Sodium-Ion Batteries Move From Lab Promise to Grid Storage Orders
For a decade sodium-ion was the battery that would matter once lithium got expensive. In 2026 it picked up something it never had before: order books measured in gigawatt-hours. CATL signed a three-year deal in April to supply Beijing HyperStrong, one of the world’s five biggest storage integrators, with 60 GWh of sodium-ion cells. In the US, Peak Energy holds a phased agreement with Jupiter Power for up to 4.75 GWh between 2027 and 2030, and Alsym Energy has a 500 MWh deployment lined up with developer Juniper Energy, mostly in California.
Those are orders. Delivered capacity is a much smaller number, and the gap between the two is the real story of sodium-ion this year.
What has actually been built
The best-known operating plant is still the one Datang Hubei Energy switched on in Qianjiang, Hubei province, in July 2024: a 50 MW / 100 MWh first phase using HiNa Battery technology, designed to double to 100 MW / 200 MWh. Two years later it remains the reference project everyone quotes. That tells you how thin the field was.
The newer Chinese pattern is the hybrid. Hebei province listed 97 standalone storage pilots in October 2025, and 45 of them (6.2 GW / 20.66 GWh) paired lithium iron phosphate with sodium-ion. The typical split is about 90% LFP and 10% sodium. Zhangjiakou’s Chabei project, for example, is 200 MW / 800 MWh, of which 30 MW / 120 MWh is sodium. The sodium slice is there as a provincial test bed, sized so that a disappointment doesn’t sink the plant. By the end of 2025 lithium batteries still made up about 98.5% of Hebei’s new-type storage installations.
Other provinces lean harder. Yunnan’s July 2026 project list included two sodium-ion plants totalling 400 MW / 1.6 GWh and no LFP at all. Shanxi asks for at least 10% of new storage to be sodium-ion; Zhejiang and Hunan pay a discharge subsidy of 0.1 yuan per kWh for it. Beijing added its own push in September: lithium-ion batteries now pay a 2% consumption tax (rising to 4% in September 2027), while sodium-ion stays exempt through the end of 2028.
CATL’s own storage product, the TENER Sodium system launched in Munich in June, packs more than 30 MWh per modular unit. The company said first deliveries to Chinese customers would start in September and that cumulative shipments would reach 1 GWh by the end of 2026, with international deliveries from June 2027. Against a 60 GWh order book, 1 GWh is the start of a ramp, and it is still a target; no delivered volume had been reported by early October. BYD launched a sodium-ion container, the 2.3 MWh MC Cube-SIB, in 2024, but has not published sodium storage shipment figures.
In the US the installed base is tiny. Peak Energy’s first grid system, 3.5 MWh at the SolarTAC test site in Colorado, came online in September 2025 and runs with nine utilities and independent power producers. Its cells come from Chinese manufacturers, built to Peak’s specification and assembled into containers in Burlingame, California. A 4 GWh-a-year plant in Sacramento is due to start production in the first quarter of 2027, and Peak closed a $108 million Series B led by GM Ventures on October 23. Energy Vault, which bought into battery storage at scale with its Goshe pipeline deal, signed a definitive agreement for 1.5 GWh of Peak’s systems in February.
The cautionary case is Natron Energy. The Stanford spinoff, built on Prussian blue electrodes, ceased operations on September 3, 2025, after failing to raise new money. It had announced a $1.4 billion factory in North Carolina a year earlier. Natron’s 95 jobs in Michigan and California went with it. A good chemistry did not save a company that couldn’t fund working capital before orders arrived.
The price gap is still about two to one
The most useful number this year came out of a Hebei tender. At the Cangzhou Renqiu project, a 100 MW / 400 MWh hybrid, CATL won the sodium-ion section at 1.035 yuan per Wh. Envision Energy won the LFP section at 0.518 yuan per Wh. Same site, same buyer. Sodium cost about twice as much.
That premium has narrowed from where it was. When Shanghai’s Shenneng group tendered 20 MWh of sodium-ion cells in March 2025, it set a ceiling of 1.1 yuan per Wh. Cell-level cost estimates from Northeast Securities, cited in July, put fully loaded sodium-ion cells at 0.33 to 0.42 yuan per Wh against 0.33 to 0.34 for LFP, which suggests the system premium comes mostly from scale and margin; the materials bill is already close. Hard carbon, the sodium anode, fell from 60,000 to 70,000 yuan per tonne in 2024 to roughly 35,000 to 40,000 in 2026. CRU expects the polyanion chemistry NFPP (sodium iron pyrophosphate) to reach cost parity with LFP in 2028. HiNa’s general manager points to 2027 or 2028.
Lithium is the swing factor, and it swings hard. Lithium carbonate on the Guangzhou Futures Exchange hit a 33-month high of 209,880 yuan per tonne on May 13. By October 12 the most active contract had dropped to 104,740 yuan, roughly half, on worries about 2027 demand and a China-EU deal expected to cut Chinese hybrid car exports. Every leg down in lithium pushes sodium’s parity date back. The same thing squeezed sodium in 2023 and 2024, when lithium fell from its 2022 peak, and Natron folded in 2025 before any recovery arrived.
Why grid buyers want it anyway
Weight is sodium-ion’s weak point, and it matters least in a container on a concrete pad. CATL’s large-format storage cell sits at about 160 Wh/kg; its Naxtra EV cell reaches 175 Wh/kg. Both are below LFP. A storage developer pays for it in land and steel. Nobody loses driving range.
What sodium buys in return is temperature tolerance and cycle life. CATL rates its newest 300-plus Ah storage cell for more than 15,000 cycles at 80% capacity retention and an operating window of minus 40 to plus 70 degrees Celsius, and claims more than 90% capacity retention at minus 40 for Naxtra. Those are company figures, and long-cycle claims only get proven by years in the field. Alsym and Juniper picked the Mojave on the same logic at the other end of the thermometer: passive cooling, fewer HVAC units, simpler balance of plant. Peak says its passively cooled system needs no planned maintenance and cuts energy cost by up to 20% against conventional storage. That claim hasn’t been independently checked.
Then there’s the supply chain. Sodium-ion uses no lithium. The polyanion cathodes such as NFPP are built from sodium, iron and phosphate, with no cobalt or nickel; many layered oxide cathodes, the route CATL’s latest cell takes, contain nickel or manganese, so “nickel-free” depends on the chemistry. Because sodium doesn’t alloy with aluminum, both electrodes can sit on aluminum foil instead of copper on the anode side, which CATL says cuts current collector cost by about 70%. For a US buyer, the catch is obvious: China holds 99.6% of global sodium-ion manufacturing capacity, according to BMI. Swapping lithium dependence for a Chinese sodium cell is no gain on energy security, which is why Peak’s Sacramento plant and its cell work with GM matter more than its megawatt-hours today. Alsym makes the same point when it says its materials avoid “foreign entities of concern”.
The honest read for late 2026: sodium-ion has crossed from pilots into contracts, backed by Chinese provincial policy, a tax break and one very large CATL order. It hasn’t crossed into volume deliveries, and it still costs about double LFP at the system level. Watch two numbers in 2027. CATL’s delivered sodium gigawatt-hours against its 60 GWh book, and the lithium carbonate price. If the first rises while the second stays near 100,000 yuan, the parity forecasts hold. If lithium keeps falling, sodium stays a hedge.