Sineng Electric's 50 MW/100 MWh sodium-ion battery energy storage system (BESS) project in China's Hubei province is the first phase of a larger plan that will eventually reach 100 MW/200 MWh. The initial capacity has already been connected to the grid and can power around 12,000 households for an entire day.
Wikipedia has a decent (albeit somewhat outdated?) comparison with other battery types.
Seems like sodium-ion batteries are somewhat cheaper, require more space and have lower usable cycles.
Probably also just aa important to note that sodium is much more readily available than lithium and doesn’t require geopolitical wars or slave-labor to acquire.
Agreed, that is an important point. That being said, it was raised in the article, a more “technical” comparison wasn’t provided.
What’s interesting to me is the power to weight ratio. Sodium-Ion is at ~1000 W/Kg vs Li-Ion at ~175-425 W/Kg. EVs could maybe have less weight and cost in the future because of this.
Sodium-ion has a lower power to weight ratio. Lithium is better in this regard.
Sodium-ion is used on the ground as storage for this reason. It’s not to be beneficial to put it into a moveable object.
Depends on how close they can be made in watt-hours per kilo. They might be good enough for vehicles once the technology comes into reasonably widespread use, while avoiding a lot of the issues with trying to acquire sufficient lithium.
According to a paper published in 2020 here, the specific energy and energy density are in line with what you are saying. But according to the article that Wikipedia cited here, sodium batteries show the opposite.
You’re probably right but it looks like there’s conflicting info about this currently.
I talked to an energy engineer about it, and I’m pretty sure it’s what he said. Would also make sense when China use it like this.