A Battery Revolution in Motion | Hacker News Reader

A Battery Revolution in Motion

news.cnrs.fr

147 pointsvmarsy86 comments

This is great news (and from a trusted source, CNRS is one of the most prestigious research institute in France, state-owned).

As the article says, it's not about having the most performing batteries (they announce 90 Wh/kg which is below Li-ion batteries) but cheaper batteries, made of salt instead of Lithium. And it matters for many use cases.

For almost anything not mobile, that would definitely be an improvement. They mentioned houses with solar storing excess energy, and there's numerous other possible uses including industrial. Potentially also slow moving autonomous machines including lawnmovers could benefit, as replacement is cheaper.

Also for anything with charge cycles fast enough that cost outweighs other factors.

testing

Re. the Wh/kg figure - If the sodium chemistry has properties comparable to lithium IRON (LiFePO4) in other respects, such as safety and robustness, then the 90Wh/kg figure is quite good in that comparison. The LiFePo4 chemistry is quite interesting and very stable and a drop-in-and-forget-about-it replacement for lead-acid battires, which is harder to do with the more sensitive and aggressive high-Wh Li-ion stuff. Afaik Tesla use LiFePo4.

PO, not Po, please. Po is Polonium, the real death metal.

haha! Thanks :)

Tesla is not currently using LiFePO4 cells. They've invested a lot into LiCoO2 because it has the highest specific energy, and therefore the lightest battery for the same range.

Swing and a miss! They don't use LiCoO2 because of the increased potential for fires. What Tesla uses is a modified version of NCA, or Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide (LiNiCoAlO2). It still has the potential for fire, but it's not as volatile as LiCoO2.

https://my.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/battery-experts-say-...

Good old Cunningham's Law.

Agreed. One of the reasons Li-ion (Lithium Cobalt Oxide) batteries are so expensive is the extensive quality controls that have to be performed on it. If you put 100 cells in a car and even 1% of those cells are faulty, your car catches fire. The worst that happens with LiFePO4 is the internal goo bubbles out of the battery and smells bad.

AFAICT, Tesla uses Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide (LiNiCoAlO2) aka "NCA". It's safer than Cobalt, but not as safe as Iron.

I understand cobalt is a big cost issue and is not plentiful.

I agree that it is great news, I wish they were a bit more open with some of the details (charge rate? discharge rate?) 90 Wh/kg is decent, a one day supply for a nominal house[1] that would be 266kg of batteries (about a quarter ton) which seems pretty reasonable. Sodium is highly reactive which is an issue but unclear if its any worse than Lithium in that regard.

[1] For reasons I don't know, the "nominal" single family house consumes 24kwhrs per day, hence each kW of generating capactity is said to support 1 house.

If the W/hr can improve enough compared to lithium the higher weight but smaller packaging might help to offset that disadvantage. Less volume you need active cooling through comes to mind.

I think this touches on an important point. According to the article, Earth's crust contains 0.06% lithium and 2.6% sodium. I think it will be critical for the future of manufacturing (and especially for things like storage of energy) to find workable solutions using abundant elements.

Without the most critical infrastructure (for example batteries for storage of energy) being built using abundant elements there's a strong risk of a lot of instability in markets in the future. Shortages, etc.

I think if a workable solution exists using abundant materials (regardless if it's the most perfect solution) it should be used. Otherwise I imagine there are plenty of hedge funds on Wall Street who will be more than happy to start stocking up on critical raw materials in short supply.

One possibility being investigated by Siemens is thermal stone storage.

Basically you dig up a gigantic hole in the ground, line it with insulation, put the dirt back in and send hot air through it (500-600 C). Then when you need the power, you connect a turbine to it and can use the heat to drive it.

I'm glossing over some details, but that's the basic operation. Last thing I heard about it they were going to build a demonstration project in Germany.

You can use a similar thermal mass trick under a house if you're looking to balance day/night energy consumption. This can have a very large impact on your bills, payback times are on the order of about a decade, much shorter than the projected lifetime of a house.

