Donate

Innovations

Energy

Sodium-ion grid storage

A grid battery storage site next to the Desert Sunlight solar farm in Riverside County, California, with rows of battery units, a substation and power lines.

A grid battery storage site next to the Desert Sunlight solar farm in Riverside County, California, with rows of battery units, a substation and power lines.

Photo: Bureau of Land Management California, courtesy of NextEra, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain (work of a U.S. federal government agency).

Energy Pilot

What it is

A sodium-ion battery stores and releases electricity by moving sodium ions between two electrodes, the way a lithium-ion battery moves lithium ions. On 22 June 2026 in Munich, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), a Chinese battery maker, unveiled TENER Sodium, a battery storage system for power grids built on sodium-ion cells. CATL describes it as the world’s first field-validated sodium-ion energy storage system and says it has reached full commercial maturity in technology, production capacity and supply chain readiness. CATL says TENER Sodium delivers more than 30 megawatt-hours of rated capacity in a modular design, and that 34 modules are enough for a 1 gigawatt-hour site.

Why it matters

CATL says lithium supply is concentrated and its prices are volatile, while sodium is more than 1,000 times more abundant and widely distributed. CATL says the system can be configured for storage durations of 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8 hours, and that it fits the same footprint as its lithium iron phosphate systems, so a project can use either chemistry in the same enclosures. At the June launch CATL said it would begin delivering systems to customers in China in September 2026, expects cumulative shipments of 1 gigawatt-hour by the end of 2026, and will begin deliveries outside China in June 2027. In April 2026 CATL and HyperStrong, a Beijing company that supplies energy storage systems, signed an agreement for 60 gigawatt-hours of sodium-ion batteries over three years, which CATL and HyperStrong both describe as the world’s largest sodium-ion battery agreement announced to date.

How to read it

Nearly everything here comes from CATL’s own announcement, so it is the company’s account of its product and its plans. The shipment figure for 2026 is a forecast, and the start of deliveries in China in September 2026 and outside China in June 2027 are schedules. Later announcements from CATL and HyperStrong will show which systems have actually been delivered and where.

Limits

Every figure here is CATL’s own or HyperStrong’s own. The one performance number in CATL’s release is a gain of nearly 2 percent in round-trip efficiency, the share of stored electricity that comes back out, from its voltage regulation system. The system was unveiled in June 2026, so its long-term record in service is still to be built. The agreement with HyperStrong is a supply commitment over three years, and actual deliveries will show up in later announcements.

Sources