Lithium-ion has been the dominant rechargeable battery technology for years.
Korean researchers managed to design a sodium battery that can charge in seconds.
Faster charge and discharge times are one of the biggest advantages of sodium batteries over their lithium rivals.
The race is still on for the best battery, with challengers to lithium-ion technology abounding. Not all of these are made equal, and it’s questionable if any would be able to dethrone li-ion batteries, but the market may turn out to be big enough for more than one technology.
Lithium-ion has been the dominant rechargeable battery technology for years, and there’s a good reason for this. Li-ion batteries are compact, they charge relatively fast, and they’re durable—unless they’re in an EV that gets into an accident and the battery catches fire.
Yet lithium batteries have some shortcomings, too, in addition to being a fire hazard. These mostly have to do with the sourcing of some materials, such as cobalt, and the need for the metal that gave the batteries its name: lithium.
Sodium batteries, on the other hand, need neither cobalt from the artisanal mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo nor lithium, whose extraction is so resource-intensive that some are questioning its green credentials. These sodium batteries are turning into the main contender to lithium-ion technology.
The last few days saw two new updates from the space. One of these came from South Korea, where researchers managed to design a sodium battery that can charge in seconds. Charging time is a major drawback of lithium-ion tech for electric vehicles, which makes the news potentially huge, especially since the researchers claim their battery also rivals the energy density of lithium-ion batteries—and its power density.
Yet it is early to retire lithium-ion because until the technology leaves the lab and proves its advantages at scale, it remains nothing but a theoretical contender for the top battery tech title. Now, a U.S. company has said it has gone from theoretical to actual with its sodium battery.
Natron Energy, a California-based battery maker, announced this week the start of commercial production at its battery factory in Holland, Michigan. The factory will produce sodium batteries that, per the company, feature “higher power, faster recharge, longer life-cycle, and a completely safe and stable chemistry.”
Faster charge and discharge times are one of the biggest advantages of sodium batteries over their lithium rivals. The fast discharging makes them especially suitable for storage systems for wind and solar, to release their charge in case of a blackout or a spike in demand. Yet there is the problem of energy density, or how much electricity a device can contain, which in sodium batteries tends to be substantially lower than in lithium-ion devices.
Until this changes, it appears that sodium batteries would be most in demand in the battery storage sector, and it seems that’s what Natron Energy is focusing on. More specifically, it is focusing on data centers, which are increasingly seen as a massive driver of additional electricity demand in the coming years as everyone goes AI in the information tech space.
Indeed, demand from data centers handling AI is seen rising so fast and so massively that there is already worry this would lead to increased power generation from gas and coal—because wind and solar won’t be able to handle the surge.
“The reality is we can keep adding renewables until we’re blue in the face and it won’t be enough,” the chief executive of one of India’s largest wind and solar energy companies, ReNew, told the WSJ recently. The time, then, is ripe for battery storage that can charge and discharge fast, when needed.
According to BloombergNEF, sodium batteries will come to represent 12% of the battery storage market by 2030. This is quite a substantial share for the challenger technology, yet it still means that lithium-ion batteries will remain dominant even in storage.
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