Safer solid-state sodium battery could cut grid storage costs

As grids fill with solar and wind, the world needs vast amounts of cheap, safe battery storage, and sodium is an attractive ingredient because it is roughly a thousand times more abundant than lithium and can even be extracted from seawater. On May 27, 2026, Tech Xplore reported a step toward making sodium batteries safer: an all-solid-state design from the National University of Singapore.

Most sodium and lithium batteries rely on flammable liquid electrolytes that can leak, while solid polymer alternatives have tended to conduct ions too slowly and to develop needle-like metal growths called dendrites that short-circuit the cell. A team led by Associate Professor Palani Balaya tackled both problems with graphitic carbon nitride, a nitrogen-rich material made by simply heating urea, one of the most widely available chemical precursors in the world, to about 550 degrees Celsius, yielding sheets just two nanometers thick. Added to the solid electrolyte, it more than doubled ionic conductivity, tripled the electrolyte's strength and suppressed the dangerous dendrites.

“On May 27, 2026, Tech Xplore reported a step toward making sodium batteries safer: an all-solid-state design from the National University of Singapore.”

The performance was encouraging. The cells sustained stable operation for more than 2,000 hours at higher current densities, and prototype cells retained 95% of their capacity after 500 charge-discharge cycles, results that suggest both durability and safety. Because sodium is so cheap and abundant, and the key additive comes from a common chemical, the approach is aimed squarely at affordable, scalable grid-scale storage as well as electric vehicles. The findings were published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The honest caveats apply. This is laboratory-scale research, and translating impressive cell results into mass-produced batteries that perform reliably and cheaply over many years is a serious manufacturing challenge. Solid-state batteries also face their own engineering hurdles around interfaces and scale-up. Even so, a safer, non-flammable battery built from sodium and a urea-derived material is exactly the kind of advance the clean-energy transition needs. If it scales, it could help store renewable power more cheaply and safely while easing the strain on scarce lithium supplies.