TWICE AS MUCH COMPARED TO WHAT???
My left ball?
To answer your question we’ll need to conduct a series of electrical tests on your left ball. Please report to the lab as soon as possible, and wear loose pants.
You really need a statistical baseline on a population of left nuts.
Should set up a PPV website to offset costs of the study.
Going to need a control ball relative to the variable ball to calibrate your measurements.
Compared to a non-hydrous sodium vanadium oxide system.
No
Yep, I’m just annoyed by lazy headlines.
YOU WON’T BELIEVE
Actor Joins Film“They said I wouldn’t believe it.”
TNT has 1162 Wh/kg ratio.
These new lithium-ion batteries get to 300-400Wh/kg range.
We are hitting the limit what is doable with energy density. Do you really want to carry 100g of TNT in your pocket or few tons of TNT in vehicle going 100km/h.
Of course things are not directly comparable, but ball parks.
Yeah but firewood is like 5 kwh/kg, or 4 times the energy density of TNT. We drive around with wood in our cars all the time.
TNT has 1162 Wh/kg ratio.
How do you recharge TNT?
We are hitting the limit what is doable with energy density.
I mean, we’re definitely running into a problem of how you build a battery without also building a bomb. But the entire point of TNT is rapid thermal expansion. The point of a battery is very low voltage steady release of electrical charge.
I might also note that C4 has around 6 Mwh/kg. A bit of applied chemistry can go a long way to improving energy efficiency. And that’s before you take advantage of geometry to focus pressure, via a shaped charge.
Point being, there’s a lot of clever ways to juice a lemon. We’re a long way from the end of the road on battery improvement.
i’d say stability is more important than energy density
like gasoline has more than 10x the energy density than tnt and we’re perfectly fine with many kg of that on a vehicle going 100km/h
a fully fueled vehicle is the equivalent of ~600kg of TNT, but it’s very stable whilst TNT is not
That is true, but my small EV the batteries are 500kg, same car with combustion engine only has 40L fuel tank.
Stability is important, but lithium-ion ain’t really that stable either. Still waiting some solid state to get made.
Sodium ion is generally much more stable.
Yeah, lithium ion is a good stopgap while we develop better options, but it’s by no means stable. Get them too hot or puncture a cell and you’re going to have a bad time.
Yeah, diesel too.
Kinda, yes? Phones already do so much, why not one additional feature to deter theft.
We’ve got a lot of that going around in the USA right now.
Every week with the “miracle battery!” headlines. This has been going on for ages and I’m sick of it.
Sodium-ion batteries are not hype though, they are in production use in multiple industries already. They are generally superior to Lithium based batteries in all regards, with the exception of having a bit lower energy density. An equivalent LiFePO4 battery might be 70-80% of the size for the same storage. It’s not a big deal for large applications like cars and solar storage.
Cool.
Right up there with “cause/cure for dementia found”
“Dyslexia for cure found!”
350 page study concludes some people spend too much time reading.
We found the cure for Alzheimer’s but can’t remember what it was. I think it began with a “c”. Who are you?
Tuesday.
It’s time for your nap, Mr President.
cure for dementia found"
The US government could use some of that these days.
Charged with fusion power! From space! Made from privately mined asteroids!
Charging a car with fusion power is actually feasible. But it’ll take more energy to keep fusion going than it creates.
And it’s got electrolytes!
You can throw any battery in the ocean. The better question is should you?
We are close to finding out why some liquids are blue.
The Gargamel Research Institute
The Institute of Sciencey Things
Sodium Ion already does 5000+ cycles. Adding Vanadium is not a scalable material. It is very expensive. 400 cycles steady is not useful information because it needs to do much more. They didn’t state a wh/kg density. This is probably not a viable research vector, but “big Vanadium” has proposed a rental model to make Vanadium more scarce for other applications. Flow batteries (a fuel cell with tanks of electrolytes) provides an ultra easy way of recycling/selling the vanadium for traditional uses. Battery rental that forces returning it could be viable.
Right up there with the batteries that would contain about 1 kg of silver in them. Even if they didn’t become insanely expensive you’d have tweakers foaming at the mouth to steal your batteries.
