New Material Pushes Sodium-Ion Batteries to Phase out Costly Lithium

With lithium prices over five times higher than they were a year ago, researchers have developed a material for sodium-ion batteries, which offer an alternative to the increasingly expensive lithium-ion tech. The new material is a powder of sodium-vanadium phosphate fluoride with a particular crystal structure. Used in the battery cathode, it provides record-high energy storage capacity, eliminating one of the bottlenecks of the emerging sodium-ion technology.