Sodium ion batteries have less energy density as opposed to Lithium ion (100-150 WH per Kg instead of 150-250). I'm curious how much these "wet" batteries improve that. The article doesn't say.

Nonetheless, even if it's not the new battery for your car, it could be useful as energy storage for the grid, storing green (solar) energy for the night, and desalinating seawater at the same time.

It's already ionized e.g. NaOH.

The compound, called nanostructured sodium vanadate hydrate (NVOH), delivered far stronger results when used in its hydrated form.

Desalinating water might be the best part. Usually, solar power has the downside of needing storage and desalination has the downside of big energy requirements. If you can do both at the same time, it's a big win for dry climates with lots of sun

I think the real breakthrough will come when we will be able to make powerful microbatteries.

We hear about a new battery chemistry like every week. Do most never get to commercialization?

R&d on these I'm guessing takes a little while. And it greatly depends on what niche they fill. Like the poster above said these might have lower density. For applications that move, that's not usually good. How sensitive are they to hot and cold? That could necessitate thermal management.

I think there were some nuclear button 1W 0.1mW decade-long 50-year batteries, from China if I recall

here: https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/betavolt-bv100-radioactive-battery-can-last-50-years-coming-in-2025

They mostly these articles are showing new avenues for research. Most are deadends usually due to issues with production/scalability.

Sodium Ions batteries are coming to market, however the issue is that Lithium Ion are just improving faster and making it harder for Sodium Ion batteries to compete.

the strategy of retaining crystal interlayer water yielded a specific capacity of 280 mA h g−1 at 10 mA g−1, one of the highest capacities reported for SIB cathodes in literature.

All I could find. This isn't a statement about capacity(?) Units are wrong(?)

Its worth noting how preliminary this research is. Currently these "batteries" are just jars with chemicals.

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2025/TA/D5TA05128B

https://www.rsc.org/suppdata/d5/ta/d5ta05128b/d5ta05128b2.mp4

i’ll take 10 please.

Finally a new one!

It was too quiet during the whole last year. But before, we had about 2 revolutionary new battery technologies every week.

I can only hope these can actually hit commercialization, unlike most new battery technologies that never leave the lab.

Fairly sure those units are milliamp•hour per gram which makes sense for energy density.

mAh/g (milliamp-hours per gram) is essentially still a measurement of capacity, but in terms of current instead of power.

We can do a little dimensional analysis here to translate between them. Power = Current x Voltage, so you'd multiply this (Current x Time)/(Weight) value by the nominal voltage of the cell to get to (Power x Time)/(Weight).

Phone batteries are often specified in units of Current*Time (e.g. milliamp-hours), but I'm not completely sure why. I think it has to do with voltages being standardized for certain types of cells, so the only real variable in the battery capacity is the current.

Edit: rearranged some ideas to make more sense

Yeah I'll take this seriously when it enters commercial service.

One in ten of chemistries in the lab work in real world conductions. One in ten of those are cheap enough to consider production. One in ten of those can scale up to mass manufacturing. Most research works like that. You have to keep going until you hit jackpot.

and boats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

Not a new idea, although I don't think that particular isotope has been used before.

What are you gonna do with your 400 charge cycles?

I can only hope one day people will stop repeating reddit clichés

I’m not completely sure why

I think it's marketing

5000 mAh is much a bigger number than 19 Wh and marketing loves huge numbers

Kinda like BMW did with the i3.

In 2013 Tesla was selling a model with a 60 kWh battery so BMW had the genius idea to install a 20 kWh battery BUT refer to it as "60 Ah" battery.

Tesla introduced the 90 kWh battery? BMW responds with a 94 Ah battery (28 kWh)

Newest Tesla has 100 kWh battery now? BMW has 120 Ah battery (38 kWh)

"See? Higher number!", says the marketing

And in order to have a comparable range number they had to implement heavy weight reduction techniques like using carbon fiber for the body, negating any cost saving from the smaller battery AND giving the owner a total loss after small collisions as it shatters instead of bending

Unless other situations where the established technology wins due to inertia, sodium ion batteries have two benefits that make them interesting regardless:

Firstly, they are safer. A punctured sodium ion battery doesn't catch fire, which massively simplifies safety design. That makes them very attractive for certain scenarios, especially ones where density is a secondary concern. That in turn means they get further development money instead of withering on the vine.

Secondly, they require fewer hard-to-obtain materials, which makes them attractive from a strategic perspective. This one should be less important than the safety factor but it's also relevant.

