The race to power AI data centers has spread to some unusual places, including the world of automobiles.
Battery recycler Redwood Materials started this trend last year with a project to attach old EV packs to its new energy storage division and its Crusoe, Nevada, data center. Ford then said it was repurposing some of its battery manufacturing capacity to make grid-scale batteries. And now GM is announcing its own – and perhaps more ambitious – plans for energy storage systems (ESS).
GM on Tuesday unveiled two new phases of its assault on the energy storage market. The biggest change so far is GM’s new partnership with energy storage startup Peak Energy. For that partnership, GM is developing an entirely new sodium-ion battery chemistry suitable for grid-scale deployment.
No automaker outside of China has announced plans to make sodium-ion batteries.
“The easy way for us to go to market is through ESS,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of batteries and sustainability, told TechCrunch. “The performance characteristics are exactly what that market needs.”
GM wouldn’t share with TechCrunch how much it is investing in energy storage efforts. But we do know that the company has invested $900 million to commercialize new battery chemistries, an investment that includes a new battery development center.
Sodium-ion batteries work similarly to lithium-ion batteries, but replace key materials, making the cells cheaper, longer lasting, and less likely to overheat. The downside is that sodium-ion batteries must be larger and heavier to store the same amount of electricity.
Peak Energy is already working on an energy storage system using sodium-ion batteries. Because sodium-ion batteries operate differently than lithium-ion batteries, Peak developed its energy storage system with this in mind. Because there is little risk of overheating, grid-scale batteries do not have cooling or fire suppression systems. Paul Menson, GM’s director of energy storage commercialization, told TechCrunch that this setup would reduce initial costs and also reduce maintenance costs.
“This just goes to show that the hardest part is not at all for engineers,” he said. “Remove the part and eliminate the problem.”
GM plans to sell sodium-ion batteries to startups and then integrate them into its own products. But that won’t happen right away.
The first GM cells are expected to enter pilot production at the company’s battery cell development center in 2028. TechCrunch recently got an exclusive look at the new facility, which GM hopes will speed up the commercialization process for sodium-ion batteries by about a year, saving money in the process.
But GM’s sodium-ion batteries are still years away from commercial production. Meanwhile, LG Electronics plans to sell lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells for energy storage devices to LG Energy Solutions. LG Energy Solutions is already collaborating with GM through the Ultium joint venture, which produces batteries for GM’s electric vehicles.
In addition to its partnerships with LG and Peak, GM also announced that it is expanding its collaboration with Redwood Materials, a battery recycling and energy storage startup founded by former Tesla executive JB Straubel.
Redwood has already been purchasing scrap from GM’s battery plant and using battery packs from its EVs. GM has a pipeline of about 10,000 packs to Redwood, and the startup operates a 12-megawatt/63-megawatt-hour migrogrid using second-life packs at its Crusoe data center in Sparks, Nevada. GM will purchase a 7.2 megawatt-hour Redwood system for use at one of its plants in Michigan, which it estimates will save the company approximately $3 million over its lifetime.
Cal Lankton, Redwood’s chief commercial officer, told TechCrunch that the GM installation was Redwood’s “first step.”
The data centers Redwood already operates and industrial sites like GM are “very different things,” he said. While data centers use batteries almost continuously to absorb some of the power fluctuations of GPUs, industrial sites are likely to use batteries to reduce peak power demands, lowering monthly power bills and providing backup power in case of power outages.
“The plant is really happy because now we have a more reliable plant,” said Kelty. “Ultimately we will have similar installations in all of our plants. It makes economic sense.”
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