Sodium & Quantum Batteries Move The Transition To Electricity Forward

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Sodium-ion batteries were once considered a joke because their energy density was too low to perform any meaningful tasks. They barely had enough power to pull the skin off custard. But once upon a time — and not so long ago — LEDs were considered a party trick scientists played in the lab because they were too dim to provide more illumination than a dozen fireflies.

Things change, and technologies like solar panels and wind turbines that were once laughed at are now mainstream in many parts of the world that are not in thrall to fossil fuel interests. Today, sodium-ion batteries have an energy density equal to LFP batteries. That’s good, but that’s not the whole news.

The latest sodium batteries from CATL and BYD are able to shrug off the cold temperatures that bedevil LFP batteries. In addition, they can charge faster and have a significantly longer lifespan. Some drivers like to say “I keep my cars until the wheels fall off” and now that could be literally true, as the latest sodium-ion batteries could easily outlast the vehicle they are installed in.

BAIC Joins The Sodium Battery Party

Beijing Automotive Group is one of the larger automakers in China, though largely unknown in other countries. In addition to its domestic production, it also is a joint venture partner of Hyundai and Mercedes/Daimler.

Last week it announced its own sodium-ion battery prototype has completed development and reached performance levels that lead the industry. The advancement means the company’s Aurora Battery platform now covers all major technologies, according to CnEVPost. That gives the company the ability to supply the needs of virtually any customer.

The sodium-ion battery pack utilizes a prismatic cell design with a single cell energy density exceeding 170 Wh/kg, equaling the energy density of the latest sodium-ion battery from CATL. But wait, there’s more. BAIC says its battery supports 4C fast charging capability, which means it can be recharged in just 11 minutes. BYD says its newest battery can be recharged in 5 minutes.

CleanTechnica readers, being better informed than most, know that charging times in the real world are dependent on a number of factors, including how the battery management system in any particular car is configured, how low the state of charge is when charging begins, how high the driver wants the SOC to be before ending the charging session, and the ambient temperature.

Suffice to say that 5 minutes vs 11 minutes may give one company bragging rights over another, but in practical terms it is a distinction without a meaningful difference. The knock on electric cars since forever is that they take too long to charge. That concern is now becoming a thing of the past.

LFP batteries have many benefits, but they are affected significantly by cold temperatures. BAIC claims its new sodium-ion batteries can operate stably in temperatures ranging from -40°C to 60°C (-40º to 140º F)  and maintain an energy output level of over 92% at -20°C. The company also said the battery did not catch fire or explode during extreme tests such as overcharging, heating, and mechanical impact, and exceeds all current Chinese national standards.

BYD said last month that its sodium-ion battery has entered the development stage of its third-generation technology platform, achieving a maximum cycle life of 10,000, which should make it ideal for most energy storage and long-life applications.

Behold The Quantum Battery

Quantum batteries were first proposed as a theoretical concept in 2013. Using the principles of quantum mechanics to store energy, they have the potential to be more efficient than conventional batteries. Now Australian scientists say they have developed the world’s first proof of concept quantum battery. Loosely translated, that means your grandkids will be out of high school before these batteries appear on the market — if they ever do. But people were skeptical of sodium-ion batteries 5 years ago, so anything is possible.

Dr James Quach of the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, told The Guardian, “It’s the first prototype which does a full cycle of a battery — in other words, you charge it, you store energy, and you can discharge it.” With conventional batteries, charge time increases with size. “That’s why your mobile phone takes about 30 minutes to charge and your electric car takes overnight to charge,” Quach said.

But “quantum batteries have this really peculiar property where the larger they are, the less time they take to charge,” he said. That’s due to a feature known as “collective effects,” in which quantum cells charge faster when there are more cells involved. Quach and his colleagues first demonstrated this property in 2022, but there was no way to extract energy from that prototype battery.

The new prototype battery was charged by a laser and took just a few quadrillionths of a second to charge. Then it stored the energy for nanoseconds, which is about six orders of magnitudes longer than it took to charge. Those of you who are underwhelmed by such numbers were probably art history or sociology majors in college.

Quach put it into perspective by explaining that if a quantum battery takes one minute to charge, six orders of magnitude means it would stay charged for “a couple of years.”

The current prototype has a capacity of only a few billion electron volts, “which is very small and not enough to power anything useful,” he said. “What we need to do next is … to increase the storage time. You want your battery to hold charge longer than a few nanoseconds if you want to be able to talk to someone on a mobile phone.”

“You could put a quantum battery, for example, on a drone … and you could charge it while it’s in flight,” Quach said. “Once the technology matures … you would no longer need to stop your car at a petrol station to charge it up. You could charge it on the go.” Talk of drones at this particular moment in time when they have become the weapons of choice in modern warfare makes us all a little queasy.

Andrew White, a professor who leads the quantum technology laboratory at the University of Queensland and was not involved in the research, described it as “a really nice piece of work showing that the quantum battery is more than an idea. It’s now a working prototype.” He noted such batteries are “not going to turn up in any electric vehicles anytime soon,” but “probably the first place that it’ll have an impact is actually for quantum computers.”

That’t the news from the world of batteries. A technology once thought to be interesting but of no commercial value is now going mainstream. Another that appears be irrelevant today may point the way to the future. At CleanTechnica, our motto is, “All the news that fits, we print.” You’re welcome.