This sounds horribly inefficient.

> Without the most critical infrastructure (for example batteries for storage of energy) being built using abundant elements there's a strong risk of a lot of instability in markets in the future.

Yes, please. Let's not repeat the petrochemical mistakes this time around.

At the time we got hooked on oil, there were places you could drill a hole in the ground, and oil would shoot out in a huge geyser. Oil ~was abundant; we just squandered it all on inefficient industrial processes, disposable consumer goods, and transporting around big four wheeled metal boxes containing just a single (relatively light) human.

Of course. That's why we used it. (Also, it being technically infeasible to create advanced modern batteries with 19th century technology!)

But there's a big difference between "oil" abundant and "sodium" abundant.

I guess my questions are. Do Sodium batteries suffer fire problems like Lithium batteries? Can you use water on those fires? How is toxicity of the battery overall, are the other metals and such (electrolytes) less toxic?

Sodium is a bit less inflammable than lithium, not much. You still can not throw water over it.

Hey so do you know how many commodity hedge funds own storage assets? Did you know those storage assets are highly specialized for each commodity? Just trying to politely point out that it's not the hedge funds that would be doing that :)

I wouldn't necessarily reduce my claim to "high inflation environments", but this link might prove helpful:

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/051905.asp

Here's another:

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102915/do-hedge-fund...

Or perhaps they'll just buy all the companies that store commodities of a certain type. I've heard horror stories (from a family member in finance) about hedge funds who will buy up all of a certain type of commodity (in this specific example all of the farms that produce a specific type of egg) and just wait until the manufactured "scarcity" causes prices to go up, and then they'll start selling.

So even if it's not necessarily part of their "plan", I know of at least the one case above. My relative assured me there are plenty of other examples out there. I'd say at the very least Hedge Funds have proven to be a very opportunistic bunch who would probably salivate at the idea of a scarce commodity that was the primary component in all batteries manufactured in the world.

The reason I ask is because I worked for one of the largest traders of physical commodities in the world, and was involved in that trade.

What you're talking about is called cornering the market, and when it happens, the people go to jail. You're using anecdotal evidence to support your claim about a large swathe of people.

Also, if their buying activities meant to create artificial scarcity was the only factor driving the prices up, why did their selling not have an equal effect pushing the price back down?

I'm certainly not a professional trader, but it seems intuitive to me that as long as demand is greater than supply for an extended period of time a trader could "unwind" the position over that entire time frame. I think it would be silly to assume these kinds of schemes would be opened and closed overnight.

Seems like these Sodium batteries would be well-suited to grid load-shifting, rather than anything mobile. They're likely to be cheaper than lithium batteries and cope with more charge cycles, but heavier. Pretty much exactly what you'd want for load-shifting for solar/wind power, but not ideal for vehicles (weight matters) or anything portable unless they were a lot cheaper, or cope with many more charge cycles.

It's going to be tough to beat pumped water and thermal storage: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/03/electricity-s...

80% efficiency and they scale with the size of your water tank or gravel pit.

What I don't get is why there's so little work on open flow batteries. Those should also scale with the size of your tank, but you'll need much smaller tanks.

But well, last time I looked at plugging anything into the grid, the inverting hardware was the cost bottleneck, so maybe that's why. I just don't really know it anymore.

There seems to be plenty of research, but making them economical seems quite complicated, and they don't have the density for mobile applications.

The baseline for grid scale storage is pumping water up a hill. That's pretty tough to beat.

The problem with pumped hydro is that you need a suitable mountain to do it at a large scale. Those are rare and found mostly outside cities. Does it work at the scale of a water tower?

Yeah, pumped water doesn't work everywhere. I think the water tower wouldn't be economical. The article I linked provides an existing alternative that doesn't require special geography.

I agree, grid load-shifting appears to be a stronger use case for these sodium batteries than anything mobile.

