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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.
That means nothing without knowing the size of your facility though.
Are your batteries 25MW/100MWH or 250MW/1000MWH.
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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. QuantumScape is a good example as it entered into agreements with opertors for their battery tech. Good article on solid state for the grid: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2025/ph240/mann2/
This greatly increases the energy density, which is very important for a mobile application, but this has little importance for stationary applications, where not the energy per mass or per volume is important, but the energy per dollar.
Moreover, for stationary electric grid applications, besides the cost, the lifetime is extremely important. As mentioned by others, the companies which provide electric energy want lifetimes of the order of 30 years, which can be ensured with sodium batteries.
For now, the main factor that has prevented the use of the lithium batteries with solid electrolytes is the short lifetimes.
There are good chances that we will see cars with lithium batteries with solid electrolytes, but I do not believe that such batteries will ever be used for high-energy stationary applications.
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.
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. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it i…
It matters less but it's still a big deal though. You need to inject the power near where you need it otherwise you have to upgrade everything between you and them, roughly speaking. So you can't put your battery in BFE where land is cheap.
Cost increases from that plus environmental and site development regs (which are always more in denser areas) screw you too. So between the upgrades and the overhead there might not be a valley of profitability because all the sites you could toss a battery on and the sites where someone who has a more $$ use case than you will outbid you on the raw land.
So the end result is you wind up having to shoehorn a bunch of little developments into small crappy parcels but then the fixed costs of development come back to bite you so density matters there because the more jiggling electrons you can pack in the more revenue you can have to offset your fixed costs.
That said, anything that lets you tell the NFPA, the environmentalists and the local screeching Karens to take their setbacks and shove them hugely improves density, especially on small sites, so the reduction in cooling needs and runaway protection that sodium gets you might make it denser once the tech is fully vetted. Every foot you can shave off the effective footprint of a battery (after accounting for fire setbacks, service space, etc) hugely increases the number of sites that are developable.
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Sorry, I accidentally cut off the last paragraph when posting. The company was Natron Energy: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/natrons-liquidation-shows-...
Germany is currently liquidating their high-performance lithium-ion battery maker. Western industrial policy is indistinguishable from malicious interference.
First shutting down working and safe nuclear power plants in favour of coal, then that.
At this rate I start wondering who actually makes this policy, at most turns exposing the country more to the energy markets issues and making them more reliant on OPEC and Putin.
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I think people should start flagging his posts. Obviously he's not here to participate in good faith.
Certainly giving strong Taylor Sheridan Landman ranting against windmills vibe, with a twist of bad chemistry and bias against batteries thrown in for good measure.
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.
I've been pondering the question of what happens if you change the design requirements to say, 20 charge/discharge cycles in total, then use it over seasonal timescales. Can you get the price so low that you can scale up enough battery storage to buffer a whole season?
This still causes wear on the battery, and it can be better or worse depending on chemistry. The only way to get around that is if you disconnect all inputs, throwing away all the excess solar/wind power and supply exclusively from battery for the entire season.
There's no real benefit apart from like a standby power supply for a cataclysmic event where all other power sources including the sun become nonviable. You just won't ever use the full capacity of the battery, so most of the resources to build it will be wasted.
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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. 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 amor…
> Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life. The article claims much better: > the company’s GS1.1 [Sodium Ion] system will store energy for 20 years, over roughly 20,000 cycles, and still retain 80 percent of its capacity. For LFP, a basic durability benchmark pegs them at 70 percent capacity after 8,000 cycles.
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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. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... The main downside is power density, which for grid storage is not as big a deal as it i…
I’d love a shed sized battery sitting on the corner of my property if it could give me 5-7 days of power.
Re use old ev batteries unmodified for battery storage
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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. 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.
Just to clarify - you were looking at 50k+ for an on grid setup and solar + battery has cost you 8k so far?
I live in a very rural spot with a difficult-to-deal-with Electric Association, with a Ute reservation on one side and unpowered parcels on other sides; I don't think that the easement is a typical issue.
And to be clear, I didn't count my labor in designing or implementing the system. I suspect that would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of another $10K if I had to get a hands-off, turn-key version of this same system.
And at some point I will likely double much of the capacity, at which point I will be able to run a mig welder at night if I want...