It's Monday. Sodium being thousands of times more common than lithium was never the hard part. The hard part is that two-thirds of the sodium-ion factories on the books belong to companies that have never shipped cells at scale.
In today's edition:
🔋 Big Story: Sodium-ion's 60 GWh order meets factory math
⚡ Quick Hits: Italy's 95 GW queue, TRISO fuel, and a 34% cell price run
💰 Capital Stack: a DOE nod for mobile batteries
📋 Policy Watch: Ohio's $4.3 billion transmission question
📊 Chart of the Day: US uranium output triples
But first…
📅 Event Announcement: Grid Innovation Coffee Meetup
Hosted by Grid Innovation Hub
Thursday, September 3, 10:00 to 11:00 AM PT · Virtual, on Zoom
The bi-weekly coffee chat for grid professionals, with 57 registered for this session. Crowd-sourced topics and SME-led conversation across generation, transmission and distribution, project development, capital and investment, operations and compliance, and grid modernization.
No presentations. No sales. No recording, so the conversation stays open. Registration is approval-based, so request a spot early.
The Big Story
Sodium-ion lands a 60 GWh order and a scale-up problem.
CATL and HyperStrong signed a three-year, 60 GWh sodium-ion supply agreement in late April, the largest to date, and ESS News argues the chemistry's real test is now the factory rather than the lab. CATL's 2026 storage platform is a 300-plus Ah cell at roughly 160 Wh/kg, rated above 15,000 cycles to 80% retention from -40 C to 70 C, after nearly CNY 10 billion of R&D since 2016. HyperStrong runs Chinese demonstrations first, then takes the data abroad.
“a cost-optimization and yield improvement game”
Benchmark Mineral Intelligence tracks 660 GWh of sodium-ion pipeline by the end of the decade, 433 GWh from tier-3 entrants. Tier-1 producers hold more than 40% of the lithium-ion pipeline and 10% of the sodium-ion one.
CRU expects sodium iron pyrophosphate to reach cost parity with LFP in 2028, trading energy density for the cycle life that 20-year warranties now demand, per CRU's Ed Rackley.
China holds 99.6% of sodium-ion manufacturing capacity, projected at 98% in 2030. Natron Energy, which announced a 24 GW US plant, has ceased operations.
Source: ESS News
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Quick Hits
Small bites from across the grid.
Five from across the stack, from a queue nobody can absorb to a cell price up 34% in three weeks.
AMPYR Australia picked OptiGrid's OptiBidder to trade its battery portfolio after benchmarking rival platforms on a digital twin of its own asset. Energy-Storage.news
Terna now holds more than 95 GW of data center connection requests in Italy, up from roughly 1 GW in 2021, Europe's version of the phantom-load problem. Data Center Dynamics
Ampera and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory formed a partnership on TRISO fuel development, the manufacturing constraint under most microreactor timelines. World Nuclear News
Storage developers are re-running whether the 30% investment tax credit still beats cheaper non-domestic cells, Latitude Media reported, as content rules tighten. Latitude Media
OPIS put FOB China TOPCon module prices up 2.86% week on week to $0.108/W, with M10 cells up about 34% since Aug. 4, which buyers pinned on US Section 232 tariffs due Dec. 4. pv magazine USA
The Capital Stack
Nomad restarts under new owners with a DOE nod for mobile batteries.
Nomad Power Solutions said the US Department of Energy's Office of Electricity has authorised its energy storage demonstration project in Vermont, the company's first announced milestone under new ownership. Mobile batteries are sold on constrained feeders and outage response, and a federal demonstration tests that in front of a utility.
Source: Energy-Storage.news
Also in the capital stack:
T1 Energy won approval to convert its solar manufacturing campus at Mo i Rana, Norway into a 50 MW data center, turning a stranded site's grid capacity into compute. Data Center Dynamics
Policy Watch
The Ohio Consumers' Counsel urged FERC to rule on a complaint filed in 2023, saying FirstEnergy, AEP and others have planned roughly $4.3 billion of supplemental local transmission with little federal review while the case sits. A ruling would reach the least scrutinised slice of transmission spending. Utility Dive
The Texas General Land Office opened a request for information on geothermal development on state lands, the step that normally precedes a lease sale. Oilfield infrastructure already on that acreage makes it the cheapest place to test enhanced geothermal. ThinkGeoEnergy
Chart of the Day:
US uranium production tripled, and still covered 7% of what reactors bought.
US uranium concentrate production reached 2.1 million pounds of U3O8 in 2025, more than triple 2024 and the most since 2017. Reactor operators still bought 46.9 million pounds at $58.46 per pound on average, with Canada at 32% of deliveries, Kazakhstan 28% and US-origin material 7%.
Source: EIA Today in Energy · August 28, 2026
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