What's the deal with sodium-ion batteries?

Lithium-ion dominates the battery world, but alternative chemistries are finding their niches. I talk with Landon Mossburg, CEO of Peak Energy, about using sodium-ion batteries for large-scale grid storage. They trade some energy density for a longer life and radically lower operating costs, thanks to an innovative, passively cooled design. We also explore the geopolitical opportunity of competing in a battery market that China doesn't already completely own.

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David Roberts

Hello everyone, hello. This is Volts for September 3, 2025, "What's the deal with sodium-ion batteries?" I'm your host, David Roberts. When it comes to energy density, it is difficult to beat lithium. It is the lightest metal, indeed the lightest solid element on the periodic table. If you are going to build an electrochemical battery with an anode and a cathode that send ions back and forth, lithium is generally the way to pack the most ions into the least space.

Of course, energy density isn't everything. There are many energy storage applications where other qualities, such as safety or cycle life, matter more. Nevertheless, lithium-ion — great on energy density and decent on everything else — has proven extraordinarily capable of fending off competitors.

Landon Mossburg

One alternative chemistry that has received a ton of attention and discussion recently is sodium-ion, which, as the name suggests, uses sodium ions rather than lithium ions to store energy. Sodium ions are larger, so they take up more space, so there is a loss of energy density. However, sodium is quite cheap and quite safe.

When talk turns to batteries, people always think first of electric vehicles, but the folks at Peak Energy are betting that sodium-ion is going to get its foothold in the grid storage business, where size and weight matter less and other things matter more. They have developed a sodium-ion energy storage system and are in the process of selling it to their first customers, including independent power producers and utilities.

I have been dying to explore sodium-ion batteries, so I am thrilled to have with me today Landon Mossburg, the founder and CEO of Peak Energy. We are going to talk all about the chemistry, the advantages and disadvantages, and what the future of the energy storage market looks like.

Landon Mossburg, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Landon Mossburg

Thanks for having me, David. Excited to be here.

David Roberts

I want to get right into the geekiest stuff, but the ghost of the editor in the back of my head is telling me to start at a more approachable level. As a first question, you have a long history in — you were at Tesla for a while and then you were at Northvolt, which listeners may recognize, big battery company, recently went out of business — that's a whole different story. And then you sort of had this period where you were wondering what to do next and you ended up coming back to batteries. Not just batteries, but energy storage specifically.

So this is sort of a twofold question. One is, when you had a blank sheet of paper in front of you and you could have done anything in the world, why come back to batteries? And then two, what is it that you see missing in the energy storage, the grid storage sort of space? Why do you think there's room for a competitor?

Landon Mossburg

That's a great question. I think Peak Energy, we're 90 people now and most of us have been in and around batteries for most of our careers, and it's a constant joke in the company that it's a love-hate relationship with batteries, right? A lot of other things you could do that would probably be easier.

David Roberts

I mean, hardware is legendarily difficult. So you got to have a little bit of a masochistic streak to do this.

Landon Mossburg

That's right. Though it is really fun. I mean, you get to work on really fun, hard problems when you're doing hardware. And I think batteries are some of the hardest things to make. And it's a pretty dialed-in industry, even though it's relatively young. So the level of competition is high. You have to have real value to survive there. So I think ultimately the reason why I'm doing it and why many others at the company are doing it is, you know, we're fortunate to have been in a position where we were able to get exposed to this technology and learn about it. And there are not that many people with the experience to work on it.

I feel deeply that it's a really meaningfully important problem to work on in the world. And when you're working on something that can really change something as large as our entire energy infrastructure, you know, speed the transition towards more sustainable practices, try to rebalance the geopolitical disadvantage — I think the US and the West in general is against Asia on this critical technology. I think there's just a lot of really interesting, hard problems to work on that are meaningful. And you know, you're spending a lot of time at work, so you might as well be doing something that you believe in.

David Roberts

And you're an "electrify-everything" guy, right? You're a member of that church.

Landon Mossburg

Oh yeah. There's going to have to be molecules for some applications. I think just it's a density issue, but I think you can even solve that with like e-fuels and things like that down the road — step at a time. But you know, we started Peak Energy and the name Peak Energy comes from peaker plants because one of the things we — you know, it's always perplexing, or not always, but at least for the last few years it's been perplexing: "Why are we still building those things?" When it felt like economically we're at the point now where you don't really need them anymore.

David Roberts

So what is it that's missing then from the energy storage biz?

Landon Mossburg

There's so much momentum in the industry, in energy in general. So I think part of this is just the fact that the techno-economics have changed so quickly, that even though it is often the cheapest, best solution to the problem — sort of storage plus some sort of renewable — it's a change management problem, right? Stakeholders don't know, or there's skepticism, there's a fear that it's new. So I think part of what we often say is we exist to sort of take away the final excuses holding back the full electrification.

And you know, from my days at Tesla, one thing that I learned there that's really powerful is you can't just be content with building something that's good enough. You should try to make it, it should be the best in every possible way you can make it. And that's what we were doing on the cars in the early days of Tesla. And that's what we're trying to do here at Peak. I think LFP (lithium iron phosphate) ESS (energy storage system) is already a really dialed-in, great solution to this problem, but it can be substantially better. And we're trying to do to the ESS industry what Tesla did to electric cars, right?

David Roberts

Okay. So that's a little background. You're in batteries, you're in energy storage. It's a booming market, it's growing quickly. There's a lot of people coming to it for the first time. It's very fertile. So with that, my next question requires a bit of wind-up, a bit of introduction. This is like the second introduction, the nerdier introduction, now that people have made it in a little ways. But this starts getting at what I'm really interested in. So just a little bit of background for listeners to contextualize this next set of questions. So I think listeners to this pod are familiar with lithium-ion batteries, and they're probably familiar with the fact that there are two big flavors of lithium-ion batteries.

You have what are called layered oxides, which is the nickel and manganese and cobalt. Those are the sort of high energy density in the original Teslas, et cetera. And then lately you've had coming along, booming, what's called lithium iron phosphate, LFP. I've done a couple of pods on LFP batteries. The trade-off there is you get a little less energy density, but it's a little cheaper and a little safer, basically. And LFP, as I think listeners to this pod are aware, are booming, especially in the energy storage business where, as we said, energy density doesn't matter that much.

What I think listeners may not be aware of, which I didn't really grok until I started reading about this recently, is that in sodium-ion there's the same split. You have layered oxide sodium-ion batteries, they use iron or copper instead of nickel and magnesium, but same idea. And then on the other side you have the phosphates, called pyrophosphates, basically iron-based. And then you also have — there's a third branch of sodium-ion, the Prussian blue. But we're just going to leave that aside and pretend it doesn't exist because we're trying to keep things simple.

So we have the same split in sodium-ion between the layered oxides and the pyrophosphates. And it's the same trade-off. The layered oxides are more energy dense, but the pyrophosphate battery is a little cheaper and a little safer. So all of this is by way of saying you're taking a sacrifice on energy density by choosing sodium-ion instead of lithium-ion. And then you're taking another sacrifice on energy density by choosing the phosphate family of sodium-ion rather than the layered oxide family of sodium-ion. Basically, you're doing the sodium-ion equivalent of LFP: NFPP.

For the listeners who are going to hear all these acronyms flying around — NFPP is the kind of battery you're using.

Landon Mossburg

That's right.

David Roberts

Which is nickel iron pyrophosphate.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, no nickel in it.

David Roberts

Oh, I'm sorry, I saw the N — sodium iron pyrophosphate, but the same idea. So all of which is just to say you are on the low end on energy density. You know, sodium-ion's less energy dense and then NFPP is a less energy dense form of sodium-ion. The idea here is that you are going to make that back up at the system level, right? Your cells at the cell level, you're less energy dense, but you're going to make up value in other places and, according to you, come out ahead. So the way I'd like to structure this next bit is just going through those advantages that compensate for the lower energy density.

And there are several. I've got a list here. We're going to go through them one by one. Let's start with operating costs because I think that's probably —

Landon Mossburg

That's the big one.

