Will this CHEAP New Technology Solve Battery Shortages?!

well the most exciting thing about sodium ion batteries is it's it's sustainable much more than lithium it's lower cost because it doesn't have those expensive raw materials and it's safer [Music] this is spodumine it's the mineral that two-thirds of the world's lithium comes from it's only found in a few places the democratic republic of congo in australia and a few others it's expensive and there's concern that there may not be enough of it to supply our voracious demand for electric vehicle batteries this is common salt there is 35 kilograms of it in every cubic meter of seawater and there's deposits on land it's cheap as chips it's everywhere and so there's a question about whether you could replace the lithium in our batteries with sodium from salt and if you could it would solve a lot of problems so can you do it well we've come to a company called freudian to find out welcome to fully charged [Music] fully charged live is coming to california this september 10th and 11th powered by electrify america get your tickets to the number one ev and home energy show now [Music] so we're talking here about replacing lithium with sodium now let's have a look at why that works this is the periodic table it lays out all the elements that exist this is all the types of atom that we have whatever we make it has to be made out of things in here so this is the toolbox we've got to work with now the way it works is that everything in a column has similar properties generally but it gets heavier as you go down so if we look up here in the top left hand corner we can see lithium right up there it's a really small atom it's only the third one and just below it here is sodium n a and so sodium has similar properties to lithium but it's just a little bit heavier so it's not that they've just picked an element out of the air there's a very good reason for thinking that sodium might be a very good replacement for lithium the sodium ion battery works very similar to a lithium ion battery there's different flavors of lithium ion today there's lithium iron phosphate which is very competitive with sodium ion technology today so that's why we see sodium ion also moving into passenger cars where lithium iron phosphate is as well where we the technology has legs so we're catching up to what's called nmc or nickel manganese cobalt technology so we will see the energy density increase but it is very comparable to lithium running started in end of 2011 so it's been just over 10 years and if you look at that trajectory relative to the trajectory of lithium-ion what you'll see is actually the progress has been at a much faster rate and i think when we first started working on sodium iron it wasn't a very well-known option as a battery solution and i think a lot of people dismissed it because typically you look at the relative size of a lithium ion relative to a sodium ion and you see sodium is bigger heavier and you think it's never going to be able to compete for an energy density perspective in fact the work that we've done over the last 10 years has been able to dispel that perception and now we can see that um it's a valid technical solution so let's have a look at the job that sodium needs to do in this system uh well we're used to looking at batteries and here is a battery this is one of ferradion's batteries it's a real thing it's definitely real uh and it works and when we look at the outside of a battery what we see are positive and negative terminals and that's what we connect up to our electrical circuit but on the inside of the battery it looks a little bit different so on the inside those two things become an anode and a cathode and that those are just electrical connectors that go into the battery and between the anode and the cathode there's something which is normally a liquid at the moment and that's called an electrolyte and the game is that to get electrons to go around the outside of the circuit outside the battery you need charged particles ions to go in between the anode and the cathode inside the battery and in the lithium-ion battery it's lithium that is going between the anode and the cathode and in a sodium ion battery it's sodium that's doing that job so that all sounds very simple but to make it work the devil is very much in the detail it's all about what goes around it and that's what determines how effective it is how efficient it is and how well it does the job of being a battery in a lithium-ion battery the lithium sits in the cathode and the electrolyte and the anode is made of graphite in a sodium ion battery we swap our lithium in the cathode for sodium lithium in the electrolyte for sodium and instead of using a graphite type anode we use a hard carbon because we use hard carbon as an anode instead of graphite as you would in lithium ion it means that we have a broader range of electrolytes that are available to us so the graphite restricts some of the electrolytes that are available in lithium-ion which are available with the hard carbon anode so that means that we can control our operating temperature to to a wider window so down to to minus 30 degrees c for example and up to plus 60 degrees c so that's a huge range temperature right and and the electrolytes wider than the stable right that's right yes so these are actually safer from a temperature point of view yes so they have that broader operating window for temperature [Music] and just to prove that this is all real and it works what this is is a residential energy storage system so it's basically a big battery that could go in your house take energy from solar panels and it's full of these cells this is a sodium-ion battery product and there it is it works the markets for sodium ion battery are really broad but i think that let's say the low-hanging fruit of the markets that we're already in now is stationary energy storage so we're already shipping products to australia we have a joint venture in australia so these are residential energy storage packs you we have some in our facility here you'll be able to see today it'll going towards telecom which is a big part of it as well uh telecom is really expanding quite a bit uh and then also will be utility and grid so that's the the entry level market but if it's big heavy