Client Spotlight Interview: Alsym Energy

Our partner Mark Haddad recently sat down with Mukesh Chatter, the CEO of our client Alsym Energy, to discuss Alsym’s journey and the future of energy storage, including the benefits of sodium-ion batteries, Alsym’s physics informed AI platform for product development, and advice for climate tech entrepreneurs.

Founding and Mission

Mark Haddad: Mukesh, thank you for joining us on Climate Law Matters. To start, can you tell our readers about the founding story of Alsym Energy? What problem did you set out to solve, and why did you believe the market needed a different approach to energy storage?

Mukesh Chatter: I co-founded Alsym Energy alongside MIT professor Kripa Varanasi out of a sense of social responsibility and a desire to make a meaningful difference in the world. Over a billion people globally still lack access to reliable electricity, which I believe contributes to the larger cycle of poverty. Building electrical grid infrastructure is exorbitantly expensive, and while distributed solar access has improved, without safe, low-cost battery storage electricity supply remains sporadic, leaving communities to suffer from extreme heat, food insecurity, and a lack of the basic necessities, internet, and cell phones that make it possible to improve one's economic station. We set out to solve this by developing a high-performance, non-flammable, low-cost sodium-ion battery purpose-built for stationary energy storage, because the market was over-reliant on lithium-ion, which is a fundamental fire hazard requiring constant active cooling and depends on a problematic, constrained supply chain. We knew the world needed a practical chemistry that eliminates fire risks at the source while remaining affordable enough to enable mass electrification for a billion-plus people.

The Case for Sodium-Ion

Much of the energy storage conversation has been dominated by lithium-ion technology. What is the market opportunity for sodium-ion batteries, and what advantages do they offer over incumbent chemistries — particularly when it comes to cost, safety, and supply chain considerations?

The market opportunity for high-performance batteries with zero fire risk and low total system cost is massive—they are precisely what the global grid needs as it undergoes a generational transformation driven by the electrification of our world and the AI data center boom (the Financial Times recently captured this in an article titled "Salt is the new oil," and Goldman Sachs forecasts US AI data center power demand to more than double from 31 GW in 2025 to 66 GW in 2027). Battery storage is uniquely valuable because it is such a flexible energy asset—enabling short-term back-up, 24x7 baseload power, higher utilization of existing transmission, and much more. Batteries are essential at AI data centers in particular as they are needed to isolate the grid and/or on-site generated base load (gas turbines, fuel cells, geothermal, etc.) while absorbing the GPU-induced power transients. Existing LFP batteries struggle with these power transients, leading to faster degradation, higher heat increasing the fire risk, and more complex and expensive auxilliary cooling systems. Our sodium-ion NFPP+ chemistry is uniquely capable of handling these transients because it operates across a wider temperature range and performs at significantly faster charge and discharge rates, letting it endure continuous electrical stress and heavy cycling without the physical wear-and-tear or heat stress that damage traditional lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. Lithium-ion (specifically LFP) showed what was possible with utility-scale storage, but once the use case moves from energy backup to core infrastructure, sodium-ion is significantly more cost-effective, winning decisively on system-level total cost of ownership—including maintenance, augmentation, cooling, permitting, safety, insurance, logistics, and lifecycle performance. For Alsym's Na-Series ("sodium series") batteries, eliminating expensive active cooling systems cuts upfront balance-of-system costs by 15% and reduces overall operational expense by 90%; the system-level economics are already there on OpEx savings alone, and as cell production costs fall with scale—Morgan Stanley predicts they will reach 30% cheaper than LFP over the next three years—the capex and total lifetime cost advantages of sodium-ion over incumbents will be unquestionable.

Energy Storage and the Clean Energy Transition

How do you see large-scale energy storage fitting into the broader clean energy transition? What role can sodium-ion batteries play in grid-scale storage, and how does that complement the growth of renewable generation?