David Roberts

The big one. So tell why the operating costs for your storage installations — your ESS, that's an energy storage system for the acronym-challenged — why your ESS, sodium-ion ESS, has lower operating costs than an equivalent, say, LFP ESS.

Landon Mossburg

So to put it in context and make this make sense, I think I'll give a quick overview about the system and why it's different from a traditional LFP system and then it'll explain a bit the OpEx.

So in a traditional, like, LFP-based ESS, you have usually about a shipping container-sized container filled with batteries. It's sealed on the outside and then you have modules inside, usually in racks or sometimes purpose-built. And even with LFP, you're starting to get fairly high energy densities. Some of these, the newest ones, get up to like nine megawatts in a container — nine megawatt hours. And those, because you're pushing so much energy in and out of these things, they generate a ton of heat. Heat scales quadratically with energy density. And you have to manage that heat because LFP batteries like to be at room temperature, about 25 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 2 degrees. It's really important that across your entire container, which has thousands of batteries in it, probably close to 10,000 batteries, maybe between 5,000 and 10,000 batteries, each one of those batteries needs to be held pretty close to that 25 degrees C.

David Roberts

A uniform temperature inside the container.

Landon Mossburg

Otherwise, you have degradation at different rates, right? And then if you do that, then you can't use all the energy in the battery anymore. It can cause safety issues.

So the way that this is accomplished today in most of the newer systems is with water cooling. So they literally pump water or some other cooling fluid through the system. There are heat exchangers and then you have some sort of pump and refrigeration system taking the heat out.

David Roberts

And is it fair to say that the cooling is the primary operating cost for most of these facilities?

Landon Mossburg

It is, yeah. It's the primary driver of auxiliary power, which actually, you know, these systems can use a real decent, like a lot of power to just cool themselves, to circulate the water. Circulate the water, run the refrigerators to pull the heat out. And when you're putting these — like, oftentimes in the markets that are biggest for ESS, especially in the US right now, they're hot markets.

David Roberts

Yeah, deserts.

Landon Mossburg

In the days you are making the most of your money, if you're — especially if you're in merchant market — you're operating in the hottest days of the year. So you're running your system hardest, and you're using more air conditioning. So your impact is even more there. And that's the aux power thing that drives a ton of power consumption. And that power is usually, especially if you're on, like, some sort of net metering rate, you're paying the most for the power when you're using it in those situations. And then the cooling system is also relatively complicated compared to the rest of the systems inside. So it's the thing that breaks most often on most of these systems.

David Roberts

So that's the biggest source of maintenance cost, too, I'm guessing.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, exactly. And it's the biggest source of safety issues as well. If you look at the publicly available data, it's pretty uncommon nowadays to see ESS fires, especially those that get out of control, happen from a cell just randomly going into propagation. Usually, what you see is there'll be like a leak in the cooling system, or a cell will vent and then that'll melt a cooling pipe and spray water everywhere that shorts the system, and then you get a full fire.

David Roberts

So the cooling system is the biggest source of operating costs, it's the biggest source of maintenance, and it's the biggest source of failures and safety violations.

Landon Mossburg

Exactly. Yeah. So that's your first answer, like, why are we better on OpEx? We save a substantial amount in auxiliary power usage because the system we've built — let me talk about the chemistry for a second. NFPP hard carbon. So it's NFPP as the cathode, hard carbon is the anode. And this chemistry is inherently more comfortable at higher temperatures. And we've done some stuff to tune it to really like being at higher temperatures and also handle, like, gassing issues and stuff like that.

David Roberts

Is there a reason that an English major like me could understand why lithium just tends to be hotter than this chemistry?

Landon Mossburg

Like, why doesn't it like to be as hot?

David Roberts

Yes, yes. Why is it more dangerous to get it hot?

Landon Mossburg

There are multiple degradation mechanisms in both sodium-ion batteries and in lithium-ion batteries. The nice thing about NFPP hard carbon is that it just has — it has the same degradation mechanisms as LFP, but it has fewer of them. So two specific ones that we don't have that LFP does have are graphite exfoliation, which is — we don't have graphite. We have hard carbon. It doesn't exfoliate the same way. That has a lot of other nice benefits, which we can talk about later. And then on the cathode side, we don't have nearly as much iron dissolution. We can't even detect it.

Iron dissolution just means you have sort of iron in the cathode. Over time it will dissolve into the electrolyte, and you lose energy density that way. And sodium pyrophosphate, because that pyrophosphate part of it is different from just LFP, which is just regular phosphate crystal structure, holds onto the iron better. So that's what, at least in theory, it looks like. And then our testing data bears that out.

David Roberts

So that's less degradation.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. This is all about degradation.

David Roberts

Yeah. What about less thermal runaway? If we're talking about safety, too.

Landon Mossburg

Primarily the benefit there we think the biggest benefit in terms of just propagation and temperature right now is mostly due to the energy density penalty. So, you know, you are safer at lower energy in all these chemistries. LFP, by the way, that's one of the reasons it's safer than higher layered oxides, because there's less energy in it.

David Roberts

Right, right.

Landon Mossburg

So when you do propagate with NFPP, it propagates and burns less hot, so it's easier to control the propagation.

David Roberts

I see. So I think one thing that we've forgotten to mention that maybe is serving as context for all this is that your systems are passively cooled.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, fully passively cooled, no moving parts.

David Roberts

Maybe we should have led with that. They're cooled without any of those pumps and fans, et cetera, et cetera.

Landon Mossburg

That's right, yeah. Like the first system which is being installed right now in Denver, it's a three and a half megawatt-hour, four-hour system. So full scale. It's the largest sodium-ion system outside of Asia. But what I'm really excited about is the first grid-scale system deployed anywhere that's fully passive. So no moving parts at all in the entire system.

David Roberts

The first passively cooled large-scale battery installation in the world.

Landon Mossburg

In the world, yeah. At least that we're aware of.

David Roberts

And so no moving parts in the whole facility because I guess all the moving parts are just the cooling stuff, right? Everything else is just sitting there.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. Resistive heating elements, I think other systems are probably — some of them would use resistive heaters. Some of them will use the cooling loop actually to heat it up and things like that. But we just have like simple resistive heaters in there that are solid state. So they don't — no moving parts.

David Roberts

So even if you're sitting out there in the desert heat running full power, like discharging at the full rate, even then airflow is enough to keep it cool?

Landon Mossburg

Yep. Yeah. So we're doing a ton of testing, a ton of simulation and correlating those thermal models to the tests that we run. And we test in sort of the worst-case scenarios that we can find using historical weather data — that's typically like Death Valley or Miami is actually pretty bad because it doesn't get cold at night. So you don't get that cool. I think a lot of the work that we've done over the past two years has really been how do we tune both the cell, but also especially the passive thermal system. Because the cell can tolerate up to 60 degrees Celsius, but you don't want to be up there all the time. So you really want to couple to the environment as much as you possibly can.

David Roberts

Yeah, yeah. So you don't have field data yet per se. Is there one of these passively cooled things running yet, or is it being built in Denver?

Landon Mossburg

So we have basically a tower that's been running for about a year under different thermal conditions. We're doing that in sort of temperature chamber environments. So it's not out in the outside because we want to be able to test it in a lot of different thermal conditions. But the first one that's going to be grid-connected and fully deployed outside in the heat and then the cold is being built right now in Denver.

David Roberts

Interesting. When's that coming online?

Landon Mossburg

I was out there. We were pouring foundations last week. I think they're going to start installing it onto the pads this week. Well, a little bit is how long it takes us to interconnect, but I think we're within a few weeks now.

David Roberts

Oh, interesting. Oh, so really close.

Landon Mossburg

Yep.

David Roberts

Okay, so just to underline this point, the big saving in operating costs relative to other ESS systems is you have no active cooling, and active cooling is most of the cost, most of the maintenance, also most of the breakdowns, and most of the safety issues. So is that when you are sort of trying to sell these things, you know, to a utility or whatever? Do you say it's safer? It's less likely to catch on fire. And is that mostly from the lack of active cooling, or are there other — in the chemistry itself?

