Member-only story
Why sodium is an increasingly viable alternative to lithium for certain battery uses
, a US company, has it is to build capable of producing about 24GW of storage per year.
North Carolina’s state government is on the basis it will create more than 1,000 high-quality local jobs and grow the state’s economy by $3.4 billion over the next 12 years.
A number of firms have been for . Sodium is one of the most abundant and easily extractable elements on the planet, making it easy to apply to industrial processes. It has and it withstands a much higher number of charge and discharge cycles (millions of cycles compared to between three thousand and five thousand for lithium batteries).
It’s biggest limitation, however, is its weight: sodium weighs almost three times as much as lithium and can’t store the same amount of energy, meaning that sodium-ion batteries tend to be significantly larger than those based on lithium chemistry. This makes this type of battery less suitable for mobility, and for renewable electricity. In return, it…
