A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.
My very uneducated understanding is that sodium batteries can be produced virtually anywhere.
Not every battery application needs to maximize energy density, so sodium batteries are good where that is the case.
I also did not read about sodium ion batteries characteristics versus lithium ion, so there might also be other use cases where sodium ion batteries are better.