Landon Mossburg

When you're able to take the active cooling out, you use a lot less power, which means you can simplify your aux power distribution through the system, you can simplify your safety disconnects. A lot of your ancillary systems that sort of go to support all this complexity, you can simplify it, and that drives additional safety and complexity reduction because those are, you know, just the more things you have in there, especially more active components and electrical components, the more things that can go wrong, right? So all of this stuff accrues to a safety advantage. It accrues to lower operating cost, and it accrues to higher reliability, which is like really important when you're thinking about, especially for data center applications, things like that.

David Roberts

So in theory, you plop this thing out in the Denver hinterlands and it just sits there doing its thing. Why would you ever have to mess with it? What would be the sources now of problems? Do you really anticipate just letting it sit there and not having to mess with it at all? Or what are the remaining reasons you might have to go do something to it?

Landon Mossburg

So you don't have to change filters or you don't have to lubricate fans and pumps and things like that. So the regular maintenance, substantially less involved. There's, you know, there's some stuff you want to make sure that, you know, like the convection channels, which are designed to be very robust against critters building nests and stuff, but if you left it for 20 years, you'd probably get some stuff. So, but like, whereas you're probably having to touch a normal ESS system like multiple times a year, even if nothing's going wrong just for regular maintenance, for our systems, it's substantially less than that.

Part of what we're doing right now is field trials to fully dial that in. But, you know, it's conceivable we could get this thing down to where you're not really having to worry about it — maybe once a year, could be less than that.

David Roberts

Interesting. I'm so taken with the no moving parts thing because you can see a system coming together in your head: it's like solar panels have no moving parts, the energy stored in batteries with no moving parts. And then like the energy goes to like a — I don't know, your phone, your phone doesn't really have moving parts. We transformed energy into value without a single moving mechanical piece being involved. That's just, that's a mind blower to me.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, that's part of why I think electrification is so cool, right? You're just simplifying things. You're removing complexity. You're driving efficiency that way. And I mean, the other thing that you don't really think about with batteries in general, and this applies for LFP, over the life of the battery, you have expansion in the materials inside, so the battery actually gets like fatter or bigger as it degrades. That's primarily due to that graphite exfoliation, which I mentioned earlier. So that actually becomes a source of complexity. And the way you do your mechanical design, it's fully understood, but it adds costs and things like that.

Another property that's really nice about NFPP hard carbon is you don't have that, which we think accrues to additional safety. We haven't gone really aggressive on the mechanical design yet to leverage that, but we think there's a lot of upside opportunity in that.

David Roberts

So it doesn't expand at all over time?

Landon Mossburg

Very, very little. Like, I mean to the point where we're struggling to detect it.

David Roberts

So, in theory, this enables you to pack more batteries closer together. I mean, if you were going to exploit that mechanically?

Landon Mossburg

You're probably a little bit more — what makes me excited about is like you can take some mechanical cost out of the system with that property, the way they're designed today. But I think, and this is a sodium-ion in general thing, there's stuff like this, and this is one of the big ones with NFPP hard carbon that just make it probably more feasible for you to do more innovative, newer ways of thinking about "what is a battery?" Right now we're not pushing these limits. Like the battery looks like an LFP battery from the outside, but you could conceivably go much bigger in terms of cell format without compromising safety with this chemistry than, for instance, LFP graphite, because you have other issues there.

David Roberts

In terms of your advantages. So you got lower operating costs because you've eliminated basically active cooling, which is the biggest problem in most places. And that's also giving you a big boost in safety. It says on your materials that your round-trip efficiency is better than LFP. How is that?

Landon Mossburg

The ionic conductivity in almost, I think, pretty much every sodium-ion chemistry is just higher. So that gives you slightly better RTE. You also generate less heat because, again, this is probably primarily because of the lower energy density, but that means less heat, you're wasting less energy there. So we think we're at the system level somewhere around a 1% better RTE than LFP.

David Roberts

I see. So a little better, but not a huge thing.

Landon Mossburg

One percent is a pretty — I mean, when you're talking about these systems, there's a lot of, like, hand-wringing over, you know, 0.2% type thing here. So it ends up being a pretty nice business case driver for the model there as well.

David Roberts

So let's talk about another advantage that you talk about, which is supply chain. This is a huge piece of all this. I mean, you know, I've done several pods on this. Everybody's wringing their hands over the fact that the lithium-ion battery supply chain is like 98% in China. So two questions: One is, where is the sodium-ion supply chain currently? Because as I understand it, that's all in China too, at least for now. So what's the potential here? What's the potential advantage over lithium-ion here?

Landon Mossburg

And this is where I think, like, sodium is really cool. I mean, there's a lot of places where it's cool, but, like, one of the reasons it's really nice is the bill of materials for a sodium-ion battery, with the exception of the anode active material, the cathode active material, and then the salts and the electrolyte, all of it is the same for sodium as it is for lithium. So you can leverage a really robust, highly scaled, mature, de-risked supply chain for almost all the components in your cells.

David Roberts

I see. Wait, say that one more time. The parts that aren't —

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, so like anode active material, cathode active material, and then the salts inside the electrolyte. Pretty much everything else inside is just standard lithium-ion stuff right now.

David Roberts

I see. So you're basically at this point building a lithium-ion battery with two or three ingredients different.

Landon Mossburg

Exactly.

David Roberts

Which means most of the supply chain is just the lithium-ion supply chain, which is already built. So what about the supply chain for those relevant materials?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, so the ones that are different, those you do need specialized supply. Most of that supply is currently at scale in China. There are some projects for active materials that are happening outside of China now. It's still relatively nascent. What you have in China is somewhere probably between, let's say, 30 gigawatt-hours and 100 gigawatt-hours of capacity.

David Roberts

Sodium-ion capacity?

Landon Mossburg

Sodium-ion capacity, yeah. And you can use — not just for cell manufacturing, but also for these active materials — the manufacturing process is really, really similar today for sodium as it is for LFPs.

So you can kind of use the same manufacturing infrastructure. And in fact, that's what we see a lot of suppliers doing, is switching over excess capacity that they have for lithium-ion.

David Roberts

Oh. So if you have manufacturing facilities that are generating materials for LFP, you can switch over and generate materials for sodium-ion batteries without a big renovation?

Landon Mossburg

Certainly on the cell manufacturing side, it's definitely happening there. On the materials, I think it's possible. You see people do that a little bit at the pilot scale or the lab scale. When they get to like real capacity, gigawatts of capacity, they typically will build dedicated infrastructure for active material because just the way you size reaction vessels and stuff like that will be slightly optimized depending on the chemistry you're making.

David Roberts

As I understand it, part of your pitch, sort of as a company, is the possibility of an entirely domestic supply chain. Is that part of the pitch?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, if you take — I mean, I guess if you take like a strategic view as like an economic planner or like, how is the US going to try to get back into this game, or any country, right? One way you could try to do this is you could try to go head at LFP and other chemistries where there's massive scale advantage, probably like a trillion dollars of investment in capital in other countries behind this.

David Roberts

People are trying to do that. I mean, they are, they are trying to do that in the US.

Landon Mossburg

It's not something we — like, I wouldn't say we shouldn't try to do it, but I think it's a hard fight. I think what I like about sodium-ion is that you've got the goodness that means you can leverage most of that investment where you want to, but it's not as scaled on some of the critical components. And there's also some structural advantages in the US. For instance, the US has the world's largest proven reserves of trona, which is the material you mine for soda ash, which is like the lithium carbonate equivalent in sodium-ion batteries. So we have like 92% of the world's natural reserves of that.

But soda ash can also be made synthetically, so it's not bottlenecked. I think that's a really good property. And energy in general, if you don't have like geopolitical geographic monopolies around these materials. So there's just a lot of goodness if you're thinking about how do we get into this game? Sodium-ion lets you sort of bootstrap into it pretty quickly because you can leverage all of this scaled infrastructure and know-how around the manufacturing processes, but then there's not as much, especially processing capacity anywhere. So you're not as at a — we're still early innings here.

David Roberts

So the idea long term would be to build manufacturing facilities in the US that are making the active cathode and anode materials, making the materials that you need that are bespoke to this battery?

