Our first episode covering sodium-ion batteries featured a cautious take on the chemistry: Back in February Adrian Yao, founder of Stanford’s STEER program, explained the challenges of reaching competitive energy density and costs, especially given the falling price of LFP. Still, sodium-ion chemistries are picking up steam, thanks largely to growing deployments in stationary storage and small-scale mobility in China.
So what’s a more bullish take on sodium-ion?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Landon Mossburg, founder and CEO of sodium-ion battery manufacturer Peak Energy. He outlines a pathway to competitiveness and argues that, in the right applications, the advantages of sodium-ion chemistries outweigh their challenges. Shayle and Landon cover topics like:
- Why almost all current deployments of sodium-ion capacity are in China — and why Korean battery giants are committed to LFP right now
- The thermal advantages of sodium iron pyrophosphate (NFPP) vs. the higher energy densities of layered oxides
- Sodium-ion’s supply chain benefits and lower CapEx requirements
- How NFPP’s system-level savings in cooling, safety, auxiliary power, and maintenance — plus strong cycle life — could offset its current cell cost premium
Resources:
- Catalyst: The promise and perils of sodium-ion batteries
- Latitude Media: Peak Energy’s quest to build US sodium-ion battery dominance
- Latitude Media: Is it too late for the US to rival China on sodium-ion batteries?
- Nature Energy: Critically assessing sodium-ion technology roadmaps and scenarios for techno-economic competitiveness against lithium-ion batteries
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
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Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media: covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann and this is Catalyst
Landon Mossburg: We can see pretty clearly for the next two years because we have quotes from both from raw material suppliers and from cell suppliers that the price is falling by about $20 per kilowatt hour over the next two-ish years, two to three years.
Shayle Kann: Coming up: Watch your blood pressure. We’re talking sodium ion.
I’m Shayle Kann. I invest in early stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. Alright, so a while back we had our first conversation on this pod about sodium ion batteries. In that case with Adrian Yao from Stanford. Sodium ion has garnered a fair bit of attention as a potential future chemistry that sort of continues the trend we’ve seen historically within lithium ion from NMC to LFP, which is to say a chemistry with potentially lower CapEx, lower energy density, but some other characteristics that make it better for certain applications, lower range vehicles and then particularly for stationary storage on the grid. Sodium in addition to that, has a bunch of other potential advantages from a very different supply chain that could be more domestic in the US at least to potentially drop in manufacturing capability to different safety characteristics.
There’s a bunch of things that are pretty interesting about it in principle that need to be proven out still. In reality, I would say that that conversation that we had with Adrian about sodium ion was fairly sober and I think reflected a fairly steep hill that the chemistry would need to climb in order to compete. So I thought it’d be worthwhile to present a more bullish view from somebody who’s on the ground starting to deploy sodium ion systems. Landon Mossburg is the CEO and co-founder of Peak Energy, which is commercializing sodium ion batteries specifically for stationary energy storage applications. As you can imagine, he’s very optimistic about it. So let’s see why. I will say this gets pretty wonky. So if you either aren’t already in battery chemistry world, dunno about sodium ion or just need some of these terms defined, go back to that episode with Adrian Yao. We’ll link to it in the show notes and that’ll be a good primer for you. In the meantime, here’s Landon. Landon, welcome. Thanks,
Landon Mossburg: I’m glad to be here.
Shayle Kann: Let’s talk about sodium ion. I want to start with you walking me through from a global perspective where we are in sodium ion technology, manufacturing, deployment, et cetera. So start with the big picture. How would you characterize today’s state of affairs in sodium ion batteries?
Landon Mossburg: Yeah, it’s been an interesting past couple of years for sodium ion, for batteries in general. I think we started peak energy about two years ago and around that time the promise and a lot of the interest going into sodium ion, frankly one of the reasons we were interested in it, it was sort of like, okay, well this is going to be fundamentally cheaper at the cost of atoms than LFP.
Shayle Kann: I’ve always described it as it’s a different thing, but people I think generally appreciate the NMC to LFP transition that went on over time where LFP fundamentally lower costs, lower energy density. That was a trade that turned out to be worth making in a bunch of context, both stationary and mobile batteries. And so if you think about the promises, you’re describing it a couple of years ago of sodium ion, it was sort of like an extension of that. It was like, okay, this is the next level, even cheaper fundamentally potentially even lower energy density fundamentally, potentially. Now we have to prove one of those things is true and it’s worth it.
