There’s a new type of battery in town: Last month, sodium ion battery manufacturer Peak Energy launched the largest sodium ion battery system in the world. The NFPP battery will be deployed to the electric grid at a site in Colorado and used by utilities and independent energy producers via a shared pilot program.
In an interview with Tech Brew, Peak President and CCO Cameron Dales said that the launch marks the beginning of sodium ion technology being used for stationary storage and the sodium ion market writ large.
Keep it cool: Sodium ion batteries differ from lithium ion batteries, which are used to power electric vehicles, in a couple of key ways. First, lithium ion batteries need to be meticulously cooled to avoid thermal runaway, or electrical current in the battery overheating and potentially catching fire, while sodium ion batteries maintain a more stable temperature. And second, lithium ion batteries have a higher energy density than sodium ion batteries.
Dales told Tech Brew that while lithium ion’s higher energy density lends the batteries to be better suited for EVs, sodium ion batteries are a great match for grid storage.
“You can build a [sodium ion] system that doesn't even have the cooling systems that these complicated [lithium ion] systems have. So you're saving a bunch of money on all the equipment up front,” Dales said. And without a cooling system, Peak is adding “more batteries so you make up a bunch of the energy density penalty at the cell level by having more room in the system to put more cells because you have less of that equipment.”
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Because sodium ion and lithium ion batteries are so different, Dales said that he expects Peak’s launch to usher in an era of varying in battery solutions for a diversity of energy storage applications.
“There's no one size fits all best battery for every application,” he told Tech Brew. “We collectively believe that this really is a better fundamental approach for grid scale storage.”
Still charging: For now, Peak is building its energy storage system around sodium ion battery cells that are currently in production. Eventually, Dales said, the company intends to bring a cell manufacturing plant to the U.S. to make them domestically in order to recoup clean energy tax credits, per the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“[The Act] makes some pretty tough rules around how you access those tax credits, which are not going to be trivial for any of us to go meet,” Dales told Tech Brew, “but I think it is doable.”