In April 2026, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL) — the world's largest battery manufacturer — and Beijing HyperStrong Technology Co. signed a three-year partnership totaling 60 gigawatt-hours of sodium-ion batteries. The deal, disclosed through HyperStrong's corporate communications channel, is the largest publicly announced sodium-ion battery order to date.
For a chemistry that has spent the last decade as a research curiosity and a marketing footnote, that volume is the moment the conversation changes. Sodium-ion is no longer a hedge against lithium prices. It is a procurement decision, with delivery commitments and project timelines attached.
This article looks at what the CATL-HyperStrong partnership actually represents, why the timing matters, what BloombergNEF's 2026 forecasts say about non-lithium chemistry trajectories, and what the deal does — and does not — mean for storage projects being structured today.
What got signed, and what it covers
The CATL-HyperStrong agreement runs three years and totals 60 GWh of sodium-ion supply. To put that in scale terms: 60 GWh is roughly a fifth of the entire 307 GWh of stationary storage that BloombergNEF reported was added globally in 2025. It is, by a wide margin, the largest single industrial commitment to non-lithium chemistry the storage industry has seen.
The two parties bring complementary positions. CATL is the dominant cell manufacturer globally, with vertical integration into upstream materials, a manufacturing footprint that no Western competitor has matched, and an established LFP cell business that has been the stationary storage industry's default chemistry. HyperStrong is one of China's most active stationary storage system integrators, with a project portfolio that has scaled rapidly across the domestic market and into Middle East and Southeast Asian deployments.
The framing matters. This is not a research and development partnership. It is a commercial supply commitment between a cell manufacturer and an integrator with deployable end markets. The 60 GWh number is a contracted volume, not an aspirational pipeline.
Why now: the chemistry math is finally starting to work
To understand why the CATL-HyperStrong partnership is happening in 2026 rather than earlier, it helps to look at what BloombergNEF reported in its May 7, 2026 analysis of the 100-gigawatt year.
In 2025, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) accounted for more than 90% of stationary storage additions. That share reflects a multi-year transition from NMC chemistry, driven by safety considerations after a series of high-profile fire incidents, lower cost per kilowatt-hour, and longer cycle life. LFP, in other words, won the lithium race for stationary applications.
What changes in 2026, according to BNEF, is the rise of long-duration energy storage and the industrial-scale entry of sodium-ion. Annual additions of long-duration storage (six hours or more) are set to quadruple to roughly 2 GW in 2026, with most of that capacity coming from non-lithium technologies and growth concentrated in China. BNEF expects sodium-ion specifically to start gaining share in the stationary storage space, noting that "the technology is generally more expensive than lithium-ion batteries today due to limited scale, but widespread sodium material abundance and growing economies of scale could reduce costs over time."
The CATL-HyperStrong order is the operational manifestation of that forecast. If 60 GWh of sodium-ion gets manufactured and deployed over three years, the unit economics that today make sodium more expensive than LFP start to compress.
The technical case for sodium-ion
The basic technical proposition has been clear for some time. Sodium-ion batteries use sodium ions (Na⁺) instead of lithium ions (Li⁺) as the charge carrier. Cathodes typically use Prussian-blue analogs or layered oxides; anodes commonly use hard carbon rather than the graphite used in lithium-ion cells. Cell voltages run around 3.0 to 3.2 volts, similar to LFP and lower than NMC.
The chemistry's structural advantages matter in three places.
Material abundance: sodium is roughly 1,000 times more abundant in the Earth's crust than lithium and is geographically distributed rather than concentrated in a handful of countries. Cathode precursor materials are also typically cheaper and more abundant.
Cold-weather performance: sodium-ion cells generally perform better than lithium-ion at low temperatures, which matters for grid-scale deployments in continental climates and for some commercial applications.
Safety profile: while every battery chemistry has its own thermal-runaway considerations, sodium-ion's typical failure modes are generally considered less severe than NMC and broadly comparable to or better than LFP. This matters as fire incidents at NMC-based BESS sites continue to drive insurance and siting requirements globally.
The disadvantages are equally real. Sodium-ion has lower energy density than lithium-ion (less attractive for mobile applications and for projects where space is constrained). It is today still typically more expensive per kilowatt-hour than mature LFP because manufacturing scale is limited. And cycle life and degradation profiles are still being characterized at industrial volumes, which means financiers and underwriters are working with less operating data than they have for LFP.
The parallel US story
The CATL-HyperStrong partnership is the largest, but it is not the only one. In the United States, Peak Energy signed an approximately 5 GWh sodium-ion supply agreement with Jupiter Power in 2025, with deployments scheduled between 2027 and 2030. That is a smaller volume but with a longer-dated commitment, and it positions a US-based supplier into a US-based developer's pipeline at a moment when domestic content considerations are increasingly material in project economics.
