– By Graeme Grant, Alsym Energy Chief Operating Officer (COO)
There are moments when a country has to decide whether it will inherit the future from someone else or build it for itself. This is one of those moments.
In recent years, it has become clearer that batteries are not just energy products. They are enabling infrastructure for energy security, grid resilience, artificial intelligence, defense readiness, advanced manufacturing, and global competitiveness. But the hard truth is that too much of the battery future has been built on supply chains the United States does not control.
Today’s energy storage battery economy is underpinned by lithium iron phosphate (or “LFP”) batteries. LFP’s legacy is changing what the market thought was possible with energy storage. Not long ago, the idea that batteries could support bulk power, firm renewable generation, back up critical infrastructure, and become a core tool for grid-scale energy storage sounded ambitious. LFP changed that conversation by showing the market that low-cost batteries could move from the edge of the grid to the center of it.
Today, however, LFP is hitting its limits. Its improvement curve is flattening. Its systems require complex thermal management, monitoring, maintenance, augmentation, and operational complexity. Despite that, large-scale battery fire incidents are still happening and there is a growing trend of communities blocking deployments. Most importantly, its supply chain is overwhelmingly concentrated in China. More than 90% of battery energy storage systems use LFP batteries. LFP batteries are almost exclusively supplied from China. And it is storage batteries that the US urgently needs to lower energy costs, enable our AI aspirations, and to power our future prosperity. This means, therefore, that the batteries America needs for our future come from a country with whom we have a complex and unstable relationship.
That is not energy independence nor leadership. That is not a durable foundation for the AI economy, the modern grid, or national security. It is time to evolve.
That brings in sodium-ion: which offers an opportunity to leapfrog LFP and put the fate of American energy infrastructure back in the hands of America.
Sodium-ion is unique because it looks like a lithium-ion battery but is made of a material roughly one thousand times more abundant in the Earth’s crust than lithium. Sodium carbonate, or soda ash, is dramatically less expensive to process than lithium carbonate and widely available in the United States, with Wyoming holding 92% of the world’s readily minable natural soda ash reserves. That gives America something it has not had in the LFP era: a credible path to a domestic, non-Foreign Entity of Concern battery supply chain from materials to deployment.
For stationary storage, sodium-ion can offer strong cycling performance, full depth of discharge, high round-trip efficiency, and reduced cooling requirements. At the system level, those advantages matter. The future of energy storage will not be won on cell cost alone. It will be won on total cost of ownership for infrastructure: maintenance, augmentation, cooling, permitting, safety, insurance, logistics, and lifecycle performance. The economics of sodium-ion batteries in energy systems have demonstrated a clear edge over LFP.
Sodium-ion is commercializing now. American companies have already announced more than 15 GWh of planned sodium-ion storage offtakes. Global deployments are moving forward and the benefits, particularly at the system-level, are getting attention.
The recent GM–Peak Energy announcement marks an important turning point. General Motors is developing next-generation sodium-ion cells purpose-built for grid-scale storage with Peak Energy. GM’s framing is exactly right: the future is not one battery chemistry for every use case. The future is the right battery for the right application. And sodium-ion is the right choice for energy storage.
So it’s not a question of whether sodium-ion is the answer. It is about whether America will build the next battery ecosystem here or once again watch as innovation is developed here and scaled elsewhere. It is about whether the United States will compete from a position of strength or depend on imported systems for the infrastructure powering AI, advanced manufacturing, military readiness, and grid resilience. For other global economies such as India and Europe, the same sodium-ion opportunity exists to gain energy sovereignty and move away from Chinese reliance for batteries.
The timing could not be more urgent. AI data centers are accelerating power needs. Grid modernization is no longer optional. Extreme weather is increasing the value of resilience. Manufacturers need reliable power to expand here at home. Communities are asking harder questions about safety, permitting, fire risk, and long-term system performance.
That is why I’m excited to announce the launch of the American Battery Leadership Coalition, a joint initiative of America’s leading sodium-ion battery companies to move the needle forward. The ABLC exists because America still has a rare opportunity to lead before the sodium-ion market fully matures. The coalition brings together the suppliers, manufacturers, developers, and policy leaders needed to build a competitive sodium-ion ecosystem in the United States. Its purpose is to strengthen American battery leadership at the exact moment when leadership is still up for grabs.
That will require action. We need demonstration projects that validate sodium-ion in the applications that matter. We need support for pilot facilities and pre-commercial manufacturing, not just large factories after the hardest scaling work has already been done. We need financing tools that help first-of-a-kind projects become bankable, procurement pathways that create early demand, and policy that supports the full value chain from active materials and hard carbon anodes to cells, modules, packs, and complete energy storage systems.
The United States does not lack innovators. It does not lack entrepreneurs. It does not lack customers, capital, talent, or demand. Companies such as Alsym are proving that America can accelerate the innovation curve itself, using cutting edge tools like physics-informed AI to compress battery development timelines and move safer, lower-cost chemistries toward commercialization faster.
What we need now is alignment. America relinquished too much of the lithium-ion industrial buildout. We cannot afford to do the same with sodium-ion.
The technology is ready. The market is moving. The need is urgent. And the window is open.
It’s time for America Battery Leadership for sodium-ion.
Learn more about the ABLC: https://americanbatteryleadership.com/
Read the press release.
