China backs sodium batteries that need no lithium with a national storage plan

China backed sodium batteries years before CATL built one

China gave sodium batteries, which need no lithium at all, equal standing with lithium batteries in national industrial planning in 2021, five years before a sodium powered car reached any customer. A sodium ion battery stores and releases power much like a lithium ion battery, the kind in most electric cars today, except it uses sodium, the same element that makes table salt salty, to carry the charge instead of lithium. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology folded that priority into the 14th Five Year Plan, the document that set industrial priorities in China through 2025, and named fixed energy storage, batteries built into the power grid rather than into a vehicle, as the first place the chemistry would matter.

China backs sodium batteries that need no lithium with national money

That early bet now sits inside a much bigger national plan. The National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration published a three year action plan in September 2025 for what the government calls new type energy storage, grid batteries and similar technology built since the older method, dammed water reservoirs. The plan targets more than 180 gigawatts of that storage by 2027. A gigawatt measures how much power a fleet of batteries can push onto the grid at once. The plan states its own starting point plainly, 73.76 gigawatts installed at the end of 2024, and backs the 2027 target with about 250 billion yuan, 35.2 billion US dollars, of direct project investment.

CATL sodium battery lands inside an already lithium heavy market

CATL, the battery maker, launched the Naxtra sodium ion battery with Changan Automobile this year, aiming for a passenger car in the middle of 2026. The company reports 175 watt hours per kilogram of energy density, a measure of how much power a battery packs into its weight, over 90% capacity retention at minus 40 degrees Celsius, and nearly 3 times the discharge power of an equivalent lithium iron phosphate battery, a common lithium chemistry, at minus 30 degrees Celsius. CATL has spent nearly 10 billion yuan on sodium ion research since 2016.

The arrival of sodium ion technology marks the beginning of a dual chemistry era.

Gao Huan, chief technology officer for the China electric car business at CATL. Source 1.

Lithium iron phosphate still runs the grid, not sodium

Almost all of that national buildout still runs on plain lithium, not sodium. New type storage added across China in 2025 reached 66.43 gigawatts, a trade press count of year end China Energy Storage Alliance figures shows, up 52% in power capacity and 73% in energy capacity from 2024. That single year added nearly half of everything the category has ever built, a share worked out for this article by dividing 66.43 gigawatts into a 144.7 gigawatt year end total, not a figure either source states directly. Lithium iron phosphate still ran over 98% of installed new type storage capacity, and the 1 named sodium ion grid project, a 40 megawatt site in Wenshan, Yunnan province, is a fraction of the national total. The Naxtra battery is landing inside a state directed buildout that already runs almost entirely on a different chemistry, not a lithium free breakthrough arriving into an empty market.