CATL’s 5C battery—announced with 12-minute charging, 1M+ mile lifespan (~3,000 cycles), and 250 Wh/kg density—overcomes EV drawbacks like cold-weather failure and high costs ($10/kWh vs. $100 for lithium-ion). Its self-healing additives and sodium-ion Naxtra tech (debuted 2023) could disrupt U.S. automakers, leaving Tesla and Toyota as outliers, while slashing commercial vehicle maintenance. Decentralized solar power replaces fuel infrastructure, but geopolitical energy control risks persist. Their Valentine’s Day sale (Feb 3–6) funds clean-ingredient supplements and AI decentralization via HealthRangerStore.com. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, over the years, I have mocked EVs because they sucked.
And really, if you think about it, it wasn't the vehicles themselves that sucked.
It was the batteries.
Batteries sucked.
And when the batteries suck, the EV sucks.
And specifically, what I didn't like about EVs was the fact that the batteries would take hours to charge.
Who's got that kind of time?
Stand around at a charging station in the middle of your road trip?
No, no, thank you.
I've got places to be.
I need to, you know, put diesel in it, fill up, and keep on going down the road, right?
But the other problem was that the battery packs didn't last very long.
You know, in terms of number of cycles or number of years that you could use it, then you would have to replace the entire battery pack, which could cost $25,000, $30,000.
And also the EVs, if you get into a little minor fender bender, the whole car is completely just wrecked and toast because of all the, you know, the battery integrity might be compromised.
And so just if someone hits your bumper, the whole car can be considered totaled.
And insurance costs are much higher for EVs and also they're much heavier.
So they stress parking garages and they make the potholes worse on the roads, etc.
They actually worsen road maintenance, you know, or they require increased road maintenance efforts when you drive these EVs around.
And also they didn't have much range and they didn't work when it was cold outside.
So it was like a lot of horrible things about EVs.
But, but all that's changing now.
So last year, well, let me back up and say that, of course, China is leading the way on battery chemistry and battery breakthroughs.
And they've just announced something that is an absolute game changer that I believe is going to make most combustion engine vehicles obsolete.
And, you know, two years ago, I couldn't have imagined myself even saying that.
But, of course, I'm data-driven and I'm open to new information.
And what China has been able to achieve, which I'll explain here shortly, is nothing short of astonishing in terms of the economics and the reduced charging time requirement, the number of cycles supported, the energy density, and the temperature range toleration of these batteries.
China is clearly, clearly leading the world in battery chemistry, battery technology.
And wow, within a few years, that is, I should say, if the U.S. government allows Chinese battery technology to make it to the U.S., then it's going to change everything.
The thing is, if we actually had free market principles in America and we allowed people to buy the superior Chinese EVs or Chinese batteries, then that would put Ford and Chevy and GM and almost everybody else completely out of business virtually overnight.
Because the cars that are made in America, now they're the ones that suck.
Quality control isn't there.
There's not even really a culture of quality in American manufacturing.
There's not a skill set anymore.
Except for Toyota, which has, of course, really outstanding quality control because it's a Japanese culture company.
And Japanese are well known for very detailed quality control processes, supply chain quality testing, all kinds of things.
So Toyota is a great high-quality company.
And by the way, Toyota will be into EVs very soon, even though they delayed that for a long time because the EV battery technology sucked.
And Toyota was right to stick with hybrids this whole time.
But I'm talking about the U.S. companies like Ford and Chevy and GM and GMC, I'm sorry, excuse me, and whatever else the companies are that are U.S. car makers, they're going to be obsolete because they don't have battery technology that's any good.
They're not even, they don't even really have sufficient research to be competitive in those areas.
The only car company in America that's doing anything innovative is Tesla, you know, with the Cybertruck and the other vehicles.
Now, Tesla is staying on the cutting edge of battery technology.
And if there's any American car company that has a shot at competing with Chinese-made vehicles, it's probably Tesla with, you know, Toyota maybe in the pack there as well as they shift over to EVs.
But the big change that's happening right now is the change in battery technology, just like I said a couple of minutes ago.
So there's a big breakthrough that was just announced by a Chinese company called Katyl.
Sodium Ion Battery Breakthrough00:04:59
C-A-T-L is how that's spelled.
I pronounce it Katyl.
I don't know how people say it, but that's what I say.
So let me explain a few things about this battery and why this is such a game changer for the world.
But before I do that, I also want to mention that there's a different battery technology that they announced last year, which is called their Naxtra sodium ion battery.
Naxtra is spelled N-A-X-T-R-A, Naxtra.
