Why everyone’s an energy company now
First Tesla, then Ford, and now GM — it seems every automaker wants a slice of the energy storage market. It’s easy to see why
First Tesla, then Ford, and now GM — it seems every automaker wants a slice of the energy storage market. It’s easy to see why. While EV sales have stagnated in the United States, sales of large, stationary batteries have doubled in the past two years. And they show no signs of stopping. Despite incentives being gutted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Solar Energy Industries Association expects annual installations to exceed 110 GWh per year by 2030, about double what they are today. “There’s a lot of potential for this market,” Kurt Kelty, vice president of battery and sustainability at GM, told TechCrunch. GM has dabbled in energy storage before, but on Tuesday it took a bigger swing, rolling out an entirely new battery sodium-ion battery chemistry that’s aimed at the heart of the market. The skyrocketing energy storage market is being driven higher by the convergence of three trends. The most obvious is the expansion of data centers being built to serve AI. Data center energy demand is expected to nearly triple by the end of the decade. But alongside that growth, entire swathes of the economy, including transportation, manufacturing, and HVAC, are being electrified. “Data centers are a big part of the growth, but even without data centers, it started to really pick up,” Kelty said. It’s not just automakers that are diving into energy storage. Startups have been raising large rounds to capture a chunk of the market.
Base Power raised a $1 billion Series C in October to expand beyond Texas, while Lunar Energy raised $232 million to sell batteries to homeowners. Others, like Lightship, are pivoting somewhat. The electric RV manufacturer is now selling a mobile battery for job sites and other locations that need temporary power. So far, Tesla has taken the lion’s share of the energy storage market. Of the 57 gigawatt-hours installed last year, Tesla was responsible for 82% of those installations. The company’s annual revenue from energy generation and storage has doubled since 2023, largely due to growth in Megapack and Powerwall installations. Tesla’s gross profits for the segment are around 30%, about double what it makes selling EVs and at least three times higher than typical automaker margins. GM’s gross margin over the last 15 years has averaged just over 11%. But despite the market’s potential, GM isn’t exactly rushing in. Rather, its first major product, the sodium-ion cells, won’t be ready until later this decade. “We’re going to develop a family cells that is appropriate for this market,” Kelty said. Kelty and his team point to sodium-ion’s strengths as reason enough for waiting: The materials are cheap and abundant, it doesn’t require an active cooling system, and it can withstand many more charge-discharge cycles than lithium-ion batteries. It doesn’t hurt that China has yet to corner the market on materials for sodium-ion batteries, like it has with other chemistries.
The BriefWire