The much-anticipated sodium-ion batteries are coming, but not for keen householders in Australia because they can’t be certified for the federal rebate under current rules.
Sodium-ion batteries are fast emerging as a real competitor to lithium ion, as they promise safer, and potentially cheaper, chemistries, and all of the biggest manufacturers are now actively pursuing the new technology.
But in Australia, the market will be limited to large-scale and commercial sizes only.
The Clean Energy Council (CEC), responsible for ticking off solar and storage technologies used in Australian homes, only registers lithium-ion batteries.
It’s a situation that will see sodium ion batteries locked out of the federal battery rebate, the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES), and many networks which require home batteries to have CEC certification in order to connect.
The CEC is working with Standards Australia on accrediting other battery chemistries, but there’s no detail on how long providers of the new battery technologies will have to wait.
It’s a situation that is frustrating Australia’s first sodium battery maker Powercap.
Group general manager John Ross says his battery, which he hopes to have on the market in Australia in January 2026, will be priced around $900 per kilowatt hour (kWh) with an inverter.
This is on par or cheaper than many popular lithium batteries before rebates, according to Solar Choice, but uncompetitively expensive once rebates and SRES certifications are factored in.
“That rebate will kill us,” Ross told Renew Economy at All Energy last week, but says there is a growing, and keen cohort of Australians who are desperate for a sodium battery.
“Anyone who is dead set on not wanting lithium…after your article last year I had 580 inbound queries. I’ve had four calls today asking when are you ready. And I say sorry, the TÜV Rheinland is holding us up and they say I don’t care, I’ll wait.”
But therein lies another problem for the company.
Powercap launched its sodium battery in December to great fanfare, promising not just sales but deliveries to start in January 2025.
What Ross didn’t count on was the amount of time global certifier TÜV Rheinland would take to certify the battery as safe.
“[Then] we thought we’d be ready by October this year, and we’re not. So it’s going to be December. We’ll be in market by January,” he says.
He is marketing to the large scale, commercial and industrial, and off-grid markets.
Big battery business
Powercap is not the only company eyeing the Australian market for sodium batteries, with the likes of BYD and CATL already announcing their own options, and Korean giant LG Chem revealing a sodium battery partnership with Sinopec on Wednesday last week.
Many of these are focusing on the electric vehicle industry with batteries for cars.
BYD launched a grid-scale sodium battery in late 2024, but representatives at All Energy would not be drawn on what future developments would look like.
CATL revealed its Naxtra passenger car sodium battery in April.
They’re moving quickly into this market because demand is high.
“We have a couple of contracts here in Australia. We’ve got one in New Zealand. As soon as the batteries are commercialized, they’ll be going in,” Ross says.
“We’ve also got a range of projects for community aged care facilities to stick sodium batteries into 16 of their sites around Australia, [with] Carinity Aged Care… under a power purchase agreement.”
Signed contracts worth 1.2 gigawatt hours (GWh), alongside the rising pressure from big battery manufacturers means they will need to scale up production quickly.
Ross says manufacturing capacity is currently 1.8 GWh a year.
“That’s why we are in a race to get to a point where we have our own assembly distribution and, finally, our own cell manufacturing, because we need to really scale that to minimum 5 GWh as fast as we can, because demand is that high,” he says.
While sodium batteries are heavier and don’t have the same energy density as lithium, they do have a better power density.
It means they don’t store as much energy as lithium, but can deliver that power faster and without the same heat build up, making them better for fast charge and discharge applications.
It also comes with a good story around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and price, given sodium is abundant, cheap, and doesn’t need to be mined from far-off, unregulated locations.