Large-scale energy storage is the backbone of the clean energy transition, providing the heavy-duty buffer needed to handle intermittent wind and solar and complement less-flexible resources like gas turbines as AI data centers, industrial electrification, and EVs put immense stress on the grid. It creates a true win-win, capturing off-peak rate spreads to generate significant project revenue for developers while securing grid stability and accelerating renewable integration for large energy users. Our sodium-ion technology, the Alsym Na-Series, is designed for these use cases and outperforms LFP by eliminating thermal runaway fire risks, opening up renewables-plus-batteries opportunities in places that aren't possible with lithium-ion; because it avoids costly active HVAC systems, it delivers a significantly higher return on investment over a longer lifespan, which we believe is key to making more renewables projects financially viable. Iron-flow developer ESS Tech recognized this broader market potential and signed a letter of intent for 8.5 GWh of our cells to expand into short- and medium-duration storage, while developer Juniper Energy, needing a solution that could withstand high-temperature environments without degrading, agreed to 500 MWh in deployments across California.

Supply Chain and Critical Minerals

One of the major policy conversations right now involves critical mineral supply chains and reducing dependence on geopolitically concentrated resources. How does Alsym's technology address those concerns, and how do you think about supply chain resilience as you scale?

Relying on lithium-ion subjects us to supply-constrained materials like cobalt, lithium and graphite that are heavily monopolized by China, leaving Western governments and companies exposed to sudden tariffs and export bans—a threat that is not theoretical, as we have seen rare earth bans deployed as high-leverage bargaining chips in tariff negotiations. We will keep seeing this until we develop our own supplies, which is why the federal government is making aggressive and costly efforts to build domestic sources. The stakes are even higher for government and DoW applications, since strict federal procurement rules taking full effect in 2027 will bar the U.S. military from using batteries or components tied to Foreign Entities of Concern (FEOC)—a serious problem given that China is a listed FEOC, produces over 95% of all storage batteries, and our military depends on these batteries to function. Sodium-ion side-steps this entirely: our Na-Series contains zero lithium, cobalt, nickel, or graphite, relying instead on abundant materials like sodium, iron, and phosphorus, and because over 90% of the world's natural soda ash reserves (the precursor to the sodium carbonate needed for batteries) are here in the U.S. and already mined at scale, we actually hold a competitive advantage. With the other core materials—hard carbon, aluminum, phosphates, and iron—also readily sourced domestically, sodium-ion gives us the opportunity to develop a fully domestic battery supply chain.

Regulatory and Policy Landscape

From your perspective as a CEO building a climate technology company, how has the regulatory environment — including initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act, DOE funding programs, and state-level storage mandates — shaped your strategy and growth trajectory?

Government policies can speed up or slow down new technologies, but they can also change underneath you, so a business built on a particular policy or subsidy is fundamentally vulnerable—you have to solve the core problem better than the alternatives and be economically viable on your own, while still taking full advantage of any incentives that exist and ensuring a level playing field where competitors receive subsidies. We are fortunate that energy storage enjoys wide, bi-partisan support: the IRA's strong battery incentives were continued in the OBBBA (unlike those for solar and wind) because everyone recognizes the importance of batteries and wants to deploy more of them, faster. The OBBBA also introduced strict Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) requirements that developers must meet to qualify for storage tax credits, and because our supply chain is entirely domestic-content-compliant and non-FEOC, we give developers a seamless way to secure full incentives without the compliance risks plaguing traditional lithium chemistries.

Manufacturing and Domestic Production

There is significant policy emphasis on onshoring clean energy manufacturing. Can you speak to Alsym's manufacturing approach and how federal and state incentives factor into decisions about where and how to build production capacity?

Our batteries have the huge advantage of being drop-in replacements for lithium-ion batteries. Unlike other non-lithium technologies that require entirely new factory tooling and custom form factors, Alsym cells can be produced directly on existing lithium-ion manufacturing lines using identical machinery. This means we can use contract manufacturing from lithium-ion cell producers to make our cells. This Capex-light approach is central to our scaling strategy. The same goes for system integration – by leveraging the same system-level architectures as LFP, we’re positioning ourselves to make customer adoption across different industries as frictionless as possible. To accelerate this roadmap, we partnered with Re:Build Manufacturing to establish commercial-scale sodium-ion cell production inside their facility in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. This domestic-first infrastructure allows us to leverage federal advanced manufacturing incentives and retool existing capacity rapidly. It positions us to bypass foreign supply chain vulnerabilities completely and build a competitive domestic battery manufacturing supply.

Safety and Performance

Battery safety has become an increasingly prominent issue for regulators, insurers, and communities hosting storage installations. How does sodium-ion chemistry change the safety calculus, and what does that mean for permitting and deployment?

