ONCE IN EVERY WEEK, DRANO IN EVERY CAR?

The first iteration of any new product or service is often expensive, and sometimes the ultimate winner might start as something impractical at what people understand as the proper scale.  Then inventive people look at the early iterations and start thinking.

Americans purchased more than 500,000 fully electric vehicles in the first three quarters of 2022, accounting for more than 6 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales. The Biden administration wants that number to exceed 50 percent domestically, and the International Energy Agency projects it to exceeed 60 percent globally by 2030. But getting those cars on the road—and storing increasing amounts of intermittent energy generated by solar panels, hydro plants, and wind turbines—would require a lot of lithium-ion batteries.

With current technology and lithium resources, that would be a daunting challenge. But ongoing battery innovation promises to address the gap.

Lithium is in the same column of the periodic table as sodium.

Electrochemists are already addressing the shortfalls he described, and their work will drive down the cost of powering electric vehicles.

Natron Energy in the U.S. and CATL in China are working on sodium-ion batteries. At $960 per ton, sodium hydroxide is much cheaper than lithium. In 2022, CATL announced that its next generation of sodium-ion batteries will reach an energy density of 200 watt-hours per kilogram, which compares well with the 220 watt-hours per kilogram of current lithium-ion batteries. CATL's sodium-ion batteries could be as much as 75 percent cheaper per kilowatt-hour than lithium-ion batteries.

While sodium-ion batteries weigh more, CATL says they will charge in just 15 minutes, last through 3,000 charge cycles, and work well in the cold and heat. Lithium-ion batteries take 30 minutes to charge, last 1,500 cycles, and do not perform well in cold or heat.

I'm old enough to remember when Dick Tracy's wrist radio was an animation, and pop cans had to be galvanized steel because the carbonated water was reactive with ordinary steel or aluminum.