It’s interesting to view Fossil Fuel industry supporters, and the demise of the industry as renewables take over the world, through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Fewer and fewer people are in denial, and most seem to have moved on to the anger & bargaining stage. This latest announcement from CATL should bring more to the depression & acceptance stages.
Most vans and trucks are owned by businesses, big and small. Soon they’ll have a choice. Stick with expensive gasoline, or go for the electric option that gets cheaper every year that passes. Being businesses, which do you guess they’ll go for?
Up next - CATL says they have sodium batteries for passenger cars that are 10–19 dollars/kWh, that is approx 10% of current lithium battery prices, which are already cheaper than gasoline.
All of this, for people who are paying attention, is one more nail in the fossil fuel coffin.
CATL launches sodium batteries: extremely durable and stable at –40°C
The energy density is still quite low. These appear to be for short city transport, especially with such a small capacity. Sodium promises even higher energy density than current NCA, so these batteries are very early in their R&D journey. Still, cool to finally see real world use of sodium batteries. Once we start seeing batteries with real world range of 1,000km+, I think we see mass adoption of EVs. It would eliminate the last major roadblock for most consumers: range anxiety.