The energy storage industry spends immense capital and engineering to manage the volatile nature of lithium cells—blast walls, fire suppression, and other mechanisms—yet the underlying chemistry remains inherently flammable, driving significant community safety concerns when systems are proposed near people, property, and critical infrastructure; indeed, the top concern for developers today is the complexity and time of permitting battery energy storage systems, with community safety at its heart, and moratoriums cropping up nationwide are a real blocker to faster, more widespread deployment. Alsym changes this calculus by solving the hazard at the chemistry level: our NFPP+ cells simply cannot enter thermal runaway—our physical abuse testing proves zero thermal runaway even when heated to 400°C or punctured in a nail penetration test—allowing developers to deploy storage safely indoors or in dense urban areas where lithium-ion is restricted or unsafe. It's worth noting that not all sodium-ion batteries are safe; it takes special cell design to achieve safety while enhancing performance, as other types (such as layered metal oxide or Prussian blue analogue frameworks) can be as susceptible to thermal runaway as Li-ion or prone to releasing toxic cyanide gases, and even other NFPP-based cells can go into thermal runaway—only Alsym Na-Series cells achieve the non-flammability results described above.

Alsym and AI

AI is rapidly changing how we create and develop new things. As a former tech entrepreneur, you have always been on the frontier of leveraging new innovations. How are you using AI to further Alsym’s mission?

Traditional battery development has historically taken decades, because testing an effectively infinite combination of raw materials through manual, sequential lab experiments is akin to waiting to win the lottery — which is why the last major battery chemistry, lithium-ion, was invented 35 years ago and subsequent inventions have been merely incremental improvements on that core chemistry. In 2020, we began developing an alternative: a physics-informed AI platform that integrates the speed and power of AI and computation with real-world battery performance and data, compressing the development cycle from over a decade to just 12 to 18 months. It operates as a closed-loop learning system that leverages quantum physics to guide us, AI and computational simulations to find new patterns and opportunities, autonomous robotics to generate high-fidelity experiments 24x7, and proprietary molecular diagnostic tools to determine not just what happened but why — feeding a unique, rapidly growing dataset of chemical-level battery behavior. Its ultimate advantage is seamlessly transferring our understanding from initial lab discovery all the way to commercial production: when scaling up inevitably introduces new physical stresses or production-line variables, our AI instantly diagnoses exactly what internal process shifted and how to fix it, ensuring our path to market is defined by certainty rather than luck.

Looking Ahead

What does the next chapter look like for Alsym? Where do you see the greatest opportunities for deployment of your technology in the near term, and what legal or policy developments would most accelerate adoption of next-generation energy storage?

Our next chapter is executing our commercial roadmap to capture a global sodium-ion market projected to reach 1.8 TWh by 2030, with our greatest near-term opportunity in AI data centers, where we are uniquely capable of handling the frequent power demand transients that can destabilize an entire data center and even the grid—a problem the whole industry is struggling to solve and to which our sodium-ion batteries hold the key. To accelerate adoption, policymakers should establish a fast-tracked, distinct permitting category for certified non-flammable storage, since lumping stable sodium-ion systems into the restrictive hazardous-materials framework written for lithium batteries creates artificial bottlenecks that slow the clean energy transition; and the federal government must create early market pull by funding dedicated sodium-ion demonstration programs for AI and critical infrastructure while implementing a 30 percent investment tax credit for domestic R&D and pilot facilities—targeted incentives that provide the demand certainty required to scale domestic midstream manufacturing and transition emerging chemistries into bankable commercial assets.

Advice for Climate Tech Entrepreneurs

Finally, for climate tech founders navigating the intersection of deep technology, regulation, and capital markets — what advice would you offer based on your experience building Alsym?

My core advice for climate tech founders is to lean into the audacity of a world-changing problem, because today's most successful ventures rewrite the rules of what's possible rather than capturing a niche market—so tune out the noise and stay true to a deeper transformational vision. But passion for a bigger cause must be paired with practical industrial means and economics from day one and a ruthlessly executable, near-term business strategy. Many brilliant deep-tech startups fail because they get trapped in a lab mindset, optimizing a single metric using exotic materials that cannot be scaled affordably; at Alsym, we're getting the traction we need because we designed for speed to market—fitting onto existing lithium production machinery and using abundant, inexpensive materials—ensuring our grand vision was rooted in near-term commercial scalability.