A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.
Some progress is being made, but it hasn’t seen large-scale adoption yet. Which is the point, as I read it.
The “progress” is typical industry bullshit. See the absolute bullshit around the Donut SS battery.
Remember when Musk invented a battery with 30% better capacity? It was a 30% bigger battery.
SS batteries require manufacturing facilities with clean rooms on the order of chip fabs. You may see these in 2027, but only in expensive cars.
It takes time to scale up production, CATL is already building factories for it:
https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html
These press releases are weekly. Naxtra will be 30% cheaper, but also bigger and heavier. The problem here is the damn periodic table, someone should change it.
It takes time to scale production and even more time to adopt a new technology.