Sodium-Ion Battery Tested for Grid-Scale Storage in Wisconsin (electrek.co)
- Reference: 0180999606
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/0320222/sodium-ion-battery-tested-for-grid-scale-storage-in-wisconsin
- Source link: https://electrek.co/2026/03/11/sodium-ion-batteries-hit-the-midwestern-grid-in-first-of-its-kind-pilot/
> Sodium-ion battery storage manufacturer [2]Peak Energy and global energy company [3]RWE Americas will pilot a passively cooled sodium-ion battery system in eastern Wisconsin on the Midcontinent Independent System Operator network — the first sodium-ion deployment on that grid. Peak Energy says its technology is specifically designed for grid-scale storage and leverages sodium-ion chemistry's inherent stability. Unlike many lithium-ion systems, sodium-ion batteries don't require active cooling and can operate over a wide temperature range without losing performance.
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> That simpler design could make a meaningful dent in the cost of storing electricity. According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly half the total cost of a typical battery system today. The company says it achieves those savings by removing energy-hungry cooling systems, eliminating routine maintenance requirements, and reducing the need to overbuild storage capacity to account for battery degradation over time...
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> If the Wisconsin pilot proves successful, it could open the door to wider adoption of sodium-ion batteries for large-scale energy storage across the US.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/11/sodium-ion-batteries-hit-the-midwestern-grid-in-first-of-its-kind-pilot/
[2] https://www.peakenergy.com/
[3] https://americas.rwe.com/
factoid (Score:1, Insightful)
To store the full daily output of a 1 GW power station using battery technology priced at $70 per kWh, the total cost would be $1.68 billion.
Re: (Score:3)
> To store the full daily output of a 1 GW power station using battery technology priced at $70 per kWh, the total cost would be $1.68 billion.
Read again:
"According to Peak Energy, its system cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour."
Re: (Score:1)
cuts the lifetime cost of stored energy by an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly half the total cost of a typical battery system today
Do you want me to explain how I worked it out?
Re: (Score:2)
I have to admit, I had to double check the article myself. Didn't realize it was a BOGO pricing deal.
I think that the critical part is that while still too expensive for grid storage that extensive for the power company, I average around 40 kWh/day. $2,800 for a Power Wall type system capable of powering my house for a day? That isn't a bad price at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Now take the lifetime cost of some various power plants which produce that 1 GW and compare them to a solar plant which makes 2 GW (up to about $2.4B) and add that battery for $1.68B and compare to for example nuclear with $10B+ per GW construction costs (estimates up to around $25B) and yes, it only makes sense to do renewables plus batteries in the vast majority of situations.
Re: (Score:2)
Ignoring the environmental factors because, you know, radiation, birds, CO2, ... ignore fuel too, too difficult
A 1 GW plant.
Nuclear about $10 billion to build, varies wildly between countries but $10 billion in a sane country. No back up battery needed.
Offshore wind $5 billion to build plus I'd add at least 5 x $1.68 billion for battery storage
Solar like you say $2.4 billion plus a short term storage $1.68 billion to cover night time PLUS 5 x $1.68 billion for battery storage
Gas maybe $1 billion and lets
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have any citations on why you think you'd need 5-6 days worth of storage with Wind/Solar?
Re: (Score:2)
No, I just thought a snow storm can easily last 5 days
Re: (Score:2)
> Solar or wind plus gas backup is clearly better than battery backup! I'm surprised, so maybe I made a mistake in the sums there.
No, it isn't. All generation has ramp-up times, battery is instant, and that saves a lot of money in ancillary costs. Waiting for a gas-plant to spin up to handle a load-spike costs money plus wear and tear, and it may well be that when it is finally producing power it isn't needed anymore. Stable energy production saves a lot of money, and even more so when there's grid energy storage like batteries available, and such storage usually pay for themselves in less than 10 years if correctly sized.
Re:factoid (Score:4, Insightful)
> Nuclear about $10 billion to build, varies wildly between countries but $10 billion in a sane country. No back up battery needed.
