The lithium-ion batteries that supply much of today\u2019s clean energy come with some infamous drawbacks, from fire risk to reliance on foreign mining.<\/p>\n
Alternatives have been slow to get off the ground.<\/p>\n
But California start-up Peak Energy announced Wednesday it\u2019s building a factory in Sacramento that will be the first in the U.S. to make sodium-ion battery packs at commercial scale.<\/p>\n
Sodium-ion batteries have long held promise. They are made from cheap and abundant sodium ash deposits. The materials are less prone to overheating, so they don\u2019t have the fire risk of lithium.<\/p>\n
But they also store less energy per cubic inch. That means they have to be bigger and heavier, which makes them harder to fit into electric vehicles. So far, they\u2019ve struggled to compete.<\/p>\n
Peak Energy thinks it has an edge. The company focuses on storage systems big enough to power large data centers, factories and whole segments of the grid, where battery size matters less. <\/p>\n
The company already delivers battery packs out of a small pilot project in San Francisco, but has gotten $1.1 billion in pre-orders and now it needs more space. <\/p>\n
CEO and co-founder Landon Mossburg said its first products, each about the size of a shipping container, will begin rolling out in early 2027. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re a three-year old company with over a billion in deposit-backed customer contracts, we\u2019ve got grid deployment already, and all those products are exceeding expectations on the grid,\u201d said Mossburg. \u201cThose are really great signals.\u201d<\/p>\n
He founded Peak after working at Tesla and the now-folded Swedish battery company Northvolt. Initially, the elements that make up the systems, the battery cells, will come from China.<\/p>\n
Customers for Peak who have out down a deposit include independent power providers Jupiter Power, Energy Vault and RWE Americas, who are connecting utilities, and increasingly data centers, with batteries. Peak also works with utilities directly including one unnamed customer in California, and is \u201cin fairly advanced discussions with two of the major hyperscalers,\u201d Mossburg said. <\/p>\n
Not everyone is so optimistic about the technology. Lithium-ion batteries are still cheaper, at least up front.<\/p>\n
\u201cSodium-ion batteries attracted considerable interest when lithium-ion battery prices surged in 2022,\u201d said Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF. Since then, he noted, those prices have come down. <\/p>\n
And as with lithium-ion battery chemistry, Asian manufacturers already have an edge. <\/p>\n
\u201cSodium-ion cells are currently exclusively manufactured on a commercial scale within China,\u201d said Evan Hartley, a research manager at the Benchmark Minerals consulting firm. Large producers, like BYD and CATL, he said, are spending enormous amounts to research and develop new products. <\/p>\n
Other U.S.-based sodium-ion startups have floundered of late. Natron Energy canceled plans<\/a> to produce sodium-ion battery cells in North Carolina last year after funding difficulties. Bedrock Materials, which was making sodium-ion batteries for EVs, also closed up shop,<\/a> citing a bet on a lithium supply shortage that hadn\u2019t panned out. <\/p>\n But Peak Energy\u2019s model is different, said Mossburg. Unlike Natron, it won\u2019t be trying to make the batteries that go into their systems at first. They\u2019ll import them, initially from China and later from other countries in Asia. <\/p>\n \u201cWhile working at Tesla, I saw the advantage of focusing on a great end product that customers want before you try to bite off more of the scope,\u201d said Mossburg. <\/p>\n