And the thing about Naxtra that's really extraordinary, even though it doesn't have the energy density that we want, so it's not going to produce really long-range vehicles.
But the Naxtra batteries only cost about one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries.
I mean, we're talking as low as $10 per kilowatt hour of energy density.
I mean, that's extraordinary.
I mean, $10 per kilowatt hour, that's unheard of.
You know, lithium, even the lower cost lithium is $100.
And on top of that, one of the ways they achieved that cost efficiency is because they managed to eliminate lithium, cobalt, and nickel out of the batteries and replace it with sodium.
You know, salt, basically.
I mean, not sodium chloride, but sodium element in a different matrix.
So basically, it's, you know, these are like salt batteries.
They're dirt cheap.
And the supply chains are very easy because you don't need cobalt and you don't need nickel and you don't need lithium.
So you don't have to deal with all these mines and all these wars and, you know, all the shipping routes and all the tariffs and everything that's happening all over the world.
And you can dig up sodium almost anywhere.
So, and I said previously that if Tesla starts to use sodium ion batteries, then I would consider buying a Tesla vehicle at that time.
I said that last year.
I've been waiting for sodium ion batteries as a grid shifting storage chemistry for my ranch.
I want to go completely off-grid.
And the only way to do that is to maybe erect a bunch of solar panels and then have a giant battery pack that can, you know, hold that solar energy and power everything you need.
But of course, I'm running a bunch of GPUs for AI data processing.
Basically, I have a mini AI data center.
So I use a lot more juice than most people or almost anyone, actually.
It's a mini data center.
So I did the calculations.
I actually need a megawatt hour of energy storage on my ranch.
Yeah, a megawatt hour.
one megawatt hour.
That's a lot for a residential user.
Most people wouldn't even get close to that.
But that's what I need.
And the only way to get there is to use something like either large-scale lithium-ion, which can catch fire.
And I don't want a giant fire on my ranch or wait for something like sodium ion to come along that's a lot cheaper and a lot safer.
Because, you know, I have goats that nibble on things.
What if they nibble on the lithium batteries?
You know, they do that.
They chew tree bark.
Who knows?
And they have horns.
They can run around and punch holes in your lithium.
And then you have a giant fire and like flaming goats running around.
You know, I don't want that.
So I want sodium ion batteries on my ranch.
And I don't care about the energy density because I'm not driving around with those batteries.
I'm just sticking them on a concrete slab and letting them cycle for 20 years.
So I'm waiting for sodium ion tech to come to America.
And sadly, we had the bankruptcy of the Natron company last year, which was a U.S. manufacturer, supposed to be a manufacturer of sodium ion.
And basically, they went bankrupt because they looked at China and said, well, we can't compete with China.
It's already over.
So they went out of business.
That's too bad.
So anyway, while I'm waiting for sodium ion batteries, the Cato Company out of China, which I would love to visit Cato, actually.
Not that I'm planning on going to China anytime soon.
Although I am studying more Chinese.
I'm really improving my Chinese linguistic skills lately.
I just figure it's going to be useful.
I mean, I already speak basic conversational Chinese, but I was really lacking a lot of technical terms.
So I'm beefing that up just in case I ever go to China and tour some of these battery factories or something, then I can speak Mandarin locally and take taxi cabs and get something to eat without sounding like a clueless foreigner who doesn't know what they're doing.
So anyway, the Cato company, and again, I'm really impressed with their technology.
5C Battery Breakthrough00:07:26
They've announced something they call their 5C battery.
And it features three breakthrough technological innovations.
One of them is in the name, the 5C battery.
I don't know if that's what they really call it themselves, but are you familiar with the C term when it comes to the speed of charging batteries?
Do you know what that means?
So a battery that can be charged at 1 C means that you can charge the entire capacity of the battery in one hour.
That's what that means.
That's all it means.
And, you know, that's pretty typical for a lot of lithium iron phosphate batteries right now.
You could typically charge it close to 100% within an hour.
So 1C batteries are pretty common.
And you may know this already about battery chemistry, but typically the faster your charge rate, the more damage you do to the battery because of thermal problems, thermal expansion problems, and causing like micro cracks throughout the electrolyte sections typically.
Or I guess the cathode maybe is where that ends up.
Because I know a lot of the electrolytes are just aqueous solutions, so they wouldn't have cracks.
But the cathodes can have lots of cracks.
Anyway, today's batteries are more like layers, thin film layers.
So it's a totally different ballgame than the old lead-acid batteries.
