Surely this will just be Chinese hardware with a "made in America" label slapped on it. I can't fathom why anyone would allow GM of all companies to get any contracts
This is the same story everywhere. Nobody has the know-how or the deep ecosystems needed to do these things.
India has a "made in India" mandate which is hilarious. >80% of solar panel (polysilicon, ingots, and silicon wafers) is from China. Situation is worse with batteries and EVs. Tata, which has been making vehicles for quite some time doesn't have any clue how to make EVs and is building an entire plant with a Chinese company (Chery).
Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....".
In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm:
1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah.
2) When its impossible to compete: China is security threat, we can't allow them. But we'll import most of it (80 - 90% of components) and still put our label.
Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).
Indian companies do not like to do research. Too much risk. They prefer to buy proven stuff. There are small companies doing a lot of what the Chinese are doing (including LFP and other battery chemistry). But they cannot scale up because they lack the necessary investment and order book.
GOI has a new locally-produced solar cell mandate that has been pushed back by six months because the requirement is 8-10x the current production. People are being forced to keep factories shut due to the lack of locally produced cells.
Huh Tata is the best selling EV manufacturer in India.
Their new Chery tieup is utilizing the Freelander architecture from the Chery and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) joint venture in China instead of a pricier internal or JLR roadmap. Remember they own JLR.
You're not wrong, but this is the economic and industrial strategy model for how countries build complex manufacturing capabilities from scratch.
Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen.
You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output.
By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable.
India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized.
There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.
My company operates two Jupiter Power owned LFP batteries in the MISO market. Each of them draws .5 - 2MW constantly for the HVAC system. If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.
Cost of replacement? Cost of insurance against a fire? Cold weather performance may also be quite important, and not only somewhere in Alaska, but even in places like Dallas, that are hot in summer but cold during winter nights.
Not an expert, but from what I read the expectation is for sodium ion batteries to get substantially cheaper than lithium, mainly due to material cost.
Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean.
The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.
AT grid scale, sodium quickly closes the gap on lithium. The safety overhead, active cooling, and physical spacing needed to control lithium’s thermal runaway risk eat away most of its energy density advantage. Plus, CATL is hitting cost parity between full sodium BESS and LFP BESS systems.
The other big reason is the longevity. LFP life span gives you about 2000-5000 cycles depending on where your application can't tolerate the capacity reduction.
Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
This makes financing a large grid scale storage plant look way better to the bean counters because the investment continues to work and make money, after the 5 year amortization, typical of a corporate investment. This will be the kicker IMHO.
Net Present Value isn't quite the right thing to look at. Inflation-adjusted energy prices have been rising over time, so the thing these batteries are projected to deliver (fixed impact on that electricity grid) increases in value over time even after the NPV discount. The more important component is the "risk-adjusted" NPV, which may or may not make tech like this effectively worthless.
I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.
It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.
So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.
Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.
Fortunately for me, I could just bop down to the bog box store and buy a more appropriate fridge from vevor; horses for courses.
I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.
For something like a battery backup that last decades that doesn't need maintenance, maybe you could bury it out of the way (like under a deck or lawn?), maybe even under the frost line.
Underground is a big problem with it comes to water permeation and flooding.
The other potential problem with a lot of energy systems that use things that have hydrogen in them is running power over the systems for long periods of time can start to leak hydrogen. You'll always want to ensure you have ventilation to ensure whatever is outgassing can escape the system. You'll end up with explosions, hydrogen embrittlement, or interesting corrosion in ways you didn't think were possible.
might need to be in some special containment at that size, depending on the technology -- some sodium ion battery implementations are very toxic / highly reactive / flammable.
I am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.
I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.
I want to replace my Lithium home battery, and what I really want to do it to move to one of the new sodium ion batteries..e.g like the one CATL is supposed to have at some point?
Anyone have a good idea when these will be available for consumers?
Probably in a year or so. CATL is expecting about 1GWh deployment by the end of the year and has contracts to deliver ~7GWh in Europe next year, so they're clearly ramping up production towards the end of this year.
Bluetti has a small battery pack for now. I think the options for consumers will balloon once CATL mass produce sodium ion cells. Solix/anker, jackery, ecoflow, etc all use CATL cells already.
Na-Ion batteries are not practical for home storage right now. They have a much higher voltage range compared to LFP batteries, so regular inverters and chargers will not work reliably. Nothing insurmountable, but the supply chain is just not here.
Na-Ion cells are great for grid-scale storage because they potentially can go down to something like $20 per kWh. But bulk LFP cells are already at ~$60 per kWh, so their cost is not really a deciding factor anymore.
Sodium ion batteries are less energy dense than lithium ion and are not prone to dendrite formation. They are also more thermally stable and less likely to do thermal run away reactions.
Also, since they are less energy dense they don’t store the same potential energy.
You are probably thinking of metallic sodium batteries which are completely different.
You must work for a LiPo company. This is the opposite of truth. Sodium doesn't behave like lithium at all. The chemistry is very different. Imagine if table salt had an exo reaction in water
What? All the data suggests that sodium ion batteries are safer than lithium ion batteries: it is harder to set them into thermal runaway and they are less violent when they do so.
Keep in mind, we could have had local Na-Ion battery production in the US. The company producing them needed about $5m of bridge loans, with products already sitting in warehouses awaiting the UL certification.
Given that $5 million is not that much in the heavy industry game, I'd like to know why they couldn't get the bridge loans.
Like, that's not an unreasonable size of loan for a regional expansion for medium-sized businesses; there should be some sort of lender interested in doing that for them.
That's why, if you look at Fervo energy's makeup, and ask why do your have so many finance people, relative to the number of engineers; that's why. As a software developer, I have no idea how to get a $5 million bridge loan other than whatever ChatGPT could tell me. Meanwhile, a team of finance guys with domain expertise could have gotten them that $5 million.
Lithium batteries in cars are usually at least that good already. Most of the efficiency lost is in converting back and forth between AC/DC between the grid and the motors, and the rest in the auxillary features such as heating and cooling the cabin.
sorry, probably should have quoted the entire thing:
> The batteries are showing a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent, a significant 2 to 3 percent better than LFP. (“Round trip” refers to the amount of energy a battery discharges, relative to the amount used to charge it).
I think for cars, the efficiency probably doesn't matter that much. If it costs $1.03 per kwh instead of $1.00 per kwh, or 103 miles vs 100 miles, no car owner will care.
Is it? Isn't there usually a very large price ratio between when grid batteries are charged and discharged? Like charging at 5 cents and discharging at 25? In that situation a couple percent of inefficiency is nothing special, just a small cost.
Yeah, I had questions when Kurt Kelty was saying that Peak's battery was "kicking butt" after the article said Peak is still building their battery factory and currently buys its cells from China.
Is GM testing Peak's cells or some Chinese company's cells?
Its a failure in the U.S. because the bet is on solid state batteries. Personally I won't take the EV plunge until they have those. The only exception for me to not wait would be the 10k BYD car. At that price point and it lasted 3 years i'd be happy.
The article is about grid storage, but grids can also use solid state and battery tech is shared between different usecases. My point was where the bet is.
QuantumScape is a good example as it entered into agreements with opertors for their battery tech.
Certainly giving strong Taylor Sheridan Landman ranting against windmills vibe, with a twist of bad chemistry and bias against batteries thrown in for good measure.
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