While Sodium-Ion sounds legitimately promising, we’ve all read so many articles about “revolutionary new battery tech” over the years that the default response is “cool, let me know when mass production starts.”
Yeah, your ire is justified. Total ADD move to start reading, have a thought pop in your head, then post without at least scanning the rest of the article to make sure you’re not posting something stupid.
I can’t resist cancelling the units even though it doesn’t actually make sense because it’s a capacity not a volume, as it were, but that’s a 3.6kw factory!
Here’s my working. There are about 31.56 million seconds in a year, which I rounded to 30 million, and so
30 GWh/year
= 30x10^9 Wh / year
~ 30x10^9 Wh / 30x10^6 s
= 10^3 Wh/s
= 1 kWh / s
= 3600 kWs / s
= 3.6 kw
I used the duckduckgo autocalculator just now, and 30/31.56*3.6 is about 3.4, so it’s much closer to 3.4kW.
(It’s not power output, it’s manufactured storage output. I think of it as like a factory that produces 3.4 litre capacity jugs per second, but they’re not jugs, they’re actually batteries. Big ones.)
They could make a 120kWh battery (which would give a family car a range in the region of 450 miles) every two minutes.
It being an ad doesn’t change anything in an of itself. They’re correct in saying that there is a mass-produced, consumer grade product available. Unless that is a lie, or said product is complete trash, this solves the “call me it’s mass-produced” problem the original commentor has.
Did you read the article? This isn’t about a research paper that talks about theoretical lab experiments. Sodium batteries are in real world application right now. Mainly in China and South America.
You can buy sodium batteries from AliExpress. It’s been available for a while. I was thinking about ordering a few but I ended up spending my hobby budget elsewhere. There’s no economies of scale yet for sodium battery tech. You can get the battery but there is zero electronics available for it. Mainly you’d have to design your own charger and battery management modules. That’s out of my pay grade. I’ve been waiting for Chinese engineers to mass produce such things.
The sub is about technology, not industry. Also, look at the advances in battery technology in the last 30 years. There have only been 3 notable technology advances in the last 40 years from a consumer perspective, but there have been significant advances within each of those major technology changes, resulting in Wh/kg increasing by 6 to 10 times and $/Wh dropping about 99%.
If you want to hear about things that could happen or are about to start happening in industry, this is the right community. If you want to know what you can buy tomorrow, try Amazon.
The point is not about this particular article, but the general attitude of that comment, which boils down to “Why is there an article about a technological breakthrough that may never pan out in my community about technology?” I feel like these guys would have complained about Newton’s quaint ideas for a new way to use mathematics. The fact this particular article is about technology that is demonstrably taking off while they complain about articles on battery tech not being implemented is pretty next level.
Oh, I see.
I was just commenting on ‘this community isn’t about industry’ bcs I didn’t quite understand that (but my comment was a bit unclear, should have added the quote I was referring to).
All good. I just keep seeing this all the time about batteries, simply because most of the technological advances are slow, cumulative, aggregate, and largely invisible to consumers. Then people complain about how none of these advances ever make it to market while ignoring, for example, how many pounds old, barely capable cell phones were compared to the functionality of smartphones these days that can run for a full day on a battery a fraction of the size we had for those old behemoths, all apparently without any of those breakthroughs making it to market. I mean, look at the first cell phone in this article. I suspect some advancements occurred in batteries between then and now.
Oh, I’m fully aware how battery tech advanced and/or awkwardly staggered in some areas.
Phones are a great example, the rise of capacities through diffident technologies were fast & very close for people to experience first hand.
I just wish we would have started this push a century ago.
Absolutely. If we had done so with batteries and solar, imagine where we could have been. Both technologies languished for far longer than they had to.
Tesla, the company run by a nazi capitalist and which has a value so inflated it’s amazing it hasn’t imploded under its own weight, raises it’s prices and you’re blaming batteries? You do know that every saving a corporation makes goes towards profits and that they never lower their prices as long as people are buying(and even then, they refuse to most of the time)?
There’s correlation not equalling causation and then there’s whatever the hell this is. Like one of the final bosses of that logical fallacy.
It’s not just Musk. All the legacy automakers switched fast to EVs because of the higher profit margins, and have been obfuscating the fact that at recent battery prices, EVs should cost less than ICE. To try and add value, they festoon the vehicles with pointless gadgetry and screens, which of course will all fail long before the battery. By Design.