stands still go slower moves fast it's a good market for ferrari and sodium ions if we we consider them from a performance perspective the current generation of sodium iron cells are equivalent to lithium ion phosphate in terms of energy density and we have a road map for development to go well beyond that so we're looking at in excess of 200 watt hours per kilo for example at the cell level and how does that compare to typical batteries that we have around now so so that's in excess of the energy density of lithium ion phosphate for example and so if you're i mean is this something that might be suitable for automotive applications for cars where you've got rapid acceleration or is it does it just not move that quickly so we see where applications where lfp is is is part of the solution phosphate battery sorry yeah lithium phosphate so so we see sodium ion as being a replacement for applications where lead acid batteries are being used and applications where lithium-ion phosphate batteries are being used and there's obviously been a lot recently about the use of lithium-ion phosphate in automotive application it's always exciting when a new technology works but we know now that that is not enough the questions which matter for a better future are are these things affordable are they accessible to everybody can they be made sustainably and can they be recycled those are the things that determine whether these solutions are really going to be part of a practical future and that's what's going to determine whether the sodium tortoise might overtake the lithium hair yeah sodium ion can be recycled very much in the way you recycle lithium ion batteries one of the main differences we can there's two main differences one is we can completely discharge the cell to zero volts so we can completely get all of the energy out of the cell and short it you cannot do that with lithium ion battery so when you bring a lithium-ion battery in to recycle it it always has 30-40 state of charge so this makes it much safer to be able to do that on the downside from an urban mining standpoint we don't have the expense of raw materials so there's not as much to recover from that respect from a a use perspective no they won't notice the difference at all the the visual difference that you see when you look at a sodium ion cell versus a lithium-ion cell is you see you've got aluminium on both sides for sodium and you might have aluminium and copper for your lithium um but in terms of an end-user the way they use their battery that that won't be any different at all what they will have is they will be able to potentially see the lower cost with sodium ion i'm sure an end user would appreciate that difference yeah the cost difference between sodium ion and lithium will be pretty significant sodium doesn't have the of raw materials lithium there's no lithium there's no cobalt there's no copper there's no graphite so we have a lower cost raw materials which also of course makes it environmentally safer but so in terms of volume it'll be about 24 to 32 percent less expensive on a cell basis than lithium so it's pretty significant [Music] now it's important to say that there's more to feradine than just what we can see here in sheffield they've got parts of their manufacturing all over the world they're actually piggybacking on a lot of lithium-ion manufacturing capability but they're about to start bringing all of that in-house and doing their own manufacturing but the point is there's much more than just all of this to this company it's it's happening now but it goes from gradual to suddenly as you know and i think that's definitely what's happening with varadian is all of a sudden uh in the beginning we had to explain why sodium ion was important and and now it's more about being able to really invest into the to scaling up the technology so the biggest the biggest uh you know impact on timing is the equipment lead times right now and that's where some of the supply chains have an impact it and again it varies in terms of timing i think if you're looking at the the grid or the energy storage of the telecoms these are conversations that are very very active and where we're building demonstrators we have product already that we're shipping if you look towards more towards trucks and buses or you look towards passenger evs we're engaged with them but we know that timeline is a little bit further out so but it's important that we stay engaged with them and and know you don't want to develop technology in isolation you really need to partner with the main players in that space to really advance the technology the most exciting thing about sodium ion batteries is that right now they are here and they are ready so this is this is not in the lab anymore you know this is in production these are real products these are going out to customers and and the the potential is huge so this is a really interesting technology i'm genuinely fascinated by the idea that this was just sort of hidden for a few years it's an idea that went away had 30 years in the world of us and then came back but i think it's really important there will be no one battery to rule them all but if there are options that are made of materials that are far far more common that is a very big deal and especially if those materials are also less toxic and less damaging to extract from the environment both in terms of environmental cost and inhuman cost so this sounds like it's got enormous potential and it'd be really exciting to see how quickly they can scale it up and just how far it's going to go so that's it for this episode and if you'd like to support us please do so on patreon have a look at what's on the website there's loads going on and if you have been thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 341,206

Keywords: electric car youtube channel, why should i buy an electric car, green energy comment, new transport ideas, renewable energy comment, renewable energy electric vehicles, electric vs ice cars, latest news on renewable energy, kryten, fully charged show live, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged, batteries, lithium, energy storage, grid, energy, supply chain, sustainability, innovation, environment

Id: IBE0NADjSrE

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 09 2022