Landon Mossburg

That's right, yeah. And then even, you know, as you push the cell designs further, the manufacturing process might change a bit too, which starts to erode scale advantage. Right now, it's very similar, almost the exact same manufacturing process. But like what I mentioned earlier with the swelling thing, these types of things just mean it's a different animal. And maybe you can do something that's harder to do on lithium-ion, and that sort of shakes the game up a little bit.

David Roberts

So to boil all this down, basically, like, China's so far ahead on lithium-ion that it's effectively impossible to catch up. So far ahead on LFP that it is going to be very difficult to catch up. But they're ahead on sodium-ion, but not so far ahead that it's out of the realm of possibility that we could catch up, that we could actually take this piece of the — have one piece of the pie that's ours.

Landon Mossburg

That's right, yeah. Show some leadership on a technology. I mean, and I think there is going to be advance, like, you know, there's dry coating and things like that for lithium-ion, that if you can cut those in, maybe they reset the game there. So, like I said, I think it's important that we're in this game, kind of as a country, you want to have some of this infrastructure, the ability to operate it across all these technologies. But I think it's probably a better-leveraged bet on something like sodium-ion, dollar for dollar, versus lithium-ion.

David Roberts

And in terms of policy, it's funny, I've been listening to some podcasts with you, and they're only from last year, but some of it sounds like —

Landon Mossburg

Different world. The world has changed a lot.

David Roberts

It's like we've uncovered a message from Ben Kenobi from centuries ago or whatever. So things are very different now. In 2024, you were sitting pretty, tons of IRA incentives for batteries, you know, a friendly administration, et cetera, et cetera. IRA got nuked. There's this new regime, and part of it is trying to build up domestic manufacturing, which you would be well suited to. But at the same time, I just did a pod on these rules about foreign content.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, the material assistance provisions and all that stuff.

David Roberts

Yeah. Right now you're getting materials from overseas, right? Like, you can't just conjure a manufacturing facility out of nothing. So at least for now you're having to pay those tariffs, right? So I guess just, it's just a long-winded way of asking, like, how does the recent Republican budget bill and all those changes in policy, how do those shake out for you?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, the final version was certainly much better for the country than the House version that was originally going in. But it is a challenge. Like, as you think about the rational steps you would go through to sort of stand up a supply chain and get manufacturing going, you start with end application, which is what we've done. We get great customer traction. We'll be announcing some stuff on that fairly soon here. And that customer traction sort of translates into bankability for a factory, and then you use that to build a cell factory, and then once you have the cell factory, you can do off-takes to material suppliers.

Right. So it's a multi-year journey to build the full supply chain up.

David Roberts

Right. You have to bootstrap yourself up to that point.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. Or, I mean, the alternative is you do it all in parallel and then there's counter-dependency risk between your upstream supply and your downstream off-taker. But you can do it. It just requires a lot of capital and a lot of capital that's very, very comfortable with high levels of risk. And in fact, that's kind of what China is doing, right? Like, they are not — it's comparatively much easier to secure financing for these supply chains in China. So you can kind of build them all in parallel without hard offtake, or at least you could historically. I think that's starting to change a little bit now.

David Roberts

Well, this gets to a question because you say you want to compete with China in this area where no one has a big established lead yet. But I just kind of like — like when China decides it wants to do one of these things, you know, as you say, it just does it. It does not have to wait to de-risk, blah, blah, blah, like it just does it. So like if China decides it wants to win on sodium-ion, how are we going to compete? It's just going to decide, you know, it can just decide to lose millions of dollars or billions of dollars building a bunch of factories without offtakes, as you said, and then figure it out later.

How is the US going to keep up with that, even, even if it tried?

Landon Mossburg

I think you're starting to see some fatigue in Chinese industrial policy that may indicate — they're not going to stop doing it, but you know, they're also focused on AI, they have to maintain the viability of their investments in solar, wind, and batteries, in lithium-ion batteries. So I think it's, you know, never say never, but I think it's much less likely that they would do as aggressive a push into a new cell chemistry as they did in prior ones, because they have such a strong incumbency advantage as well in terms of these things.

David Roberts

And it's not like lithium-ion is a small market that's exhausted.

Landon Mossburg

It competes. So you have the innovator's dilemma a little bit here, as we see that when we talk to some of the bigger suppliers there, they are working on sodium, they're interested, but generally they see it as like a supplementary technology. They don't see it as the thing that's sort of taking over part of the market. And we very much think right now this is the right technology for grid-scale energy storage. There is some really promising stuff down the road on higher temperature LFP, for instance, that could be really interesting. And we're working on that too.

We're not dogmatic about sodium. We want to pick the best technology for the application.

David Roberts

Well, just to finish up on this question, so there's a bunch of changes in the Republican budget bill, one of them, which we did a whole podcast about, about foreign entities of concern. Basically, like, big penalties on buying — you can't get any assistance, you get tariffed if you buy. And right now, you're stuck buying from foreign suppliers, as we said. So, are you getting directly dinged by this bill?

Landon Mossburg

Oh yeah. I mean, like, the tariff load on the systems that we're shipping — even, you know, like when we do everything besides a cell in the US — and we plan to do the cell eventually, but right now we're doing everything besides the cell — and the tariff load is massive. Like, it's really, really heavy. And yeah, I think it's actually like a counter to the stated aims of the policy here to encourage domestic manufacturing because you would want to be able to, like, leverage these scaled component supply chains to sort of crawl back the vertical integration chain. But the tariffs just make it harder.

David Roberts

Well, we should say the idea that it's designed to boost domestic manufacturing is sort of a post hoc retrofit of a reason — no one knows the reason. It makes no sense. So everybody's sort of like a detective here, like, "Would it make sense to do for this reason?" Well, "No, that doesn't make any sense either." So it doesn't make any sense as a way of boosting domestic manufacturing, but it doesn't make any sense on any other metric either. Okay, so that is hurting you. Presumably, that's going to slow you down a little bit. The other advantage I was going to talk about is how well sodium-ion fits into the lithium-ion manufacturing process, but we've already kind of touched on that.

Basically, like, if I'm a factory making lithium-ion materials, could I just start making sodium-ion materials? I mean, how much of the manufacturing process could just be kind of flip a switch versus doing more retrofit?

Landon Mossburg

If you're doing prismatic stacked jelly roll cells, you can pretty much change your line over. You have to clean, but then you can kind of change it over to recipe change.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Landon Mossburg

If you're talking about active material production — this is not where I'm an expert — but my understanding is that actually you can either use some of the processes that are used for layered oxide chemistries in the lithium world, or the way that LFP is manufactured. Both will work. Again, I think, like, reaction vessel sizing and stuff like this, you probably would want to tune that for the chemistry that you're building. But at least in theory, what I've heard is that the processes are materially similar.

David Roberts

So this is an advantage in that in terms of alternative chemistries, this is sort of like, from a manufacturing point of view, the shortest step away from the existing regime. So a lot of stuff could just be switched to do this without starting over from a blank sheet of paper?

Landon Mossburg

That's right. And it also has, like, similar advantages in terms of application space, because the way that the cell operates, the way that it degrades, the electrochemical mechanism of operation is materially the same as lithium-ion. And so there's a lot less unknown unknowns, and it's easier to get comfortable with how it's going to perform long term.

David Roberts

So people who are using lithium-ion batteries in their applications will be comfortable with this. More comfortable than they would be like jumping to a flow battery?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, for sure, like a flow battery to an operator. It's different complexity, right — I'm not an expert on flow batteries.

David Roberts

But this is a small step, basically.

Landon Mossburg

Exactly, exactly. But even if you compare to a lithium-sulfur battery, right, that's a very different mechanism of operation inside. And like, these are kind of boring in all the best possible ways. I think that's what's nice.

David Roberts

Right, right. Okay. And the final one on the list here is recoverability and recyclability. Just talk through that a little bit. I know the lithium-ion recycling business is just getting cranked up. Is there any reason to think that these sodium-ion batteries that you're making will be easier to recover and recycle or more recyclable, or is there any difference on that metric?

