The world's largest battery maker has just placed a very large bet on a technology that, until recently, most of the industry considered was science fiction.

Last week China’s CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited) signed a 60 gigawatt-hour sodium-ion supply agreement with energy storage firm HyperStrong — the biggest sodium-ion order ever placed, and equivalent to roughly half of all the energy storage batteries CATL delivered across the entirety of 2025.

The deal is revolutionary as it's a breakthrough for the sodium-based version of batteries that has until now been seen as a promising but distant alternative to lithium that is used in most batteries.

Lithium supplies are limited and the metal is hard to process into a usable form to make batteries. Sodium is the other half of table salt and ubiquitous. As IntelliNews reported, last year China made a number of technological breakthroughs that have made sodium-ion batteries commercially viable.

The company has declared that the mass production challenge for sodium-ion technology is now solved. Whether or not that claim survives contact with reality at scale, remains to be seen, but mass production of sodium batteries could transform the generation of green energy by dramatically dropping the price of energy storage again and completing the green revolution by providing the storage capacity renewables have been missing to deal with the “base load problem” – the unreliable and irregular generation of power from wind and solar generation.

The innovation also confirms China as the global green energy champion and will be a key step in its establishing itself as the world’s first electrostate.

What sodium is, and is not

To understand the excitement, and the caveats, it helps to understand what sodium-ion chemistry actually offers.

The fundamental appeal is geological and geopolitical. Sodium is one of the most abundant elements on Earth. Lithium, by contrast, is a critical mineral concentrated in a handful of countries, subject to supply chain disruption, and at the centre of an intensifying competition between the US and China’s almost virtual monopoly over the production of critical minerals.

Lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, the dominant chemistry for grid-scale storage, has already become dramatically cheaper — cell prices have hit $40 per kilowatt-hour and are tracking toward $20 — but that trajectory depends on continued access to a supply chain that is neither politically neutral nor geographically diversified.

Sodium will decouple battery economics from lithium's supply chain politics. Unlike lithium, there are no critical mineral chokepoints. Cheap lithium today does not guarantee cheap lithium in 2032, particularly if the energy transition accelerates demand or if trade tensions tighten supply. Sodium sidesteps that uncertainty entirely.

And sodium ion batteries come with various technological advantages over lithium. For one thing, as they are solid state batteries, they don't catch fire. Their durability is also striking. Sodium-ion cells are being cited with cycle life figures of 15,000 charge-discharge cycles — well above what most lithium chemistries deliver in real-world deployment.

The weight problem

There is, however, a number in the CATL specifications that is a problem: 160 watt-hours per kilogram.

For a mobile application that figure is a serious handicap. Sodium batteries are significantly heavier than lithium batteries, which will limit their application.

The leading lithium chemistries are running at 250–300 Wh/kg and climbing. At 160 Wh/kg, a sodium battery is carrying roughly twice the weight for the same amount of stored energy.

For consumer use then things like mobile phones and even EV will probably prefer to continue with lithium batteries for the meantime, but the weight of sodium batteries will not be a disadvantage for industrial applications, especially for the grid-scale eight-hour batteries that are still needed to provide an around-the-cycle source of stored power.

This is precisely why the HyperStrong deal is structured around microgrid and stationary storage applications and won’t be used in CATL’s cars for the meantime. When a battery is sitting on a concrete pad in an industrial facility or a remote community power system, its weight is largely irrelevant. What matters is cost per kilowatt-hour of storage over its operational lifetime — and that is the calculation sodium is designed to win.

The competitive picture: 2025 versus 2030

Sodium and lithium are not in direct competition and sodium's niche is one that will be the most transformative for the global economy.

LFP is not standing still. Cell prices below $40 per kilowatt-hour have already been transformative as the battery revolution was already well underway based on the lithium-ion batteries.

But the very fall in the cost of the lithium battery is also going to limit its proliferation. As the cost heads to below $20, the economics of extracting at those prices become less attractive, but its light weight will make lithium iron phosphate extraordinarily difficult to displace in the applications it dominates.

Over the longer term to 2030 the horizon looks different. Sodium entering the ring now nicely sets up the post 2030 development of green energy.

Like Moore's Law, coined in 1965 that says the number of transistors on a microchip doubled roughly every two years, while costs fell accordingly, batteries are better described by Wright's Law coined by aviator Theodore Wright observed in 1936 observed the as plane production doubled, costs fall by a predictable percentage. In batteries, that learning rate has historically run at around 18–20%; every time cumulative global battery production doubles, the cost per kilowatt-hour drops by roughly a fifth.

The CATL deal is significant as it will increase the production sufficiently to kick the Wright’s law regression in prices off. Currently, sodium-ion batteries have barely started on that journey but a 60 GWh anchor order from the world's largest battery manufacturer is precisely what will set prices off down the curve. The CATL deal is less about what sodium batteries cost today but where their production will send the cost to in 2030 and beyond.

The bigger picture

The strategic logic here extends well beyond battery chemistry. One of the persistent vulnerabilities of the global energy transition has been its dependence on a relatively small number of critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese — whose supply chains run through a handful of countries and are subject to exactly the kind of geopolitical pressure that has disrupted other commodity markets in recent years.

A world in which grid-scale energy storage no longer requires lithium is a structurally different world from the one the energy transition has been planning for. It does not eliminate supply chain risk and it is telling that China, which already dominates lithium battery production, is investing in sodium battery technology so aggressively. However, this has as much to do with its ambition to become the world’s leading electrostate in which batteries are a crucial building block, as it does to do with business.