries 25MW/100MWH or 250MW/1000MWH.

Why would that be a reason to switch, given the LFP batteries typically have better operational parameters in everything except cold-weather charging?

Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.

India has a "made in India" mandate which is hilarious. >80% of solar panel (polysilicon, ingots, and silicon wafers) is from China. Situation is worse with batteries and EVs. Tata, which has been making vehicles for quite some time doesn't have any clue how to make EVs and is building an entire plant with a Chinese company (Chery).

Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....".

In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm:

1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah.

2) When its impossible to compete: China is security threat, we can't allow them. But we'll import most of it (80 - 90% of components) and still put our label.

Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).

It's all a game of desperation for a failing automaker once again desperate for bailouts in new, fun ways.

First they run over a few kids with Cruise, then they decide they wanna get into the H-bomb game, now it's... molden salt?

Na-Ion cells are great for grid-scale storage because they potentially can go down to something like $20 per kWh. But bulk LFP cells are already at ~$60 per kWh, so their cost is not really a deciding factor anymore.

And proposals using aluminium but again not in action.

Also zinc air https://inc42.com/startups/sthyr-energy-aims-to-tame-169-bn-...

the trouble is it's easy enough to propose such things but hard to be economically competitive with existing solutions. My guess is sodium ion will get cheap because the ingredients are cheap and there's a lot of money going into mass production which will bring the cost of that down over time.

There's an ancient non electrical seasonal solar storage practiced in Austria and such places where they grow tree and then chop them into logs for the winter but it's a bit labour intensive.

This still causes wear on the battery, and it can be better or worse depending on chemistry. The only way to get around that is if you disconnect all inputs, throwing away all the excess solar/wind power and supply exclusively from battery for the entire season.

There's no real benefit apart from like a standby power supply for a cataclysmic event where all other power sources including the sun become nonviable. You just won't ever use the full capacity of the battery, so most of the resources to build it will be wasted.

Is GM testing Peak's cells or some Chinese company's cells?

On the other hand the 2 Chinese companies that now make sodium batteries "rely on sodium iron pyrophosphate (NFPP) cathodes, which are chemically and structurally similar to lithium-iron phosphate in an LFP battery".

This similarity probably enabled them to reuse much of their existing fabrication lines for LFP batteries.

It is unavoidable that in the long term the cost of sodium batteries will be much lower than of any lithium batteries.

That would have been enough for their adoption for stationary uses, but their much greater temperature range (which allows operation and charging at -40 degrees, both Celsius and Fahrenheit) and their longer lifetime are enough to make them replace lithium batteries in certain applications even without the price advantage.

Lithium batteries will always be used in mobile applications, because they will continue to have a better energy per weight ratio, but for high energy stationary uses and for vehicles in cold climates it is likely that they will be mostly completely replaced by sodium batteries.

But the economics part is true, people looked to sodium as lithium prices went high and then enthusiasm cooled as they dropped again.

However they now seem to be passed that slump and the long term benefits seem enough for sustained investment.

It helps that the wider market is growing. You can keep your lithium battery factory and use your know how to set up a new sodium battery factory and aim to sell both to slightly different markets for the life of a factory.

Meanwhile, most serious applications have power conversion circuitry, so a variable voltage may not be much of a problem.

The low-end “12V” LFP packs without real BMSes or power conversion that sort of pretend to be lead-acid batteries in RVs and such are awful designs and work pretty poorly, and their “24V” and “48V” cousins are not much better. It’s true that Na-Ion may not be an easy drop-in replacement. That being said, some people are working on Na-Ion as a lead-acid replacement for car starter batteries (and for low voltage systems in EVs), and they have a lot of potential in this application. (LFP doesn’t have adequate not temperature performance and lead-acid sucks for many reasons.)

> In October 2012, A123 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was thrown into a narrative of Obama-era green energy failures with defunct California solar company Solyndra that had received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees — a comparison to which Vieau objects because A123's technology was "proven," and it built plants and hired people with government support.

> Wanxiang Group Corp., a subsidiary of the largest auto parts supplier in China, acquired its assets for $256.6 million after it had sought to acquire 80% of A123 earlier that year

Like, that's not an unreasonable size of loan for a regional expansion for medium-sized businesses; there should be some sort of lender interested in doing that for them.

In a car it’s worth paying more for higher volumetric and gravitational density. For aircraft even more so.

For grid storage, physical space is usually not the largest issue. Cost of deployment, stability, and cycle life are bigger factors.