Those changes are over 40 years, only 13 years of which apply to your reference, and include only one component of a luxury vehicle. Also, the current base price for a Tesla Model S that it showed me was $150k. If we apply inflation to $140k since 2012 ($150k minus the $10k you said), we get a value of $197k. So, $47k cheaper in 2025 dollars.
I suppose you blame battery prices for why McDonalds costs more, too?
But Elon told us EVs cost more than ICE because of battery costs. There are hundreds less components in EV versus ICE, and there could be even less if they removed the pointless gadgetry.
As for the McDonalds comment, which makes no sense, maybe loosen your ponytail elastic.
The McDonalds point is in reference to inflation, which will certainly have an impact on the cost of vehicles. And I feel like you don’t grasp the concept of a luxury vehicle. By definition, it has more than the basics. This could be why my EV cost less than $20k used and a Model S costs $151k new. No ponytail, but I don’t expect having one would hinder my basic math, economics, or English comprehension skills.
look at EV prices in china for a more accurate depiction of the battery progress that is being made
apparently the government EV subsidy for outright purchases ended in 2022, but they’re good enough at the manufacturing now that EVs are still exceptionally cheap. 70-80% of world lithium-ion production also takes place in China, so it makes sense.
There’s a lot of reasons that I don’t like the Chinese government, but they have been doing a whole lot better than the rest of the world with investment into the future of technology from what I’ve seen. The number of top-rated CS and EE schools in China is doing a whole lot on its own.
Yeah, I want to buy a car w/ reduced range at substantially lower prices, but I can’t do that right now. Give me a sub-$20k option to get to work and back and then I’ll get excited about the tech.
The Nissan Leaf is about $30k w/ ~300 mile range (my local area’s cheapest is $36k, but I guess that’s because they don’t carry base trims), and a replacement battery is something like $5-10k, depending on size. That’s pretty close to that $20k target, and given that the Soul is around that $20k price, I could see a manufacturer getting a sodium-ion based EV with limited range (say, 100-150 miles) right around $20k.
The Slate truck is targeting $25k or so, so if the battery prices are similar to the Leaf, that’s your $20k vehicle right there.
Buying new cars is stupid. You wasted several thousand just by driving it out of the dealership. Let someone else do that and buy it a year later with low milage and ten grand off.
I buy used cars exclusively. A used EV that retails under $20k new will be very affordable used.
My point isn’t that used cars don’t exist under $20k, my point is that sodium ion batteries are supposed to be way cheaper than lithium ion batteries, and they’re more than sufficient for a commuter. I want those available where I live.
the problem is that North American consumers don’t rationally buy vehicles. They buy $60,000 pickups to commute to office jobs, and they want 500 mile EVs because of “range anxiety” which is likely going to be in the next DVM.
Sodium batteries have a lower energy density, but they work better in cold temps. They are also inherently safer and last longer, longer than a car will last so they can be reused in the home battery market. Sodium is far less energy intensive to mine.
Of course, the big problem in NA is all this tech is from China, while we just spent billions on lithium cells. China is making 8K TVs and we’re just tooling up to make 12" Black and white TVs.
And that’s why the tariff situation pisses me off. I get that we don’t want subsidized EVs from China to ruin the local EV market, but we should at least take the tech that works and implement it here. Maybe we can estimate the amount of subsidies the Chinese government gives its EV market and charge that on import, idk, I’m not an economist so I don’t know what that would look like. I just know I want an inexpensive EV for commuting and I only need to go about 50-60 miles in a given day (call it 100 if I need to run some errands after work). If I can get that, during winter, for a low price, I’ll buy.
While Sodium-Ion sounds legitimately promising, we’ve all read so many articles about “revolutionary new battery tech” over the years that the default response is “cool, let me know when mass production starts.”
Fewer things irritate me more than someone who just hops straight into the comments without actually reading the article first.
Yeah, your ire is justified. Total ADD move to start reading, have a thought pop in your head, then post without at least scanning the rest of the article to make sure you’re not posting something stupid.
(“to the best of my knowledge, that is now, immediately.”)
Yup. BYD’s 30GWh/year means 1kwh/second!
I can’t resist cancelling the units even though it doesn’t actually make sense because it’s a capacity not a volume, as it were, but that’s a 3.6kw factory!
3.6 MW even. :)
3.6 kW is what a 50cc internal combustion engine typically produces
Here’s my working. There are about 31.56 million seconds in a year, which I rounded to 30 million, and so
30 GWh/year
= 30x10^9 Wh / year
~ 30x10^9 Wh / 30x10^6 s
= 10^3 Wh/s
= 1 kWh / s
= 3600 kWs / s
= 3.6 kw
I used the duckduckgo autocalculator just now, and 30/31.56*3.6 is about 3.4, so it’s much closer to 3.4kW.