Landon Mossburg

Well, there's a safety angle to this because if you're trying to decommission any pack, you have to, like, safely disassemble it. And, you know, propagation is an issue there. And all of this stuff. So should be easier, like safer, which will go to cost to decommission these things. Already we have substantially less explosive gas generation when the cells do thermally run away. We've got 50% less hydrogen than an LFP cell, but we think we can get it down to under 5% total volume, which is probably not ignitable in regular atmosphere.

David Roberts

So, eliminate thermal runaway?

Landon Mossburg

Or at least eliminate explosive gas generation. You could potentially still thermally run away. But the real challenge for putting these systems, like, inside, for instance, is you don't want to collect explosive gas in any sort of confined space because that's super dangerous. But that said, easier to decommission. On the flip side, what's inside these batteries is dirt cheap. We don't have any copper. It's aluminum on both sides to the current collector. There's no expensive transition metals in the cathode. So economically—

David Roberts

Yeah, that's true. As I think about it, there's really nothing in there that's particularly worth going after.

Landon Mossburg

Salt, iron, aluminum, phosphorus.

David Roberts

So that's interesting. So would you just throw them away then? Because those materials aren't particularly toxic.

Landon Mossburg

I think you probably still recycle them. It's going to be a question of how economically attractive it is to — you might have to pay to deal with them at end of life. And LFP has this problem as well. Like, it's expensive to recover lithium and it's hard to recover all of it. And in an LFP cell, besides the lithium, you have some copper on the current collector, but there's nothing else expensive in that battery at all. So everybody kind of has this problem. Where we are advantaged is — and this goes to some of the OpEx savings too — not only are we more comfortable at high temperatures, we also degrade less. So the cell lasts longer. It's much more cyclable.

David Roberts

So one of these things is just going to sit and operate longer than an LFP would, just naturally.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah.

David Roberts

How much? Like, what's the delta?

Landon Mossburg

We see life going well over 15,000 cycles into the 20ish-thousand cycle range.

David Roberts

Compared to what for —

Landon Mossburg

Well, it's like about 10ish for LFP. Depends on the LFP you're talking about. But 8 to 12 is generally what you see. There are some specialty chemistry variants of LFP that are now getting up into the 15 realm. But that again, that's at a lower temperature than when I say 15,000 to 20,000 cycles. I'm talking about 45 degrees Celsius average temperature.

David Roberts

So in the ballpark of double?

Landon Mossburg

You could achieve double, for sure.

David Roberts

A lifespan that's twice as long is not — that's not a small thing.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. And you have two mechanisms for degradation. You have calendar aging and then you have cycling-derived aging and sort of both of these interact. Again, because the chemistry is so stable, it doesn't have any of that mechanical, really very little, sort of swelling. That means it just can last. You know, it's just kind of really, really stable. That's one of the reasons we picked it. Early on we knew that the energy density penalty was going to be a challenge for us to go after, but it just felt like a really safe, stable platform to build our first product on.

And then I think we vastly underestimated the value of that stability because then it accrued to all these OpEx savings. And by the way, I didn't even talk about the CapEx. I mean, the cell itself, because we have this energy density penalty, is on a cost-per-kilowatt-hour basis at the cell is more expensive than LFP today.

David Roberts

Ultimately, the energy density penalty is a materials penalty. You need more material intensity.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. Even though your materials are very, very cheap, you need more of them for the same amount of energy. And so you're fighting against that penalty in everything you do. Our OpEx savings end up being—if you take like the net present value of them over a 20-year system life, discount them by like 10% a year, which is kind of the standard number, you're talking in the realm of about $75 per kilowatt-hour of savings, TCO.

David Roberts

So just to clarify that, even though you need more material for the same energy output, the material itself is so much cheaper that your materials costs end up cheaper regardless?

Landon Mossburg

Well, no, actually that was — I went off on a tangent there talking about OpEx benefits. So those were the sort of totaling up the OpEx benefits we talked about earlier, it gets you to $75 per kilowatt-hour. At the system level, we basically have just the cell-level energy density cost penalty. So on a like-for-like basis at the cell level, you're paying right now today about $30 per kilowatt-hour more than LFP. LFP is like around $50 per kilowatt-hour. We see that trending down to get to within about $10 per kilowatt-hour or more by 2028.

David Roberts

Sodium-ion trending down?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, exactly. But you would expect, because we had this big energy density penalty, you would expect to see that sort of exacerbated at the system level because you also have material intensity there. But because we've been able to simplify the system so much, take out the passive cooling, take out all this aux infrastructure, we're basically able to hold that line. So our penalty is really on the order of about $20 per kilowatt-hour more than LFP, and then we have $75 per kilowatt-hour savings for OpEx. So you end up coming out like way, way ahead at the total system level.

David Roberts

I see, so you have a slight penalty on the CapEx level, but huge savings on the OpEx level.

Landon Mossburg

That's right.

David Roberts

Thus coming out ahead of LFP currently, like your current product that you can sell to people today, you can promise them that on a total cost of ownership basis it'll be cheaper to buy your thing than to buy an LFP?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, I mean, cards on the table today, like if you're buying for a system that's going to deliver next year, it's definitely going to be more expensive because we're scaling, but we're delivering like small-scale systems. There's mostly like for bankability projects to customers, and we're not talking about like massively more expensive — with the TCO benefit, you're probably right around parity. But by 2027, certainly the business case is really, really attractive for customers there when you factor in the OpEx.

David Roberts

Interesting. And so these small-scale projects you're doing today are mainly just for bankability purposes?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, customers want to put, you know, like maybe 10 to 50 megawatt-hours each. Everybody has a different— so there's still big projects in terms of like the amount of revenue you're talking about, but in the overall scheme of things...

David Roberts

And where are you on bankability? Like, do you feel like you've got some lenders that are getting more comfortable here, like where are you on that sort of journey?

Landon Mossburg

When we started, like, so the company is about two, a little over two years old and even before we formally like incorporated the company, we were already talking to customers, putting together a plan to get, you know, customers comfortable, get financing parties, insurers, regulators, everybody kind of going through this. We call it the Peak Pilot Program that's been running now for two years and we're relatively far down that path. We expect full system certification first half of next year. And aligned with that is when we start to see the banks getting comfortable. Basically, what we're signing up for right now are first projects which are like fully contracted, PO'd, but then there's CPs on those projects that unlock much larger deliveries in '27 and beyond based on us delivering those first projects successfully.

David Roberts

You think, say, by the end of next year you will have banks that are ready to fund large-scale projects?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah.

David Roberts

Okay. These are meant for roughly the same duration as lithium-ion, is that right? Like two to eight hours-ish. That's where you're playing.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. Our first product's a four-hour system. But we could do two, we could do eight.

David Roberts

But duration-wise you don't have any advantages over lithium-ion. You're roughly comparable?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, you could actually — you know, what's interesting about all sodium-ion is because of that high ionic conductivity, you actually can push a lot more energy through the cell. So it's like a much higher potential power rating. So you could go really short duration. We're not playing there because it's not the market that we're going after to start. But conceivably you would be even better, you know, for some of those applications.

David Roberts

Oh, so like short duration that requires big bursts of power, that kind of thing? But there's no, like, we shouldn't anticipate any sort of, like, breakthroughs that get you to whatever, 40 hours or longer? You're going to be in the short-term storage?

Landon Mossburg

I think 12 hours is probably — like, even LFP is starting to push into those realms. So I think anywhere LFP is going to push, we can push a little bit further because our TCO case is better. But yeah, I think you're going to — like, anything bigger than diurnal is going to be tough for these technologies just because, you know, the scaling.

David Roberts

When you say in your materials you say "Peak is an end-to-end solution that is vertically integrated." What does that mean, what's the significance of that?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, so one of the things that really makes the company special is that we are fully dedicated to ESS. We're not coming at this problem as like a battery company that's first thinking about cars and then trying to figure out how do I make this into an ESS product, or the other side of it, just like purely a system integrator and not knowing much about the cell side. So we bring together like a deep, really skilled team of cell engineers with one of the best engineering teams in the world, I think, on the system side. And we also have some really good experience on the project development side.

