It's Wednesday. The world's biggest battery maker spent a decade making lithium cheap. In Munich this week, it told the industry to make room for sodium.
In today's edition:
🔋 CATL takes its grid-scale sodium-ion battery global
⚡ Quick Hits: California's first 8-hour battery and Europe's storage fleet passing nuclear
💰 Capital: a $7B off-grid gas plant for a Microsoft AI campus
📋 Policy Watch: the flexibility-or-defection question and a data-center turbine fight
📊 Chart: How fast batteries scaled last year
The Big Story
CATL takes grid-scale sodium-ion global.
CATL, the world's largest battery maker, used The smarter E Europe in Munich to launch the sodium-ion version of its TENER storage system, its first purpose-built grid-scale sodium-ion product. The 42-ton unit holds more than 30 MWh, enough that 34 modules build a 1 GWh project, and supports anything from one-hour to eight-hour discharge. CATL says it has already produced 300,000 sodium-ion cells for validation, with a dedicated factory opening shortly. Deliveries start in China in September under a 60 GWh agreement with HyperStrong, and shipments outside China begin in June 2027.
"After more than a decade of focused development, CATL has brought sodium-ion technology to commercial maturity. That maturity rests on three fundamental efforts: supply chain readiness, manufacturing readiness, and real-world validation." Amanda Xu, CATL energy storage CTO, via Energy-Storage News, June 23, 2026
The decoupled energy and power block runs 1-hour to 8-hour discharge at full rated power, and faulty modules can be isolated and swapped while the rest of the system keeps operating.
CATL claims up to 15,000 cycles at 25C, a wider operating temperature range than lithium, and compatibility with all major power-conversion-system brands.
Sodium's abundance is the pitch, cutting reliance on lithium supply chains, the first of three uncertainties the company says the chemistry addresses alongside climate variability and cycle life.
CATL has shipped more than 300 GWh of lithium-ion to date and now frames sodium as a second building block to sit alongside it.
Source: Energy-Storage News
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Two of Europe's biggest storage and solar shows opened in Munich this week, and the launches came fast.
REV Renewables and LS Power switched on Tumbleweed in Kern County, California's first eight-hour lithium-ion battery at 69 MW/552 MWh, helping satisfy the state's long-duration storage mandate. POWER Magazine
Energy Storage Europe reported that installed storage capacity across Europe has overtaken nuclear, as German reactor shutdowns removed about 11 GW and behind-the-meter batteries surged. Energy-Storage.news
SMA gave the world premiere of a new three-phase hybrid inverter line, 5 to 30 kVA with 3.2 to 49 kWh of storage and built-in backup, at Intersolar Europe. pv Europe
Huawei won a smarter E Award for its SUN2000-506KTL, billed as the industry's first grid-forming string inverter above 500 kW. PR Newswire
The World Economic Forum named "everything-to-grid" energy, where buildings, vehicles and data centers feed power back to the grid, to its Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026. The National
The Capital Stack
Chevron and Microsoft commit to a 2.67 GW off-grid gas plant for AI.
Chevron and Microsoft signed a 20-year agreement for Project Kilby, a roughly $7 billion, 2.67 GW natural gas plant near Pecos in West Texas that will supply a Microsoft AI data center directly, off the ERCOT grid. Running on GE Vernova and Solar Turbines equipment fed by Permian gas, the plant is built to sidestep multi-year interconnection queues and keep new generation off the shared transmission system that ratepayers fund. Chevron targets a final investment decision by year-end and first power in 2028.
Source: mgrid.org
Also in the capital stack:
ZincFive, an Oregon maker of nickel-zinc battery systems for data-center and AI backup power, said it will go public through a $752 million SPAC merger with Spark I Acquisition, listing on Nasdaq as ZFIV with at least $100 million in new PIPE capital.
Source: Data Center Dynamics
Policy Watch
Jackson Ewing argues FERC's large-load orders leave the real question open, whether AI loads become flexible grid assets or defect behind-the-meter, which decides how much new grid investment actually gets shared across ratepayers. Latitude Media
The Trump DOJ intervened on behalf of xAI in the Memphis data-center gas-turbine permitting suit, urging dismissal on national-security grounds, a ruling that could set precedent for AI data centers self-supplying power outside Clean Air Act and utility oversight. Utility Dive
Chart of the Day
Battery storage scaled faster than any other grid technology in 2025.
The world deployed 108 GW of new battery storage in 2025, about 40% more than in 2024 and roughly eleven times the 2021 level. That curve is what makes new-chemistry bets like today's Big Story bankable.
Source: IEA, Global Energy Review 2026 (Battery storage), 2026.
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