China’s dominance of the battery supply chain is uncontested. Many U.S. storage companies have tried to catch up by replicating the technologies already in mass production there. But a smaller cohort is taking a different tack: building factories for next-generation batteries that could give American manufacturers more of a competitive edge.
Peak Energy is one of the newest members of that cohort. The startup, which appeared on the scene in 2023, took a big step this summer when it shipped its first sodium-based grid-battery system for installation in the field. The 875-kilowatt/3.5-megawatt-hour battery is now being completed in Watkins, Colorado, at a testing facility known as the Solar Technology Acceleration Center.
In fairness, the battery cells were imported from China, but Peak designed and built a new enclosure for them in Burlingame, California. Since the sodium batteries are especially rugged, Peak could forgo the temperature-control equipment needed for the current favorite chemistry for grid storage, lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP). If this first installation works well and the cost savings are as consequential as promised, Peak plans to build U.S. manufacturing for the whole package, cells and all.
But the power sector still wants to build grid batteries at record pace, especially as supersized data centers clamor for electricity supply as soon as possible.
Safer batteries mean less energy spent on temperature control
Upstart battery-makers often jockey over how much energy density they can pack into their cells, or how they can reduce the fire risks that follow from squeezing so much energy into a tight footprint. Peak Energy brags more about what its technology doesn’t need: heavy-duty climate control.
“If you think about it, an LFP [energy storage system] is essentially a giant refrigerator that has to operate flawlessly for 20 years in the desert,” said Cameron Dales, Peak’s chief commercial officer and cofounder. That’s because that particular chemistry ideally needs to stay within a few degrees of 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) to preserve its useful life; serious deviations from that safe zone could lead to declining performance or even dangerous failures. A handful of dramatic battery fires has already inspired community pushback against storage plants, making safety a crucial part of the industry’s social license. Indeed, this week U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin pledged to support communities resisting nearby battery installations.
The sodium-ion cells that Peak favors — technically called sodium iron pyrophosphate or NFPP — can withstand a much broader range of temperatures, from minus 20 degrees C (minus 4 degrees F) to 45 degrees C (113 degrees F). Peak’s engineers thus dispensed with the usual battery-cooling systems, relying instead on what Dales calls “clever engineering” around how the cells fit into the broader package. “There’s no moving parts, no fans, no liquids, no pumps, no nothing,” he said. The container does include a solid-state heater to ensure the cells never get too cold to charge.
This saves money by reducing the cost of materials and cutting auxiliary power usage up to 90% over the life of the project. But axing the conventional safety equipment brings one more major benefit, because that hardware has paradoxically caused several of the recent high-profile grid-battery fires (by, for example, erroneously spraying water on live batteries, which can make a fire where there wasn’t one).
Plenty of cleantech startups have pitched themselves as safer alternatives to dominant strains of lithium-ion batteries, only to be crushed mercilessly by the lithium-ion manufacturing juggernaut. Overwhelming scale and a wealth of industrial expertise keep pushing mainstream batteries to lower prices and superior performance. However, the up-front costs of the batteries themselves are now just a small piece of the overall bill.