Nevertheless, the faster you charge a battery, the more damage you do to it.
So if you keep charging a battery very quickly at its maximum charge rate, you will typically reduce its total capacity over time.
So instead of holding 100% charge, it might only begin to hold like a 95% charge or a 90% charge if you really abuse it with a lot of fast charging.
So typically, if you want your battery to last longer, you slow charge it.
However, China's new innovation, well, let me say, Slow charging sucks when you're trying to drive somewhere.
So you can see these are competing issues.
You want to charge a battery quickly when you're on the road because you don't want to wait three hours at a charging station.
You'd rather charge it in five minutes and get back on the road, right?
But fast charging damages the batteries and reduces your overall capacity over time.
So what Catal has come up with, which is a game changer, is a battery that charges at 5C without causing too much damage.
Causes a little bit of damage, but not that much.
5C means you can charge the whole battery to 100% capacity in 12 minutes.
Because of course, that's an hour divided by 5, right?
So 12 minutes is one-fifth of an hour.
And a 5C battery means as long as you have the charging capacity available, the charger has to be able to push through that many kilowatts that you need.
But as long as you have the charging capacity, you can charge everything in 12 minutes to almost 100% and then get back on the road.
And that's reasonable.
That's reasonable for people that drive cars and people that drive trucks.
A 12-minute break to get out and stretch your legs, that doesn't really interfere with your road trip very much.
Whereas a two-hour or a three-hour break makes highway logistics impossible for trucking.
You can't stop for two or three hours every time you need to recharge your truck, right?
So this battery changes everything.
It makes long-term trucking with EV trucks viable, not only because of the rapid charging time, but also because of the fact that the batteries have much higher energy density, which we'll get to.
And also the number of miles you can put on that battery before its capacity drops to about 80%.
And that answer, by the way, is over 1 million miles.
So if you have a battery pack, this new 5C battery, if you have this in your vehicle, it can handle about 1,400 charge-discharge cycles at 5C speeds.
And that's at 60-degree heat.
Or if you charge it in colder weather or like more normal weather, you get up to 3,000 cycles out of it.
And that translates into over 1 million miles of overall range.
And even then, you still have about 80% of the capacity.
So this is six times better than the current industry average.
So it's almost an order of magnitude improvement in the lifetime duration of the battery pack of a vehicle.
And it charges quickly.
Now, we don't know exactly the battery chemistry of this battery because the Cato company hasn't really announced it, but it is suspected that this uses what's called NMC ternary chemistry.
And it achieves an energy density of about 250 watt hours per kilogram, which that's not breakthrough by itself, but it's also not bad.
And it's much better than existing batteries.
The real innovation in this battery line is not just that it can be charged rapidly, but that it has self-healing additives that are put into the electrolyte.
It's called an SEI additive or a self-repairing or a solid electrolyte interphase film that, quote, patches micro cracks that appear during blazing fast charging sessions.
So in other words, when you charge it rapidly, which we all want to do, it does cause damage, but the damage is self-healed.
So we now have a self-healing battery.
Wow.
And then on top of that, there's supposed to be something called a temperature responsive coating on the separator surface that automatically slows ion migration when the temperatures get too hot.
So it's a self-regulating, just by the laws of chemistry.
It's self-regulating to reduce the risk of thermal runaway damage or even self-ignition of the battery, because I believe this battery still does use lithium.
But self-healing technologies, that sounds like it's from the future, you know?
Charging a giant truck battery in 12 minutes and you're back on the road, that's a game changer.
And the cost of this hasn't yet been disclosed, but given that it's Katyl, it's going to be very affordable.
Anyway, the bottom line in all of this is that this battery breakthrough technology really does make combustion engines largely obsolete for a lot of transportation, personal transportation as well as commercial transportation.
The only question is, will President Trump or other future administrations, will they engage in domestic protectionism to protect the obsolete U.S. car industry?
Or will they allow U.S. companies to import these batteries or even Chinese vehicles built around these batteries, which would make transportation much more affordable for many U.S. consumers and transportation companies?
Of course, they would be tied to the grid for recharging, and that is an issue when the grid's down, obviously.
Or for the Eastern power grid, it's already stretched to its limit.
But still, for a lot of people who aren't on the Eastern power grid and who do have plenty of electricity, this makes vehicle operations much less expensive.
And it also greatly reduces the maintenance time that's required for commercial vehicles.
For example, diesel trucks, you know, the 18-wheelers rolling down the highway, all those diesel engines have to be rebuilt before they hit something like a million miles.
