The race to secure the power for AI data centers has spread to some unusual places, including the automotive world.
Battery recycling company Redwood Materials started the trend last year with a new energy storage division and a project that attached old EV packs to a Crusoe, Nevada data center. Ford then said it was repurposing some of its battery capacity to make grid-scale batteries. And now GM is announcing its own — arguably more ambitious — plans for an energy storage system (ESS).
GM on Tuesday unveiled two new phases in its assault on the energy storage market. The biggest development is GM’s new partnership with an energy storage startup Maximum Energy. For this collaboration, GM is developing an entirely new sodium-ion battery chemistry tailored for grid-scale deployment.
Outside of China, no automakers have announced plans to manufacture sodium-ion cells.
“The way we’re going to market is the easy way, through ESS,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of batteries and sustainability, told TechCrunch. “The performance characteristics are exactly what is needed in this market.”
GM would not share with TechCrunch how much money it is investing in this energy storage effort. However, we do know that the company has committed $900 million to commercializing new battery chemistries, an investment that includes a new battery development center.
Sodium-ion batteries work similarly to lithium-ion, but exchange key materials to make the cells cheaper, longer-lasting and less prone to overheating. The trade-off is that sodium-ion batteries must be larger and heavier to store the same amount of electricity.
Peak Energy has already worked on energy storage systems using sodium ion batteries. Because sodium-ion batteries behave differently than lithium-ion batteries, Peak has developed an energy storage system with this in mind. Its grid-scale batteries have no cooling or fire suppression systems because there is less risk of overheating. The installation lowers upfront costs and should also eliminate costly maintenance, Paul Menson, director of energy storage commercialization at GM, told TechCrunch.
“This is the manifestation of the hardest part of the engineer is not a part at all,” he said. “Remove the part, eliminate the problem.”
GM plans to sell sodium-ion cells to the startup, which will then incorporate them into its products. But that won’t happen right away.
The first GM cells are expected to enter trial production at the company’s Battery Cell Development Center in 2028. TechCrunch recently got an exclusive look at the new facility, which GM expects will shave about a year off the commercialization process for sodium-ion batteries, cutting costs in the process.
However, GM’s sodium ion cells are still years away from commercial production. Meanwhile, the automaker will sell lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells to LG Energy Solution for use in its energy storage systems. LG Energy Solution already works with GM through the Ultium joint venture, which makes batteries for the automaker’s EVs.
Alongside the LG and Peak partnerships, GM announced it is expanding its work with Redwood Materials, the battery recycling and energy storage startup founded by former Tesla executive JB Straubel.
Redwood already buys scrap from GM’s battery plants and used batteries from its EVs. GM has a pipeline of about 10,000 packets that it sends to Redwood, and the startup operates a 12-megawatt/63-megawatt-hour migration network using second-life packets at a Crusoe data center in Sparks, Nevada. GM said it is buying a 7.2-megawatt-hour Redwood system for use at one of its Michigan plants, which it estimates will save about $3 million over its lifetime.
The GM facility is “step one” for Redwood, Cal Lankton, Redwood’s chief commercial officer, told TechCrunch.
Data centers, where Redwood already operates, and industrial sites like GM’s are “very different things,” he said. Where data centers may use batteries almost continuously to absorb some of the power fluctuations from GPUs, industrial facilities are more likely to use them to reduce power demand peaks, which can lower monthly power bills, and use them to provide backup power in the event of an outage.
“The plant is really excited because now we have a more reliable plant,” Kelty said. “Eventually, we’ll have similar facilities like this in all our factories. It just makes good economic sense.”
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