This is big! Grid scale Sodium Ion battery technology is (on paper) the best candidate for cheap large scale electricity storage. The fact that this company is working on 9 pilot deployments mean that this will likely produce the real world results that the paper exercises promise.
There are SO MANY advantages of Sodium Ion battery tech for grid storage over everything else we’ve used so far (nearly all Lithium based).
Sodium Ion batteries:
don’t have as intense thermal management needs Lithium chemistries
don’t have the massive negative environmental impact for their source materials (because its a part of regular old table/sea salt)
doesn’t have the massive swings in capacity when operated in extreme hot or cold temperatures. Sodium Ion doesn’t care.
The only downsides to Sodium Ion is that the batteries are physically larger for the same amount of energy stored (which isn’t a problem for stationary storage), and the charging/discharging curves are not as linear as other chemistries (which again, isn’t an issue because these are purpose built applications where the curves can easily be managed by battery management systems).
We have used water before lithium, and it isn’t bad at all.
Not so great in a flat dry desert though. Pump storage is great when there is lots of water and a naturally occurring elevation, but there’s lots of places on Earth that don’t have that, but do have energy to store.
This is big! Grid scale Sodium Ion battery technology is (on paper) the best candidate for cheap large scale electricity storage. The fact that this company is working on 9 pilot deployments mean that this will likely produce the real world results that the paper exercises promise.
There are SO MANY advantages of Sodium Ion battery tech for grid storage over everything else we’ve used so far (nearly all Lithium based).
Sodium Ion batteries:
The only downsides to Sodium Ion is that the batteries are physically larger for the same amount of energy stored (which isn’t a problem for stationary storage), and the charging/discharging curves are not as linear as other chemistries (which again, isn’t an issue because these are purpose built applications where the curves can easily be managed by battery management systems).
We have used water before lithium, and it isn’t bad at all.
Not so great in a flat dry desert though. Pump storage is great when there is lots of water and a naturally occurring elevation, but there’s lots of places on Earth that don’t have that, but do have energy to store.
Hopefully you are free not to live there…
Middle east would like a word with you.
Middle-East involves plenty of mountainous areas, and the reason many of those are arid is because water, ahem, flows down.
Also in a flat dry desert one can replace pumping water up with raising heavy things up. I think. More wear though.
Pumped hydro?
Also very good, but geographically limited.
Can we make them from desalination plants, in part? Or no? I don’t know the science for it.
Yeah, the brine is where various useful ions can be further extracted from. https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-hydroxide-0213
It’s both amazing and hilarious that our sodium battery production is similar to modded Minecraft logic.