LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the storage itself.

"Watershed moment:" Big battery storage prices hit record low in China auction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504630 - July 2025 (4 comments)

IEA: The battery industry has entered a new phase - https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-battery-industry-has-en... - March 5th, 2025

Naxtra Battery Breakthrough & Dual-Power Architecture: CATL Pioneers the Multi-Power Era - https://www.catl.com/en/news/6401.html - April 21st, 2025

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/china-alread... - April 19th, 2024

Currently "Sodium Battery Cell" is priced at US$50–70/kWh on the Shanghai Metals Market, which gives every appearance of being a real thing: https://www.metal.com/en/markets/43. They list LFP batteries currently at US$38–52/kWh: https://www.metal.com/en/markets/42

I think you may be dramatically overestimating how much container shipping costs.

("Shanghai Metals Market" is reportedly a consultancy which provides price data, not a market.)

Sodium batteries have significantly lower round-trip efficiency, so they have to be cheaper to win against LFP.

That's because of the huge range of voltages in the charge curve - resistive losses in wiring scale with the square of current. When the voltage drops, the current needs to increase for the same power.

If you can accept low power/current output (which EVs cant, but homes can), this isn't so bad.

EVs have giant batteries - they can be connected via their DC ports and charged/discharged via solar inverters - technically. The current spec for CCS and NACS doesn't allow for this (Chademo did, but they lost the 'format war'). Giant effing oversight on manufacturers' part if you ask me.

Some people have managed to trick their cars into reverse charging via solar hybrid inverters and some custom hardware and it works as advertised - which is no surprise since its a lithium battery charge controller charging/discharing a solar battery.

If you could use your 60kWh EV battery on top of the 10-20 kWh you have at home, it would be a game changer, most people could power their homes for a week on that sort of capacity.

Replacing all the road vehicles in the US with 70 kWh BEVs would mean their battery capacity would equal about 40 hours of the average US grid power consumption.

BTW, this will mean that EV charging is going to have to have variable rates, or else people will just ride over Dunkleflauten by charging up their EV at a charger, driving back, then using it to power the home.

I think variable consumption is a thing even now - we have peaker plants just for that purpose, so that could be handled as well.