So we can see into the projects what makes these things expensive to operate and install and all that stuff. And so we take like a full sort of value chain view of this thing and try to pick the best solution with the full scope of the thing that we're building in mind. And I think that's incredibly important because the way the industry has evolved over the past five years — five years ago you had like these projects, probably 80% of the cost was just the DC block, mostly just the battery, right? But the cost of batteries has fallen so much that now that portion of the cost is probably like less than a third.

And the remainder is relatively evenly split between operating costs, discounted, the NPV of operating costs, and installation commissioning. And while the battery cost has fallen so much, those two cost buckets really haven't changed very much. So I think most of the opportunity, the low-hanging fruit's actually in those things, and that's where we're focusing most of our work.

David Roberts

Well, there's vertically integrated and then there's vertically integrated. You're making cells, packs, systems, everything from the cell up, but there's also from the cell down. You know, it's one of the things people complain about lithium-ion is there's the digging up of the minerals—that's one stage. Then there's the processing of the raw minerals into sort of like anode or cathode-ready materials. That is like 99% done in China. So how low on the supply chain do you want to go? Do you want to be digging up minerals? Do you want to be doing the processing, the making of your own anode and cathode materials?

How far down do you want to go?

Landon Mossburg

You know, I think we'd prefer to work with partners on that stuff if we — you know, we will do it if we need to, but it's a different kind of company when you're doing kind of like that type of manufacturing, that type of materials research.

David Roberts

Yeah, it's pretty dirty, it's pretty nasty.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. And it's like the process industry is just really — like, it's different and it's hard in its own interesting ways. And it's fascinating, but it's not really that congruent in terms of skill set with the type of engineering that we think we're really great at. So I would say where we want to start is really on the cell, and then we want to end at thinking about how do we deliver these things in the most efficient, best possible way to a project and actually ship electrons.

David Roberts

How small could you go? Is there any thought of doing residential batteries or smaller, like community installations? Like, are there any physical reasons you couldn't scale all the way down to the household level?

Landon Mossburg

I mean, you do have the energy density penalty, but like, because you are able to depopulate a lot of these supporting systems, you get a lot of that density back at the system level.

David Roberts

Like, do you get the cooling, do you get the elimination of cooling at that small size too?

Landon Mossburg

You would. But a lot of resi systems are actually not actively cooled already, and what they do is they just derate. So, like, if it gets too hot in your garage, the battery will just discharge much slower, charge much slower, or not at all, right? So there are some dynamics there. But we actually think the safety benefit of the chemistry, especially if we can get this "no explosive gas" thing working, is super attractive. It could potentially unlock things like you don't need to have a firewall on your garage, which is a current requirement with code and stuff like that.

David Roberts

Interesting. So that's out there somewhere on the horizon?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, it's just a focus thing. You know, we want to get the first market really, really dialed in. And C&I as well is really interesting because if you think about like especially —

David Roberts

That's commercial and industrial.

Landon Mossburg

Right commercial. Your business is not managing these things, right? So you kind of want them there, and you don't want to have to deal with them and think about them. So I think we think the reliability, maintenance, lower maintenance is going to be like a real killer feature there.

David Roberts

The "set it and forget it" aspect of it is, I think, going to be big.

Landon Mossburg

Exactly.

David Roberts

Most people who are going to install batteries don't want to mess with them, right?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. I mean, in general you like — and that's what, like, when I went into batteries first I thought, "Oh, these things really boring." Turns out they're like extremely complicated and hard to manage. But if you're really good at designing something great for this space, I think one hallmark of that design is that it's going to be a "set it and forget it" type solution.

David Roberts

Yeah, yeah. So tell me about this factory you're building. What's it making, where is it, and how far along is it?

Landon Mossburg

Right now we're doing systems in Burlingame, five minutes from SFO. That's where I am right now. Think of it as like a pilot manufacturing line for systems. So we build modules and we integrate them into the full system here. In Denver, we have a cell lab. So we have a lab-scale capability to make cells, and we work with partners to do full-size cells right now. We are in the process of scaling up our system capability to deliver on these several, like, tens of — probably pushing up to about 100 megawatt-hour —

David Roberts

That's expanding the California factory or building?

Landon Mossburg

We'll probably put a little extra capacity in here, and then also build a dedicated facility somewhere else that should be able to deliver several gigawatt-hours per year by 2027 because that's what we have to get to, sort of, deliver on the commitments we've made. And then, as quickly as we can, sort of — I think like in '27, probably more into '28, that's when we plan to start cell production.

David Roberts

I see, so currently you're buying cells from partners, but you want to bring that in-house too?

Landon Mossburg

That's right.

David Roberts

And one of the things here, like, one of the reasons people have had such trouble competing with lithium-ion is that however much lithium-ion costs today, it's probably going to cost a lot less, you know, whenever you've developed your product or built your factory, whatever it is you're trying to do. Is your business case in any way dependent on lithium becoming supply-constrained and more expensive?

Landon Mossburg

No. So basically, when we're aiming all of our sort of techno-economic targets, we're aiming at what we think is like the most aggressive case for LFP getting to in the next, you know, 5ish years, which is a bit lower than where it has been. It's actually gone up a little bit in the last few months. But, like, take the low point over the last year and a half, we think it could go down a little bit lower than that. But barring some really aggressive change in technology, something new that is still in the lab somewhere, we don't see it going substantially below where it has been for the past year.

David Roberts

There's a lot of resources going into LFP right now. I mean, a lot of brainpower, a lot of manufacturing power.

Landon Mossburg

I think you can drive it maybe another 5 to $10 per kilowatt-hour lower just by improving manufacturing, going to bigger cells, stuff like that. And that's why we build that into our case. But then to get lower than that, you need to start thinking about, like, even higher, like electrode loadings or new sort of something almost at the material science level that we don't — at least it's not clear what that would be right now. So I agree. But, like, the critical success factor for a lot of these things is — one of the things that makes batteries hard is where you kind of have to, like, predict the future about where things are going to go.

David Roberts

Yes. A lot of people have predicted that lithium will become supply constrained, and a lot of people have come to tears from that. That's a rickety thing to base anything on.

Landon Mossburg

That's right. And I think, like, you're already at the point now where the battery, like the actual cell part of the system, is only — let's say it's $50 per kilowatt-hour. You know, if you cut that in half, that's $25 lower. And that would be like a really aggressive cut there. We're still probably about 10% better than LFP at the system level, even if that happens, right? So we have a lot of buffer with these OpEx. And we're also not stopping. I mean, we have some pretty exciting, aggressive plans on how we take some cost out in other areas.

David Roberts

Two-part question: one is, your sodium-ion storage systems that you're building now, where are you trying to lower costs? Like, where is the sort of R&D happening? Where is there room still within this system for further lowering costs? And then, secondarily, like, what's out there beyond sodium-ion ESS?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. So I think there's a few areas of opportunity. One is like expanding the scope of the thing that we're working on. So we're looking at power electronics next. Because if you look at the things that break, not just the battery, but like the whole site — the next thing that's breaking all the time is the inverters and the transformers. Those are all actively cooled. There's scope to make them passive. There's a lot of other, like, challenges with actively cooled systems. For instance, one of them is noise, which sounds kind of crazy for these, but like, that's increasingly becoming a problem of getting them permitted where people live.

David Roberts

These things are super loud. It's not something you would have thought a battery, if it's just sitting there. But like, these battery installations are weirdly loud.

Landon Mossburg

Yep. And that's all the thermal system, or not all, but almost all of it is the thermal system. So to have a truly silent one, we need to make a passive power system. And if you get into the power system, there's a lot of really interesting things you can do. I mean, already the system is really attractive for data centers because of the safety benefit — that's really important for these types of customers. But also the reliability thing. It's easier to hit your nines with this kind of a system. But we think we can extend that advantage even further with some power electronics work that is specifically designed at those types of customers.

So there's a lot of interesting stuff around that. There's some interesting stuff around like how we install and ship the product to the site. Those are big cost drivers, increasingly large. Installation commissioning is just wildly expensive in general. And I think there's a lot of opportunity on that.

