TL;DR
Lu Yaxiang’s sodium battery charges in 4 minutes, retains 90% after 2,000 cycles. CATL and Gotion are scaling production. China imports 75% of its lithium.
Lu Yaxiang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Physics, has spent a decade making sodium-ion batteries commercially viable. In April, he received China’s Youth May Fourth Medal, the country’s top honour for outstanding achievers under 35, for developing a sodium metal battery that charges in roughly four minutes, retains 90% capacity after 2,000 cycles, and works using a quasi-solid gel electrolyte that functions even when repeatedly bent.
The breakthrough matters because China imports 75% of its lithium. Sodium is 500 times more abundant, can be extracted from seawater, and costs a fraction of what lithium does. Lu’s work is part of a broader Chinese push to build battery technology that does not depend on foreign supply chains. Separately, Gotion unveiled sodium battery products with 261 Wh/kg energy density and 20,000 charge cycles in May, approaching performance levels that make sodium competitive with lithium iron phosphate for many applications.
The technology is already at grid scale. A sodium battery station the size of 15 football fields is feeding a Chinese power grid, storing energy for 12,000 homes. CATL signed a deal to provide 60 GWh of sodium batteries for energy storage in Ningde, Fujian. MIT Technology Review named sodium-ion batteries one of its 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026. China has a pattern of scaling domestic alternatives when foreign supply chains become unreliable, and the sodium battery push follows the same logic as its memory chip expansion.
Current commercial sodium cells still lag lithium on energy density, typically hitting 150-175 Wh/kg at the cell level compared with 250-280 Wh/kg for high-nickel lithium-ion. But Lu’s 4-minute charging, Gotion’s 261 Wh/kg prototype, and CATL’s mass production are closing the gap faster than most analysts expected. The AI-driven memory shortage that pushed lithium demand through the roof has made the economics of sodium batteries look better every quarter. Sodium-ion could reach lithium cost parity by 2027, with overlapping price ranges by 2028 as production scales.
