GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Lithium makes up 0.002% of the Earth's crust, meanwhile sodium is 2.36%, and there's quite a lot of it in the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it is for vehicles. But it will still be some years of research on sodium batteries for the cost advantage and manufacturing scale to materialize.
If this battery plus some solar panels could get us free power for the next 20+ years, that's easily worth $15-$20k or so.
I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.
I live in a very rural spot with a difficult-to-deal-with Electric Association, with a Ute reservation on one side and unpowered parcels on other sides; I don't think that the easement is a typical issue.
And to be clear, I didn't count my labor in designing or implementing the system. I suspect that would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of another $10K if I had to get a hands-off, turn-key version of this same system.
And at some point I will likely double much of the capacity, at which point I will be able to run a mig welder at night if I want...
The other potential problem with a lot of energy systems that use things that have hydrogen in them is running power over the systems for long periods of time can start to leak hydrogen. You'll always want to ensure you have ventilation to ensure whatever is outgassing can escape the system. You'll end up with explosions, hydrogen embrittlement, or interesting corrosion in ways you didn't think were possible.
I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.
It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.
So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.
Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.
If the GP commenter is typing in from the UK .. that's a not uncommon garden tool shed size.
By contrast modern Australian farm sheds have clouds forming within them and host birds that seasonally migrate from one side to the other.
I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.
Re use old ev batteries unmodified for battery storage
This makes financing a large grid scale storage plant look way better to the bean counters because the investment continues to work and make money, after the 5 year amortization, typical of a corporate investment. This will be the kicker IMHO.
The article claims much better:
> the company’s GS1.1 [Sodium Ion] system will store energy for 20 years, over roughly 20,000 cycles, and still retain 80 percent of its capacity. For LFP, a basic durability benchmark pegs them at 70 percent capacity after 8,000 cycles.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...
I’ll show myself out.
It matters less but it's still a big deal though. You need to inject the power near where you need it otherwise you have to upgrade everything between you and them, roughly speaking. So you can't put your battery in BFE where land is cheap.
Cost increases from that plus environmental and site development regs (which are always more in denser areas) screw you too. So between the upgrades and the overhead there might not be a valley of profitability because all the sites you could toss a battery on and the sites where someone who has a more $$ use case than you will outbid you on the raw land.
So the end result is you wind up having to shoehorn a bunch of little developments into small crappy parcels but then the fixed costs of development come back to bite you so density matters there because the more jiggling electrons you can pack in the more revenue you can have to offset your fixed costs.
That said, anything that lets you tell the NFPA, the environmentalists and the local screeching Karens to take their setbacks and shove them hugely improves density, especially on small sites, so the reduction in cooling needs and runaway protection that sodium gets you might make it denser once the tech is fully vetted. Every foot you can shave off the effective footprint of a battery (after accounting for fire setbacks, service space, etc) hugely increases the number of sites that are developable.
Or you install them near your solar/wind farm (or where the power connects to shore, if it’s offshore). If it’s a shore install, you might run a desalination side business when you have surplus energy.
Why would that be a reason to switch, given the LFP batteries typically have better operational parameters in everything except cold-weather charging?
In this case I’d suggest underground installation. Use the Earth as an insulator and heat sink. Temperatures underground are a lot more stable and predictable.
That means nothing without knowing the size of your facility though.
Are your batteries 25MW/100MWH or 250MW/1000MWH.
Thing is - LFP process keeps getting cheaper and charts show it’s going to be 15 years until sodium reaches LFP cost.
India has a "made in India" mandate which is hilarious. >80% of solar panel (polysilicon, ingots, and silicon wafers) is from China. Situation is worse with batteries and EVs. Tata, which has been making vehicles for quite some time doesn't have any clue how to make EVs and is building an entire plant with a Chinese company (Chery).
Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....".
In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm:
1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah.
2) When its impossible to compete: China is security threat, we can't allow them. But we'll import most of it (80 - 90% of components) and still put our label.
Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).
Their new Chery tieup is utilizing the Freelander architecture from the Chery and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) joint venture in China instead of a pricier internal or JLR roadmap. Remember they own JLR.
This is for their new premium EV line.
Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen.
You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output.
By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable.
India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized.
There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.
