Toward Emerging Sodium‐Based Energy Storage Technologies: From Performance to Sustainability

As one of the potential alternatives to current lithium-ion batteries, sodium-based energy storage technologies including sodium batteries and capacitors are widely attracting increasing attention from both industry and academia. However, the performance and sustainability of current sodium-based energy storage devices mostly rely on various critical materials and traditional energy-consuming fabrication processes. Meanwhile, the detailed working mechanisms of some sodium-based energy storage technologies are still under debate. Hence, how to realize low-cost, sustainable, and high-performance sodium-based energy storage technologies remains challenging from the perspective of theoretical studies, material diversification, and device optimization. In this review, the development state of sodium-based energy storage technologies from research background to principles is comprehensively discussed, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of state-of-the-art sodium-based energy storage devices are systematically analyzed, thus providing critical insight into the challenges and opportunities for emerging sodium-based energy storage technologies to achieve not only improved performance, but also enhanced sustainability.