"No battery needed" only because the grid has more nimble sources of power.
Solar, wind, nuclear are non-dispatchable - that is, they cannot meet demand for electricity. If you turn on a light, and the sun or wind isn't blowing, the lightbulb won't turn on. But if you turn OFF a light, the nuclear plant might meltdown.
Now, that's being dramatic, but that's the truth - a nuclear plant takes hours to increase or decrease its output. The duck curve is needed so nuclear plants can plan their power generation around it.
For a stable grid, this means you need to curtail generation of solar and wind - that is, they need to produce more power than demanded. For nuclear, the opposite is true - you need to make sure it never generates close to what is needed - it must always run under demand.
It is impossible to run a grid on nuclear energy alone. Typically, this isn't a problem because hydroelectric, natural gas, and to a limited extent coal plants are dispatchable sources of power - they can ramp up and down within minutes. When demand peaks, they can be brought online and within 5-10 minutes be making up demand.
You want to run a nuclear plant, you need batteries as well to both supply and make up for the mismatch in demand.
If the nuclear plant is producing too much energy, then the battery can soak up the excess in the time it takes to ramp production down. If the nuclear plant isn't producing enough energy the battery can provide the deficit until it ramps up.
Nuclear isn't magic - it's a slow lumbering beast we operate very conservatively because at no point can it produce too much power without something to absorb it. Battery technology is getting good enough this can be an option. So a nuclear plant plus battery will likely be required.
Re: (Score:2)
> Nuclear about $10 billion to build, varies wildly between countries but $10 billion in a sane country. No back up battery needed.
Nuclear needs really large ways to store electricity. As a nuclear plant can not be shut down easily when less power is required, it needs a way to get rid of the additional energy. Usually, it's stored into large pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants, and you need to include their cost too.
On a side note, people are always waving the baseload flag, without every asking themselves what baseload actually means: It's a source of energy which (except when shut down for maintenance or an unforeseen event) al
Re: (Score:2)
That puts it within vague price competition of building a second GW of production. Not quite par with a GW of solar (or best-case costs of natgas or wind), but less than the worst-case cost of combined-cycle natgas ($2B) and wind. Then it becomes a question of whether we need a full day of storage to back that level of generation, not to mention whether it can be spread out to multiple secondary sites (ie close to the last mile or even individual residences) in ways that wind or gas cannot.
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Is $1.68B for a battery a lot? Building a 1 GW natural gas plant costs $1â"1.5B. Then you pay $200M per year for gas, forever. Or $600M per year in Europe.
Of course, the energy to charge the battery isn't free either. But these numbers are getting to be in the same ballpark like never before.
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Your computation assumes that you are storing 1 GW produced continuously for 24 hours. Solar power plants produce their nominal power only for a few hours each day. A good rule of thumb is 4 hours of nominal power per day. Therefore you need to divide your computed cost by about 6. If you also consider that a large portion of the power is consumed during the time that it is produced, the storage requirement is even lower. On the other hand, you may want more than overnight storage, for cloudy days. We
Re: (Score:2)
> To store the full daily output
Obviously that isn't the objective. This is;
"installing 10 GWh of battery storage capacity in the MISO region over the next decade could cut system costs by as much as $27 billion compared with a scenario without that storage"
Re: (Score:2)
In the real world, they actually keep burning to level out the operating costs of tradition power it doesn't ramp up or down quickly well so they handle dips by CUTTING hydro power output - the cheap reliable baseload and they use the grid network. A battery can green the grid and lower costs WITHOUT wind or solar. It's a buffering problem! With a flux in prices, it becomes like a less random stock market of buying and selling power. You'd think some free market people would be promoting creating a bi
Cheaper Batteries == Game over (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar/Wind + Cheaper Batteries + a bit of Nuclear = Game Over for coal and oil
Even Trump can't stop this.
Re:Cheaper Batteries == Game over (Score:4, Interesting)
Trump doesn't need to stop it, the wind stops all by itself. Posting once again the graph I look at every day...
