One week after unveiling its Naxtra sodium-ion battery for electric vehicles, CATL has signed the largest sodium-ion battery order in history: 60 GWh for grid-scale energy storage over three years. The technology has crossed the line from lab breakthrough to industrial product.
The ink on CATL’s Tech Day announcements was barely dry. The world’s largest battery declared that its Naxtra sodium-ion cell would enter mass production by the end of 2026. It was a statement about cars following the Beijing Motor Show. Less than a week later, the company already demonstrates how it can scale up sodium-ion technology to unprecedented levels.
Watershed moment
CATL has signed a three-year strategic cooperation agreement with Beijing HyperStrong Technology, which covers the delivery of 60 GWh of sodium-ion batteries for energy storage applications.
No sodium-ion manufacturer has ever come close to a commercial order of this scale. How big that is is shown by the fact that the battery maker shipped only double that amount in energy storage cells across all chemistry types and continents last year.
More importantly, it is proof that CATL has overcome the challenges across the entire sodium-ion battery mass-production chain. This indeed opens the door to wide adoption in cars and the energy storage industry; it represents a watershed moment.
Not the same battery
One important distinction, however, is that it matters technically. The cell going into HyperStrong’s grid storage systems is not the same as the Naxtra EV battery unveiled at Tech Day. The energy storage version is a large-format cell with an energy density of around 160 Wh/kg, somewhat below Naxtra’s 175 Wh/kg. Lithium-ion doubles that.
But what these sodium-ion cells lack in raw density, they make up for in endurance: over 15,000 cycles while keeping 80% capacity. This means the packs can last forty years of daily charge-discharge use, while the thermal operating window stretches from -40°C to +70°C.
The manufacturing problem
Sodium-ion battery chemistry has been understood for decades. Just as with solid-state versions, the barrier to commercialization was not so much the electrochemistry textbook as the reality of the factory floor. CATL’s announcement names the specific manufacturing problems it has now solved: foaming in hard carbon production lines and moisture control during cell assembly.
The solutions it deployed are unglamorous engineering achievements (angstrom-level pore-size adjustment, surface molecular water locking, and adaptive dynamic formation processes, to be precise). Still, they do what they are supposed to: turn the working prototype into a reliable supply chain.
Debrecen, Hungary
Interestingly, CATL also designed the new cells to share the same physical dimensions as its existing lithium-ion energy storage products. As such, customers like HyperStrong can deploy sodium-ion cells into their existing architectures without a fundamental redesign. This skips adaptation costs and, of course, is a convincing commercial pitch.
Sodium-ion batteries have been on CATL’s roadmap since the company first unveiled the chemistry publicly in 2021. Though this 60 GWh deal sets a new pace for sodium-ion as a chemistry, it is not a surprise disruption, rather a meticulously built production plan.
Sodium is approximately 1,000 times more abundant in the Earth’s crust than lithium, and its supply chains carry none of the geopolitical concentration risks that lithium, cobalt, and nickel do.
The conversation around energy storage in Europe tends to center on lithium iron phosphate. CATL has a European cell factory in Debrecen, Hungary. Whether Debrecen’s facility will produce sodium-ion cells alongside its lithium-ion lines is too soon to say.