Doesnt matter if the capacity is even less than sodium batteries.
We’ll see.
What is the catch?
Low capacity is my guess.
Dunno if the article is the same I have read a few days ago but the, mentioned “everything” except the comparable capacity to sodium or lithium batteries.
And I can’t imagine that the capacity for salty water with tofu remnants is much higher than a sodium battery which is atm serialized for mass production runs (isnt it even available in some capacity as a commercial product?)
What do they do with the Chlorine though?
They run a pool service
Clean chickens.
I can only hope these can actually hit commercialization, unlike most new battery technologies that never leave the lab.
Yes, because battery technology stagnated years ago…
Oh wait
I mean the first diagram is effectively useless without knowledge of battery density. They as well could compare the 2010 compacts with 2025s SUVs which have probably 2x the amount of total capacity.
For the other charts: Agreed.Wow! Thanks for sharing that data. I had no idea.
Weird, I didn’t know Lithium-Ion batteries were still in the lab. I thought for sure we were using those already. I thought the batteries in the labs were various solid-state batteries like graphene or like this sodium-ion battery, where there’s been a rise in patents around it but not a lot delivered
There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently.
LFP sits in the low cost marker while NCA is the highest performing of the mass market batteries, and NMC is somewhere in between.
Sodium might be coming for LFP’s low cost position, and is already beginning mass production (some Chinese manufacturers expect those models to hit the road in a few months).
If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn’t making it into mass produced products today, you’re just not paying attention.
There are a bunch of lithium ion chemistries that have come to market more recently
Like what? [Citation required]
If you think rechargeable battery R&D from 10 years ago isn’t making it into mass produced products today, you’re just not paying attention.
Please provide examples.
I mean, as much as a person who doesn’t work in research and development of energy storage, or work in industries directly related to it, I personally feel I’ve kept up. The day Donut Labs announced their battery I was watching review videos about it, and I want to believe, but until I see it for purchase, I’m not going to call it a win.
Great response, people just love to parrot easy dismissals without looking and the sheer magnitude on innovation and commercialisation going on in this sector
It doesn’t really dispute it, though. Lithium-ion has seen a lot of improvement, yes, because it’s already a giant industry; other battery chemistries have a hard time breaking through because they require entirely different processes to manufacture.
I’m still rooting for it, but it’s not really the same thing.This too is false, great progress has been made on for instance solid state batteries.
You can’t buy anything with solid state batteries yet, and when you can, they will cost a fortune.
Uhh you know you can buy an external mag safe battery bank with a solid state battery for like 45 bucks on amazon as well as the big generator ones as well?
I agree that cost isn’t amazing. You are essentially getting about half the capacity per dollar spent to a standard battery device but also these are in fact more stable for temp swings and damage. Soo… consumer available and not a fortune just need to have justification for it.
Some progress is being made, but it hasn’t seen large-scale adoption yet. Which is the point, as I read it.
The “progress” is typical industry bullshit. See the absolute bullshit around the Donut SS battery.
Remember when Musk invented a battery with 30% better capacity? It was a 30% bigger battery.
SS batteries require manufacturing facilities with clean rooms on the order of chip fabs. You may see these in 2027, but only in expensive cars.
It takes time to scale up production, CATL is already building factories for it:
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html
On April 21, 2025, CATL unveiled three groundbreaking EV battery products at its inaugural Super Tech Day: The Freevoy Dual-Power Battery, Naxtra - the world’s first mass produced sodium-ion battery
These press releases are weekly. Naxtra will be 30% cheaper, but also bigger and heavier. The problem here is the damn periodic table, someone should change it.
It takes time to scale production and even more time to adopt a new technology.
Well all those graphs show is that the cost of batteries has gone down and that as a result electric cars contain more batteries and therefore more range. It doesn’t actually show that the individual battery capacity has increased.
The third graph that indicates battery performance vs battery chemistry doesn’t really show incremental improvement it just shows general improvement but there’s plenty of battery chemistries that are worse than pre-existing ones.
@[email protected] The hero we need!
Did you mean to tag me?
You are a literal scientist or something that always answers these questions. We need you!
