this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Well, Sodium is the 6th most abundant element on Earth, so there's a lot more of it and the extraction process is probably far more environmentally friendly.
Since Sodium batteries are so new I don't think we have data on the toxicity, disposal or recycling avenues yet.
They're actually old tech. They just could never match lithium.
They'll shine as standing storage more so than mobile applications. Home storage will benefit greatly from their improvements
That's very interesting. If they can be used at home or in cars that don't require batteries with a very large capacity, then that would be really good to counter the scarcity of lithium (and hopefully, help the environment too)
If they can get industrial scale it could also allow energy grids to capture excess power instead of wasting it. Could yield massive efficiency increases being able to reclaim some of that loss.
It was a light bulb moment to me when I realised toxicity is at least somewhat correlated with abundance.
Like lots of metals can be toxic but something like iron is so common you could just throw it on the ground and while certainly not ideal it's far from a major problem. The environment is very good at dealing with iron.
Interesting! So it would make sense to have tons of sodium batteries for all purposes for which one doesn't need maybe higher capacity or performance as I understand lithium batteries offer
Instead of thinking "capacity" by itself, thing of "capacity for the given space" or rather "density". So Sodium batteries can be equal capacity as Lithium, but the equivalent capacity Sodium battery will be significantly larger. In applications like storing overproduced wind or solar electricity for use later, we don't care how big the battery is. However, it a moving vehicle where every square centimeter and every kg changes the performance of the car, those density differences can have a real impact.