Natron Energy has announced a 24 GW sodium-ion battery factory at Kingsboro in North Carolina to produce energy storage systems for a variety of fields, with industrial power supply prominent alongside EV fast charging. There’s no timetable for that scale to be achieved, but there is a $1.4 billion price tag, supplemented by aid approved by North Carolina’s Economic Investment Committee, from the Job Development Investment Grant. In theory sodium-ion has potential to be a cheaper form of energy storage than lithium – if the lithium price ever rises from rock-bottom, which isn’t going to happen for a while. That’s left sodium-ion as a percentage point in the energy storage industry – a percentage point located in China because of…