I don't know what the exact number is, but you can't just drive a diesel engine forever.
You have to rebuild the whole engine.
And many other components, obviously, you have to change the oil.
Obviously, you have air filters and you've got all kinds of mechanical components, transmissions, etc., and all the gear shifting and everything.
And electric motors make all that obsolete.
You can rip out the whole thing, rip out the engine, rip out essentially the transmission as well.
You can rip out all of it.
You don't need fuel.
You just have batteries.
And then the cost of transportation drops substantially.
And then that makes food more affordable in the United States, you see.
And it accomplishes a lot of things economically that actually promote economic growth in your country, wherever you happen to be.
For example, the cost of an Uber would dramatically drop if all the Uber drivers were using electric vehicles with these batteries because it just sharply reduces the cost to operate a vehicle.
So these batteries are such a revolutionary technology that they'll be used in ATVs or UTVs side-by-sides.
They'll be used, of course, in golf carts and things like that, but also they'll be used in military applications.
Definitely robots and drones.
And then on top of that, they'll probably be used in electric aircraft or what we might call like personal taxi aircraft, like drones that you can sit in and it takes you from point A to point B.
Those will be powered by these kinds of batteries.
And, you know, as much as I currently enjoy the advantages of diesel engines, because I've talked before about the ability to store diesel fuel safely on a ranch, you know, in a fuel storage tank, because diesel is not very combustible.
It's very safe to handle compared to gasoline.
But you still always need some giant truck of fuel to come out and refill your diesel tank, right?
Well, once you have an electric vehicle with this new battery technology, you can fill it up yourself with solar panels.
So that creates decentralization.
You no longer need the fuel refineries.
You don't need barrels of oil to be turned into diesel to power your truck or your car or your tractor.
Instead, you're using sunlight.
You're just recharging it.
And, you know, however many hours of sun it takes to give you how many miles or how many hours on a on a hobby farm tractor or what have you, that's going to become possible with new battery technology.
Granted, it'll take several years for all of this to work its way through the system, but I'm looking forward to a day when I can buy a battery-powered skid steer or literally a battery-powered tractor, even though I've mocked that idea in the past, but that's because the batteries sucked.
That's changing now.
We will have battery-powered tractors eventually, although it still may be many years off and they'll have a limited runtime.
But for a lot of hobby farmers, that's fine.
Or like a battery-powered riding lawnmower, those already exist, don't they?
You could see a little tractor like a 20-horsepower tractor that's battery-powered.
You can run it for two hours, and then that's it.
You got to recharge.
Well, that's fine for a lot of users who aren't commercial crop growers.
Now, granted, the big tractors will still run on diesel for at least a decade or more.
But over time, as technology comes in, that'll change as well.
I mean, this is really revolutionary.
This battery technology is changing everything.
And it does mean that combustion engines are about to become obsolete in a great many applications over the next few years.
So stay informed on all of this.
You can find battery chemistry technology podcasts on my channel at brighton.com or articles at naturalnews.com where I will be covering this.
And as always, my focus is about helping you live off-grid, helping you decentralize.
I want to decentralize away from fuel refineries if I can, because if I can just erect solar panels and then give myself fuel for tractors and cars and ATVs and all kinds of things like that, that's decentralization.
And it's hard for governments or corporations to cut you off from the sun, isn't it?
That's hard, although they are trying that with stratospheric aerosol injection, you know, global dimming.
But even then, it takes a big effort from a government to block even 1% of the sunlight.
So they're unlikely to be able to succeed in dimming the sun enough to take away your energy.
Otherwise, they collapse the whole all life on planet Earth, right?
Which maybe they do want to do that, but that's going to take some time.
In the meantime, we've got free fuel, you know, coming out of the sky from that giant fusion reactor called the sun, which is over 99.8% of the mass of the solar system.
And that mass is being converted into energy completely free.
All we have to do is collect that, and we could power our vehicles.
And the only thing that stood in the way this whole time was just crappy batteries.
And that's being resolved now.
It's a very interesting time.
So I'll keep covering this from a decentralization and off-grid point of view.
I want to help you decentralize away from the power grid, which is failing in the U.S., and also away from the fuel refineries.
I want to help you live as independently and in the most self-reliant way possible.
That's sustainable.
You don't depend on wires or pipelines from somebody else.
And battery technology is actually a very key component for achieving that.
Valentine's Sale Bonuses00:03:51
So thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams here, the Health Ranger, naturalnews.com and brightion.com.
care.
Get ready for this Valentine's Day by giving the gift of great nutrition to those you love.
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