Deploying sodium-ion batteries to meet the grid’s long-term energy storage needs has opportunities and challenges, and they both lie in cost reduction.
That’s according to Cameron Dales, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, which is developing energy storage technology for the grid and has recently announced a $55 million Series A led by Xora Innovation, with participation from Eclipse and TDK Ventures, among others.
“The real promise of investing in sodium-ion, and the reason why our customers are interested in the approach, is number one, cost, number two, safety, and number three, supply chain security,” he told Latitude Media in an interview.
Peak Energy is part of a handful of U.S. companies – such as Acculon Energy, Bedrock Materials, and Natron Energy – rushing to commercialize sodium-ion batteries, after China started mass-producing them in recent years. (“It’s going gangbusters there now,” Dales said.)
Its first customers are independent power producers and utility companies that will receive its sodium-ion batteries as part of a pilot program early next year.
The bet is that sodium-ion batteries, which have long been snubbed in favor of their lithium-ion counterparts, will get cheap enough to provide the perfect solution for longer-duration grid storage applications, where energy density is not a top priority.
“The technical challenges [of sodium-ion] are simpler and better understood, but the application requires scale and low cost,” Dales said. “We’re focusing on making it as simple, cheap, and safe as possible because that ultimately drives lower cost to address a larger scale market.”
Sodium-ion batteries are theoretically already cheaper than lithium ones to manufacture – sodium-ion cells are about $50/kWh, compared with $70/kWh, according to S&P Global Mobility research – but they’re not commercially deployed at scale.
Peak Energy predicts long-duration storage sodium-ion batteries for the grid will achieve cost-parity with the lowest-cost lithium batteries in 2025, and become as much as 50% cheaper over the next few years.
It’s worth noting that projections across the industry are not consistent. An August 2024 report by the DOE found that innovation costs for sodium-ion batteries are low, but their innovation implementation period is long. The projected average levelized cost of sodium-ion storage in 2030 is one of the highest among ten potential long-duration energy storage technologies.
The report also projected a baseline levelized cost of storage of $0.553/kWh based on a 100-megawatt sodium-ion battery system with 10 hours of storage, versus just $0.143/kWh for a lithium-ion equivalent.
The analysis, however, is based “on a sodium chemistry which has historically been the focus of academic research in the US and Europe” and “has quite different properties to materials that have emerged in China recently as the preferred sodium ion approach for energy storage systems,” according to Dales.
“At Peak Energy, we are seeing significantly better data from our suppliers and our own testing of cells. DOE notes specifically the difficulty of accessing reliable data in Western academic studies. In fact, they have reached out to us to better understand the current status of sodium-ion technology.”
Three-phase plan
Peak Energy’s ultimate goal is to become “the CATL of America,” a domestic company capable of commercially producing and deploying sodium-ion batteries worldwide, according to Dales. The plan is to scale up in phases, leveraging China’s head start at first.
In its first phase, Peak Energy plans to focus on developing the energy storage system, while purchasing sodium-ion battery cells out of China, to start servicing customers as soon as possible. In its second phase, it plans to operate a sodium-ion battery cell factory in the U.S., slated to open in 2027 and lean on China for raw materials. And in its third phase, it hopes to have a material supply chain in the U.S. that will allow it to be fully independent.
“You can’t just 100% focus on the resources and the capabilities that exist in the US today, because we’re so far behind in the battery world,” Dales said. “It’s a mistake to put the blinders on, wave the American flag, and try to build a company that’s isolated from the center of gravity of the battery industry.”
That said, the U.S. is not even among the top eight lithium producers in the world. Sodium carbonate, on the other hand, is cheap and plentiful, and one of its largest known natural deposits is in Wyoming, which gives U.S. battery companies a “fresh start” they haven’t enjoyed in a while.
“It’s the right place for companies outside of China to skate to where the puck is going, as opposed to where it’s been,” Dales said.