I'm pretty sure we'll actually see wet sodium cells in the wild if they are actually practical. Sodium ion tech is already being commercialized and if this brings it within the same ballpark as lithium ion then it becomes a very interesting choice for vehicles due to instant crash safety gains.

Its that way with many technologies. The lead time on such research is long enough that market factors alter the viability by the time it is ready to get commercialized.

Quite often innovations from prototype technology can be transplanted into existing tech for part of the benefit, without having to build new production capacity. So the new technology does not commercialised, but the learnings from it does.

Would you prefer researchers to not publish results?

Yes, because battery technology stagnated years ago...

Oh wait

Great response, people just love to parrot easy dismissals without looking and the sheer magnitude on innovation and commercialisation going on in this sector

There is also the issue with the salt by itself in desalinisation. If it's removed with water, you have to deal with that stuff. Table salt is really cheap and there is plenty of offer,, so you can't really economically clean it enough and package it for human consumption or industrial use. So what usually happens is that they dump it back at one moment or another. And that is a hard pollution, and can lead to dead zones around the desalinisation plants if not managed well enough. Being able to add it in a high demand product such as batteries takes all those hurdles away

probably too expensive and inefficient. LI-ion is pretty efficient compared to NA-ION.

It doesn't really dispute it, though. Lithium-ion has seen a lot of improvement, yes, because it's already a giant industry; other battery chemistries have a hard time breaking through because they require entirely different processes to manufacture.
I'm still rooting for it, but it's not really the same thing.

And instead of charging them, you can drink them! Unlike Lithium Ion batteries, which you have to chew.

This too is false, great progress has been made on for instance solid state batteries.

TBF, there are a lot of "battery breakthroughs" that turn out to just be hot air. Battery technology has made tremendous progress though and there is still a lot of room for improvement.

I can't imagine it's doing this at a rate that will make a big impact on water supply, I suspect this is one of those things they throw in just to have a good headline.

Some progress is being made, but it hasn't seen large-scale adoption yet. Which is the point, as I read it.

They have slightly lower density right now, but there is work to increase the density, and it could very well get up to about 210wh/kg which would put it directly on par with current lithium ion batteries. So it could replace the low end of the EV market without any significant change except for a reduction in price by a lot.

That's an incredibly longwinded way of saying "mahh Tezlur burns three times as much 'clean coal' per mile as a commie BMW, yee-haw".

ok but this specific source is quite sober

hot air.

No, that's a different type of battery.

Well all those graphs show is that the cost of batteries has gone down and that as a result electric cars contain more batteries and therefore more range. It doesn't actually show that the individual battery capacity has increased.

The third graph that indicates battery performance vs battery chemistry doesn't really show incremental improvement it just shows general improvement but there's plenty of battery chemistries that are worse than pre-existing ones.

Li-ion technology has huge factories behind it, so economies of scale apply here. The first Na-ion battery factories have just started, so everything is more expensive to manufacture on a small scale. However, the ingredients are cheaper and easily available. Once they ramp up production, we can make a fair comparison between the two.

I have a feeling LIBs are going to be more expensive, but they won’t disappear since high energy density is very handy in mobile applications like cars and phones. NIBs are probably going to end up being a lot cheaper, which should make them a popular option in all the less demanding applications, like grid energy storage, kitchen scales, and anything in between.

It takes time to scale up production, CATL is already building factories for it:

https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html

On April 21, 2025, CATL unveiled three groundbreaking EV battery products at its inaugural Super Tech Day: The Freevoy Dual-Power Battery, Naxtra - the world's first mass produced sodium-ion battery

No, this is Patrick.

Exactly this, there's a huge market for energy storage, where cost, power and cycle life matter way more than size and weight.
And Na-ion can be produced in countries that do not have access to lithium mines, making transport less of an issue and countries more self-sustaining.

Wow! Thanks for sharing that data. I had no idea.

Not to mention from a human rights perspective, it's not just easier to obtain sodium than lithium but also more humane.

There is an industry for ethically-sourced materials, and even if this doesn't completely replace lithium it can still significantly reduce the amount needed to meet demand, which can also encourage more ethical practices in that supply chain too, such as sourcing it from areas with stronger labor laws.

Man this title reminded me of an old animation involving iPhone and some Android phone, lemme go find...

https://youtu.be/YWNQTpdcoC4

The part about transforming into a jet and flying you to an island reminded me of the title.