Old Salts

Sodium-ion batteries make waves with latest developments

This news might make lithium-ion enthusiasts a little salty. At the Battery Show's Open Tech Forum on Tuesday, October 8, one of the sessions with the strongest attendance was Empowering the Future: Commercialization of Na-ion Batteries. It generated a lot of interest and enthusiastic Q&A conversations regarding the development of sodium-ion batteries as an alternative to their lithium-ion counterparts, which currently dominate most of the EV market.

One of the tangential items discussed was energy storage: which the panel agreed is generally thought of as large-scale, “but a lot of this is going to be domestic. A lot of this is going to be commercial/industrial, what people call ‘behind the grid’,” said Oliver Gross, Senior Fellow at Stellantis.

Sodium vs. lithium was a big part of the discussion. Sodium could be better because it could be localized and wouldn’t currently be competing with other markets. One question from Q&A portion of the session was posed: “How will the right level of people, in terms of the skills gap, be attained?” To this, Curtis Collar, CCO at Nanotech Energy, answered: “We had people come in every month to train our people. The specifics of training---such as nano vs. lithium vs. sodium,” are an important priority, he added. “The partnership needs to extend beyond the factory,” often requiring 1 to 2 years of time, he said.

Tim Han, Founder at Ammandarry Sodium Power, had useful insight on current market conditions. “Over $150,000 USD/kW for lithium-ion [is currently] a high cost," Han said. "Sodium right now is around $50-70 USD/kW. Which one is the best is hard to see.”

This raised the discussion within the entire panel of cost vs. performance as a determinant for which kind of battery to pick. For those of you out there with an interest in battery technology and/or EVs in general, this developing market competition is certainly something to monitor.