I’ve been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.
While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.
Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.
I was about to say. A third of a cup is more than the ENTIRE VOLUME OF DRESSING I’d consider putting in a salad… that would serve four people.
Maybe a teaspoon of sugar to balance the acidic flavours in the dressing. Maybe.
Looking at that recipe, it reads like “quick pickles” which are normally made with a hot mixture of white vinegar and sugar (and admittedly quite a lot of sugar), but in those the critical step is you drain the pickled vegetables before serving, so the actual amount of sugar retained by the food is still relatively low. No mention of draining before serving here though, so perhaps it is just artificially-sweetened cucumber and vinegar soup? Blergh.
Unfortunately what’s shipping today seems it would offer maybe half that.
For the batteries that were announced this past week, a larger-than-refrigerator-sized cabinet held a capacity of around 15kWh.
Around half the energy density by mass of Lithium batteries, and in the order of a sixth of the density by volume.
Now if only we could come up with a system where your car could be charged while stopped at traffic lights, we might be onto a winner (:
Considering however that the price of sodium is around 1-2% that of lithium, I expect we will see significant R&D and those numbers quickly start to improve.