GOI has a new locally-produced solar cell mandate that has been pushed back by six months because the requirement is 8-10x the current production. People are being forced to keep factories shut due to the lack of locally produced cells.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-solar-push-id...
But there is an obvious explanation: short-term economic growth is a contradictory goal to building local industry. China has built their economy around scale and the rest of the world takes advantage of this. Scaling local industry will be expensive and require investment. Of course politicians are eager to provide both growth and the aesthetics of local industry while paying off their patrons.
This is unsustainable. At some point things will snap and people will swing wildly to the left or right.
Regardless of ideological or humanitarian concerns with China, they are clearly able to manage an economy with a longer term strategy than anyone else on earth, excepting maybe Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. Singapore and Rwanda also seem to be less affected by the malaise of short-term pleasuring of investors. Even norway with its sovereign wealth fund hasn't managed to diversify—or perhaps they simply don't have the labor or resources to do so.
It's all a game of desperation for a failing automaker once again desperate for bailouts in new, fun ways.
First they run over a few kids with Cruise, then they decide they wanna get into the H-bomb game, now it's... molden salt?
So really just assembly and sales then. I suppose it's a good start and maybe if business takes off they can figure out their own cells.
Is GM testing Peak's cells or some Chinese company's cells?
Anyone have a good idea when these will be available for consumers?
Na-Ion cells are great for grid-scale storage because they potentially can go down to something like $20 per kWh. But bulk LFP cells are already at ~$60 per kWh, so their cost is not really a deciding factor anymore.
This company got sold for scrap.
Western industrial policy is indistinguishable from malicious interference.
First shutting down working and safe nuclear power plants in favour of coal, then that.
At this rate I start wondering who actually makes this policy, at most turns exposing the country more to the energy markets issues and making them more reliant on OPEC and Putin.
I don't think there is any other country which had this many opportunities and leads into high-growth and ultra-high-growth industries and made sure none of them panned out. That's not bad timing or bad luck, it's systemic. Maybe the US's conversion into a petrostate?
Like, that's not an unreasonable size of loan for a regional expansion for medium-sized businesses; there should be some sort of lender interested in doing that for them.
> In October 2012, A123 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was thrown into a narrative of Obama-era green energy failures with defunct California solar company Solyndra that had received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees — a comparison to which Vieau objects because A123's technology was "proven," and it built plants and hired people with government support.
> Wanxiang Group Corp., a subsidiary of the largest auto parts supplier in China, acquired its assets for $256.6 million after it had sought to acquire 80% of A123 earlier that year
And proposals using aluminium but again not in action.
Also zinc air https://inc42.com/startups/sthyr-energy-aims-to-tame-169-bn-...
the trouble is it's easy enough to propose such things but hard to be economically competitive with existing solutions. My guess is sodium ion will get cheap because the ingredients are cheap and there's a lot of money going into mass production which will bring the cost of that down over time.
There's an ancient non electrical seasonal solar storage practiced in Austria and such places where they grow tree and then chop them into logs for the winter but it's a bit labour intensive.
This still causes wear on the battery, and it can be better or worse depending on chemistry. The only way to get around that is if you disconnect all inputs, throwing away all the excess solar/wind power and supply exclusively from battery for the entire season.
There's no real benefit apart from like a standby power supply for a cataclysmic event where all other power sources including the sun become nonviable. You just won't ever use the full capacity of the battery, so most of the resources to build it will be wasted.
Lithium prices have faced a massive crash, so there is no cost penalty for them anymore. Sodium's cost benefit isn't that significant now, and while other technical benefits exist, the question remains, is it worth it to setup an entire new factory from scratch for that marginal benefit?
But the economics part is true, people looked to sodium as lithium prices went high and then enthusiasm cooled as they dropped again.
However they now seem to be passed that slump and the long term benefits seem enough for sustained investment.
It helps that the wider market is growing. You can keep your lithium battery factory and use your know how to set up a new sodium battery factory and aim to sell both to slightly different markets for the life of a factory.
On the other hand the 2 Chinese companies that now make sodium batteries "rely on sodium iron pyrophosphate (NFPP) cathodes, which are chemically and structurally similar to lithium-iron phosphate in an LFP battery".
This similarity probably enabled them to reuse much of their existing fabrication lines for LFP batteries.