Landon Mossburg: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And by the way, I think that’s still the trajectory that is possible, whether that’s the ultimate landing spot is still I think very much dependent on how much traction it gets in different applications and things like that. But I think with similar levels of investment that LFP saw, you would see a similar, you’ll see a similar sort of transition there, but I think two years ago LFP was almost twice as expensive as it is today, and so at that point it just felt like, okay, well the mark to get a cheaper cell with sodium ion is easier it, it’s a easier bar to clear. And lo and behold, sort of over starting two years ago and really over the next year, the price just kind of fell very, very quickly, which is a very interesting time to be starting a sodium ion based energy storage company.
And I had love to say we were smart enough to sort of see where we were going to end up at the application layer, but I think there was a good blend of being far enough along with the work that we were doing to realize that were some other application level benefits that still kept this very, very interesting despite the fact that the bar had gotten harder to meet on or to beat it on a full cost of add-on spaces. But maybe I’ll back up and we can go into those benefits later. To answer your original question about where it is right now, there’s somewhere probably between, it’s hard to know exactly because a lot of this capacity is actually existing lithium ion capacity that can be repurposed or has been repurposed for sodium ion, but I think you’d be pretty safe in saying there’s at least 30 gigawatt hours, probably as much as a hundred gigawatt hours of sodium ion capacity worldwide for all different variants. And sodium ion is similar to lithium ion. It’s not a monolithic cell. You have mostly differentiated by the cathode that you’re using and we’re using sodium pyrophosphate, NNFP, which until very recently didn’t get much attention at all outside of China and even in China it was the second fiddle to higher energy density layered oxides.
Shayle Kann: So 30 gigawatt hours to maybe a hundred gigawatt hours of capacity globally. You made a good point there that the numbers are squishy because people can, and in some cases have repurposed LFP lines to make sodium ion, so the numbers are not as easy as they’re in other cases, but let’s assume it’s something in that range. I assume 95% of that, 99% of that is in China. How much of that is in China?
Landon Mossburg: Almost all of it’s in China. There’s some sort of token projects and stuff elsewhere, but almost all of it’s in China.
Shayle Kann: Interestingly, that implies that the large Korean battery companies like the LGS and SKS and Samsungs are not yet a big players in sodium ion world. Is that true?
Landon Mossburg: Yeah, I think the large Korean players are, they saw the roading riding on the wall with LFP a few years ago and decided to go straight at that, and I think they’re pretty, they got their hands full with that. That’s a really tough thing to try to catch up to the Chinese on that pathway. We’re starting to see some interest there from smaller players in Korea, but also from some of the bigger ones. But I think it’s going to be a journey for them. They’re already kind of committed on LFP to a large extent and they’re going to have to go through that process.
Shayle Kann: So then most of this manufacturing capacity in China. One thing we’ve learned over the years is that manufacturing capacity does not equate to installations, particularly when it is in China. What do we know about where if and where these batteries are getting deployed from the Chinese manufacturers?
Landon Mossburg: It really depends on the, again, sort of type of sodium ion you’re talking about, but there seems to be a large portion of this market’s going towards smaller applications. So think of 12 volt battery replacement stuff, scooters, smaller packs for other kind of scooter like applications
Shayle Kann: Because that’s interesting. I would think that energy density matters a lot in a scooter type application. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Landon Mossburg: I mean, I think that, so you can approach LFP energy density and get really close and even some cases there’s some claims of matching it with layered oxides. Now that’s a higher cost than sodium because you have some sort of transition metal in it, like a nickel or something like that. Copper, we are not doing that. And the layered oxides are also sort of similar to the layered oxides in lithium ion world where cyclability is not as good. The safety profile is a little tougher to design for and things like that, but they are higher energy to higher voltages, so that’s where they play.
