While Sodium-Ion sounds legitimately promising, we’ve all read so many articles about “revolutionary new battery tech” over the years that the default response is “cool, let me know when mass production starts.”
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
373 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
76415 readers
3949 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
“cool, let me know when mass production starts.”
("to the best of my knowledge, that is now, immediately.")
HiNa opened a 1 GWh sodium-ion battery factory in December 2022. Since then, both BYD and CATL have opened huge sodium-ion battery factories.
Yup. BYD's 30GWh/year means 1kwh/second!
I can't resist cancelling the units even though it doesn't actually make sense because it's a capacity not a volume, as it were, but that's a 3.6kw factory!
3.6 MW even. :)
3.6 kW is what a 50cc internal combustion engine typically produces
Here's my working. There are about 31.56 million seconds in a year, which I rounded to 30 million, and so
30 GWh/year
= 30x10^9 Wh / year
~ 30x10^9 Wh / 30x10^6 s
= 10^3 Wh/s
= 1 kWh / s
= 3600 kWs / s
= 3.6 kw
I used the duckduckgo autocalculator just now, and 30/31.56*3.6 is about 3.4, so it's much closer to 3.4kW.
(It's not power output, it's manufactured storage output. I think of it as like a factory that produces 3.4 litre capacity jugs per second, but they're not jugs, they're actually batteries. Big ones.)
They could make a 120kWh battery (which would give a family car a range in the region of 450 miles) every two minutes.
load more comments
(2 replies)
The article literally starts off with a mass produced $800 Sodium Ion battery that you can buy right now.
Because it's an ad..you all know that,right?
Did..did you want them to keep it a secret?
It being an ad doesn’t change anything in an of itself. They’re correct in saying that there is a mass-produced, consumer grade product available. Unless that is a lie, or said product is complete trash, this solves the “call me it’s mass-produced” problem the original commentor has.
You don't generally advertise things that you don't mass produce, though.
Somebody gotta tell Silicon Valley about that.
Did you read the article? This isn't about a research paper that talks about theoretical lab experiments. Sodium batteries are in real world application right now. Mainly in China and South America.
You can buy sodium batteries from AliExpress. It's been available for a while. I was thinking about ordering a few but I ended up spending my hobby budget elsewhere. There's no economies of scale yet for sodium battery tech. You can get the battery but there is zero electronics available for it. Mainly you'd have to design your own charger and battery management modules. That's out of my pay grade. I've been waiting for Chinese engineers to mass produce such things.
you’d have to design your own charger and battery management modules
Just searched for "Sodium-ion BMS" on Aliexpress:
load more comments
(4 replies)
Fewer things irritate me more than someone who just hops straight into the comments without actually reading the article first.
Yeah, your ire is justified. Total ADD move to start reading, have a thought pop in your head, then post without at least scanning the rest of the article to make sure you’re not posting something stupid.
The sub is about technology, not industry. Also, look at the advances in battery technology in the last 30 years. There have only been 3 notable technology advances in the last 40 years from a consumer perspective, but there have been significant advances within each of those major technology changes, resulting in Wh/kg increasing by 6 to 10 times and $/Wh dropping about 99%.
If you want to hear about things that could happen or are about to start happening in industry, this is the right community. If you want to know what you can buy tomorrow, try Amazon.
load more comments
(13 replies)
Can buy them in relatively small quantities now online.
load more comments
(12 replies)
Nothing factually wrong with the article, but it has this sound of "this technology will solve all our problems" to it that I find highly problematic. Seven out of nine planetary boundaries are exceeded, climate change just being one of them. And all of them are exceeded because of our wasteful and growth-oriented way of life.
Because of ~~our wasteful and growth-oriented way of life~~ capitalism.
FTFY.
I don't doubt for a moment that humanity can be extremely wasteful in any economic system. But capitalism sure embraces and enhances our worst tendencies.
Partially. It's more that people don't click unless the headline is sensational.
We can change our technology to be more sustainable or we can regress to a pre-industrial society with 90% of the population dying in the process. Which do you prefer?
