Peak Energy announced last week that it has entered a new partnership with General Motors to manufacture sodium-ion batteries for energy storage systems.
The deal marks a pivotal moment for Peak, a startup founded three years ago, and an opportunity for GM to branch out into a battery technology that is largely limited to China.
I spoke this week with Cameron Dales, Peak’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, and I started by asking him how he would explain a sodium-ion battery to a 10-year-old.
A good place to start, he said, is to understand that the market-leading technology—lithium-ion batteries—gained a foothold in the 1990s because of high energy density. So it has a long track record of success.
“They pack a lot of power into a small package, which is why they’re so great for mobile applications, because you’re carrying this battery around with you in your phone, you’re carrying it around with you in your car, which is a large mobile device,” he said.