In parallel, US researchers (covered by ESS News in May 2026) developed a meta-weakly solvating electrolyte that enables stable operation of high-voltage sodium-ion batteries. The breakthrough optimizes sodium-ion solvation structure, enabling faster ion transport, reduced side reactions, and improved interfacial stability. Practically, the work extends cycle life materially over conventional and localized high-concentration electrolytes — and outperforms them in head-to-head testing.
That kind of incremental research progress matters because it gradually pulls sodium-ion's performance metrics closer to lithium-ion's at any given price point. Combined with manufacturing scale-up, the chemistry's economic case improves with each generation.
What 60 GWh actually means in market context
Volume context helps put the CATL-HyperStrong deal in perspective.
| Reference point | Volume | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Global stationary storage additions (2025) | 307 GWh | BloombergNEF |
| Long-duration storage additions (2026 forecast) | ~2 GW (multi-GWh in energy) | BloombergNEF, mostly non-lithium |
| CATL-HyperStrong sodium-ion partnership | 60 GWh over 3 years | Largest disclosed sodium-ion commitment |
| Peak Energy-Jupiter Power agreement | ~5 GWh, 2027-2030 | Largest US sodium-ion order |
| Fluence order backlog (2026) | 147 GWh pipeline, $5.6B value | Mostly LFP — comparison for scale |
A 60 GWh sodium-ion commitment over three years works out to roughly 20 GWh per year on average. Against the 2025 stationary storage market of 307 GWh, that represents on the order of 6-7% if delivered on schedule and entirely into stationary applications. That is meaningful share without being dominant — which is probably the right framing for where sodium-ion sits in the chemistry mix headed into the late 2020s.
What this means for projects being structured today
For developers and financiers building storage projects in 2026, the CATL-HyperStrong partnership does not yet change the default procurement chemistry. LFP remains the rational choice for most stationary applications — it has the manufacturing scale, the operating data, the bankability, and the price point.
What the partnership does change is the optionality calculus.
For long-duration projects (6 hours or more), sodium-ion increasingly belongs in the procurement evaluation, particularly in markets where non-lithium chemistries face less of a regulatory or buyer-preference disadvantage. The Chinese market is leading on this, but European and US LDES tenders structured for the late 2020s should expect sodium-ion bidders to participate.
For projects in cold-climate or supply-chain-sensitive markets, the chemistry is starting to make sense even at smaller scales. Sodium-ion's cold-weather performance and reduced exposure to lithium-supply geopolitics are genuine differentiators in places that value either.
For utility procurement teams, the CATL-HyperStrong volume signals that sodium-ion supply is becoming real enough to write into multi-year RFPs without committing to a chemistry that does not yet have the manufacturing scale to deliver. Three years out — call it 2028-2029 deliveries — sodium-ion as a procurement option becomes plausible at scale.
For LFP-focused suppliers, the deal is a quiet reminder that chemistry diversification is no longer a hypothetical. The next generation of stationary storage bids will increasingly include alternative chemistry options, and the suppliers who hedge their cell-mix will be better positioned than the ones who treat LFP as permanent.
What to watch next
Three signals will determine whether sodium-ion follows the trajectory BloombergNEF projects.
First, CATL's actual delivery cadence under the HyperStrong agreement. If the first 20 GWh hits the ground on time and at competitive cost per kilowatt-hour, that validates the manufacturing scale-up thesis. If it slips materially, the chemistry's cost trajectory stretches.
Second, how Western markets respond. The Peak Energy-Jupiter partnership is the most concrete US data point, but Australia, the UK, and Germany all have storage tenders in the pipeline that could explicitly favor or accommodate sodium-ion. Tender specifications matter as much as private commercial deals.
Third, the safety operating record. Sodium-ion's safety case is theoretical until it has years of large-scale field operation. The chemistry's first major incident — whatever and wherever it is — will be scrutinized intensely, and the industry's response to that incident will shape the chemistry's trajectory for the rest of the decade.
The CATL-HyperStrong partnership does not end the LFP era. It opens the door to a multi-chemistry future for stationary storage that BloombergNEF has been forecasting and that the industry has been talking about for several years. April 2026 is the month that talk became a 60 GWh contract.
Sources: BloombergNEF, "Energy Storage Enters the 100-Gigawatt Era: Three Things to Know," by Isshu Kikuma, May 7, 2026 (https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/energy-storage-enters-the-100-gigawatt-era-three-things-to-know/); HyperStrong Technology corporate communications (https://www.hyperstrong.com/en/news/company-news/95); Discovery Alert, "CATL's Sodium Battery Capacity Expansion: A 2026 Chemistry Shift" (May 2026); ESS News, sodium-ion electrolyte research coverage (May 2026); Peak Energy public communications regarding Jupiter Power agreement.
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