On a related note, there are other ways salt batteries are being explored for grid energy storage:

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

https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to...

For clarification, the CNRS is a French public organisation, whose name stands for National Center for Scientific Research. Their research and findinds usually bear weight in the scientific community.

Ah, yes, the Center National for Research Scientific.

French is little-endian. English is big-endian.

Haha, the French would claim it's the other way around.

In terms of mass energy storage from intermittent renewable sources, this seems like a winner - less cost means increased competitiveness for renewable energy.

However, it seems like energy density will be the winning factor in consumer battery tech which, as far as I can tell, appears to be a significant chunk of the EXISTING market. This is something that Na ion doesn't yet seem competitive at - which is not to say that it won't get better with time/investment/research.

Unless lithium gets crazy expensive, I don't see the battery being a big enough expense in a laptop or mobile phone for people to be willing to put up with more weight for an incremental price saving.

This is definitely great news for renewable energy though.

Sodium atoms have a much higher molecular weight (22.99 u) than Lithium atoms (6.94 u). This alone makes Lithium more competitive by weight in the long run.

The ideal battery consists of two electrodes where one consists purely of the alkali metal in the charged state and the other one is weightless at the charged state but then collects the metal oxide when discharging. The oxygen is ideally taken from the air.

Currently we are far from that ideal since the electrodes contain additional matrix materials, between the electrodes an electrolyte is present, the oxidizing agent is stored inside the battery requiring yet other chemicals to keep it stable. Then the battery needs a casing which adds more weight.

> consumer battery tech

Depends which consumers you're talking about. There are huge, untapped markets in Africa and Asia where people have no refrigeration or washing machines (partly due to having an insufficient electrical grid, or a complete lack of one), and they would benefit immensely from being able to store cheaply generated solar power.

A large enough battery system based on this tech might be out of reach for a single individual in those circumstances, but not for a group who pooled their money and shared it.

If you could build a giant battery the size of a large warehouse, on the cheap..... even people in Texas would be buying, as then all that wind could be used.

There seems to be a 'revolution' in battery tech every so often or so out of R&D labs. So far, the promised improvements have not yet made their way into mainstream, commercial batteries: higher production costs, lower capacity or lesser lifespan.

I hope this one sticks, although I would not bet on it.

It seems they're closer than the "breakthroughs" you usually hear about. My impression is that the prototype is a product prototype, i.e. something they're actually testing and trying to design products around, rather than just a lab prototype.

Research into battery technology is high profile because of the demand for better batteries, but it's good to understand that it isn't the researchers that are claiming 'revolutions' are happening, it's a PR exercise. Most progress is iterative and gradual. The research often isn't important because of a big 'breakthrough' but rather because it provides the answer to a small part of a bigger puzzle.

As for better batteries (cheaper, better capacity, etc...) not making it to the market, consider the following graph showing the improvements in price and performance of Li-ion batteries between 1991 and 2005:

http://i.imgur.com/NjvUGXh.png

Batteries are improving all the time. By the time a "breakthrough" makes it to market, it's just the next incremental improvement.

> Lithium's only disadvantage is its (relative) rareness, and the fact that it is only found in a few specific locations (Columbia, Chile, China, etc.).

So no revolutionary performance advancements (except for no. of recharges), but mostly a way to address rare earths scarcity.

Indeed. The scarcity issue is hardly intractable though. Currently Lithium is extracted by evaporation of high concentration brine and salts. There are efforts to extract it directly from seawater[1] though. There's plenty of Lithium in seawater, it's just a matter of extracting it efficiently as we do with magnesium.

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/538036/quest-to-mine-se...

Just to note that Lithium is not a rare earth metal. It is a metal that is rare on earth. Hope that clarifies everything.

Rare earths are the much heavier lanthanides, as well as scandium and yttrium.

Also, doesn't it feel a little discordant for a French web site to be using the left-pondian spelling of centimetre?

