Peak Energy, the Burlingame, California startup commercializing sodium-ion battery energy storage, has selected Sacramento as the site of what it calls America's first factory dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion energy storage systems. The 183,000-square-foot facility will be built in Sacramento's Metro Air Park and produce up to 4 GWh of battery systems annually, with production and shipments starting in Q1 2027. Peak announced the milestone on July 8, 2026 alongside California state officials.
The Numbers Behind The Site Selection
The facility represents up to $71 million in capital investment and will create 239 local jobs over 18 months at average annual wages above $90,000. Combined with continued growth in Burlingame, Peak expects to add 348 net new jobs across California by 2030. Peak chose Sacramento following a competitive nationwide site selection process, citing the region's manufacturing talent, proximity to California's storage market and support from the Greater Sacramento Economic Council. A $10.5 million CalCompetes tax credit awarded in May 2026 anchored the incentive package. "America needs energy storage that is lower cost, more affordable, more reliable and purpose-built," CEO Landon Mossburg said in the announcement.
Passive Cooling And A 20% Cost Cut
Peak's proprietary system pairs sodium-ion cells with a fully passive cooling architecture engineered to run more than 20 years without scheduled maintenance and to drop into existing battery energy storage system footprints. The company says the design reduces the levelized cost of energy storage by roughly 20% and guarantees 99% uptime. In California alone, eliminating battery refrigeration costs could save ratepayers an average of $100 million annually. The passive-cooling approach is the same architectural bet that Hithium's Navarre gigafactory makes on the LFP side of the market, but Peak is applying it to a chemistry that offers cheaper raw materials, safer thermal behavior and less exposure to lithium supply chains.
Where The Demand Comes From
Peak has already banked more than 6 GWh of customer commitments and more than $1 billion in commercial agreements, with named counterparties Jupiter Power, RWE Americas and Energy Vault. In June 2026, the company added a strategic partnership with General Motors — backed by an equity investment from GM Ventures — to pair GM's next-generation sodium-ion cell technology with Peak's storage platform. That deal matters industrially because it plugs a legacy automaker's cell R&D into a purpose-built grid-scale product line rather than a passenger-EV product line, extending sodium-ion volumes beyond automotive traction packs.
Why Sodium-Ion Now
Grid-storage demand is being pulled forward by the same AI and data center expansion that is reshaping U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. Sodium-ion chemistry is well suited to that load profile: it uses abundant materials, its thermal behavior is more forgiving than lithium-iron-phosphate cells and its cycle life at stationary duty cycles is competitive. The domestic manufacturing angle also matters. Founded in 2023 by veterans from Tesla, Enovix and Fluence, Peak Energy is positioning Sacramento as the U.S. answer to the LFP gigafactory buildout underway in China, Spain and Italy — a bet that ratepayers, developers and off-takers will pay a premium for grid-scale storage built in-country and freed from cryogenic maintenance overhead. The first shipments will tell whether the 20% cost claim survives contact with real project economics.
Reporting based on coverage from PRNewswire, the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, Bloomberg and CBS Sacramento.