GM's sodium-ion battery bet

As electric vehicle sales remain uneven in the U.S., automakers are redirecting their battery efforts towards energy storage systems. General Motors, especially, is now an emerging energy company, not just an automaker.

It is bringing sodium-ion battery production to the U.S. for energy storage systems, working on the next-generation of these cells which won’t be licensed from Chinese battery companies. They’ll be developed in the U.S. and produced here for the domestic market, to help the country better manage the enormous power demands from AI data centers.

I saw the prototype sodium-ion cells at the GM Empower event in San Francisco on Tuesday. GM engineers believe they’ll unlock huge cost savings over current lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries. However, the official production timeline and capacity are yet to be announced.

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