Only if the energy density is not important for your application. There are such applications, but they are a minority. Smartphones, laptops, car batteries all want to be both light and small.
Yeah, but if all the grid storage and powerwall production could go sodium, that would free up lithium for the places it's needed.
The same argument could be made for nickel-iron batteries, though. They're heavy and bulky, but they last literally forever, and their source materials are ludicrously abundant. Why don't we see nickel-iron grid-scale storage? I'd love to know.
They are relatively expensive, they have fairly high self-discharge rates and aren’t very efficient. Last I checked, they had on the order of 1%/day discharge (some versions are as low as ~20%/month). They also are not very efficient in the charge/discharge cycle, losing 30-40% of the power put in. Lithium currently is around 10%.
Their primary use is in applications where their long lifetimes outweigh all other considerations.
Is it a minority? What about batteries tied to energy grids like the Tesla battery farm in Australia? Wouldn't that be a potential use case which would be useful across the globe?
