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Sodium-Ion Battery Tested for Grid-Scale Storage in Wisconsin (electrek.co) 135

Posted by EditorDavid from the battery-up dept.
"A new type of battery storage is about to be deployed on the Midwestern grid for the first time," reports Electrek: Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer Peak Energy and global energy company RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the first sodium-ion deployment on that grid. Peak Energy says its technology is specifically designed for grid-scale storage and leverages sodium-ion chemistry's inherent stability. Unlike many lithium-ion systems, sodium-ion batteries don't require active cooling and can operate over a wide temperature range without losing performance.

That simpler design could make a meaningful dent in the cost of storing electricity. According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly half the total cost of a typical battery system today. The company says it achieves those savings by removing energy-hungry cooling systems, eliminating routine maintenance requirements, and reducing the need to overbuild storage capacity to account for battery degradation over time...

If the Wisconsin pilot proves successful, it could open the door to wider adoption of sodium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage across the US.
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Sodium-Ion Battery Tested for Grid-Scale Storage in Wisconsin More

Sodium-Ion Battery Tested for Grid-Scale Storage in Wisconsin

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  • YouTuber technology connections (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday March 16, 2026 @08:06AM (#66043792)
    Did a good video about grid scale solar and wind. The too long didn't watch is if we were a sane civilization that wasn't run by oil companies and religious lunatics we would be rapidly transitioning to wind and solar as our primary form of energy with just a tiny bit of nuclear in places like Japan where they just isn't enough land.

    It's bizarre to think that we have basically solved every single shortage problem the human race has except we can't do it because we're too busy fighting to see who can give Elon Musk musk and Jeff bezos the most money.

    • Re:YouTuber technology connections (Score:5, Informative)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Monday March 16, 2026 @09:33AM (#66043918)
      Bit of a side-note but if anyone else is wondering who RWE America Holdings (Holdings) Offshore Holdings (Holdings) Ltd is, it's Rheinisch-WestfÃlisches ElektrizitÃtswerk Aktiengesellschaft is Essen, Germany.

      • Actually no, it's RWE AG. That's it. They haven't used the name you just gave them in 35 years. RWE is a multinational energy company headquartered in Germany. That's it. It's shorter to write, and you don't need to worry about Slashdot eating your unicode.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "...if we were a sane civilization..."

      A "sane civilization" would not exploit greed to drive economies. Sanity is relative, humans are flawed, capitalism is worshipped.

      Don't forget, Elon Musk says that empathy is the greatest weakness of "the West". No "sane civilization" would accept this, but here it barely makes the daily news.

      "It's bizarre to think ..."

      It's not. It's the only reality any of us have ever experienced. The difference is that now it happens more to white people. Capitalism gets worse i

    • The too long didn't watch is if we were a sane civilization that wasn't run by oil companies and religious lunatics we would be rapidly transitioning to wind and solar as our primary form of energy with just a tiny bit of nuclear in places like Japan where they just isn't enough land.

      In your dreams. For personal uses, running a refrigerator, heating water, possibly even charging a car, wind and solar are sufficient. For industrial uses, we are orders of magnitude away from being able to generate that much power with wind and solar.

      Wind and solar absolutely should be pursued; however, they are insufficient alone for the world's energy needs.

  • factoid (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BadgerStork ( 7656678 )

    To store the full daily output of a 1 GW power station using battery technology priced at $70 per kWh, the total cost would be $1.68 billion.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by gaiageek ( 1070870 )

      To store the full daily output of a 1 GW power station using battery technology priced at $70 per kWh, the total cost would be $1.68 billion.

      Read again:

      "According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour."

      • cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly half the total cost of a typical battery system today

        Do you want me to explain how I worked it out?

        • I have to admit, I had to double check the article myself. Didn't realize it was a BOGO pricing deal.

          I think that the critical part is that while still too expensive for grid storage that extensive for the power company, I average around 40 kWh/day. $2,800 for a Power Wall type system capable of powering my house for a day? That isn't a bad price at all.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by HiThere ( 15173 )

            OK, but expect the sodium-ion system to take, at a guess, half-again more space. It'll also be heavier, but that doesn't really matter for a fixed installation.

      • Read again:

        "According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour."

        As written the text is misleading noise yet from other sources the actual cost of the battery alone is likely around the same level. There is still no cost advantage over LFP and still nothing on the horizon that will enabling scaling sufficient to fundamentally change the equation.

        • The current price might be similar at the moment because its early adopter time and the supply chains are still not as comprehensive as the lithium yet.

    • Re:factoid (Score:5, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday March 16, 2026 @09:38AM (#66043932) Homepage Journal

      Now take the lifetime cost of some various power plants which produce that 1 GW and compare them to a solar plant which makes 2 GW (up to about $2.4B) and add that battery for $1.68B and compare to for example nuclear with $10B+ per GW construction costs (estimates up to around $25B) and yes, it only makes sense to do renewables plus batteries in the vast majority of situations.

    • That puts it within vague price competition of building a second GW of production. Not quite par with a GW of solar (or best-case costs of natgas or wind), but less than the worst-case cost of combined-cycle natgas ($2B) and wind. Then it becomes a question of whether we need a full day of storage to back that level of generation, not to mention whether it can be spread out to multiple secondary sites (ie close to the last mile or even individual residences) in ways that wind or gas cannot.
    • Is $1.68B for a battery a lot? Building a 1 GW natural gas plant costs $1â"1.5B. Then you pay $200M per year for gas, forever. Or $600M per year in Europe.

