PNNL Fires Up the First Prismatic Battery Cell Line
- Energy Storage Research Utility-Scale BESS
Marin Holt
- 0
- 6 minutes read
- Manufacturing equipment: 16 pieces
- Dry room size: 1,400 square feet
- Chemistries: sodium-ion and lithium iron phosphate
- Funder: DOE Office of Electricity
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington switched on the first prismatic battery cell production line at a U.S. national laboratory on June 4, 2026, a setup of 16 pieces of equipment filling a 1,400-square-foot dry room at the lab’s Grid Storage Launchpad. Funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity, the line builds full-size prismatic cells from sodium-ion and lithium iron phosphate chemistries — the boxy, hard-cased format used in most grid and stationary storage today.
The gap the line closes is one of scale. “Making a coin cell takes a few milligrams of material; making a prismatic cell takes at least a kilogram,” said Mark Weller, the PNNL materials scientist leading the work. University and lab researchers usually test new chemistries in coin cells the size of a watch battery, where results often fall apart once a recipe is scaled to a real cell. The Grid Storage Launchpad line lets a promising chemistry be built in the same prismatic format a manufacturer would ship, inside a dry room kept drier than the most arid places on Earth so trace water does not wreck the materials.
Path to Commercialization
PNNL opened the Grid Storage Launchpad in 2024 as a DOE user facility, and the prismatic line is meant to be shared: the lab plans to host private battery companies that want to validate their own chemistries at pilot scale before committing to a factory. That matters for sodium-ion in particular, a lithium-free chemistry backed for grid duty because it sidesteps lithium and cobalt supply chains, but one that has lagged lithium iron phosphate on the path from lab bench to bankable product. A neutral, federally run line gives startups a place to prove cells without building their own pilot plant first.
Critical Perspective
The prismatic battery cell line at PNNL, while a significant step towards advancing grid storage technologies, is constrained by its modest scale: only 16 pieces of manufacturing equipment and a 1,400 square foot dry room. This setup falls far short of the industrial-scale production required to test and validate new chemistries like sodium-ion and lithium iron phosphate on a commercial basis. According to Watt-Logic’s analysis, “New report: Electrification – can the grid cope?” highlights that such minerals as lithium will see demand increases by 4,200% by 2040, indicating that even if these batteries prove effective, scaling up production will be logistically and economically challenging. The question is, how will PNNL ensure these chemistries meet safety standards like UL 1973, given the limited testing capacity? Will this pilot project’s findings translate into commercially viable products capable of mitigating flicker issues as per IEEE 519 standards, or will they merely serve to highlight the engineering and financial hurdles that lie ahead in widespread deployment?
Why It Matters
Most U.S. battery research dies in the jump from coin cell to a cell a utility would buy — a step that today usually happens overseas. A national-lab prismatic line keeps that scale-up work, and the data it produces, inside the country, and it gives grid-storage chemistries a testbed separate from the automotive cell formats that dominate private pilot lines. The caveat: a 16-tool pilot line proves chemistry and process, not cost. Whether sodium-ion or any new chemistry beats incumbent lithium iron phosphate on installed dollars per kilowatt-hour is a question only full-scale factories will settle.
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