A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.
There actually is not a lot of room for improvement. Highest energy will still be limited to lithium chemistry because of the periodic table.
That’s a limit on gravimetric energy density. There are plenty of other parameters that can be improved.
You don’t know that. This is chemistry, not Moore’s stupid law.
no, actually, we do know that… things like cycle time, lifetime cycles, their durability < 20% and > 80%, performance in the cold, sustained current
lots of these are to do with heat and degradation, but these are all problems that can be solved to improve batteries in general… some of them are inherently to lithium chemistry and easily solved with others
sodium batteries, for example, are better in most categories other than wh/kg making them not useful for portable electronics and cars etc but for stationary applications these benefits can significantly outweigh the major downside because wh/kg is not a useful metric (eg grid storage)… especially true when sodium batteries are able to deal with higher operating temperatures which means you don’t need as much if any extra cooling, which is getting close to making up for even energy density of the system in some situations
flow batteries are also real things, as are hydrogen fuel cells