Start of my villain arc right here. Like unidan, but with more buttholes.
Shhhh…we’re having a bullshit feel good moment…
TBF, there are a lot of “battery breakthroughs” that turn out to just be hot air. Battery technology has made tremendous progress though and there is still a lot of room for improvement.
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.
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
hot air.
No, that’s a different type of battery.
No, this is Patrick.
All that data says is batteries got cheaper so they are putting more of them into cars. Also 100 to 300 wh/kg is in labs. No explanation why it went from 175 to 100 Wh/kg 08-10.
We’ve had 3 major changes in battery chemistry in the last 45 years. Energy density, lifespan, cost, and dangerous materials have all generally improved. We also have 2 new battery technologies in the process of becoming generally commercially available. Also, batteries went from 500 mAh batteries about the size of your smartphone to 3000 mAh as a minor component of that same smartphone, about an order of magnitude in energy density.
No explanation? You might want to get checked for color blindness
I can only hope one day people will stop repeating reddit clichés
Sodium ion batteries have less energy density as opposed to Lithium ion (100-150 WH per Kg instead of 150-250). I’m curious how much these “wet” batteries improve that. The article doesn’t say.
Nonetheless, even if it’s not the new battery for your car, it could be useful as energy storage for the grid, storing green (solar) energy for the night, and desalinating seawater at the same time.
My very uneducated understanding is that sodium batteries can be produced virtually anywhere.
Not every battery application needs to maximize energy density, so sodium batteries are good where that is the case.
I also did not read about sodium ion batteries characteristics versus lithium ion, so there might also be other use cases where sodium ion batteries are better.
No thermal runaway if I remember correct as those are not prone to exploding (unlike li-ion/li-po)
Well it’s a pretty big deal, especially for large power storage.
There is a branch of battery research that is only focused on grid storage. It’s the last piece to make solar and to a less extent wind unbeatably affordable.
In a home solar setup, batteries are the other half of the cost and have not fallen as fast as the cost of the panels themselves, the other half of the cost. For fully off grid setups, they quickly become the main cost.
And instead of charging them, you can drink them! Unlike Lithium Ion batteries, which you have to chew.
Its got electrolytes! It’s what plants crave!
Me: looking at plants after realizing that I’m full of ions
“KEEP IT IN YOUR PANTS!”
Sounds like a win/win!
We hear about a new battery chemistry like every week. Do most never get to commercialization?
No, that’s why we use the same batteries Voltaire did on his frogs.
Voltaire was a French poet.
Alessandro Volta was the electrochemist.
JFC…what do they teach in schools any more?
Well, I know the difference between alkaline, NiCd, NiMH, and lithium batteries, and that they don’t grow on trees, so at least I have that.
They mostly these articles are showing new avenues for research. Most are deadends usually due to issues with production/scalability.
Sodium Ions batteries are coming to market, however the issue is that Lithium Ion are just improving faster and making it harder for Sodium Ion batteries to compete.
Unless other situations where the established technology wins due to inertia, sodium ion batteries have two benefits that make them interesting regardless:
Firstly, they are safer. A punctured sodium ion battery doesn’t catch fire, which massively simplifies safety design. That makes them very attractive for certain scenarios, especially ones where density is a secondary concern. That in turn means they get further development money instead of withering on the vine.
Secondly, they require fewer hard-to-obtain materials, which makes them attractive from a strategic perspective. This one should be less important than the safety factor but it’s also relevant.
I’m pretty sure we’ll actually see wet sodium cells in the wild if they are actually practical. Sodium ion tech is already being commercialized and if this brings it within the same ballpark as lithium ion then it becomes a very interesting choice for vehicles due to instant crash safety gains.
They also perform better in the cold making them a better choice for EVs in cold regions. This is why I think CATL saw the videos of cars getting killed by cold and pulled the trigger on retooling even with the lithium price crash.
The harder to obtain materials aspect, while long term relevant, is barely a factor right now. Lithium production has exploded and resulted in a massive drop in prices that’s making the main consumer appeal for sodium batteries, price, a non-factor and driving some sodium battery producers out of business
Not to mention from a human rights perspective, it’s not just easier to obtain sodium than lithium but also more humane.
