this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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You can go and buy sodium batteries already. They're not competitive with Lithium ion batteries in many mobile applications, but very much competitive for everything where price is more important than size or weight.
Lithium has decades of research and industrial scaling behind it, it's hard to break into that. But especially sodium is on a pretty good path to replace it in large scale storage applications.
Sodium-ion batteries have been in development since 1970s and the lithium-ion batteries have been in development since 1960s. Not much of a difference.
It's not just the amount of time. The portable electronics market and the electric car market both settled on lithium batteries, which created a huge demand for that particular technology. Over the past 2 decades there has been a massive incentive to develop smaller, denser lithium batteries.
There may be interest in developing other battery technologies, but nothing like the amount of money and effort being spent on lithium batteries.
And before that there were several decades of massive incentive to develop smaller more powerful ICE engines.
Lithium probably has some room to grow, but it also has a lot of problems like volatility and materials sourcing. EV manufacturers have been searching for ways to make better/cheaper/denser batteries, not better/cheaper/denser lithium batteries. They've been actively searching for alternatives.
Sure, it's the lithium battery manufacturers that are invested in making better lithium batteries. Everyone has been buying their products for decades and they want that to keep happening, so they pour resources into research and development. And they have a lot of resources, because everyone has been buying their products.
Once a market settles on a particular technology it becomes self-feeding and tends to accelerate. It's difficult for a competing technology to break in primarily because of momentum - it's hard to catch up.
A device manufacturer might be interested in using a different battery technology, but if they have a whole design and production process already built around lithium batteries then it's not just the battery that they have to change. It's their logistics chain, on-device electronics, design theory and possible regulatory concerns. Changing an established system is expensive, so that has to be justified somehow.
I'm not saying that it can't happen - I'm sure that it will eventually. What I'm saying is that in order for a different battery technology to really change the market and push lithium out, it will have to be significantly better (not just marginally better).
Similar deal with LCD versus other display technology: once something is dominant, a metric shitload of money is spent pushing from its practical shortcomings toward its theoretical limits. Even twenty years ago, LCDs suuucked. Plasma would save us from their high latency. OLED would save us from their low contrast. And then, uh... neither did much of anything. LCDs were just so damn cheap that consumers didn't care for much else, and manufacturers attacked the technical problems keeping them slow and dim. Nowadays - they're still not ideal. But nothing else is a drop-in replacement, because nothing else has enjoyed the same firehose of revenue-fueled R&D.
Lithium has problems. But after a couple decades as the technology for laptops and smartphones, those problems are mostly jokes about that exploding Samsung phone, and the fact gasoline still has higher density. If something can be cheaper - it will gradually disrupt and displace this highly-regarded standard.
Expect a similar outcome for RISC-V versus ARM.