David Roberts

What does that mean, installation commissioning? Say a little bit about that.

Landon Mossburg

Getting it to the site on trucks, these are usually oversized, very heavy loads. So you got to permit the trucks and all that stuff. Then you have a crane and you have people on site, you have electricians, foundations. It's like a little bit like a construction challenge in general, like death by a thousand cuts. But there's a — I think there's just a lot of opportunity to really optimize that process. So there's less on-site work to do, and the work that's still there is more highly automated. So that's another area. And then on the cell side, we're continuing to push the energy density.

We're going to see, like, you know, double-digit percentage increases in energy density for the next few years at least.

David Roberts

Where's that coming from?

Landon Mossburg

That's interesting. Like, it again goes to why, like, I really love building on a platform that's borrowed so heavily from lithium-ion. Because a lot of this is just stuff that LFP did, right, for the last 10, 15 years. You got a lot of, like, morphology improvements on the active materials. So particle size distribution, there's purity that material suppliers are working on. There's some doping that's really interesting to bring the voltage up. You know, these are all like the really low-risk things. And then there's some fairly exciting, more higher, let's say, more aggressive swings that are in the lab.

Dry coating I think is a really interesting thing for this technology. There's some reasons that I won't get into because I can't speak as intelligently as I should to them, but reasons that our cell engineering team is really excited about dry coating for sodium-ion specifically. And then there's some really interesting research — actually some published out of China in Nature, there was recently a really good paper on this, some done in the US, Shirley Meng published a paper all around anode-less batteries or like reservoir-less or whatever you want to call self-forming anode.

David Roberts

Anode-less?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah. So it's basically you just have a current collector down, and then you plate onto that current collector from the cathode. You don't have any anode active material.

David Roberts

Interesting. Are these out there somewhere?

Landon Mossburg

In the labs. And this isn't a new idea. This is like — everybody has been going after this in lithium-ion for like almost as long as lithium-ion's been around. It's one of the big things, for instance, like QuantumScape is trying to do, solid-state companies are trying to go for it because it's a little bit like the holy grail of batteries because you get a huge energy density improvement and you're not paying for the active material on the anode side, but sodium-ion, because of some of the properties of sodium plating, just makes it look like it's potentially easier to make it work safely than it is with lithium-ion.

David Roberts

Right. So no one's really probably put a ton of energy into trying to do that particular thing with sodium?

Landon Mossburg

It's early, you know, only a few years into it. But like, our head of cell engineering comes from Solid Power, right? And he ran a bunch of the work over there for like 10-plus years. And they were trying anode-less in the early days and he tried it here. We just tried it in the lab. The first shot in the lab got to over 100 cycles on a coin cell, and it took them years to get to that level at Solid Power. So it's like, you know, it's hard to extrapolate. Are we going to get to the level of stability we need for a commercializable product? I don't know. But it looks really promising based on early indication.

David Roberts

So there are large-scale breakthroughs, at least in the theoretical space, out there available to you. I'm sort of curious, like, you're in a business-wise — people who are investing in your company would like you to make a product and sell it and make money. On the other hand, you are also in a space that is relatively new in terms of R&D and understanding of the basic physical properties. So there's a ton of really basic R&D to be done. I'm sort of curious how you think about splitting your efforts and resources between those.

I mean, I'm sure this is something you lose sleep over, but like, how do you think about how much attention to give one versus the other?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, it's a constant push-pull. But I think when we started Peak, we knew we didn't want to do an R&D company that was going to be in the lab for 10 years. One of my co-founders, Cam, was at Enovix from the very start to when they went public. And they were in the lab for, you know, 10-plus years, and like, it's fun and like ups and downs and hard in different ways, but we just didn't want to build a company that stays in the lab that long and maybe never gets out.

David Roberts

I will tell you, I'm constantly getting pitches from like, "Hey, blah, blah, blah, started a company. He's been working on this since 1973 and he's finally, he's finally doing his—he's finally starting a company." I'm just like, imagine working on something for that long and then like the market could just crush you after all that.

Landon Mossburg

And the whole industry is built on the backs of like professors and entrepreneurs who did that stuff. So like, tons of respect. It's not the thing we wanted to do. We wanted to, like, you know, we were really motivated by making an impact here. We saw urgency to get this out there. So the way I think about it is we need to do core R&D for our future, and we need to always be pushing ourselves to be better than what we think the best possible thing could be in a few years. But the way you earn the right to do really fundamental, aggressive research on hard things that are probably pretty expensive to go figure out is you have to get scale.

And so we intentionally picked technologies that we thought would get us to market as fast as possible with a really great solution that was awesome, but probably not as good as it's ever going to be because there's a lot of, like, whitespace to continue to improve it.

David Roberts

Yeah. Is there any kind of consortium or any, like, are there other companies involved in sodium-ion who want to go in and do some of this basic R&D, maybe in a cooperative way?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, there's — I mean, we're working with a lot of them. Actually, right down the street from us is another company called Mana. It's a small team, but really, really great. They're doing some really interesting stuff on electrolytes. Another company called Unigrid spun out of Shirley Meng's lab. They're more, I think, focused on higher energy density applications, but they're a great team. So it's a small but I think pretty effective community of folks working on this here in the States, and then in China, there's a huge ecosystem that's growing that you can work with, and some stuff as well in Korea and Japan, some stuff in Europe as well.

David Roberts

So do you think at the cell level — I mean, obviously there's tons of efficiencies to wring out of the balance of systems costs, as you're saying. There's, you know, modularization and figuring out construction and all basic business stuff — but at the cell level, at the sort of like chemistry level, is there any prospect of sodium-ion catching up with LFP or other lithium-ion chemistries in terms of energy density? Like, is there headroom on energy density, or are there fundamental physical limits out there?

Landon Mossburg

I mean, if you got an anode-less cell working, you're certainly — especially with a layered oxide cathode — you probably get more energy density, at like a really attractive cost. So I think that's like an incredibly attractive cell for potentially, like, for cars and things like that.

David Roberts

And that could get you the energy density of lithium-ion with the safety and OpEx benefits of sodium-ion. Theoretically.

Landon Mossburg

No, I think that cell would be more just very like — it would be basically like slightly higher energy density than LFP, but much less cost. But similar safety profile, probably similar cyclability and stuff like that.

David Roberts

If you're increasing the energy density, I guess you are thereby losing some safety benefits.

Landon Mossburg

Exactly, exactly. So it's always that trade-off, right? And I think that's why it's really important to be very application-focused when you're trying to decide what you're going to build on. Because at least we haven't found a cell yet that is the perfect cell for all things. So usually you're — and there's so many knobs you can twist, right? So finding the right combination of things that you want to optimize for is incredibly important. And that's also why I think, like, what we're trying to do in the ecosystem of different folks working on this is be a path to market at decent scale or even large scale for many of these more fundamental research companies because they need offtake.

David Roberts

Yeah, yeah. By way of wrapping up, then let's have some fun and just project out to, say, 2030. If everything goes well, if everything goes well and according to plan, how do you see the supply chain and the ecosystem and the products — like, what does the sodium-ion market look like in 2030 if things go well?

Landon Mossburg

You know, I think the thing that I can be most confident about is by 2030 we're going to stop seeing this trend towards just trying to cram more energy density into ESS and much more focus on OpEx and installation commissioning cost. That's not sodium-ion specific, but I think it's the thing I can say with the most confidence just based on what I've seen so far.

David Roberts

Oh, this raises a question I meant to ask earlier, which is totally out of place here, but I don't want to forget it, which is: the passive cooling, does that—because one of the things you have to do with a lithium-ion, with these big containers, is you have to space them out and there's just one layer of them because of the heat. Does your passive cooling allow you to cram your containers closer together or stack them? Like, could you theoretically get more storage on the same piece of land because of your cooling benefits?