There is an industry for ethically-sourced materials, and even if this doesn’t completely replace lithium it can still significantly reduce the amount needed to meet demand, which can also encourage more ethical practices in that supply chain too, such as sourcing it from areas with stronger labor laws.
Too bad the market doesn’t care about human rights
That’s why sodium ion batteries are good. The market only cares when it effects their bottom line, and a few more years of development should see more Na+ battery market share
One in ten of chemistries in the lab work in real world conductions. One in ten of those are cheap enough to consider production. One in ten of those can scale up to mass manufacturing. Most research works like that. You have to keep going until you hit jackpot.
R&d on these I’m guessing takes a little while. And it greatly depends on what niche they fill. Like the poster above said these might have lower density. For applications that move, that’s not usually good. How sensitive are they to hot and cold? That could necessitate thermal management.
They have slightly lower density right now, but there is work to increase the density, and it could very well get up to about 210wh/kg which would put it directly on par with current lithium ion batteries. So it could replace the low end of the EV market without any significant change except for a reduction in price by a lot.
Its that way with many technologies. The lead time on such research is long enough that market factors alter the viability by the time it is ready to get commercialized.
Quite often innovations from prototype technology can be transplanted into existing tech for part of the benefit, without having to build new production capacity. So the new technology does not commercialised, but the learnings from it does.
probably too expensive and inefficient. LI-ion is pretty efficient compared to NA-ION.
LI-ion is pretty efficient compared to NA-ION.
at room temperature, but in the real world, where it gets cold, sodium batteries have an advantage.
Li-ion technology has huge factories behind it, so economies of scale apply here. The first Na-ion battery factories have just started, so everything is more expensive to manufacture on a small scale. However, the ingredients are cheaper and easily available. Once they ramp up production, we can make a fair comparison between the two.
I have a feeling LIBs are going to be more expensive, but they won’t disappear since high energy density is very handy in mobile applications like cars and phones. NIBs are probably going to end up being a lot cheaper, which should make them a popular option in all the less demanding applications, like grid energy storage, kitchen scales, and anything in between.
Exactly this, there’s a huge market for energy storage, where cost, power and cycle life matter way more than size and weight. And Na-ion can be produced in countries that do not have access to lithium mines, making transport less of an issue and countries more self-sustaining.
Hilarious…all of these batteries are coming out of one country because only one country is doing serious R&D.
If the data is available for mass production, you just need to copy paste the factory and establish the trading partners for supply chains.
Not the same issue as, for example, ASML and China.
the strategy of retaining crystal interlayer water yielded a specific capacity of 280 mA h g−1 at 10 mA g−1, one of the highest capacities reported for SIB cathodes in literature.
All I could find. This isn’t a statement about capacity(?) Units are wrong(?)
Its worth noting how preliminary this research is. Currently these “batteries” are just jars with chemicals.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2025/TA/D5TA05128B
https://www.rsc.org/suppdata/d5/ta/d5ta05128b/d5ta05128b2.mp4
Fairly sure those units are milliamp•hour per gram which makes sense for energy density.
mAh/g (milliamp-hours per gram) is essentially still a measurement of capacity, but in terms of current instead of power.
We can do a little dimensional analysis here to translate between them. Power = Current x Voltage, so you’d multiply this (Current x Time)/(Weight) value by the nominal voltage of the cell to get to (Power x Time)/(Weight).
Phone batteries are often specified in units of Current*Time (e.g. milliamp-hours), but I’m not completely sure why. I think it has to do with voltages being standardized for certain types of cells, so the only real variable in the battery capacity is the current.
Edit: rearranged some ideas to make more sense
multiply this (Current x Time)/(Weight) value by the nominal voltage of the cell to get to (Power x Time)/(Weight).
This is the part that annoys me. The nominal voltage could vary between different batteries. 200Ah/g means different capacity for a 6v battery verses a 48v battery. I’m guessing battery scientists are using standardized nominal voltages for these tests or are seeing the same Ah/g capacity at different voltages (that I may have simply missed in the paper because I skimmed it and I don’t claim any deeper knowledge on battery research)
I’m not completely sure why
I think it’s marketing
5000 mAh is much a bigger number than 19 Wh and marketing loves huge numbers
Kinda like BMW did with the i3.