      Of course, the energy to charge the battery isn't free either. But these numbers are getting to be in the same ballpark like never before.

    • Your computation assumes that you are storing 1 GW produced continuously for 24 hours. Solar power plants produce their nominal power only for a few hours each day. A good rule of thumb is 4 hours of nominal power per day. Therefore you need to divide your computed cost by about 6. If you also consider that a large portion of the power is consumed during the time that it is produced, the storage requirement is even lower. On the other hand, you may want more than overnight storage, for cloudy days. We

    • >> To store the full daily output

      Obviously that isn't the objective. This is;

      "installing 10 GWh of battery storage capacity in the MISO region over the next decade could cut system costs by as much as $27 billion compared with a scenario without that storage"

    • In the real world, they actually keep burning to level out the operating costs of tradition power it doesn't ramp up or down quickly well so they handle dips by CUTTING hydro power output - the cheap reliable baseload and they use the grid network. A battery can green the grid and lower costs WITHOUT wind or solar. It's a buffering problem! With a flux in prices, it becomes like a less random stock market of buying and selling power. You'd think some free market people would be promoting creating a bi

  • Cheaper Batteries == Game over (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday March 16, 2026 @09:34AM (#66043924)
    Solar/Wind + Cheaper Batteries + a bit of Nuclear = Game Over for coal and oil

    Even Trump can't stop this.
  • ...does sodium contained in the batteries cause hypertension in the connected circuits ?!?

  • Match demand to supply - political problem (Score:3)

    by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Monday March 16, 2026 @01:25PM (#66044368)
    Trigger warning - this comment contains political stupidity that may anger technical people. Before May 1, 2025 the spot price of electricity in Ontario, Canada, Ohio and Pennsylvania would vary in March between $-0.02/kWh and $1.50. In the summer it might break $5/kWh. Other than a few industrial consumers, most people didn't pay this. The over price consumers paid during low demand paid for the subsidized price they pay during peak demand. This removes any incentive to switch when you consume electricity. Today, with the added fees that are charged per kWh, the change in price between peak demand and low demand, don't make it worth anyone's effort to shift when they consume electricity. I'm not going to finish doing laundry at 1am for a 20% savings in electricity.

    I once worked on a pilot project to have people pay closer to the spot price and to give them the ability to automatically shift some demand. At the end of the month people were given the old billing price and the new spot price method and only had to pay the lesser of the two. The median savings for people who took advantage of the new pricing was $50/month (people in Oklahoma have huge air conditioners and no home insulation). The monthly savings to OG&E were non trivial per customer and they would have saved 2.2B by not needing to build peaker plants.

    The politics of how Electric utilities are funded meant this wasn't viable. OG&E's profits are guaranteed to be 12% of whatever capital they have built. The 2.2B in peaker plants were already approved and would have increased OG&E's profit by 260M a year. Investors would have borrowed at 3.75% (US prime rate in 2016) and gotten a 12% return. Expanding the pilot from 100,000 homes to all of Oklahoma, if successful would have meant not having to build the peaker plants. The Oklahoma regulator would not budge giving OG&E any reason to go with the cost saving approach so the project was scrapped and the peaker plants built.
    • This happened because the peaker plants were already planned and the profits had been accounted for in spreadsheets and in the dollar signs in politician's eyes.

      All those dollars will be paid for by higher rates aka money out of consumer pockets. They had already voted for the politicians and the current regulatory structure, so they had already gotten their say in the matter. A better tech came along, halfway through the process, but these sorts of huge infrastructure projects build up a momentum of th
      • In this case OG&E and their investors wanted the new solution. They had already invested money, taken the risk and seen a return far beyond what they expected using the new pricing model. Everyone involved saw this as a revolutionary shift to matching demand to supply. It would have significantly increased the value of semi predictable renewables like wind and solar. For the public utility regulator, who's job it is to keep rates low, this should have been a no brainer. They were just unwilling to
        • Somebody, somewhere, will implement the newer approaches. Those communities will see lower costs. Other communities will observe and start wondering why they need to pay triple the cost of energy one state over. The best strategies will spread. But it will take more time than you would like. Sounds like Arizona declined to be the first. Somebody else will. Eventually.

  • Peak energy is claiming round trip efficiency of 95% which is excellent for NFPP.

    $70/kWh is a good price although LFP is currently "roughly" the same cost not anywhere near "roughly half". Unless you need the wider temperature range this still isn't offering an advantage over LFP and voltage curves are terrible compared to LFP.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Unless you need the wider temperature range

      Wider temperature range is a killer feature. It simplifies everything, so the plant costs far less and needs much less attention.

  • I posted this in a substack forum recently, using very back-of-envelope arithmetic using half-remembered price mentions. I was surprised to see nobody dunk on the estimate. If this is for reals, I think my trollish ending of "so nuclear's toast" might be true?

    The money issue is the one where I'd have to tell a Big Investor, that a good $10/watt should be budgeted as the CAPEX for a new nuclear station that will provide 7x24 power (85% of the time, they need scheduled downtime).

    For $10/watt, instead of a

  • Because it would be nice to have a whole-house UPS that doesn't degrade like lithium ion, or pose a fire risk.

    Yes, I'm aware of LFP, but more options is always better.

  • Tesla was on the right track with wireless energy. But when he died the FBI swooped in and confiscated all his documents and notes. Someone didn't want his "free" as in beer energy to get out.

  • aka sodium-sulfur?
    it was used successfully in a couple big projects in Japan decades ago but i've not heard it mentioned in a very long time

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