(It’s not power output, it’s manufactured storage output. I think of it as like a factory that produces 3.4 litre capacity jugs per second, but they’re not jugs, they’re actually batteries. Big ones.)
They could make a 120kWh battery (which would give a family car a range in the region of 450 miles) every two minutes.
I appreciate the work :)
1 kWh/s (with you there) = 3600 kWs / s = kJ/s = kW!
= 3600000 J/s (=W) = 3.6 MJ/s (=MW)
Doh! You’re right of course!
The article literally starts off with a mass produced $800 Sodium Ion battery that you can buy right now.
Because it’s an ad…you all know that,right?
Did…did you want them to keep it a secret?
It being an ad doesn’t change anything in an of itself. They’re correct in saying that there is a mass-produced, consumer grade product available. Unless that is a lie, or said product is complete trash, this solves the “call me it’s mass-produced” problem the original commentor has.
You don’t generally advertise things that you don’t mass produce, though.
Somebody gotta tell Silicon Valley about that.
Did you read the article? This isn’t about a research paper that talks about theoretical lab experiments. Sodium batteries are in real world application right now. Mainly in China and South America.
You can buy sodium batteries from AliExpress. It’s been available for a while. I was thinking about ordering a few but I ended up spending my hobby budget elsewhere. There’s no economies of scale yet for sodium battery tech. You can get the battery but there is zero electronics available for it. Mainly you’d have to design your own charger and battery management modules. That’s out of my pay grade. I’ve been waiting for Chinese engineers to mass produce such things.
Just searched for “Sodium-ion BMS” on Aliexpress:
You can buy a lot of bullshit from AliExpress.
There’s a world that exists outside of your bubble. It’s real. No matter how much you bury your head in the sand.
they’re actively manufactured for consumers, and cheap and available enough to be relatively competitive with lithium ion on there
i hope isdt releases a firmware update for the q6 nano for that if RC sodium ion packs become available.
although afaik energy density per volume and weight isn’t quite there yet
Can buy them in relatively small quantities now online.
The sub is about technology, not industry. Also, look at the advances in battery technology in the last 30 years. There have only been 3 notable technology advances in the last 40 years from a consumer perspective, but there have been significant advances within each of those major technology changes, resulting in Wh/kg increasing by 6 to 10 times and $/Wh dropping about 99%.
If you want to hear about things that could happen or are about to start happening in industry, this is the right community. If you want to know what you can buy tomorrow, try Amazon.
Feels weird to gatekeep that - the des says ‘news or articles’ so an article about some ancient tech isn’t for this community?
I understand it as anything tech related, that explains/talks about technology, manufacturing tech included.
The ‘not industry’ part as in macroeconomics & geopolitical stuff - I agree on that.
The point is not about this particular article, but the general attitude of that comment, which boils down to “Why is there an article about a technological breakthrough that may never pan out in my community about technology?” I feel like these guys would have complained about Newton’s quaint ideas for a new way to use mathematics. The fact this particular article is about technology that is demonstrably taking off while they complain about articles on battery tech not being implemented is pretty next level.
Oh, I see.
I was just commenting on ‘this community isn’t about industry’ bcs I didn’t quite understand that (but my comment was a bit unclear, should have added the quote I was referring to).
All good. I just keep seeing this all the time about batteries, simply because most of the technological advances are slow, cumulative, aggregate, and largely invisible to consumers. Then people complain about how none of these advances ever make it to market while ignoring, for example, how many pounds old, barely capable cell phones were compared to the functionality of smartphones these days that can run for a full day on a battery a fraction of the size we had for those old behemoths, all apparently without any of those breakthroughs making it to market. I mean, look at the first cell phone in this article. I suspect some advancements occurred in batteries between then and now.
Oh, I’m fully aware how battery tech advanced and/or awkwardly staggered in some areas.
Phones are a great example, the rise of capacities through diffident technologies were fast & very close for people to experience first hand.
I just wish we would have started this push a century ago.
Absolutely. If we had done so with batteries and solar, imagine where we could have been. Both technologies languished for far longer than they had to.
And yet, a Tesla model S costs $10,000 more than 2012.
Tesla, the company run by a nazi capitalist and which has a value so inflated it’s amazing it hasn’t imploded under its own weight, raises it’s prices and you’re blaming batteries? You do know that every saving a corporation makes goes towards profits and that they never lower their prices as long as people are buying(and even then, they refuse to most of the time)?
