Li-Ion, the king of the jungle meets rivals

Li-Ion has been king of the roost for a bit now. And it seems to have no end in sight with the new size factor being made at the Gigafactory. More than any other chemistry, in small electronics, to EV batteries, to grid connected batteries the most proposed chemistry has been Li-Ion.

Beyond that, research into battery technology has been the greatest in improving Li-Ion and not in new chemistries. So should we be worried that so much money is being put into one basket of eggs?

Despite the disparity in spending, marketing, and product development favoring Li-Ion, there is still a lot of interest in other chemistries. But Li-Ion works, and the smart money knows it will be the workhorse for a few years to come.

But what else is out there? One alternative chemistry is sodium-sulfur. NGK in Japan has bet it's future on the chemistry. They are installing systems now, and they work. The systems use molten sodium and molten sulfur. Because the components keep reforming in their molten state, the battery has a great cycle life. If the numbers keep coming in better for sodium-sulfur, the switch will happen.

Dyson has been a strong technology company. And when they put their money on a technology, one can expect that it should be pretty good.

Dyson bought Sakti3. A company that makes a solid state battery. Yes, it is lithium, but it has a very different set of properties because of its construction.

This acquisition was a while back, but not much news is not bad news when a company that is privately owned. And Dyson has inferred that the battery has been meeting its marks. I expect we'll hear more about it soon, within the next 2 years, since other more public promising battery technologies have been making gains.

The advantage of solid state is robustness. The battery is very safe and has great cycle life.

Flow batteries have been prototyped and installed in a number grid battery tests. The advantage has been capacity since the capacity is only limited by the size of the tanks. And making the fluid inexpensive is also a possibility since construction costs with a particular material aren't a big consideration.

But there are a few things the fluid must do. One is its viscosity and the other is that it cannot be corrosive and break the machinery that the fluid flows in. Can a break-through fluid be made that will have such an advantage over other chemistries that its weakness, the machinery that runs it, won't be seen as such a liability? A lot of companies are spending their own money betting they can.