[1]https://transmission.bpa.gov/b... [bpa.gov]
The green line is mostly wind, installed capacity is 2800 MW. The green line also includes 138 MW of solar. Yesterday was cloudy so it didn't help much.
One other thing I'll note is that Wisconsin will definitely test the temperature tolerance of the battery. 90 F in the summer (more if it's in town) and -20 in the winter (less if it's in the country).
[1] https://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx
Nice, but... (Score:2)
...does sodium contained in the batteries cause hypertension in the connected circuits ?!?
Re: (Score:2)
Just add a calcium channel blocker and a beta-blocking circuit and that should mitigate the hypertension.
YouTuber technology connections (Score:5, Insightful)
Did a good video about grid scale solar and wind. The too long didn't watch is if we were a sane civilization that wasn't run by oil companies and religious lunatics we would be rapidly transitioning to wind and solar as our primary form of energy with just a tiny bit of nuclear in places like Japan where they just isn't enough land.
It's bizarre to think that we have basically solved every single shortage problem the human race has except we can't do it because we're too busy fighting to see who can give Elon Musk musk and Jeff bezos the most money.
Re:YouTuber technology connections (Score:4, Insightful)
Which part of what he said do you disagree with? You haven't addressed the subject at all. You've wandered off topic because you're triggered and are arguing that he has problems? womp womp
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
> One could legitimately wonder
One could, if one were not a coward, and therefore a zero.
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Re: (Score:2)
Except the post did not "question silvergun", it merely hurled insults. Just like yours.
Re: (Score:2)
Usually I find myself in agreement with rsilvergun and not Ol Olsoc, but not this time. The subject in TFS is energy storage, not energy production. It is the former, not the latter, who has "wandered off-topic."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
shattered soul? tell us how many drama classes you took in high school you big baby
Re: (Score:3)
So someone shouldn't comment about the insanity of our energy policy making on an article about alternative methods of mass grid-level electricity storage.
Why? Because it hurts your fee-fees to see billionaires be criticized? Are you one of these people who, despite the overwhelming evidence since... well the dot-com era... is just unable to see billionaires as anyone other than your "better" who must be "better" because they got richer than you despite the fact you didn't because of bad luck and a possible
Re: (Score:2)
As an aside, did you mean to post that logged in? The rsilvergun trolls usually post AC. Want to tell us anything? Are you the idiot who keeps spamming Slashdot with unfunny attempts to parody rsilvergun?
Whoever is doing this is obsessed enough to genuinely require psychiatric treatment. It's tiresome, dumb, and honestly, the impression I get is that whoever is doing it is enraged by his views and angry he can't actually challenge them. If that's you, maybe you do, genuinely, need therapy.
Re: (Score:1)
> Have you sought therapy?
Dude, look who you're replying to. Obviously, the answer is "no." Honestly, if I were a therapist, I wouldn't feel safe in the same room.
Re: (Score:2)
"Doommongering"? He's talking about what they *do* with the battery storage, and you, inhaling the fumes from your rolling coal oversized pickup (but have no stocks or job in the petrochemical industry), attack him for... talking about reasons?
Re:YouTuber technology connections (Score:4, Informative)
Bit of a side-note but if anyone else is wondering who RWE America Holdings (Holdings) Offshore Holdings (Holdings) Ltd is, it's Rheinisch-WestfÃlisches ElektrizitÃtswerk Aktiengesellschaft is Essen, Germany.
Re: (Score:2)
"...if we were a sane civilization..."
A "sane civilization" would not exploit greed to drive economies. Sanity is relative, humans are flawed, capitalism is worshipped.
Don't forget, Elon Musk says that empathy is the greatest weakness of "the West". No "sane civilization" would accept this, but here it barely makes the daily news.
"It's bizarre to think ..."
It's not. It's the only reality any of us have ever experienced. The difference is that now it happens more to white people. Capitalism gets worse i