There’s correlation not equalling causation and then there’s whatever the hell this is. Like one of the final bosses of that logical fallacy.
It’s not just Musk. All the legacy automakers switched fast to EVs because of the higher profit margins, and have been obfuscating the fact that at recent battery prices, EVs should cost less than ICE. To try and add value, they festoon the vehicles with pointless gadgetry and screens, which of course will all fail long before the battery. By Design.
I’ll take out of context quotes for $100, Alex.
Those changes are over 40 years, only 13 years of which apply to your reference, and include only one component of a luxury vehicle. Also, the current base price for a Tesla Model S that it showed me was $150k. If we apply inflation to $140k since 2012 ($150k minus the $10k you said), we get a value of $197k. So, $47k cheaper in 2025 dollars.
I suppose you blame battery prices for why McDonalds costs more, too?
But Elon told us EVs cost more than ICE because of battery costs. There are hundreds less components in EV versus ICE, and there could be even less if they removed the pointless gadgetry. As for the McDonalds comment, which makes no sense, maybe loosen your ponytail elastic.
The McDonalds point is in reference to inflation, which will certainly have an impact on the cost of vehicles. And I feel like you don’t grasp the concept of a luxury vehicle. By definition, it has more than the basics. This could be why my EV cost less than $20k used and a Model S costs $151k new. No ponytail, but I don’t expect having one would hinder my basic math, economics, or English comprehension skills.
look at EV prices in china for a more accurate depiction of the battery progress that is being made
apparently the government EV subsidy for outright purchases ended in 2022, but they’re good enough at the manufacturing now that EVs are still exceptionally cheap. 70-80% of world lithium-ion production also takes place in China, so it makes sense.
There’s a lot of reasons that I don’t like the Chinese government, but they have been doing a whole lot better than the rest of the world with investment into the future of technology from what I’ve seen. The number of top-rated CS and EE schools in China is doing a whole lot on its own.
I only pay attention if Dr. Goodenough’s name is somewhere in the ecosystem.
Yeah, I want to buy a car w/ reduced range at substantially lower prices, but I can’t do that right now. Give me a sub-$20k option to get to work and back and then I’ll get excited about the tech.
What car anywhere is sub $20k?
The Kia Soul is just over $20k, but not EV.
The Nissan Leaf is about $30k w/ ~300 mile range (my local area’s cheapest is $36k, but I guess that’s because they don’t carry base trims), and a replacement battery is something like $5-10k, depending on size. That’s pretty close to that $20k target, and given that the Soul is around that $20k price, I could see a manufacturer getting a sodium-ion based EV with limited range (say, 100-150 miles) right around $20k.
The Slate truck is targeting $25k or so, so if the battery prices are similar to the Leaf, that’s your $20k vehicle right there.
Second-hand Nissan Leaf?
Those are very cheap, undervalued. I see them at US$4000 with 60,000 miles.
Right, used cars are feasible, I’m talking about new cars. A sub-$20k new commuter should be possible w/ sodium ion batteries.
Buying new cars is stupid. You wasted several thousand just by driving it out of the dealership. Let someone else do that and buy it a year later with low milage and ten grand off.
And the Nissan leaf is an absolute joy to drive.
I buy used cars exclusively. A used EV that retails under $20k new will be very affordable used.
My point isn’t that used cars don’t exist under $20k, my point is that sodium ion batteries are supposed to be way cheaper than lithium ion batteries, and they’re more than sufficient for a commuter. I want those available where I live.
the problem is that North American consumers don’t rationally buy vehicles. They buy $60,000 pickups to commute to office jobs, and they want 500 mile EVs because of “range anxiety” which is likely going to be in the next DVM.
Sodium batteries have a lower energy density, but they work better in cold temps. They are also inherently safer and last longer, longer than a car will last so they can be reused in the home battery market. Sodium is far less energy intensive to mine.
Of course, the big problem in NA is all this tech is from China, while we just spent billions on lithium cells. China is making 8K TVs and we’re just tooling up to make 12" Black and white TVs.
And that’s why the tariff situation pisses me off. I get that we don’t want subsidized EVs from China to ruin the local EV market, but we should at least take the tech that works and implement it here. Maybe we can estimate the amount of subsidies the Chinese government gives its EV market and charge that on import, idk, I’m not an economist so I don’t know what that would look like. I just know I want an inexpensive EV for commuting and I only need to go about 50-60 miles in a given day (call it 100 if I need to run some errands after work). If I can get that, during winter, for a low price, I’ll buy.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
In fact, I very much agree.