Battery technology is often associated with the material bottleneck issue: A stringent transition to highly renewable energy systems in combination with high electrification would require large capacities for battery storage, both stationary and mobile, for which there is not enough Lithium available. Lithium criticality is, indeed, an important topic, while previous research has found that well-established recycling, vehicle-to-grid (V2G), and transport with low Lithium intensity (non-battery electric) would be required.
A recent study took a closer look at one of the most promising alternatives to Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) on the horizon: Sodium-ion batteries (SIB). Contrary to LIBs, SIBs are based on abundant raw materials, also beyond the cathode material: Anodes can be made of hard carbon instead of natural graphite, and copper as a current collector at the anode can be substituted with the more available and cheaper aluminum.
Previous energy system simulations resulted in close to 75 TWhcap stationary battery demand by 2050, while an estimation for mobile batteries revealed a dominating role of moving batteries at up to almost 275 TWhcap by mid-century. Latest findings indicate a ratio of needed battery capacity to installed solar PV capacity of about 0.8 kWhcap/kW in a cost-optimized and flexible global energy system that is run entirely on renewable energy. Adding the niche of electronics and other applications, the total battery demand may reach over 350 TWhcap by 2050.
The bottom-up, cell-level to system-level cost assessment showed that SIBs are already close to cost parity with their Lithium counterpart.
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