It is unavoidable that in the long term the cost of sodium batteries will be much lower than of any lithium batteries.
That would have been enough for their adoption for stationary uses, but their much greater temperature range (which allows operation and charging at -40 degrees, both Celsius and Fahrenheit) and their longer lifetime are enough to make them replace lithium batteries in certain applications even without the price advantage.
Lithium batteries will always be used in mobile applications, because they will continue to have a better energy per weight ratio, but for high energy stationary uses and for vehicles in cold climates it is likely that they will be mostly completely replaced by sodium batteries.
The question is, will it be meaningfully lower?
if processes are mature, and because of economies of scale the difference comes out to something like a few cents (or less) per cell... at that point it might become meaningful to ask if the density becomes in play again.
Sure for grid density is not an issue, but installing and setting up a pack still has a cost... so let's say the cost saved by sodium allows them to buy an extra pack... but lithium's density allows them to save the headache of installing that extra pack... won't it even out?
But looking at the discharge profile of Sodium-Ion [1], then a 24v stable output would need about 48v at 100% battery charge and that means cost and complexity on the input and output sides to keep a steady voltage over the discharge cycle. LFP have a much flatter discharge curve but it's a much greater concern with Sodium Ion. Sodium Ion is also criticized for its lifetime cycle degradation.
LTO (Lithium Titanate) batteries hit the sweet spot between both chemistries and are used in electric buses, but I still like Sodium batteries for their environmental considerations.
Wouldn't it be great to somehow harvest power from the temperature swings between night and day in arid regions? Also large changes between sea level and cruising altitude.
I know black tourmaline and certain lithium compounds being pyroelectric generate power upon temperature change due to mechanical stress, which instigates piezoelectricity.
"If the goal is maximum electrical energy generated per degree shift, single-crystal PMN-PT (Lead Magnesium Niobate–Lead Titanate) is currently the top-performing synthetic material." [2]
[1] https://hackaday.com/2025/10/30/why-sodium-ion-batteries-are...
Meanwhile, most serious applications have power conversion circuitry, so a variable voltage may not be much of a problem.
The low-end “12V” LFP packs without real BMSes or power conversion that sort of pretend to be lead-acid batteries in RVs and such are awful designs and work pretty poorly, and their “24V” and “48V” cousins are not much better. It’s true that Na-Ion may not be an easy drop-in replacement. That being said, some people are working on Na-Ion as a lead-acid replacement for car starter batteries (and for low voltage systems in EVs), and they have a lot of potential in this application. (LFP doesn’t have adequate not temperature performance and lead-acid sucks for many reasons.)
Doesn't matter for cars, but I think that's pretty good/important for grid storage.
> The batteries are showing a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent, a significant 2 to 3 percent better than LFP. (“Round trip” refers to the amount of energy a battery discharges, relative to the amount used to charge it).
I think for cars, the efficiency probably doesn't matter that much. If it costs $1.03 per kwh instead of $1.00 per kwh, or 103 miles vs 100 miles, no car owner will care.
But grid storage is all about efficiency.
Is it? Isn't there usually a very large price ratio between when grid batteries are charged and discharged? Like charging at 5 cents and discharging at 25? In that situation a couple percent of inefficiency is nothing special, just a small cost.
QuantumScape is a good example as it entered into agreements with opertors for their battery tech.
Good article on solid state for the grid: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/
This greatly increases the energy density, which is very important for a mobile application, but this has little importance for stationary applications, where not the energy per mass or per volume is important, but the energy per dollar.
Moreover, for stationary electric grid applications, besides the cost, the lifetime is extremely important. As mentioned by others, the companies which provide electric energy want lifetimes of the order of 30 years, which can be ensured with sodium batteries.
For now, the main factor that has prevented the use of the lithium batteries with solid electrolytes is the short lifetimes.
There are good chances that we will see cars with lithium batteries with solid electrolytes, but I do not believe that such batteries will ever be used for high-energy stationary applications.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-d...
Sodium ion batteries are safer than Lithium ion or LFP batteries and also perform better in very cold temperatures.
In a car it’s worth paying more for higher volumetric and gravitational density. For aircraft even more so.
For grid storage, physical space is usually not the largest issue. Cost of deployment, stability, and cycle life are bigger factors.