whats good is that the most populous countries all have their own soda ash supply chain, so each country can independently prop up the industry without major reliance to others. helps promote competion for prices globally.

This is big! Grid scale Sodium Ion battery technology is (on paper) the best candidate for cheap large scale electricity storage. The fact that this company is working on 9 pilot deployments mean that this will likely produce the real world results that the paper exercises promise.

There are SO MANY advantages of Sodium Ion battery tech for grid storage over everything else we've used so far (nearly all Lithium based).

Sodium Ion batteries:

• don't have as intense thermal management needs Lithium chemistries
• don't have the massive negative environmental impact for their source materials (because its a part of regular old table/sea salt)
• doesn't have the massive swings in capacity when operated in extreme hot or cold temperatures. Sodium Ion doesn't care.

The only downsides to Sodium Ion is that the batteries are physically larger for the same amount of energy stored (which isn't a problem for stationary storage), and the charging/discharging curves are not as linear as other chemistries (which again, isn't an issue because these are purpose built applications where the curves can easily be managed by battery management systems).

I work for a controller OEM that builds the brains for managing these systems. It’s cutting edge stuff.

I wonder which is saltier, oil companies or the batteries.

It would be nice to see a price/GWh of this (along with running costs, it says they save 1 Million per GWh, how much were the running costs before!?), but any improvement in battery tech is definitely a good thing.

But why US? Can't store fracking oil in there.

That much salt is not going to be good for blood pressure.