Shayle Kann: But I guess it raises the question like why, so if you’re going to put a sodium ion battery in a scooter, what is the benefit that you’re seeking there? You’re getting maybe same energy density at a cost that means that you probably aren’t getting a cheaper battery or vice versa, you’re getting a cheaper battery that has lower energy density. Do you know what, I know this is not the application you’re going after, but I’m just curious what the thinking is. There
Landon Mossburg: Are some performance benefits. So sodium ion in general, again, it’s very chemistry specific, but in general you have much higher ionic conductivity, which translates to higher power, so you can get more power out of these things, especially with layered oxide architectures. They can have really nice cold weather performance. So scooters, this can be super interesting. I think some of this is just momentum too, especially in the layered oxide side that two years ago when they were starting to sign these contracts and stuff like that, LFP was expensive and they could beat the price. Now they’re probably close to the price of LFP, probably not cheaper, but as you know, battery projects take a while to get going and you design a pack and then you have to kind of make a guess about where you’re going to end up on the price.
We from very early days looked at layered oxide and then decided it’s not the chemistry, at least for the current product set that we’re building on the energy storage side. And that’s actually, I mean I think there are really interesting applications. CATL has been very vocal about their hybrid pack technology where they’re using, I think it’s a layered oxide based sodium ion, but they basically have some portion of a vehicle pack that is sodium primarily for power and for cold weather performance, and then the rest is LFP and you’re also hearing BYD push out their first sort of sodium ion packs. So I think there’s a broad consensus that this is trending in the direction and we see the same thing. I mean from the quotes and what we’re hearing from the suppliers, not just cells but also materials. We see a really low risk pathway to the crossover point on price with LFP coming somewhere between 2028 and 2030 out of China. So I think that’s broadly why you see people investing here because you have these performance benefits on the layered oxide side plus a trajectory to get to that level of cost. Sodium ion a different or energy store’s different picture, which is what we’re really excited about, but that’s where we see the other ones.
Shayle Kann: So then that leads to deployment question on the energy storage side. So for stationary energy storage, are we seeing within China deployments at a hundred megawatt scale, 10 megawatt scale megawatt scale? What do we see so far?
Landon Mossburg: You saw the first announcements late last year, early this year with first demonstrator projects, and those are in the tens of megawatt hour scale, and we know there are multiple other in the pipeline. Some of this is driven by some policy in China that provided projects that do non lithium storage with some preference in interconnect queue speed and stuff like that, or the equivalent of whatever the interconnect queue is in China. And so you’re starting to see that get deployed there. There’s also some safety benefits on the NFPP side, which I can talk about where they’re like, if you’re looking at deploying energy storage for fast charging at gas stations, the safety requirement’s really high there. So they’re having an easier time getting those permitted. Interestingly, I think where we see the benefit and where we’re really excited about the product trajectory on our first system is really on non CapEx cost, and we don’t see a ton of focus on that yet in China. I expect there will be as we’re getting traction and they’re seeing what we’re doing, but mostly what you’re seeing right now is either some sort of policy driven measures or things that are due to safety characteristics of the systems that they’re deploying there.
Shayle Kann: I should know the answer to this question, but I’ll ask it to you anyway. I asked you in megawatts, you answered megawatt hours and it made me realize, I don’t actually know, does cost scale with duration with sodium ion similar to how it does with lithium ion?
Landon Mossburg: Yes. Yeah, yeah. That’s one of the benefits of the technology in general, right? There are a lot of really interesting energy storage technologies out there that have promise, but the problem is that they’re really, really, they’re very different than what is the mass, the thing that’s gotten adoption, which is lithium ion based systems. So if you look at flow batteries or compressed air storage or things like that, they’re just new and there’s a lot of unknown unknowns about how you deploy them at mass scale. For sodium ion though it’s so, it’s similar in enough ways to lithium ion that operators know how to use it. The risks are largely well understood. You can apply a huge amount of the supply chain and scale and de-risking and capital and all those structures against it. So that just means that you can get to scale much, much faster with much less risk. And so if you have a technology that actually fits better, it just means the addressable market is much immediately larger.
Shayle Kann: So if I could step back and just characterize how you describe this sort of state of affairs today, there is manufacturing capacity that is at meaningful scale. I mean not compared to LFP or whatever, but tens of gigawatt hours basically all in China. Deployments are starting to happen, it seems more initially in the mobility world than in stationary storage, but they’re initially as well, but we’re very early innings. This is just the past year or two this is happening. Is that right?
