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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 maxwell demon on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:41AM (5 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:41AM (#580346) Journal

    There's lots of silicon in the world. Indeed, the deserts are full of it. So why are computer chips not essentially free?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:36AM (#580364)

    What you see in a desert is impure silicon dioxide. Isolating and refining the silicon is necessary. Semiconductor grade monocrystalline silicon costs $102 to $127 per kg FOB China [alibaba.com].

    The lithium mentioned in the article is in a refined form that's ready to use.

  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by c0lo on Wednesday October 11 2017, @10:23AM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 11 2017, @10:23AM (#580370) Journal

    Indeed, the deserts are full of it.

    The desert are full of silicon dioxide

    So why are computer chips not essentially free?

    Indeed, why? (grin)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:36PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:36PM (#580427)

      Search for a Pentium iV or Core2Duo chip on eBay. There's your "essentially free" chips.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:14PM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:14PM (#580545) Journal

        And even better, if you get the Netburst chip, you also get an essentially free space heater! :D

        I've always thought of the P4 as a kind of resistive heating element that just so happened to have an x86 ISA implemented in it...

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:39PM (#580786)

    Because Moore's Law can be used in different ways. Either it can be used to drive down cost of the individual chip by packing more dies on a single wafer, or it can be used to maintain price by packing more transistors onto a single chip and thus maintain the die count on a wafer.

    Guess what Intel has been doing all this time...