Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 17, 2025
Grid-scale sodium-ion batteries!
China just built the world’s first grid-scale sodium-ion battery storage.
Tell the Senate to save America’s clean energy industries!
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Reasons For Hope
The world’s first-ever grid-scale battery storage project to feature cutting-edge sodium-ion batteries (whose key element, sodium, is much cheaper and more abundant than industry-standard lithium) has come online in China. The Baochi Energy Storage Station, located in Yunnan, stores power from over 30 wind and solar projects in the region. It was built in seven months and is set to be the first of many.
In Q1 2025 (January through March), China installed a record-high 60 GW (60,000 MW) of solar power, including 36 GW of rooftop solar.
For context, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that as of 2023, all the nuclear power plants in America collectively amounted to 96 GW of electricity-generating capacity. China just built 60 GW of solar in three months — and they’re building more and more grid-scale batteries to solve intermittency issues.
In this historic moment, with clean energy technologies transforming the world’s economy and geopolitics, it beggars belief that the Senate is even considering a budget that utterly cripples America’s global competitiveness by repealing a wide range of tax credits for domestic clean energy manufacturing and deployment.
One recent report calculated that this proposed budget’s attacks on clean energy would decrease U.S. GDP by $1.1 trillion through 2034 — and another report finds that it would put two million jobs at risk! A third report forecast that this budget will slash clean energy build-out across America from the previous “with tax credits” projection of nearly 1,000 GW by 2035 to only about 342 GW by 2035.
If this bill passes, the U.S. will self-sabotage on an unprecedented scale, deliberately choosing to have a less abundant electricity supply (meaning higher prices for consumers across the nation, a self-imposed disadvantage in the AI race, and more) and less domestic battery manufacturing capacity (a serious national security issue in a world where battery-powered drones are increasingly dominating modern battlefields).
The Senate must stand up to defend American industry, prosperity, and security from this reckless and senseless budget.
Grid scale sodium ion batteries. That’s exciting. It would be interesting to know what the capacity of this battery is. How any megawatt hours can it store and how does this translate to a real world scenario? For example, for how many hours could this battery power a certain number of homes?