Landon Mossburg: Exactly. And I think go back a year ago, you saw when we were over in China, I mean you heard a little bit about NFPP and energy storage for sodium, but it was usually almost everybody was doing it as a side project against layered oxide and higher energy density sodium ion. Today we’re starting to see that flip. There’s increasing interest in NFPP as an energy storage, like a really great technology for energy storage. And you’re seeing even some of the other applications, they’re getting interested into this because we can go into the benefits, but it’s got a lot of system level goodness that just make, especially in energy storage, a better product that’s easier to make and easier to de-risk, but they probably translate to other spaces as well. So I think we’re early innings on sodium ion, but we’re even earlier innings on the scale up of NFPP and I think we’re going to see a lot more of that soon.
Shayle Kann: That sort of gets to my final question on the state of affairs before we go into a deep dive comparison between sodium ion and LFP for grid storage, which is the supply chain. I mean people are familiar with the supply chain for lithium ion generally, where do you get the lithium? Where do you get the cathode materials? Where do you, do you make CAM or PAM? Where do you turn into cells and how and packs and all that. What does that look like in the early days of sodium ion, at least in the initial construct? Is it like an entirely internal China supply chain? Because I know one thing that’s different is that the resource, the base resource is differentiated versus lithium ion.
Landon Mossburg: Yeah, yeah. So I think if you take the bomb for lithium ion and you take the bomb for sodium ion with a few small caveats, they are exactly, you can use the exact same supply chain for sodium ion that you can use for lithium ion except for active material. So cathode active material and anode active material, obviously salts for electrolyte. And then as you get to more specialized architectures, we see a lot of opportunity to customize stuff like separators and solvents and stuff like that, which we are doing. But in general, that’s one of the really nice characteristics of this is that you have a scaled supply chain that you can already draw on for most of the bomb. Now, for the active materials on the, let’s talk about cathode first. What we’re doing is NFPP, and that’s pretty simple. It’s very similar to LFP and the lithium carbonate sort of equivalent for NFPP is sodium bicarbonate.
So you can make that synthetically. It’s relatively cheap to make synthetically. You can also mine it from trona reserves. The US has the world’s largest naturally exploitable proven trona reserves. We have 92% of proven reserves, but you can also make it synthetically and a lot of countries do that. So it’s really not a constrained resource in the same way that high quality lithium carbonate sources are. That’s not going to be the thing that drives any bottlenecks in the process. In fact, I think mostly it’s about getting processing of that up. And I think on that, if you look at the way people make NFPP cathodes now, I think layer oxides are going to be similar in some ways, but I’m not as expert on that. NFPP can use very, very similar process steps as lithium ion cathodes. Interestingly, you can adopt processes that take from LFP type cathode manufacturing or from layered oxide type cathode manufacturing on the, so you have some choices there, and I think there’s ongoing optimization around that.
That’s part of what’s going to continue to drive cost optimization. On the cathode side, of course, most of the processing capability for that today is in China. But I think if you talk about the scale of the challenge to bring up non-Chinese supplies of active material, it’s much easier for sodium ion because you have much less incumbent scale benefit in China to compete with on that technology. So if we wait for four or five years to get into this game, we’re going to be in a similar place that we are today on LFP, but today at least you’re not facing such a huge economy of scale challenge active materials. A really interesting thing too, which we can talk about as well if you’re interested in that, but yeah, hard carbon’s on the anode active side.
Shayle Kann: Okay. So what you’re focused on is stationary storage using NFPP as you said, and I know that your view is that an appropriate comparison. Obviously the thing you need to do to win is to go take down LFP or at least take down a chunk of LFP to go penetrate that market substantially because that market is dominated by LFP. So I think your view is that an appropriate comparison between sodium ion and LFP for grid storage purposes is a holistic view of a bunch of different characteristics. So what I kind of want to do is run through a bunch of different characteristics for you and have you walk me through how you view the comparison between sodium ion, let’s say over the next couple of years, not 10 years from now and not today, but what you see is realistic in if somebody is developing a project, if they’re developing a greenfield project today, what is that going to look like? And then you can tell me how these stack up against each other.
