The lithium-ion battery is the beating heart of the modern world. It powers eight billion mobile phones, hundreds of millions of laptops and rapidly growing fleets of electric cars and energy-storage banks. But there's a new contender breaking into the battery market. In April, Chinese firm CATL ' the world's largest battery producer ' announced that it will start mass-producing sodium-ion batteries before the end of 2026. CATL, which is headquartered in Ningde, added that it had signed deals to sell the batteries both to a car manufacturer and to a provider of energy-storage stations for electricity grids. Sodium-ion batteries were first developed in the 1980s, around the same time as lithium-ion ones. But early prototypes had some major shortcomings: they couldn't hold as much energy as lithium-ion batteries, and they weren't as durable, quickly losing their ability to recharge. For decades, therefore, research focused on lithium-ion technology. But interest and investment in...
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