New battery technology hopes to cut the cost of storage by 80 percent compared to lithium storage.

The sodium-ion battery can be made from salt and myo-inositol and would be several orders of magnitude cheaper than lithium.

Applications for the new technology would include grid-scale storage for utilities and home solar. While improvements are still in the works, the energy density at this stage of would likely prohibit any kind of mobile application.

Source:
Stanford News
Nature