Landon Mossburg: Yeah, happy to do it. And I think maybe to reframe where a little bit about how to think about peak energy. I mean we are building our first technology on sodium ion, but I would not necessarily think of us as a sodium ion company. We are a vertically integrated energy storage company. We want to work from the cell up to the system and pick the best technology there. So it’s not necessarily that we want to beat LFP, we want to just pick the right technology for this application and we think that’s NFPP hard carbon sodium ion right now. There are some really interesting things that might be interesting to talk about later with LFP, high temperature LFP and stuff like that that we are working on, but we’re not dogmatic about LFP versus sodium ion. We just want the right technology there.
Shayle Kann: Good. So that means you’ll be less biased in the answers that you’ll give in a moment as we compare the to. Okay. So I want to start with the sort of obvious one, which is CapEx. Talk me through CapEx and how they compare to each other. I think at the cell level and then at the system level, which is always important not to forget.
Landon Mossburg: Yeah, and that’s where this gets really interesting. So at the cell level, it doesn’t really make any sense to talk about cost per cell because what you actually care about is how much energy is in the cell. So cost per ki kilowatt hour
Shayle Kann: Is
Landon Mossburg: The thing to care about. And right off the bat, NFPP, the primary challenge for the chemistry is that it’s less energy dense than LFP, substantially less. It’s getting better, but that gap is pretty wide. And so the material inside the cell is dirt cheap, even though it’s substantially less energy dense, you’re less, you make up a lot of that cost because your materials are really cheap. But we’re still, today we are, depending on which LFP you’re comparing to, the cells that we’re working on are somewhere between 15 to $30 per kilowatt hour, more expensive than equivalent LFP on a cost per kilowatt hour basis. And this is looking at a LFP cell in China that’s anywhere between 50 to $60 per kilowatt hour. So that’s kind of where it is today.
Shayle Kann: So you’ve got a premium at the cell level, which I think folks appreciate and we can debate till the cows come home, whether that premium sustains into the future or not, sort of irrelevant for the conversation right now.
Landon Mossburg: And we can see pretty clearly for the next two years we have quotes from both from raw material suppliers and from cell suppliers that take the price is falling by about $20 per kilowatt hour over the next two-ish years, two to three years.
Shayle Kann: Okay, so your view is that that premium erodes.
Landon Mossburg: Yeah, not entirely. I think we’ll still be about a $10 per kilowatt hour more expensive if you talk like 2028.
Shayle Kann: Okay. So then let’s talk about the system level. I think there’s things pushing in both directions here. On one hand, your lower energy density and lower energy density effectively means more of all the other stuff. It’s the same reason that people care about efficiency for panels, right? The less efficient you are. The only reason you really care is that your balance of system scales up more. You need more–
Landon Mossburg: More stuff
Shayle Kann: –wiring and more steel and more, right? All that kind of stuff. But on the other hand, there’s also some things in the full system that I think you can spend less on and sodium ion,
Landon Mossburg: Right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. So
Shayle Kann: Walk me through that trade
Landon Mossburg: Now probably the way to explain this is to maybe back up and tell you a little bit about our system, otherwise these trades don’t really make sense. So NFPP hard carbon has a couple properties that make it really interesting for energy storage. The most important property here is that it is much more comfortable at higher temperatures than LFP. So we’re talking like temperatures in a range between 45 degrees Celsius and 60 degrees Celsius where this cell is pretty comfortable and shows similar degradation performance at those temperatures that LFP does at 25 degrees C. This is really important in an energy storage context and it hasn’t historically gotten that much attention because mostly in things like vehicles, you don’t care about this because it’s easy to cool a pack, you have to do that anyway. And what they care more about is cold weather because the car’s off and then it’s going to get cold.
So everyone’s focused down there for energy storage though it’s really much more important at the high end of the range because managing heat becomes one of the hardest things you have to do at these technologies. You’re just pushing so much power in and out of the pack. That’s one piece. The other is partially because of lower energy density, so that’s part of this to be clear. But partially because of chemistry benefits, the cell has a much easier safety profile to design for. So it starts to self heat at a lower temperature than LFP. And when it goes into thermal runaway, it burns colder than LFP, so much easier to prevent propagation. And then when it does start to vent the gas that the cells vent is substantially less explosive, so there’s less hydrogen in that gas than we see about 50% today and 50% less than LFP and opportunity to get that even maybe down below a threshold where you could light it with an open flame, which is a really interesting property. Sorry, go ahead.