The French default to "left-pondian" when speaking English, much to my Australian-living-in-Paris chagrin. Most aren't even aware that there is a difference between English English and American English. One step up from that are those that aware that there is a difference, to the point that they actually think that the two are very nearly distinct languages, and that people from England may have trouble understanding Americans. After that you have the people that actually understand the true difference between the two versions of the language, but even they rarely understand that the US is actually the exception, and that pretty much all other English-speaking countries use English spelling (well, there is Canada, which decided to sit on the fence between the two, I suppose).

Well, the US is the "exception" if you count solely the number of countries. It actually has a slightly larger English-speaking population than all other majority-native-English-speaking countries combined, so it makes sense that the US's interpretation of the language would be rather weighty internationally. :)

Sort of like how Brazil is the "exception" in South America because most countries on the continent speak Spanish... but when you look at the population numbers, there are actually more Portuguese than Spanish speakers in South America!

0.06% of the Earth's crust is hardly rare. What is rare is deposits having a significantly higher local concentration.

Dilbert: Rocket boosters will move an asteroid into the moon's orbit so we can mine its precious metals.

Dilbert's Boss: Why don't we mine for precious metals in Afghanistan? They have lots of them.

Dilbert: That only happens in science fiction.

[1] Edited to add:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-06-20

The sodium battery also seems to have a longer lifecycle (more recharge cycle/less capacity loss per cycle). On the other hand, way lower specific energy (energy/mass) and no mention of energy density (energy/volume).

Much better suited than li-ion for load management, not so much for mobile applications.

This is revolutionary enough for me. Make an electric car for everyone on Earth and you've used up all available lithium; what are you going to do then?

> what are you going to do then?

Make them autonomous and share them between more people.

No need for everyone on Earth to own an electric car

2000 recharge cycle vs 1000 recharge cycle is significant.

Sodium is 4 times heavier than lithium which is even more significant.

Having a car battery which weights 4 times more isn't viable.

Also you can recycle the lithium from batteries quite easily.

Weight is irrelevant when looking at on-site storage. Cost per KW storage and battery fade performance are more important factors. This is why they are saying this could be a game-changer for renewables. Being able to store energy cheaply is key. Something Lithium has been unable to deliver.

Having a battery that is cheaper and lasts twice as long before needing replacing is significant.

> For the moment, its creators have not disclosed the composition of the materials wrapped around the two electrodes of their sodium-ion battery—a trade secret.

I wonder if it might make sense for Gates and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition to just outright buy certain proprietary technologies and put them in the public domain. If so, I wonder how they should best evaluate if this might be one such technology.

They don't keep it proprietary because they want money, but because they want the companies producing the batteries to be local ones.

Which I understand from a nationalist perspective, but it also harms deployment because manufacturing costs are probably higher in France than Japan or Korea

> Its format, called "18650," indicates that it is presented in the form of a cylinder, with a diameter of 1.8 centimeters and a height of 6.5 centimeters.

What a strange way to say express it. Why not say 18 millimeters and 65 millimeters?

Never let it be said that HN nitpicks minor issues in articles.

The advantages over lithium-ion are not clear to me. Is it just cost?

Lithium-ion life is about 1000 cycles (80% capacity by 500 cycles).

So we have a battery that has better charge cycle life expectancy and uses a more readily available "cheaper" resource.

The main point is that lithium is hard to get for European companies. Sodium is abundant in saltwater, which is good for European companies and good for a more massive use of batteries (electric cars and home storage).

If they can demonstrate that this battery technology is viable for large grid storage uses, there is a potentially enormous market for it in Germany. The problem is that solar pv makes most sense in Southern Germany, where it's sunnier, but a lot of the power is required further north, so there is a requirement for major new powerlines to be built[1]. Also, there is wind power generated in the North Sea that is needed further south.

Providing massive, (relatively) cheap battery backup to these intermittent power sources could allow Germany to accelerate the transition away from coal, which they've been forced to use more of due to decommissioning nuclear plants. If the power companies are willing to invest heavily in infrastructure for renewables, it bodes well for them investing further in batteries to improve grid stability and prices.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/electrical-resis...

