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posted by mrpg on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:45AM   Printer-friendly

As a warming world moves from fossil fuels toward renewable solar and wind energy, industrial forecasts predict an insatiable need for battery farms to store power and provide electricity when the sky is dark and the air is still. Against that backdrop, Stanford researchers have developed a sodium-based battery that can store the same amount of energy as a state-of-the-art lithium ion, at substantially lower cost.

Chemical engineer Zhenan Bao and her faculty collaborators, materials scientists Yi Cui and William Chueh, aren't the first researchers to design a sodium ion battery. But they believe the approach they describe in an Oct. 9 Nature Energy paper has the price and performance characteristics to create a sodium ion battery costing less than 80 percent of a lithium ion battery with the same storage capacity.

"Nothing may ever surpass lithium in performance," Bao said. "But lithium is so rare and costly that we need to develop high-performance but low-cost batteries based on abundant elements like sodium."

With materials constituting about one-quarter of a battery's price, the cost of lithium – about $15,000 a ton to mine and refine – looms large. That's why the Stanford team is basing its battery on widely available sodium-based electrode material that costs just $150 a ton.

Sodium batteries taste better, too.


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  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:28AM (4 children)

    by arslan (3462) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:28AM (#580317)

    They haven't look at the volumetric density yet so hard to compare if it is a viable replacement just on cost. If it takes 10 times more space for the same energy output, no matter how cheap it is still unpractical in a lot of use-case.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:45AM (2 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:45AM (#580348) Journal

    The use-case mentioned in the summary, storing energy from solar plants, probably isn't that sensitive on volume. Sure, volume does matter, if only because it determined how much property you need to build your storage on. But as long as the battery price reduction is more than the extra property cost (and you'll likely not put the storage onto the most expensive land available!) it still is a net win.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:45PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:45PM (#580432)

      We tolerate propane tanks on our properties and in the past the entire basement would be filled with coal. We also tolerate a hot water storage tank in the house.

      If someone built a cheap, reliable, long-lived battery of the same kind of dimensions: 1m x 2m or thereabouts then it could just sit in a cupboard or in the basement. Then every 20 years you refurbish it or buy a new one. This seems a very feasible future for distributed solar when the price is right. Which may be soon.

      This video about disruptive solar power was posted recently - a good watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0 [youtube.com]

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:07PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:07PM (#580759) Homepage
      Lithium's so good in modern contexts (laptops/tablets/cars) because batteries made therefrom are light, and volume is a secondary issue. Sodium, doesn't quite have that benefit so much.

      But let's flip things around. For some energy stores, mass and volume are a good thing - thermal ballast.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 1) by whibla on Friday October 13 2017, @11:53AM

    by whibla (2352) on Friday October 13 2017, @11:53AM (#581701)
    The use case for these is grid storage, for when the sun ain't shining and the wind ain't blowing. Size is practically irrelevant.