Sodium-ion batteries have been overshadowed by lithium-ion for decades, but there's a thousand times more sodium in the earth's crust than there is lithium. ...

This shit could be so big. And if China gets the jump on US on new energy storage tech, the economic race over the next decade might not even be close.

  • gaycomputeruser [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I'm no expert, but many of the breakthrough claims touted by media tend to be very much media opinion.

    There are a couple factors that make adoption of this tech fairly plausable: Sodium supply chains already exist in industrial capacities, so while demand would increase for sodium, companies already exist that canscale to supply manufacturers.

    This tech is about as close to a perfect direct replacement as you could get for manufacturing. Certain processes in the manufacturing chain are different, especially for the electrodes, but almost all the battery manufacturing would be identical.

    Graphene should not have been hyped the way it was. As you said, most of the issue with graphene is in the fanufacturing process. All the components that I have looked at for this tech appear fairly easy to scale to industrial applications.