Surely this will just be Chinese hardware with a "made in America" label slapped on it. I can't fathom why anyone would allow GM of all companies to get any contracts
This is the same story everywhere. Nobody has the know-how or the deep ecosystems needed to do these things.<p>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).<p>Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....".<p>In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm:<p>1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah.<p>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.<p>Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).
Indian companies do not like to do research. Too much risk. They prefer to buy proven stuff. There are small companies doing a lot of what the Chinese are doing (including LFP and other battery chemistry). But they cannot scale up because they lack the necessary investment and order book.<p>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.<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-solar-push-idles-factories-unable-shake-reliance-china-2026-07-23/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-solar-push-id...</a>
Huh Tata is the best selling EV manufacturer in India.<p>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.<p>This is for their new premium EV line.
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My company operates two Jupiter Power owned LFP batteries in the MISO market. Each of them draws .5 - 2MW constantly for the HVAC system. If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.
> If the cost for sodium batteries is similar to LFP, that alone would be a reason to switch.<p>Why would that be a reason to switch, given the LFP batteries typically have better operational parameters in everything except cold-weather charging?
Cost of replacement? Cost of insurance against a fire? Cold weather performance may also be quite important, and not only somewhere in Alaska, but even in places like Dallas, that are hot in summer but cold during winter nights.
Not an expert, but from what I read the expectation is for sodium ion batteries to get substantially cheaper than lithium, mainly due to material cost.<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...</a><p>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.
AT grid scale, sodium quickly closes the gap on lithium. The safety overhead, active cooling, and physical spacing needed to control lithium’s thermal runaway risk eat away most of its energy density advantage. Plus, CATL is hitting cost parity between full sodium BESS and LFP BESS systems.
The other big reason is the longevity. LFP life span gives you about 2000-5000 cycles depending on where your application can't tolerate the capacity reduction.
Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.<p>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.
I’d love a shed sized battery sitting on the corner of my property if it could give me 5-7 days of power.
I'm writing this from my off grid shack.<p>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.<p>It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.<p>So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.<p>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.
> It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.<p>If the GP commenter is typing in from the UK .. that's a not uncommon garden tool shed size.<p>By contrast modern Australian farm sheds have clouds forming within them and host birds that seasonally migrate from one side to the other.
They make hyper-insulated refrigerators for use on ships with limited electricity that use either vacuum insulated panels or aerogel insulation.
For something like a battery backup that last decades that doesn't need maintenance, maybe you could bury it out of the way (like under a deck or lawn?), maybe even under the frost line.
Underground is a big problem with it comes to water permeation and flooding.<p>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.
might need to be in some special containment at that size, depending on the technology -- some sodium ion battery implementations are very toxic / highly reactive / flammable.
That would you pay for that shed size battery?
Depending on just how much more cost effective sodium battery tech gets, that might not be a questionable proposition
I mean, I pay around $2,000 (AUD) per annum for electricity from the grid.<p>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 am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.<p>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.
It's called diesel fuel.
I want to replace my Lithium home battery, and what I really want to do it to move to one of the new sodium ion batteries..e.g like the one CATL is supposed to have at some point?<p>Anyone have a good idea when these will be available for consumers?
Bluetti has a small battery pack for now. I think the options for consumers will balloon once CATL mass produce sodium ion cells. Solix/anker, jackery, ecoflow, etc all use CATL cells already.
Na-Ion batteries are not practical for home storage right now. They have a much higher voltage range compared to LFP batteries, so regular inverters and chargers will not work reliably. Nothing insurmountable, but the supply chain is just not here.<p>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.
Why would you replace it? That asset likely has at least 10 years in it if you already have it.
Why? You also need to replace your inverter in that case.
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Pretty that’s just not true.<p>Sodium ion batteries are less energy dense than lithium ion and are not prone to dendrite formation. They are also more thermally stable and less likely to do thermal run away reactions.<p>Also, since they are less energy dense they don’t store the same potential energy.<p>You are probably thinking of metallic sodium batteries which are completely different.
You must work for a LiPo company. This is the opposite of truth. Sodium doesn't behave like lithium at all. The chemistry is very different. Imagine if table salt had an exo reaction in water
> This is bad in that when the battery malfunctions, the energy is released at 30x the rate<p>Got a study you can link about that?
What bullshit are you spouting sodium batteries are safer and do not have the same thermal runway concern that lithium batteries do.
You have this flipped backwards
What? All the data suggests that sodium ion batteries are safer than lithium ion batteries: it is harder to set them into thermal runaway and they are less violent when they do so.
> a round-trip efficiency of 96 percent<p>Doesn't matter for cars, but I think that's pretty good/important for grid storage.
Keep in mind, we could have had local Na-Ion battery production in the US. The company producing them needed about $5m of bridge loans, with products already sitting in warehouses awaiting the UL certification.<p>This company got sold for scrap.
your comment would be more interesting if you actually provided any details at all
Sorry, I accidentally cut off the last paragraph when posting. The company was Natron Energy: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/natrons-liquidation-shows-why-the-us-isnt-ready-to-make-its-own-batteries/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/natrons-liquidation-shows-...</a>
If it only cost 5M for something like that investors would have been in a line around the building.
Given that $5 million is not <i>that</i> much in the heavy industry game, I'd like to know why they couldn't get the bridge loans.<p>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.
I suspect some shenanigans from investors. The bankruptcy also was handled in an unusual manner, not through a regular liquidation.
That's why, if you look at Fervo energy's makeup, and ask why do your have so many finance people, relative to the number of engineers; that's why. As a software developer, I have no idea how to get a $5 million bridge loan other than whatever ChatGPT could tell me. Meanwhile, a team of finance guys with domain expertise could have gotten them that $5 million.
> Peak Energy is buying its commercial cells via contracts with Chinese suppliers<p>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.
Yeah, I had questions when Kurt Kelty was saying that Peak's battery was "kicking butt" after the article said Peak is still building their battery factory and currently buys its cells from China.<p>Is GM testing Peak's cells or some Chinese company's cells?
Chinese companies started similarly 25-30 years ago.
Hardware-speech synthesis.
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Its a failure in the U.S. because the bet is on solid state batteries. Personally I won't take the EV plunge until they have those. The only exception for me to not wait would be the 10k BYD car. At that price point and it lasted 3 years i'd be happy.
The constraints and priorities for EVs and grid storage are very different.<p>In a car it’s worth paying more for higher volumetric and gravitational density. For aircraft even more so.<p>For grid storage, physical space is usually not the largest issue. Cost of deployment, stability, and cycle life are bigger factors.
This is for grid storage, not EVs.
The article is about grid storage, but grids can also use solid state and battery tech is shared between different usecases. My point was where the bet is.<p>QuantumScape is a good example as it entered into agreements with opertors for their battery tech.<p>Good article on solid state for the grid: <a href="http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/" rel="nofollow">http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/</a>
Nobody in their right mind would put Na-ion batteries in an EV. The lawsuits would never stop. It would be worse than Asbestos lawsuits.
Ridiculous statement without any evidence. CATL and Changan Automotive are already making and putting them in EVs.<p><a href="https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-debuts-game-changer/" rel="nofollow">https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-d...</a><p>Sodium ion batteries are safer than Lithium ion or LFP batteries and also perform better in very cold temperatures.
Receipts please. This is counter to everything I've read about the technology.
I think you need to start backing up your claims. (And no, beautiful, clean coal won't cut it.)