Not everyone is leaving California -- new commercial battery maker sets up shop in Sacramento
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Set us as preferred The lithium-ion batteries that supply much of today’s clean energy come with some infamous drawbacks, from fire risk to reliance on foreign mining.Alternatives have been slow to get off the ground.But California start-up Peak Energy announced Wednesday it’s building a factory in Sacramento that will be the first in the U.S.to make sodium-ion battery packs at commercial scale.Sodium-ion batteries have long held promise.
They are made from cheap and abundant sodium ash deposits.The materials are less prone to overheating, so they don’t have the fire risk of lithium.But they also store less energy per cubic inch.
That means they have to be bigger and heavier, which makes them harder to fit into electric vehicles.So far, they’ve struggled to compete.Peak Energy thinks it has an edge.
The company focuses on storage systems big enough to power large data centers, factories and whole segments of the grid, where battery size matters less.The company already delivers battery packs out of a small pilot project in San Francisco, but has gotten $1.1 billion in pre-orders and now it needs more space.
CEO and co-founder Landon Mossburg said its first products, each about the size of a shipping container, will begin rolling out in early 2027.“We’re a three-year old company with over a billion in deposit-backed customer contracts, we’ve got grid deployment already, and all those products are exceeding expectations on the grid,” said Mossburg.
“Those are really great signals.”He founded Peak after working at Tesla and the now-folded Swedish battery company Northvolt.Initially, the elements that make up the systems, the battery cells, will come from China.Customers for Peak who have out down a deposit include independent power providers Jupiter Power, Energy Vault and RWE Americas, who are connecting...