i always remember the impression he made on me when i first watched a Tesla keynote he did, years and years ago. I remember thinking to myself "how can he be so shit at this compared to Jobs?" I know Steve Jobs was a phenomenal presenter, but Musk was just such a *shit* presenter. I couldn't believe that other people thought he was good at it.

We've all got first-hand knowledge of that because he keeps saying and doing things in public that confirm it. We don't need to have direct access to someone's inner mind to make reasonable inferences about their motivations. It's a completely normal thing to do, and you do it all the time, because humans can't function without it.

Wh/kg or Wh/l is energy density, not power density. Power density is W/kg or W/l. It depends on internal resistance, ion mobility and electrode design. Sodium cells have better ion transport at low temperature than LFP and don't have the plating risk.

I don’t disagree, but I think it’s going to be coming in markets outside the US first. Asia, emerging markets, then Europe — where small cars truly are small, and in particular where a small car is a big step up from a bike or a moped only.

Ironically, the OP has it the wrong way round. Sodium has better power density than LFP, by and large, although NMC is still better. It has lower energy density, which means it won’t be in premium EV traction batteries except in hybrid Na-Li double batteries any time soon. But it’s well suited for aux batteries that need a big surge of power and cold-start capabilities.

Where did I say that cost is a fundamental quality? The answer: nowhere. So you’re arguing with a strawman. Pointlessly. Li is absolutely not going to be 4x more energy dense than today. To think you later accuse me of wishful thinking! This is argument for the sake of argument. You asked what a thermodynamic cost floor was, and I told you. That’s all there was to that particular exchange, except that you were aggressive and dickish throughout.

And of course you carry on in the same vein. Pretending that I’m saying something stupid when I simply point out that a pack’s costs comprise the cells at 60 to 70% and the non-cell components at 30 to 40%, so driving down cell costs will, in fact, drive down overall pack costs.

I’ve no idea why you’re being such a prize tool about all this, but you do you, sunshine. Angrily deny that Na opens up a new cost curve all you like. If it’s important to your identity to pin your colours to a lithium mast, you go right ahead and do that. I personally think lithium will continue to advance and will be great, and that sodium will also be great in different ways, including lowering battery costs further for certain applications. It baffles me that you feel the need to create some kind of weird point-by-point attempted rebuttal of what I wrote about this, but I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.

A thermodynamic cost floor is the irreducible minimum cost set by the fundamental mass, energy, and material requirements of a chemistry.

The objective reason for believing that sodium is going to make a substantive difference is that the raw materials cost for sodium-based batteries are much lower than they are for lithium-based batteries. And while it’s true that pack cost includes much more than cell cost:
1. Cell costs are still 60 to 70% of pack costs, so cutting cell costs has a big impact on pack costs. It’s not just the cathode costs, many Na chemistries use hard carbon, have no graphite constraints, and there’s no Li plating risks, cutting anode costs.
2. Li pack costs came down substantially as the other systems within them beyond the cell, mainly pack structure, cooling, BMS, and safety, were optimised to suit the particular nature of different Li chemistries over time, and the same process can happen for Na packs.
3. Na chemistries will improve in density, potentially by as much as 40%, whereas LFP has less headroom for improvement, because it’s already doubled through particle morphology control, carbon coating, compaction density improvements, thinner separators, etc.

On top of this, LFP pack manufacturing is highly scaled, optimised for process and yield, integrated along the supply-chain and very capital efficient. By contrast, Na is at an early industrialisation stage, with lower yields, little process-turning, and less equipment optimisation. So there’s plenty of scope for high learning rates and thus large and fast cost reductions.

On top of that, Na competition will spur further Li development. There’s still plenty of areas where we can expect to see advances, from dry electrode coating through to standardisation of larger formats.

If we're going to get into the weeds of the comparison, then you have to think about the system service each setup is intended to provide to make the correct comparison. That's not an identical hourly output profile.

A 500MW SMR provides about 4TWh per annum of low-carbon energy plus firm capacity most of the time. It still goes offline for planned and unplanned maintenance, so it's not perfectly continuous and it has limited ramping. This is all assuming it does what it says it will do, of course. It's also unproven tech.

But it's connected into a grid. Data centres require commercially firm power, not islanded self-firming. So you don't need to cover a 3 day dunkelflaute, but you do need to cover night time as you say. The right comparator is a grid-connected solar+BESS with a PPA. 2GW solar, 6 to 10GWh of battery, and a grid connection for rare longer extended shortfalls. That will have capex of about 3 to 4.5bn USD, is competitive with an SMR, and deployable in three years instead of a (theoretical) 10.

Blithely dismissing the value of a new tech by pointing out the wildly obvious without addressing the less-obvious is also not a great strategy for decision-making. See my other posts for details of why Na is likely to win in some segments of the EV market.

Li has behaved like other types of tech such as solar PV, wind or DRAM over the last 30 years, in that every year it's got better and cheaper. Everyone still has the expectation that this can continue, but LFP is getting close to its thermodynamic cost floor and may be reaching the maturity ceiling for process improvement. So we get further declines but they're more incremental and are delivered by scale, integration and financial engineering.

By contrast, sodium offers a path to a new round of structural cost decline: a new S-curve. We get new learning rates and new capex cycles, which can deliver a path to substantially lower cost. I'm excited to see where it leads.

I think we're likely to see segmentation in the EV market:
Na will win in:
1. low-range, cost-capped EVs. Exactly like this first model. City cars, superminis, two and three wheelers. It will be a chemistry of choice in emerging markets because it fits local needs.
2. Some types of commercial fleets, such as urban delivery vans, buses with depot charging, municipal vehicles. They have predictable routes, need cold tolerance, long calendar life, excellent safety, great reliability, low TCO.

I'm excited to see the impact of sodium in delivering ever-cheaper EVs, given that upfront costs especially at the low end of the market remain a major barrier. I'm hopeful that they may finally help to deliver on the promise of EVs for a new market tier that exploits the mechanical simplicity of the drivetrain and low-cost battery materials to undercut cheap new ICE vehicles.

But almost as interesting to me is the aux battery value. Li isn't well-suited to take over from Pb especially for heavier duty vehicles because it's more expensive, is more challenging for safety ahd thermal management, has poor cold cranking performance, has quite high fault sensitivity, and solves for the problem of volumetric density above all, which isn't the main issue for a starter battery -- starter batteries are all about peak power ie cold-cranking amps, which requires power density instead of energy density.

You need 5kW of power for two to five seconds, potentially at -20C. And that's what sodium can deliver just as well as lead. They will do great on safety and abuse tolerance, ie frequent shallow cycling, the odd deep discharge, long idle periods, and bugger all thermal management. They have the power density needed, and their lower gravimetric and volumetric density than Li is irrelevant. The get rid of Pb recycling liabilities and will have fewer warranty replacements and generally last much longer. They can do the job of being boring, forgiving, cheap and cold-tolerant.

Hmm, who do I place my faith in on this question, you or CATL? It's a tricky one, because on the one hand we have the world's largest traction battery maker with a long history of innovation in actually available products, but on the other hand there's this Slashdot poster who's got a lot of confidence.

Deploying financially viable actual working reactors that deliver on the promised benefits would be the bar for success in my eyes. Ie not just a pilot, but a scaled program that delivers energy at a price that can compete with solar. I'll believe it when I see it.

I don't know what point you think you're making here?