China-based energy storage company, HiTHIUM, has unveiled a 4MWh sodium-ion energy storage system designed to last for 30 years, as the battery industry looks beyond lithium-ion for large-scale power storage.
The company introduced the ∞Power N4.0MWh system on Wednesday, September 16, alongside its ∞Cell N785Ah sodium-ion battery.
HiTHIUM said it planned to begin full-scale production and deliveries of the system in 2027, in a move targeting one of the biggest challenges facing grid-scale energy storage, which is reducing dependence on lithium and building battery supply chains around more widely available materials.
“Energy storage technologies must overcome two barriers to achieve large-scale deployment: affordability and availability,” HiTHIUM chief technology officer said Dr. Nazar Yi.
Sodium is considerably more abundant and widely distributed than lithium, potentially giving sodium-ion batteries an advantage in resource availability. But the technology still has to demonstrate the performance, cost and manufacturing scale needed for widespread deployment.
Sodium chemistry scales up
HiTHIUM’s ∞Cell N785Ah is designed specifically for energy storage and has a claimed service life of 20,000 cycles. The company says it can support storage durations ranging from two to eight hours.
The cell is also designed to work with HiTHIUM’s existing 1,000 Ah lithium-ion manufacturing platform, including cell and system integration production lines. This could allow the company to scale sodium-ion production without building an entirely separate manufacturing infrastructure.
“We started from the most fundamental chemistry and materials, retracing the 30-year journey of lithium-ion batteries,” said Dr. Aileen Wang, director of Battery Research Institute. The company used that approach to develop the sodium-ion cell while adapting its existing manufacturing expertise to the new chemistry.
The ∞Power N4.0MWh uses a stacked-cell architecture and a dedicated battery management system. HiTHIUM claims its state-of-charge estimation has an accuracy of 2.5 percent or better, while the system can operate with power conversion systems rated between 800 and 1,500 volts. HiTHIUM also says power-conversion-system utilisation is more than 20 percent higher than its previous-generation sodium-ion system.
The system’s architecture reduces its footprint by 30 percent, according to the company, while its 24-hour comprehensive efficiency exceeds 88 percent.
Cooling is another area where HiTHIUM has targeted operating costs. The system combines air and liquid cooling with automated thermal management and integrated weather monitoring. Weather data can be used to select cooling modes, which the company says cuts auxiliary power consumption during operation by 30 percent and standby consumption by 50 percent.
The company has designed the system for a 30-year service life, equivalent to 10,950 days of operation. “30 years means 10,950 days of validation—a long-term commitment to our customers. It means electrochemical energy storage can be viewed, evaluated and held to the service-life standards of infrastructure,” Wang said.
HiTHIUM plans to expand its sodium-ion systems beyond utility-scale projects into commercial and industrial storage, residential applications and energy-access projects. The company has also launched its ∞Edge Pioneer Program to test sodium-ion batteries and systems in extreme environments. It plans to disclose progress over the next three years and introduce technology packages for extreme environments, with a stated goal of moving energy storage toward a levelised cost of storage of RMB 0.1 per kWh.