In 2013 Tesla was selling a model with a 60 kWh battery so BMW had the genius idea to install a 20 kWh battery BUT refer to it as “60 Ah” battery.
Tesla introduced the 90 kWh battery? BMW responds with a 94 Ah battery (28 kWh)
Newest Tesla has 100 kWh battery now? BMW has 120 Ah battery (38 kWh)
“See? Higher number!”, says the marketing
And in order to have a comparable range number they had to implement heavy weight reduction techniques like using carbon fiber for the body, negating any cost saving from the smaller battery AND giving the owner a total loss after small collisions as it shatters instead of bending
That’s an incredibly longwinded way of saying “mahh Tezlur burns three times as much ‘clean coal’ per mile as a commie BMW, yee-haw”.
Man this title reminded me of an old animation involving iPhone and some Android phone, lemme go find…
The part about transforming into a jet and flying you to an island reminded me of the title.
Desalinating water might be the best part. Usually, solar power has the downside of needing storage and desalination has the downside of big energy requirements. If you can do both at the same time, it’s a big win for dry climates with lots of sun
There is also the issue with the salt by itself in desalinisation. If it’s removed with water, you have to deal with that stuff. Table salt is really cheap and there is plenty of offer, so you can’t really economically clean it enough and package it for human consumption or industrial use. So what usually happens is that they dump it back at one moment or another. And that is a hard pollution, and can lead to dead zones around the desalinisation plants if not managed well enough. Being able to add it in a high demand product such as batteries takes all those hurdles away
Make it into bricks and build a pyramid somewhere really dry?
I need a shit ton of salt in winter for my road. But for how long?
Ever wondered what the salt does after melting?
Same issue.I use salt as a a weed killer in some specific area. So I guess I know, at least a little bit
Could the excess sodium used for carbon sequestration? Sodium bicarbonate is baking soda but I don’t know what it could be used for aside from baking or if the energy to capture that carbon would even be a net positive.
I can’t imagine it’s doing this at a rate that will make a big impact on water supply, I suspect this is one of those things they throw in just to have a good headline.
and boats.
They are not going to get the sodium from desalination, they will mine it because it’s cheaper.
and more pure
Exactly, the desalination gimmick is bullshit for STEM ignorant hippies.
Finally a new one!
It was too quiet during the whole last year. But before, we had about 2 revolutionary new battery technologies every week.
Would you prefer researchers to not publish results?
Would you prefer
Not at all!
I like serious publications very much, and I was also well humored by all these shoutings about revolutions…
No but I’d prefer if journalists didn’t take the results of one experiment in the lab and write headlines about how cars will now have a 10,000 mile range and charge in 4.2 seconds and last for 75 million cycles
I don’t think any of the mistrust from other comments in this thread is directed at researchers - it’s directed at the usually-sensationalised reporting. The “I’ll believe it when I see it” comments are because journalists have cried wolf too many times so now the headlines are just background noise.
The photo choice is a big one that always bothers me with these articles.
Article photo. https://www.sciencedaily.com/images/1200/aqueous-batteries.webp
Actual lab setup. https://www.rsc.org/suppdata/d5/ta/d5ta05128b/d5ta05128b2.mp4
ok but this specific source is quite sober
well maybe, but that’s exactly what crying wolf does. You hear “twice the enrgy density” so many times that you stop believing it, even if one day it really is true.
If my car battery’s energy density had doubled every time I read a headline saying that a new battery tech will double energy density, it’d now have more energy storage than the sun.
spoiler
edit: assuming 6x10^43j energy capactiy in the sun and 3.6x10^8j (100kwh) in my car, it’d take 116 energy-doubling articles :)
Well, the downside of this not being a 4x game is that sometimes research doesn’t pan out, and you don’t know which ones until after you’re done.
I prefer the media not mindlessly overhype scientific publications.
Yeah I’ll take this seriously when it enters commercial service.
i’ll take 10 please.
