Aug 12, 2026 | Battery Technology
Solid-state batteries are not arriving in 2027. What arrives in 2027, if the schedules hold, is a trial production line — a few thousand cells built to prove the process works, not a battery you can buy in a car. CATL and BYD, which between them make most of the...
Aug 12, 2026 | Battery Technology
America is getting its first sodium-ion battery factory — for the second time. Peak Energy is building a $71 million plant near Sacramento to make 4 GWh of sodium-ion grid batteries a year, a twentieth of the budget of the $1.4 billion Natron Energy gigafactory that...
Aug 10, 2026 | Battery Technology, Charging & Infrastructure
Lithium plating is what goes wrong inside a battery when it is charged too fast or too cold. Instead of tucking into the graphite anode the way they are supposed to, lithium ions arrive faster than the graphite can absorb them and settle on its surface as a film of...
Aug 7, 2026 | Battery Technology, Charging & Infrastructure
A battery’s C-rate is how fast it charges or discharges relative to its own capacity: at 1C it fills in an hour, at 4C in fifteen minutes, at 10C in six. That last figure is not hypothetical. In March 2025 BYD’s Super e-Platform hit 10C — 1,000 kW, 1,000...
Aug 2, 2026 | Battery Technology, Charging & Infrastructure
A Lucid Gravity GT was measured on a 500 kW Tesla V4 Supercharger in January 2026. It touched 419 kW — briefly, between 3% and 5% state of charge. It averaged 223 kW across the useful 10–80% window, and 107 kW across a full charge to 100%. The number on the sign was...
Aug 1, 2026 | Battery Technology
A commercial sodium-ion cell holds about 175 Wh/kg. Lithium iron phosphate holds about 205, and NMC about 255. That 30 Wh/kg gap between sodium and the cheapest lithium chemistry is the entire story of what sodium-ion is for, and it is not going to close, because the...