Shayle Kann: So just to boil those down then. So what you’re saying is where your savings come in here at the system level are one thermal management and two safety, what you need to install in a lithium-ion battery for safety purposes, you should be able to spend less, at least have less safety equipment embedded within the system.
Landon Mossburg: Exactly, exactly that. And then there’s some other ones like slightly better RTE, less swelling, things like this. They all accrue to system benefits. So that’s the chemistry right now, let me back up to the system level. How do we use that? So a normal LFP system out in the wild, you basically have a bunch of batteries in a container that maybe need to sit in a desert for 20 years and operate and push enough power to power hundreds or thousands of homes every day out of this block. And as you’re doing that, it generates a lot of heat. You also want to make sure that none of these cells go into thermal runway and then explode and that cause a lot of issues. So there’s a huge amount of design and complexity go into the system. And if you actually look at what that nets out to is you get thermal management systems where cooling is the most complex and expensive part of this.
So just on a CapEx perspective, you got to install fans, coolers, pumps a water cooling, and a lot of these cases there’s a ton of material, a ton of volumetric energy density loss because you’re having to put all this stuff in there and auxiliary power to power all of this stuff is actually becomes really, really significant. So in a hot region, these things use on the order of about 50 megawatt hour for a given equivalent unit or block container of LFP energy storage per year of energy just to cool them. So that’s the OX power load and that becomes actually pretty expensive. And then all this stuff, if you think about pumps and fans, it’s all moving. So the moving stuff’s, the stuff that’s going to break this thing has to be out in the desert for 20 years and that’s what you’re going to have to go maintain. You’re having to change filters and do regular maintenance. If the thermal management breaks, you probably have to shut the system down, you can’t use it for a while. So it hits reliability and drives a ton of cost. So you end up spending a lot on operating and maintenance and on auxiliary power for these things in addition to the CapEx cost.
But back to the CapEx cost, all these things plus the safety plus some mechanical stuff you have to do drive a lot of cost and a lot of energy density loss. So because I’ll sort of our system and what I’m really excited about our system is yeah, it’s great that it’s a sodium ion system. It’s the largest sodium ion system deployed to the grid. We actually are the first three and a half megawatt hour unit of capacity is going into the grid right now in Denver. It’s going to be the largest outside of China. All that’s exciting, but what I’m really excited about is that it’s the first passively completely passive thermal management system on the cooling side ever deployed anywhere in the world at Gridscale. This means no moving parts at all through the whole system. And we’ve dramatically simplified the OX power system because of this.
So we have no external power requirements. We’ve managed to depopulate a ton of systems. So a lot of our team come from Tesla and SpaceX. So there’s this engineering philosophy in there where everyone always says best part is no part, right? And so we’ve taken that to heart. We try to depopulate a lot of the subsystems that drive cost complexity and energy density loss here. And what that lets us do is actually get to a balance of system cost despite a serious energy density penalty that is already today pretty much on par with where LFP systems are. And that’s massive because we’re a three and a
Shayle Kann: Sorry, is that the balance of systems cost or is that the total installed cost?
Landon Mossburg: Total installed cost is still a little bit higher primarily because we have that sell
Shayle Kann: Because you have this penalty, right? Okay. So the way to think about it is you’ve got, right, so you’ve got some portion that’s the sell cost, you’ve got a premium there, you’ve got the rest of it that’s bounce system despite the energy penalty, or sorry, the energy density penalty, which should drive higher balance system costs. You’re saying you can get to basically parody on the
Landon Mossburg: Exactly. Yeah, pretty much there, right? It again really depends on the system you’re talking about and all that stuff, but we’re working–
Shayle Kann: Well and it’s idiosyncratic based on the labor rates in the region and all that. But yeah, high level I understand.
Landon Mossburg: Yeah, exactly.
