sodium-sulfur batteries

A Chinese-Australian research group has created a new sodium-sulfur battery that purportedly provides four times the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries. They say it is far cheaper to produce and offers the potential to dramatically reduce energy storage costs.

Sodium batteries, an increasingly competitive area of research, have emerged as a low-cost, lithium-free energy storage alternative based on abundant, more environmentally friendly materials. A pair of new research papers addresses some of the remaining hurdles to widespread adoption, such as the formation of dendrites on the anode.

A 5 MW / 3.6 MWh solar-plus-storage plant is being built with sodium-sulfur batteries provided by Japanese specialist NGK Insulators in Mongolia’s Zavkhan Province. The project developer, Japan-based contractor JGC Holdings, wants to bring the facility online in the spring of next year.

International researchers have analyzed the potential of sodium-based energy storage and found recent technical advances have arrived faster than those for the lithium-ion batteries which have been studied for three decades. Issues remain, however, before sodium constitutes a complementary option to lithium.

Researchers have sounded the alarm. If no serious efforts are made on second-life battery use, recycling and vehicle-to-grid applications, decarbonization efforts may hit the buffers a lot sooner than expected.

Testing lithium-ion, redox flow, and sodium-sulfur technologies, EPC provider CMI Energy wants to establish which types of system, or which combinations, are most suitable for different applications using the 4.2 MWh facility.