Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: September 3, 2024
Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: September 3, 2024
A sodium-ion battery factory in North Carolina!
A gigafactory in North Carolina will manufacture sodium-ion batteries in America at the largest scale ever.
Tell Congress to sustain the IRA cleantech tax credits powering investment in new battery chemistries!
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Reasons For Hope
American innovator company Natron Energy is building “Project Neptune,” a $1.4 billion giga-scale battery factory in Edgecomb County, North Carolina, set to create 1,000 jobs and produce 24 GW (24,000 MW!) of batteries per year when complete.
“North Carolina’s momentum in the clean energy economy reaches epic proportions with today’s news.
Natron Energy’s choice to build this large and unique battery factory in our state will help the nation reduce greenhouse gas emissions while creating good jobs in…eastern North Carolina.”
-Governor Roy Cooper, D-North Carolina
This is just one of the multitude of new battery factories that have sprung up nationwide thanks to the ongoing clean manufacturing unleashed two years ago by the Inflation Reduction Act - but there’s something extra special about Project Neptune.
Natron Energy’s new North Carolina factory will be the largest-ever sodium-ion battery factory in America, using a recently developed battery chemistry (and their unique Prussian blue electrodes) to make fully functional large-scale batteries containing zero lithium, cobalt, nickel, or copper, instead using much more commonly available minerals like aluminum, manganese, iron, and sodium1. Natron also claims that their sodium-ion batteries are nonflammable and can charge and discharge power faster than lithium-ion batteries.
Project Neptune is a bold bet on a powerful new technology, with amazing potential to catalyze a new industry that could help rev up the renewables revolution even further. It’s also a smart geopolitical move for America, as China has developed a substantial lead in lithium-ion battery manufacturing market share, but sodium-ion batteries are just starting out and the USA is moving a lot faster this time.
All this was made possible by an array of targeted state and federal industrial policy support, including grants from the state of North Carolina, a grant from the Biden-Harris Administration’s Department of Energy, and of course the clean manufacturing tax credits of the Inflation Reduction Act!
As the IRA’s success becomes undeniably apparent, we’re already starting to see pleasantly surprising glimmers of bipartisan support for sustained cleantech funding. Project Neptune is exactly the kind of emergent success being made possible by the IRA, and policymakers need to hear about it.
Tell Congress to sustain the IRA cleantech tax credits powering investment in new battery chemistries!
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This is exactly the kind of novel-chemistries effect the Rocky Mountain Institute is talking about in their new report on the Battery Mineral Loop!