Shayle Kann: So that’s CapEx,
Landon Mossburg: CapEx. So we end up being today, again, all of this is on scale curves and stuff like that, but if you look at equivalents conditions, we’re within 20 to $30 per kilowatt hour of a good LFP system from China today on a cost basis, which is a massive achievement given the energy density penalty. And then that’s trending, as I said, as those cell costs come down, we’ll be within probably $10 per kilowatt hour by 2028. And that is exciting because we’re still more, if that’s where we stopped, we’re like, why do we exist? There’s no reason to buy a sodium ion system in the world. But I think the reason that it’s exciting is because you go to the o and m cost portion of this and that’s where it really, really gets interesting.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, that was going to be my next steps of there’s the sell level, the system, total CapEx level, and then there’s the lifetime cost of ownership level. You’ve already mentioned two pieces here, which is OpEx in general, for example, the electricity load driven by the OX power, things like that, and then lifetime and degradation. So talk to me about the OpEx and lifetime portion.
Landon Mossburg: Yeah, so what’s interesting about this, and it was super surprising to me when I got into this space and we started the company because at the time, and still today I think everybody’s focused on the DC block cost. That’s what you’re trying to get energy density into that going higher energy density, just trying to drive those costs down on the CapEx level. And because intuitively it seems like that would make sense, it’s a battery, how much operating costs should there even be? But as you pull these numbers apart, especially today, because the cost for the hardware has come down so much over the last three, four years today, the cost of the hardware is probably only about a third of the total project cost o and m. So all operating and maintenance, including degradation maintenance, ox power, RTE losses, that is about another third of the total cost NP VD at like a 10% discount if you don’t take an NPV of it, it’s massive.
It’s led by far the biggest thing. And then the other third is installation commissioning, which is still quite high. But while the hardware cost has been massively focused since the beginning of the ESS industry, those other two buckets really haven’t gotten much focus. They haven’t moved too much. And what we found is that with these systems that we’ve talked about, these improvements that we’ve been able to build into this first passive system, we’ve been able to reduce those by really, really material amounts. So just on OX power, we’re a little bit more than 50 times more efficient. We use 50 times less power than an equivalent LFP system. And then on maintenance, we’re substantially less maintenance. Something like 90 or almost 90% of all the components that require regular maintenance or break in a system we’ve just completely removed. By the way, those are also the things that drive a lot of the safety incidents. So if you look at most causes of fires and ESS, which are still fairly rare, but when they happen, they’re usually caused by some thermal management system or some auxiliary system that’s there. We don’t have those. So it’s a safety system by that if you add all that stuff together, we’re at about in a hot region, let’s take Miami or Phoenix, we’re at about a $75 per kilowatt hour in PV benefit on A TCO basis versus an equivalent LFP system,
Shayle Kann: NPV benefit on a TCO basis. Okay, I understand if you’re doing a levelized cost of storage type of calculation, what about lifetime? What about cycle life?
Landon Mossburg: Yeah,
Shayle Kann: And also how certain can we be about cycle life with sodium mine, given how new it is.
Landon Mossburg: Cycle life is not actually, cycle life is pretty good. We are getting close to, I think we’re at very close to 10,000 cycles now on these cells. The one that I think also for LFP, by the way, I think everybody should worry about this is calendar life where you’re like, these things have been on test for over a year now in calendar conditions and we’re really stressing them doing a lot of accelerated life testing. But these are in cases 20 year systems. And also for LFP, this industry is not 20 years old. So there’s a lot of work you have to do to try to estimate that. The good news is that the degradation mechanisms in this chemistry are simpler than, they’re fairly equivalent to LFP. There’s just less of them. So there’s multiple different mechanisms of degradation in all batteries. In NNFP hard carbon, we have less, for instance, we don’t have any graphite, so there’s no graphite exfoliation, which is a major issue in LFP chemistries, but we both have SEI dissolution.
And the way that that happens seems to be very, very similar in both these architectures. So we feel like the risk there of some unknown unknowns popping up is substantially less than if you were going to something that was really novel and new. To answer your question about where the data is showing us that we’re going to get to, we are, this chemistry is just incredibly stable. So you have very, very little mechanical stress. You have almost no iron dissolution in the cathode, which is a problem in LFP chemistries. You do have SEI dissolution, but that is a very well understood problem and it seems like most of the strategies used to stabilize SEI for LFP work also for NFPP. So we’ve seen massive improvements in things like first cycle efficiency loss and overall degradation on SEI over the last year, and it’s continued to get better.