That's a false dichotomy. We can also improve our technology while ditching capitalism.
load more comments
(32 replies)
Question: would I have to give up my exploitative companies that fuel my bid to become the first King of Internet? Because that's kind of a dealbreaker for me.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
This has got to be better than lithium mining.
HiNa supplied sodium-ion batteries for JAC Motors in 2023. Early batteries had lower gravimetric energy density (145 Wh/kg) and volumetric energy density (330 Wh/liter) than LFP, but sodium-ion batteries have already improved since then. They have outstanding temperature range, yielding 88% retention at -20°C. For reference, the discharge capacity of NMC at 0°C, −10°C and −20°C is only 80%, 53%, and 23% of that at 25°C. The HiNa batteries had a cycle life of 4,500 cycles with 83% retention and a 2C charge rate, but even better sodium-ion batteries are on their way.
...
These developments point the way to much more. The cost of sodium battery materials is much lower than for any lithium battery. There are no resource bottleneck materials like cobalt or lithium to contend with. In addition, aluminum can be used for electrodes, whereas lithium requires copper for one of the electrodes. Carbon or graphite and separator materials will be similar, but in all other respects, sodium has much lower material costs. Compared to LFP, sodium does not require phosphorous, a substance that is almost exclusively sourced from one state in north Africa, nor lithium, a relatively abundant but more expensive substance than sodium. LFP cannot compete on material costs or temperature range, and both BYD and CATL expect to phase it out first in energy storage.
Early batteries had lower gravimetric energy density (145 Wh/kg) and volumetric energy density (330 Wh/liter) than LFP, but sodium-ion batteries have already improved since then.
OK, and where are the new numbers? 1% better, but still much worse than lfp?
Edit:a bit later they mention 175 Wh/kg and 10,000 lifetime cycles for some catl cells, that is not too bad, but still not great with lfp at about 200 Wh/kg which still is less than ~~Lithium Ion~~ NMC.
with lfp at about 200 Wh/kg which still is less than Lithium Ion.
LFP is a lithium-ion technology. You probably meant "worse than NMC", which is another, older, higher density but less safe lithium-ion technology.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Sodium ion is great, but
While batteries have enabled passenger car developments, they have been somewhat stymied in large mobile power applications like shipping and electric trucks. That day is gone now. At these costs, electric shipping is achievable and the debate over alternative fuels will fall off quickly as applications are realized.
heavy transport is not the right application. Very heavy, and LFP has similar advantages while only being medium heavy. heating vehicle batteries is a solved problem.
Great that you can get a home power 48v 33.6kwh system for well under $3000. (afaik, it comes with connector plates for 112x100ahx3v for $2340. Don't know about shipping or a box)
For 10% more, on that site, LFP is 33% lighter. Can affect shipping costs.
Sodium ion has extra applications/advantages. Not requiring a heated space could place them under solar panels in the field.
At $100/kwh or less, "retail", offgrid even oversized solar+ batteries is far cheaper than any utility service. At low charge/discharge rates (4+ hour charge from solar, and 16 hours of discharge (even with 0.25c peak discharge), 10000 cycles is achievable with both chemistries. $0.01/kwh/cycle.
As bullish as I am on Sodium-ion batteries, only very recently did researchers figure out how to boost the charge capacity, making any attempted commercial models in use so far nice, but not the final form where normies are buying them from Home Depot.
The Sehol car mentioned is a niche configuration of a common model, because the Li-ion model goes farther between charges. Other than the launch in 2023, and articles recycling the same info, find me 1 article that doesn't use words like "could" or "will" or "might" about sales of this model? Same thing for the BYD Seagull with Na-ion batteries. It's all greenwashing news where if you dig at it even slightly, you see how not real any of it is.
It's closer than it was 5 years ago, but it's still not a "revolution" by any means.
The article has so many acronyms in it, I had to give up reading it. I assume this isn't just cat like typing?
I got a LIPO4 battery to run my tiny plastic boat or canoe with a trolling motor, most amazing performance I've ever seen. Hours of full thrust, never dropped below 20% power. So what's up with that tech?
view more: next ›