By Allison Proffitt
July 16, 2024 | At the beginning of July, Shirley Meng’s team published new advances in anode-free sodium ion batteries. Last month, two companies—one Chinese and one based in San Diego—netted venture funds for grid applications for sodium ion batteries.
The common thread is clear. Now is the time for sodium ion chemistry, says Landon Mossburg, CEO and cofounder of Peak Energy. Mossburg says sodium ion batteries are the fundamental building block for energy storage systems of the future.
Editor’s Note: Explore sodium ion batteries in more depth at the upcoming Sodium Ion Battery Conference in Chicago, August 13-14.
The United States has an urgent need for more energy storage, he said, driven most recently by rising grid electricity demand from EVs and data centers. Old natural gas and coal plants are still on the grid past their scheduled retirements to offer redundancy, and renewable sources of power—solar and wind—come with intermittency.
“When I started learning about [sodium ion batteries], it just seemed like a perfect fundamental fit… It was like a better version of LFP. It’s not quite energy dense enough for cars—at least not yet—but for ESS it’s perfect. It’s safer, better temperature range, much more abundant materials, so a lot less supply chain bottlenecks. In almost all the ways that really matter for ESS, it’s a better option,” Mossburg told Battery Power Online. “The fundamental cost component—because nothing in there is very expensive—it’s always going to be lower than LFP at scale.”
That last bit—“at scale”—is key. When Mossburg scanned the battery industry looking for the next best opportunity—he was leaving Northvolt with a background from Tesla and Accenture—there were some sodium ion startups. He mentions Altris, Faradion, which was bought by Reliance Industries in 2022, and a few others. But, “Nobody was really looking to scale up. That’s where we saw the gap. The only real scale seemed to be happening in China,” he says.
“We were too late to the game to compete with China [on LFP],” he said. “It’ll take a lot of capital to catch up.” So instead, one year ago he—along with a founding team from Tesla, Northvolt, Enovix, and Zipline—launched Peak Energy. In October 2023 the company closed its seed round with $10 million from Eclipse Ventures and TDK Ventures.
China is also moving quickly, he notes, on sodium ion chemistry. “The Chinese government has put in place some policies that really encourage the adoption for sodium… These policies are really similar to what they did for LFP ten, 15 years ago. They’re running that playbook again.”
But China’s scale is an asset, he argues. “That’s one of the reasons I think this is going to be a winning technology, because there is a supply chain for it.”
Now Peak Energy’s headcount is “about 40”, he said. About 30% of the team are from Tesla, Mossburg estimates. “Almost everyone else comes from a place like Rivian, Panasonic, or Nothvolt.” The company has signed six customers for the pilot program, he says, starting with IPPs.
Think of the product—at this point—like a Tesla Megapack, but filled with sodium ion cells, Mossburg explains. But it’s not just a chemistry swap. “We’re starting with systems,” he says. “If you think about a battery system, this thing has hundreds—probably more than a thousand—part numbers in it. [It’s a] really complex machine to do this because it’s so large, so much energy is being stored. You need to handle all the thermals and all that stuff. The battery’s certainly probably the most complicated, most important part of that system, but there’s a huge amount of work and IP and technology that goes into the stuff around it.”
Peak buys sodium ion cells from providers and integrates them into the systems it is designing, “from the ground up to be the best fit for the technology.” Just sticking a sodium ion cell into an LFP system isn’t good enough, Mossburg contends. “It will probably be more expensive than if you just used LFP because it’s less energy dense, so you need to optimize for that.”
The grid-connected battery storage is for both utilities and independent power producers. “You can also go behind the meter with this, but the batteries are really big, so you need a lot of demand behind the meter if you want to do it,” he adds.
The first builds for Peak’s pilot customers are happening now, Mossburg says, and will scale up starting in 2026. He says the company plans to begin producing its own sodium ion cells in 2027, with an R&D roadmap that will lead to eventually producing the full supply of cells Peak needs. “Then we’ll do a sort of third generation product,” he says, “which is going to be from the cell to the full system, purpose built for ESS and all of our IT.”