Landon Mossburg

We think so. So we have some sort of like prototype stuff around stacking, going higher, and actually our current silo layout is more energy dense. So we have a — but probably not enough time here — but like, our mechanical system design is really interesting, a lot of really cool ways, and it lets us sort of service the modules in a different way than is currently done, which requires really large aisles between them. We're not making any aggressive assumptions on, like, you don't need to leave room for fire trucks and stuff. We have the same sort of requirements there until maybe in the future we have even higher safety system where we can start to densify even more in that direction. But right now we're not making any of those assumptions.

David Roberts

Because theoretically you could make up some of your energy density back at the land level, at the sort of system level.

Landon Mossburg

I think the primary opportunity there is one that we've already done, which is like taking out—the thermal management systems are pretty volumetrically large, right? They take up a lot of space. So we've captured a lot of that back. And then we also think it's going to be much cheaper and easier for us to stack vertically. But that still actually drives a decent amount of cost even for us because you need to pass seismic ratings for earthquakes. So you have to add a ton of structure. These things are not light, so we aren't going after that yet.

It's on the roadmap, but we don't actually see the addressable market being that huge for site-level energy density being the major buying factor for most projects. Usually, either land is really, really constrained and expensive, which is a small minority of projects, or it's like the marginal cost of a little bit more land is almost zero, which is still the majority, we think.

David Roberts

Interesting. Anyway, I interrupted you. You're describing 2030...

Landon Mossburg

Okay. Systems, I think, will be seeing much more passive, much more focus on like OpEx and installation commissioning optimization. Sodium-ion in general, I think you're going to continue to see improvements in energy density for NFPP hard carbon and the layered oxides. But to be honest, like, layered oxides, the way they're currently constituted, especially the ones happening in China — there's some interesting stuff here in the States that I know some of the companies I mentioned earlier are working on, so I won't — I'll exclude that from this comment. But the layered oxides I see mostly talked about in Asia right now, I don't really — unless you really unlock one of these, like, an anode-less battery or something that really pushes it beyond — it's still hard to see how that gets like really cost competitive against LFP. There are some, like, cold weather charging benefits and stuff that might — I think you'll still see them used in niches. But I'm pretty bullish on the chemistry we're choosing and I think that's going to become increasingly the dominant chemistry in any place where you're not space constrained.

David Roberts

Well, I feel like, and tell me if you think this is wrong, but I feel like sort of at the macro level, you know, in the battery space, looking back like five to ten years, I feel like people really rated energy density very, very highly.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, I saw this firsthand at Tesla, right?

David Roberts

To the point of obsession.

Landon Mossburg

It intuitively makes sense, right? Because when you start working on these, there's such a virtuous cycle with increasing energy density — it reduces the cost of the cell and then at the pack level as well. But with LFP the same thing happened, right? Like, there was a debate even as recently as like, you know, 2018 or something about whether —

David Roberts

Right. They got written off. Like, LFP were sort of like — written off early because of energy density.

Landon Mossburg

Exactly. Even though the cell was more expensive for like high nickel, you're like, "Well, you're going to pay less at the system level because you have less stuff you need, the material intensity is less." But that actually didn't end up panning out because, as you know, like, you went to larger cells on LFP, that was easier to do and you got much more back by optimizing at the system level, leveraging the higher safety, the better life of LFP than you did for —

David Roberts

So that move from layered oxide to LFP in the lithium-ion space, people predicted that it wouldn't work, and then it turned out it did work because it turns out in practice energy density is just one thing among many, you can make it up in other places. So you're basically just extending that logic more or less. You're basically just saying that's going to continue, like energy density is going to continue to decline in importance, and other things are going to continue to rise. That's your prediction.

Landon Mossburg

There's always going to be this trade-off, right? Because if you ever go too far in the other direction, energy density was — but like, I think you'll see these like boom and bust cycles almost of like, energy density is most important until it isn't anymore, and then it's other stuff. And I think that's where we are right now.

David Roberts

Got it. So you will be, you think, are going to establish a foothold in the ESS market and grow. Do you have any ballpark predictions for how much of the stationary storage market that you think sodium-ion is eventually going to eat up? Like, LFP has gotten a lot farther than people said it would, so there's reason for optimism.

Landon Mossburg

I think it's just limited by scale. Like, right now, if I look, there's probably some stuff, if you need really high energy density at the container level, you're not going to pick sodium for that. But there are very few projects that care about that. And we can probably address it by stacking, right, if you have vertical height. But other than that, I think it's like the business case for doing this — and it's like, these are pure economic assets, right? They should generate a return for you. There's no, you know, branding or anything like that that really should matter.

I don't see a reason, at least with current other solutions. Now, if we get like an LFP version of this with some high-temp LFP variant, and that, again, that's an interesting thing. It's really hard, there's other things, but we're working on it too, and that could change the game.

David Roberts

Are you also doing LFP research?

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're not — I mean, we certainly have a lot of background and IP around sodium-ion, but we're an energy storage company, right? We pick the best tool for the job. And right now, we think that's NFPP hard carbon.

David Roberts

Final question, and maybe this isn't your company, but just sodium-ion in general. One of the things I think people are trying to wrap their heads around is, you know, lithium-ion has gotten on this enormously amazing cost curve, faster even than solar power, which was sort of like the fastest cost curve we were previously aware of. And the question, I guess, is, is sodium-ion going to get on that kind of cost curve? On the one hand, it kind of already is because, as you say, a lot of the pieces are the same, a lot of the battery is the same.

So in a sense, it's already benefited from that cost curve. But the other parts, the remainder, the different bits, as you say, are new, newish, and there's a lot of blank space there. So do you — should we anticipate a similar type of cost curve with sodium-ion?

Landon Mossburg

Oh yeah. And we already see that. I mean, our quotes from suppliers sort of bear that out, both at the materials level and at the cell level. We're seeing, like, you know, very material, high teens, you know, in the 20% decrease in price year over year for at least for the next couple years out.

Yeah. Oh yeah. It was bigger last year too. I mean, it's been falling really, really quickly because there's just, like, there's so much low-hanging fruit. And that's kind of what's happening with LFP, right? LFP had periods where it's like sort of fallen precipitously because there's been some unlock and then it sort of asymptotically approaches some limit, and then it falls again.

And so I think we're going to see, as LFP matures and lithium-ion is fairly mature now, you're seeing longer plateaus possible between the next, like, big cut. For sodium-ion, I think it's going to see much more rapid advancement just because there's just so much stuff you can do to continue to optimize for the application. Part of the thing — we're using most of the same constituent bill of material stuff besides the active material. But there's no reason you have to. There's probably some optimization, and certainly there is.

David Roberts

Yeah. Yes. So in a sense, just plugging your new active materials into existing lithium-ion architecture is a sort of just opportunistic — it's just a way of getting going. But you think over time those things could be tweaked and optimized to the chemistry in a way that gets you more system benefits.

Landon Mossburg

Yeah, like, for instance, the separator. Right now you're probably using a ceramic-coated separator. In an LFP world, that might be overkill for some of these because the energy density is lower. And so you could maybe do a cellulose or something that's cheaper. So that's just like one example. But there's lots of examples like that where you're using something from the lithium world and it works really well and it's pretty cheap. But you might be able to push it even harder if you go to a purpose-designed thing.

David Roberts

Really interesting. I tell you, man, these are such salad days for hardware engineers. Just for, like, engineers generally. I just don't understand why all these young smart people in Harvard or whatever are like going into crypto or going into apps. Like, honest to God, like, how much faster can a burrito get to you? There's so many cool things to be doing right now. I don't understand why, like, all these young, bright people coming out of Ivy League colleges, et cetera, aren't just flooding into this area. It's so fun and cool right now. There are so many, as you say, low-hanging fruits to be discovered. Like, you can be a hero in this.

Landon Mossburg

I love that you said that. Help us recruit a little because I think there's, you know, if you want to work on really hard, interesting problems with some of the best people in the world, I think this is a great place to come to it. But in general, I would pitch go work on energy or hardware in general. There's not enough smart people working on that stuff, and it's really hard.

David Roberts

All right. Your lips to God's ears. Well, Landon, thank you. This has been as fascinating as I thought it would be. Thanks for coming on and thanks for all your work.

Landon Mossburg

Thanks for having me, Dave. It was really fun.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.