The punchline of this is that the cyclability data that we see is substantially better. So compared to LFP, if you take two cells just cycling equivalent at 45 degrees C, I’m just looking at the data right here that we have after we got two cells, equivalent cells, same size on test in our lab right now LFP is at about 2,600 cycles and it’s at 80% state of health. NFPP is almost 3000 cycles, same cell, and we’re at 95, 94 0.5%. And like I said, we’ve seen almost 10,000 cycles still trending, way above 80% state of health on those things. They just don’t seem to really want to move down. So cyclability is one of the principle reasons that this thing is better and some of our OpEx savings come from reduced augmentation, but actually what we’ve done is we’ve tried to design the system to push to not drive as much benefit in terms of augmentation because the way customers think about augmentation, everyone has a little bit different of a strategy around that and some customers really value less of augmentation others. So we see more value in trying to be better than LFP in degradation, but not way, way better. Instead, we’re sort of taking the system and designing it so that it uses less aux power, needs less cooling, has less maintenance and that sort of stuff. So we pushed the cells harder and still have better degradation performance, but it could even be better if we wanted to cool them the same way, for instance, that LFP does.
Shayle Kann: Alright, so stepping back, I guess one last time here, I want to talk briefly about geography of manufacturing. I think in LFP world, we’ve been very China dominant at the cell level. That’s where the big CapEx investment is on the cell. And now we’re starting to see LFP manufacturing stood up in the US at least to some extent. We’ve got LG and Panasonic, Tesla and so on coming. What do you think happens with sodium ion and what is your plan, right? Right now you’re buying cells from China where they’re produced. Are you eventually going to have to stand up a cell line assuming you stick with sodium ion in the US and what’s that going to look like?
Landon Mossburg: We’re definitely going to build sale manufacturing here in the states. We’re also going to continue to work with partners all over the world. Obviously we have some good partners in China right now we’re in the process of basically getting the plan of the company is kind of like a multi-phase plan, right? Where the first phase is get the technology in the hand of customers, get them comfortable with the technology so that they’ll give us off takes to make a good bankability case to build the cell factory. And we’ve done it, I think we’re at the tail end of that part right now. So we coming out in fairly soon with some pretty big customer announcements around this. But we see tons of traction based on these OpEx benefits and better reliability, better safety characteristics that make this thing really great for all existing IPP applications, but also really attractive for data centers who really care about reliability, stuff like that.
And on the back of that, we have the bank ability to set up the factories here and invest in the supply chain to get this going. But you can’t do that. I mean you’ve talked a lot on prior podcasts about folk financing and all that stuff. It’s the same here. Even though the cell technology is manufactured in a materially similar way to LFP, it still takes some convincing to the market to show that it works and it’s real and that’s what we’re in the business of doing now. But I think your general challenge in setting up a competitive long-term competitive sodium ion based supply chain is probably less, like we talked a little bit before than LFP or any lithium ion just because you are competing with a much less scaled supply chain, at least on active material. And I think there are some properties of sodium ion that give you more flexibility in different ways that haven’t been fully explored on lithium ion.
For instance, the plating mechanism there maybe shows a lot of promise for anode lists or self-forming anode or whatever you want to call it, type cell architectures where that’s been really challenging for lithium ion. It’s not going to be easy for sodium ion, but it looks like it might be easier that could unlock some really interesting products that might be great for automotive and stuff like that and really changes your manufacturing process. Samze thing for things like dry coating, larger cell formats. So I think it just, the nice thing about sodium ion is it lets you go ahead and get started at scale with a product that is really competitive out the gate in the right applications on today. You don’t have to be in the lab for 10 years, but then it has the promise where you can take it in new directions and kind of disrupt the incumbents potentially because the technology allows you to do things down the road that might not be possible with lithium ion.
Shayle Kann: Alright, Landon, and this was super illuminating, really interesting, excited to see some sodium ion and systems out in the wild that you guys are going to put out there, but thank you so much for the time.
Landon Mossburg: Of course. Great talking to you show
Shayle Kann: Landon Mossburg is the CEO and co-founder of Peak Energy. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitude media.com for links to today’s topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode was produced by Daniel Woldorff, mixing a theme song by Sean Maquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I’m Shaylle Kann and this is Catalyst.
