518
New sodium-ion battery skips mechanical cooling with 97.9% efficiency
(interestingengineering.com)
Is this the next big thing? Na. /j
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
518 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
87190 readers
4244 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Maybe they will make a potassium battery, K?
Maybe, but I want to see Uranium batteries go mainstream, how 'bout U?
Id prefer francium batteries, fr
Or gallium hydride? GaH.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Sodium-Ion is already in production at CATL. Been for about half a year if I recall. It's slightly less dense than LFP but it's cheaper and promises to get cheaper yet.
You're right, they were making a pun about sodium's chemical symbol.
Not who you replied to, but thanks for explaining! I saw the /j but still didn't get it. I wasn't a good chemistry student...
The advantage of Sodium -Ion is that it's cheap, abundant, safe, and can cycle. It's mainly used where large capacities are needed. So industrial, grid scale, stationary types of storage.
load more comments
(1 replies)
but it's cheaper
and way less dangerous.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Na.
Sodium, not natrium.
I have a surprise for you...
I've been doing some looking into sodium ion batteries for the last couple of months and it sounds like it's going to drastically reduce the price of batteries and sodium ion is more thermally stable and can handle cold temperatures of negative 40 and can handle hot temperatures.
I'm also hearing charge cycle counts around 10,000, which would be something like 20 years worth of battery usage.
The current downside is power density and even that is not terrible as it's pretty close to what LFP does now and They think they can improve it more in the future.
Sodium ion is already being used in some mass market cars that don't need an incredible range, but need to be economical.
If it's cheap and abundant enough you can have overcapacity and it easily lasts 30 years - which apparently is an important breakpoint for infrastructure project funding.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Heck, if energy density is an issue the use this initially for grid storage, home solar, etc. where a larger size isn’t a huge deal. That would increase existing lithium ion supplies for EVs.
The 210Ah sodium-ion cells deliver up to 218Ah of discharge capacity.
WTF does that mean?
Either AI slop, someone fucked up the math for the capacity, or they’ve broken thermodynamics and are pulling power out of the ether.
First is most likely, 3rd is the coolest.
If only my other electronics operated at 104% efficiency.
It's the world's worst ZPM
Badly written, i suspect the cells are speecified to have about 210ah and a real test showed 218ah capacity. That would be pretty normal since you always have manufacturing tolerances. But i think in a good article they would have worded it better if thats the case since not all of these batterys will do 218ah.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Any info about energy density?
According to Wikipedia:
Looks like power to weight it much higher, while energy per volume and energy per mass is comparable to existing lithium ion batteries.
idk about that, the regularly cited reason Na-ion batteries are mainly being looked at for grid storage rather than vehicle applications is their bad Wh/l and W/kg numbers compared to Li-ion. the table in the Na-ion article seems to use "1000W/kg" without a source, and it shows lithium as being about a third of that even though the Li-ion article quotes figures up to 10kW/kg.
seems the editors of the two articles aren't cross-checking eachother.
The "1000W/kg" figure appears to be from Wikipedia, which claims https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-article/sodium-ion-batteries-will-diversify-the-energy-storage-industry/30405 as a source. Wikipedia has the information in a table flagged as "Needs update".
Anyway, most of the lithium-ion chemistry variations drop off relatively fast in capacity over repeated charge cycles (the exception being LiFePo4). If the sodium-ion chemistry is better that way, and drops off less in the cold, it's still worth exploring for vehicle use even if the energy density is a little lower.
In colder climates, the lower density could be offset by better performance in cold. This is why sodium has made it to large mining trucks.
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
I think they are testing Unigrid battery model 72173207 (terrible name). That is their 210Ah NCO prismatic cells.
I found this spec sheet. No definitive metrics, but someone else could do the napkin math.
72173207 (terrible name)
That's my daughter's name. It was my great grandmother's name.
load more comments
(2 replies)
CATL's that went into mass prod sometime ago are 175Wh/kg.
The article says that they contain NaCrO₂. That means that, by mass, they are 21% Na, 49% Cr, and 30% O. So I'm curious: why are they called sodium batteries, and not chromium batteries?
By mass it would be mostly graphene or water batteries - like always
Presumably because Na+ ions are the active charge carriers.
Wow, an actual innovation and not just growthfroth.
Yeah batteries have been one of the main areas where the real technological advances have been happening in the past decade. That and photovoltaics
Archive link: https://archive.ph/Xe3BU
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/unigrid-sodium-ion-battery-tech
This page couldn’t load
Reload to try again, or go back.
What is this shit? The page loads perfectly, then goes blank. They just fucking pretend to be broken because of some ad blocker or something. Why is the internet getting worse all the time. I don't want you fucking layout, share buttons and other garbage.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Can we just skip to solid state batteries please?
No one can figure out how to make them without costing a fortune.
To be fair, solid state batteries went from being a pipe dream, to being only possible in perfect laboratory settings, to the current state of very real and possible -just expensive. And it has done all of this in about a decade. Just give it time.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Commercialize it? Oh this one could be real
Its already way past its "real" point. Just hasnt really made it to Europe fully. China is already mass producing them for everything.
according to their product page, the charge rate for a single cell seems to max out at 3C, which could be a pretty big obstacle to grid-scale deployment. unless that's a problem that can be fixed with a different arrangement; i'm not too up on how to build batteries.
This wouldn't be an obstacle for grid, only for mobile/moving applications.
which could be a pretty big obstacle to grid-scale deployment.
Well, on a grid scale if you've got a 100MWh battery and you want to charge it at 3C, then you're looking to find a spare 300MW out on the grid somewhere for 20 minutes.
That's not impossible, but you'll buy that 100MWh a lot cheaper if you're willing to get it over the course of a few hours. For example, buying power in the middle of the day when there's excess solar, to then drop it back into the grid in a one hour burst during peak times in the evening for 10 times the price.
That kind of thing is where the battery will make the most profit, so slow charge rates don't really matter.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(10 replies)
view more: next ›