The problem in Germany is transporting power from wind to the south, and not transporting power from PV. And Germany didn't use more energy from coal since the shut down of nuclear. (renewables replaced nuclear)

Cheap batteries would allow every country to move to renewables.

Sodium-Ion batteries have a few advantages - they can be completely discharged without taking damage. This is a huge deal for cargo (remember the cargo plane that caught fire because of lithium batteries a while ago?)

It's research grants.

> Being three times lighter than sodium ions, lithium ions also make it possible to produce very lightweight batteries, an undeniable asset when it comes to portable electronics.

So what is the article about? It doesn't mention any real advantages of sodium ion batteries? Lithium is more rare than Sodium but that should be a minor disadvantage?

> It doesn't mention any real advantages of sodium ion batteries?

Price, ubiquity (no need to rely on a limited number of lithium providers) and lifecycle length (number of discharge cycles).

> Lithium is more rare than Sodium but that should be a minor disadvantage?

Rarer means more expensive.

Not all batteries need to live in a cell phone. If you're building battery warehouses for renewable-gap-filling-in-the-grid, then the weight is nearly a nonissue, and energy density is less a concern.

Price isn't a real advantage?

I see the point that it is smarter to use Sodium instead of Lithium. But where is the revolution, as the capacity is comparable? Lets see, if the number of recharging cycles will really be twice as large (2000 instead of 1000). That would eat into the revenue, unless the new batteries were sold for a higher price (which in turn would give them trouble to compete against Lithium).

The main revolution is not a technical one, it is the fact that a big market may move from Asia to Europe.

If a capacity increase or a weight decrease could be realised, I'd accept the term 'revolution'.

Sodium is cheaper, so the battery should be too. This and the technology will allow solar to replace fuel, here is the revolution.

Lithium allows solar already to replace fuel. Does it? Sodium is cheaper so the battery will be cheaper is certainly naive. The prices are not made from the costs of the components but from the market. Sodium batteries will have trouble to compete price wise in the beginning, because the production industry must be build in Europe and compete against an established industry in Asia. On the long run, you may be right. But for introduction, I have strong doubts. Needs a good marketing, as they have the same capacity, but are heavier.

It's advantageous for static applications e.g. grid load management and distributed generation. If the findings hold, a big sodium-ion battery bank in your basement for your rooftop solar would be cheaper and longer-lasting than a li-ion for instance.

Well, look into our towns and calculate the number of square centimeters of the rooftops that are available for every household, in say, a 100 household houses. Ground area shrinks and height increases. I'd like to think you are right, though.

Deleted comment

So does Lithium.

here we go again with another amazing battery breakthrough! remember fuel cells and how they were going to power your cellphone _real_ soon now. exactly.

I can tell you now why there will never be a battery with a significantly greater energy density than we have now. It's because such a thing is also known as a "bomb".

There are solutions, of course, nature solves this problem with, for example, sugar. But what you need is a metabolic process for the release of energy.

Anything that's a solid lump of something won't work. don't invest in this.

Did you even take time to read the article? Using sodium instead of lithium isn't about making higher density batteries; it's about making cheaper batteries since sodium is much more abundant than lithium.

I thought I read somewhere that in terms of the percentage cost of a battery the raw materials are fairly insignificant. Don't remember off the top of my head, I'll have a hunt for some sources and edit this comment. Maybe we'll get a multi-material battery market, that'd be cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTIH6ncIXYc&t=32m20s (or 30m0s for the whole story)

According to Elon Musk currently lithium ion battery production steps are scattered all over the world and this creates enormous overheads and transportation costs. His plan is to consolidate everything to one place and get raw materials from the mines and produce batteries on site at his gigafactory.

They didn't note energy density as a benefit of these batteries. They noted cost, availability, and recharge cycles as principal advantages.

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