Sheffield-based Faradion has developed a sodium-ion battery that looks and performs in the same way as a regular lithium-ion battery but is 30% cheaper

There was a surge in the sale of electric cars last year but the number leaving the forecourts is still dwarfed by traditional gas-guzzlers at a ratio of almost 50 to one. The high cost of the batteries that power the vehicles is a prime reason.

Sheffield-based Faradion believes it has found a solution – new battery technology, the development of which has been spearheaded in the UK.

“For an electric car, the cost of a battery is crudely the same as the cost of the rest. That is quite the wrong proportion for it to take off. So people are desperate to find ways to supply cheaper batteries,” Faradion chairman, Chris Wright, said.

In 2010, Wright and some colleagues pondered why large batteries used for electric cars and for energy storage from solar panels in the home were so expensive. The problem lay in the materials used to make them – specifically, those that contain lithium, of which there is a scarcity that drives up price. Wright said his team “would be on to a winner” if they could find a material that contained a comparable but cheaper material to make the equivalent of lithium-ion batteries such as those used in mobile phones.

The answer, they thought, was to use sodium, which has a similar chemistry to lithium. The base materials needed to produce a sodium-ion battery are significantly easier to source than those for lithium-ion batteries.

Battery performance has really lagged behind the ambition and vision of people who are making other products Chris Wright, Faradion

The market for systems that use large-scale batteries is expected to grow as demand increases for home storage units for the energy generated from solar panels as well as for electric cars.

“We set out to make sodium materials that worked in a simple electrochemical [battery] cell that behaved as well as if not better than some of the lithium systems. We were able to produce material which outperformed lithium-ion phosphate, which has until recently been the workhorse in automotive batteries.”

Last May Faradion revealed what it claims to be one of the most advanced sodium-ion batteries on the market, costing about 30% less than a lithium-ion equivalent. The company demonstrated the new technology in May at the headquarters of Williams Advanced Engineering in Oxfordshire using an electric bike. To the casual observer, the battery looks and performs in the same way as a lithium-ion battery.

As well as being cheaper, sodium-ion batteries are easier to transport. Strict guidelines surround the transport of lithium-ion batteries because they can cause explosions if they short circuit. Last month Boeing warned passenger airlines against carrying bulk shipments of lithium-ion batteries.

The sodium-ion batteries could be transported more quickly and easily without the safety concerns and logistical costs.

Cheaper batteries could lead to goods such as electric cars and energy storage units falling in price, Wright said. “Things will become available which weren’t available before. People are very frequently annoyed with their batteries. Battery performance has really lagged behind the ambition and vision of people who are making other products. There is a lot of potential for batteries which tick the right boxes.”

After starting in the area with relatively few players, the sector is booming, said Wright. Faradion is now on trying to licence the technology.



The problem with getting the batteries into cars is that it can take eight years from when the deal is done to vehicles going on sale, Wright said. For energy storage units however, the technology could be installed much quicker.

The innovators: how smaller batteries give more power to UK solar households Read more

Home energy generation has blossomed in the UK over the past four years, with an estimated 670,000 homes fitted with solar panels. Companies such as Elon Musk’s Tesla aim to capitalise on this trend with Powerwall home energy storage batteries and a planned “gigafactory” in Nevada that will be the largest producer of lithium-ion batteries in the world by 2017. This is expected to force other battery manufacturers to seek alternatives in case they are priced out of the market, which is where Faradion aims to come in.

“[Other battery producers] are a natural target for us because they can use our materials and reduce their materials cost and find themselves able to compete with Tesla who have a large-scale plant,” Wright said. A decade ago, solar panels for the home were prohibitively expensive but the reduction in costs now mean they have proliferated. “I can see the same thing happen with energy storage,” he said.

Electric cars in the UK

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said in Janaury that sales of alternatively fuelled vehicles (AFVs) – including electric cars and hybrids – rose by 58% in 2014, with 51,739 new AFVs registered. AFV sales accounted for a market share of 2.1% in 2014 – up from 1.4% a year earlier.