Hina releases sodium-ion battery solution for commercial cars, able to be fully charged in 25 minutes

We saw a USB pack similar to this released by a Japanese company earlier this month.
If these prove to be as viable as they appear to be, the age of oil is over, because as interesting as these may appear for vehicles, mobile-ish electronics (read, they aren't great in terms of energy density), where they'll shine is immobile grid scale or structural scale or immobile device scale storage.
Your oven might end up with a bank of these. Your fridge. An air conditioner. A heat pump. A power wall for your house that holds 4 days worth of electricity. These have way way way higher cycle reliability than their lithium counter parts. They're good for something like 5x-10x as many cycles. But they are heavier per unit energy. But they degrade slower.
I'm trying to not get to hyped but the bits of news of these getting into consumer technology is extremely heartening. The biggest and frankly, only middling issue, with renewables is where to stick the energy in the between times. Grid scale or microscale storage is the answer, but honestly, lithium hasn't been a great technology for that. Its good enough to get started, but the cycle time isn't great and the consequences of failure are high. Lithium fires arent nothing to fuck with.
As far as I know, these sodium batteries basically can't catch fire the way lithium can. There is no thermal runaway potential.
They don't consume (as much) hard to get, planet destroying minerals like lithium or cobalt.
They're very young, but even in these first generations, are coming in price competitive with lithium comparables. Remember how expensive lithium was in its first generations?
We've already spent a few decades setting the world up to run on lithium batteries. Sodium should be a drop in replacement.
- Imagine if we started seriously investing in battery tech at the time the combustion car was invented and hadnt stopped since. We would still have been limited by not having computers for simulation for a long time, but we could probably have gotten to the current level like 20 years ago.
  But yes, the future of electricity depends entirely on eco friendly, sustainable and cheap batteries. Its just a matter of time.
  
  batteries didn't make much sense in the past because where do you take the electricity from? combusting coal to generate electricity to charge your car is not much better than just combusting oil directly. now, we have solar. that changes everything.
  
  We have been investing in battery tech for centuries. It is a hard problem and there hasn't always been a path forward. Engines are much easier, but we are near the end of where we can go with them according to the laws of physics. (too bad, liquid fuels are such a great energy dense solution)
- Appliances that don't depower when unplugged sound like an incredibly bad idea.
  
  Refrigerators could use a battery backup. AC also.
  
  Only if you like humans
  
  Yet we love devices that keep their power with them.
  Curious.
- They can be charged below 0*C, too. No need to redirect lots of current to heating the batteries during charging like with Lithium.
  
  It just seems like almost all very reasonable upsides.
- Sodium ion batteries don’t have the energy density of lithium ion batteries. Yet. If they manage to mass produce energy dense sodium ion batteries, then yes, it would be amazing.
  
  Them not being capable of thermal runaway is the big game changer imo. They explode, but don't catch fire in doing so.
- 100% agree. These along with induction charging roads are what puts EVs over the line in terms of average distance per charge.
  Sodium is also far easier to get, no mines involved. This might be closer to the era of 89¢ gas.
  
  I don't agree with induction roads. Its simply not necessary and makes roads far more complicated to build and maintain.
  just batteries is plenty.

Batmaaaan

Hey hey

They should sell a charger called “ba” and then a two pack called “banana” and a four pack called “bananana”
- And they could sell a solar panel pack called a rama!
  Bananarama
- mAh Na mAh Na
  
  Tooo tooo, rooo tooo tooooo.

Matt ferrall has talked about these batteries before... If your interested in learning more about them first segment is about these batteries...
https://youtu.be/EbFRp7K1z2o

Obviously they're not as efficient as lithium-ion because the atom size of sodium is bigger than lithium. However lithium is scarce, sodium is everywhere. While it's not so effective for small devices, they're fine for big battery storages. If true, being able to charge in 25 minutes is great.
- They're far more useful as stationary power supplies, so really, it doesn't matter much in most cases that it can fully charge in even 2 hours.
  
  It depends how much power they can dump in 1 second. If more or the same as lion tech stacks then they will be viable for EVs.
  Another thing. Fast charging stationary power might be important for a distributed power grid. Currently one of the problems in some implementations is that excess power from clients cant even be accepted. Fast charging storage might be important for accepting large excess coming in from the grid.