it was a bit worrying as there was somewhat of a stagnation in battery chemistry, but having non toxic/dangerous battery storage is going to make off-griding so much more attractive.
technically speaking, if every household had solar panels and batteries it would not only be cheaper than the grid it would also have complete independence from oil fluctuations, weather disasters and centralization.
now if you combine that with electric cars that charge off your off-grid system and transition to eletric appliances instead of something like gas the benefits keep stacking all while being pretty much net neutral post manufacturing.
Useful, but not a "breakthrough" in energy density. More like another good low-end option.
A battery that can charge as fast as you can pump electricity into it, as many times as you want opens up a lot of possibilities.
E.g. a car that has a 200 mile range and a 5 minute charging time is way more useable than a car with 300 miles of range that takes an hour to charge.
Sodium-ion is exciting because it has the potential to have less degradation over time, much less sensitivity to cold and less reliance on rare earth metals. Could also end up significantly cheaper. However it has struggled to reach the same energy densities and so hasn’t been practical thus far.
This seems like a big step towards it being a practical technology choice for certain models, if it bears out.
The 1000km range likely has more to do with the efficiency of the drivetrain and the aerodynamics of the car more than the battery tech. kWh is an absolute value that is fungible and the Denza has a 122.5 kWh battery pack, which means its getting 5mi/kWh. For perspective my Rivian R1S gets ~350 miles on a 135 kWh pack which is about 2.5mi/kWh (so about half that)
The only part of the battery tech that could affect range is the weight. Sodium batteries are typically much heavier than Li-on. I believe the Denza uses LFP, which means it's likely somewhere else on the car that they're gaining improvement in the range - not from the battery tech. That being said, the battery tech definitely affects the charge/discharge rates.
It has damped my enthusiasm for perusing it as a potential future home energy storage solution.
I have never heard such a thing and all the articles that I have seen about overcharging concluded that such batteries are much safer during overcharging than other kinds of batteries, the worst case effect being battery swelling.
In normal conditions, even during overcharging there are no obvious chemical reactions that could produce hydrogen cyanide.
For instance, at
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.4c02915
it is said that cyanide release can happen only at temperatures above 300 Celsius degrees. Such temperatures cannot be reached in normal conditions.
Also, I think HCN can be scrubbed by adding a special absorptive cap onto the battery.
And the government did nothing.
Why didn't a private investment company, even venture capital, extend them a bridge loan? It seems like the type of technology that could have decent returns in licensing fees.
I ask this question because it seems odd to someone in the software world so flooded with startups that the government would be expected to intercede on behalf of a startup.
This is not about research articles, but it is advertising already existing commercial products.
There are a handful of competing Chinese companies, which have launched during the last few months greatly improved batteries, both for cars and for stationary energy storage, removing the main complaints against such batteries, like charging times, loss of capacity at low temperatures and use of materials that might become scarce.
The latest high-power chargers made in China that achieve the 5-minute charge times have their own batteries for providing the charge power, so they take from the grid only the average power, not the peak power.
