Technology

We saw a USB pack similar to this released by a Japanese company earlier this month.

If these prove to be as viable as they appear to be, the age of oil is over, because as interesting as these may appear for vehicles, mobile-ish electronics (read, they aren't great in terms of energy density), where they'll shine is immobile grid scale or structural scale or immobile device scale storage.

Your oven might end up with a bank of these. Your fridge. An air conditioner. A heat pump. A power wall for your house that holds 4 days worth of electricity. These have way way way higher cycle reliability than their lithium counter parts. They're good for something like 5x-10x as many cycles. But they are heavier per unit energy. But they degrade slower.

I'm trying to not get to hyped but the bits of news of these getting into consumer technology is extremely heartening. The biggest and frankly, only middling issue, with renewables is where to stick the energy in the between times. Grid scale or microscale storage is the answer, but honestly, lithium hasn't been a great technology for that. Its good enough to get started, but the cycle time isn't great and the consequences of failure are high. Lithium fires arent nothing to fuck with.

As far as I know, these sodium batteries basically can't catch fire the way lithium can. There is no thermal runaway potential.

They don't consume (as much) hard to get, planet destroying minerals like lithium or cobalt.

They're very young, but even in these first generations, are coming in price competitive with lithium comparables. Remember how expensive lithium was in its first generations?

We've already spent a few decades setting the world up to run on lithium batteries. Sodium should be a drop in replacement.