The inflection point for the commercialization of sodium-ion batteries has truly arrived. CATL has signed a 70GWh sodium-ion battery order, and European integrators will no longer take a wait-and-see stance.
CATL's 70GWh sodium-ion battery order lands in Europe, the "backup option" label is removed, and the large-scale inflection point has arrived.
On October 10, Hubertus Jakobi, CEO of German system integrator Intilion, posted a post on LinkedIn, announcing an agreement reached with CATL: To deploy energy storage projects equipped with CATL's sodium-ion batteries in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the next five years, with a maximum target scale of 3GWh. This news itself is not particularly explosive: a German integrator purchasing Chinese batteries has happened countless times in the past decade.
After the implementation of this order, CATL's sodium-ion battery energy storage orders have been updated from 67GWh to 70GWh. What is the concept of 70GWh? The total global shipment of sodium-ion batteries in 2025 was only 9GWh, and the proportion of energy storage applications just exceeded 60%.
The company's on-hand orders are more than seven times the actual global shipment of last year. The energy storage industry has never lacked "planned production capacity", but what sodium-ion batteries have presented this time is a set of performance parameters that can hardly be explained by the logic of lithium batteries.
Three parameters push sodium-ion batteries from "usable" to "excellent to use"
The technical indicators disclosed by Intilion show that the round-trip efficiency exceeds 96.5%, the number of cycles in high-temperature environment is more than 15,000 times, and the low-temperature capacity retention rate is higher than 90%. The round-trip efficiency determines the energy loss during charging and discharging. 96.5% means that for every 100 kWh of electricity charged, 96.5 kWh is discharged — this level has caught up with the performance of mainstream LFP energy storage systems. What is the concept of 15,000 cycles? If the battery is charged and discharged once a day, it can operate for more than 40 years. A low-temperature capacity retention rate higher than 90% means that in an environment of minus 20 degrees Celsius, the battery can still discharge more than 90% of its electricity. For energy storage projects in regions with long winters such as Northern Europe, Canada, and northern China, this is a pain point that lithium batteries have never completely solved.
Jakobi only said on LinkedIn that this is "a key step to expand the technology matrix and tap the potential of sodium-ion technology". But when read in the context of the European energy storage market, this statement carries significant weight. Energy storage projects in Europe are shifting from "whether it is available" to "whether it is cost-effective". When integrators choose batteries, they no longer only look at the purchase price per Wh, but the levelized cost of electricity over the full life cycle. 15,000 cycles mean that the battery replacement cycle is greatly extended, and 96.5% round-trip efficiency means that the power loss during operation is minimized.
Chinese competitors have taken another path, and the route debate is more noteworthy than orders
CATL adopts the layered oxide route for energy storage, while Zhongke Hina and Natrium New Energy have chosen the polyanion route. The differences between these two routes in material system and cost structure are determining the penetration pace of sodium-ion batteries in the energy storage market.
In September, Zhongke Hina won the bid for the 20MWh polyanion sodium-ion battery energy storage project of China Huaneng Clean Energy Research Institute, which is the first engineering implementation of this technology route in the field of large-scale domestic energy storage.
Earlier, Zhongke Hina provided 40MWh of sodium-ion batteries for the 200MW/400MWh independent energy storage power station in Qiubei County, Wenshan Prefecture, Yunnan Province. The project achieved full-capacity grid connection in March 2025, which is the largest grid-forming lithium-sodium hybrid energy storage power station in China. The advantages of the polyanion route lie in cycle life and safety, with stable structure and low risk of thermal runaway, making it suitable for grid-side energy storage scenarios with extremely high safety requirements. The 71173 type 170Ah energy storage cell of Natrium New Energy has a cycle life of more than 15,000 times. The megawatt-level project deployed in the chemical industrial park in cooperation with BYD Energy Storage Consortium has been charged and discharged twice a day since it was connected to the grid in January 2025, and the charge-discharge efficiency exceeds 90%.
CATL has taken another path. The second-generation "Sodium New" battery cell has an energy density of 175Wh/kg and a cycle life of over 10,000 times, and will start large-scale delivery in December 2025. The layered oxide route has a higher upper limit of energy density, and CATL is obviously leaving leeway for the extension of sodium-ion batteries from energy storage to power scenarios.
The two routes are not in a relationship of one replacing the other, but each occupies its own share in the large energy storage market: The polyanion route covers grid-side and chemical industrial park scenarios with the highest safety requirements, and the layered oxide route covers commercial and industrial energy storage and low-speed power scenarios that require high energy density. The route differentiation itself precisely shows that the industrialization of sodium-ion batteries is no longer a question of "whether it can be manufactured", but a question of "where it is most cost-effective to apply".
The cost inflection point is coming, but large-scale production is the real threshold
The latest report from the International Renewable Energy Agency shows that The cost of sodium-ion batteries has dropped to the range of $90 to $125 per kWh, which is approaching the $75 to $105 level of lithium-ion batteries. More importantly, many enterprises believe that with the expansion of production capacity and the maturity of upstream material systems, the cost of sodium-ion batteries still has room to drop to around $40 per kWh.
The basis for this judgment lies in raw materials: the abundance of sodium in the crust is about 1,000 times that of lithium, and the price of sodium carbonate has long been stable at $100 to $500 per ton, while lithium carbonate fluctuated drastically between $6,000 and $83,000 per ton from 2020 to 2024. In terms of cathode materials, the price of sodium-based cathode is about one-tenth of that of a typical lithium-based cathode, and aluminum foil can be used to replace copper foil for current collectors, further reducing manufacturing costs.
However, the cost calculation cannot only consider the theoretical value. The current average price of sodium-ion cells is still above 0.5 yuan per Wh, and the average price of energy storage lithium-ion cells is about 0.32 yuan. Sodium-ion batteries have cheap raw materials, but the manufacturing scale has not yet come up, leading to high amortization costs. CATL's 70GWh order is a "forward check", and whether it can be fulfilled on time depends on the speed of production capacity ramp-up and yield.
The global shipment of sodium-ion batteries in 2025 is 9GWh, and CATL's on-hand orders alone exceed seven times this figure. The gap between production capacity and orders is the biggest risk itself. Policy support has already been in place: the "Action Plan for High-Quality Development of New Energy Storage Manufacturing Industry" issued by 8 departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology clearly lists sodium batteries as the direction for engineering and applied technology research. The data that 1771 game version numbers were issued throughout 2025 is meaningless for comparison here — What sodium-ion batteries lack is not policy signals, but the actual ramp-up speed of mass production lines.
The enemy of sodium-ion batteries has never been lithium batteries. The price of lithium batteries dropped sharply after 2023, which once made the cost advantage of sodium-ion batteries embarrassing. But the demand curve of the energy storage market is changing. The grid-side demand for batteries with long cycle life, high safety and wide temperature range is emerging, and the room for marginal improvement of lithium batteries in these dimensions is narrowing.
The real significance of this Intilion order is that it proves one thing: when a European integrator carefully calculates the full life cycle cost, it chooses sodium-ion batteries not because they are cheap, but because they are sufficient and cost-effective. 70GWh is a target, not a reality. The reality is that sodium-ion batteries have just proved that they do not need to rely on subsidies to survive.