On September 7, Suining Daily's digital edition published an industry survey titled "Can Sichuan Build Another Battery Capital". Citing quoted data (media statistics), domestic sodium-ion battery cell shipments in the first half of this year were about 1 GWh, up over 25% year-on-year; although shipments are less than one-thousandth of lithium-ion's (China's lithium-ion battery shipments exceeded 1.8 TWh in 2025), sodium capacity planning has clearly accelerated: nearly 50 sodium-ion battery and supporting materials expansion projects landed in H1 with total planned industry-chain investment exceeding 70 billion yuan, showing a pattern of "eastern coastal areas clustering first, central and western cities following". Per quoted data, new planned sodium battery capacity in China in 2025 exceeded 290 GWh, with Sichuan accounting for 81 GWh.
On regional layout, the report surveys four Sichuan cities: Zigong, the first Chinese city to make sodium batteries a leading industry, has signed 11 sodium-related projects with 5 in production, hosting 7 companies including Xingchu Century in its high-tech zone, whose solar-storage-charging demonstration project has run over 1,000 days at 85% charge-discharge efficiency; Suining built the country's first thousand-ton sodium hard-carbon anode line via Bisg (Baishige) in January 2023 and has signed 8 sodium projects under a "Li-Na reuse" model; Bazhong has landed 6 companies with a sodium battery industry technology research institute operating; Dazhou is building an 11.5-billion-yuan full-chain sodium-ion battery project with Starry Sodium, which signed a cooperation memorandum with BASF (China) in March 2026 covering storage and pack components, cell material optimization, bamboo-carbon anode and Prussian blue cathode research.
The survey's main value lies in the incremental national statistical data - H1 shipments of about 1 GWh (up over 25% YoY) and the 2025 planned capacity of 290 GWh (Sichuan 81 GWh) - providing a quantitative reference for the current state of "planned capacity far exceeding actual demand": the gap between a single province's 81 GWh planned capacity and about 1 GWh of national H1 actual shipments confirms the industry consensus that planned capacity is not actual capacity, nor actual demand. The report also quotes practitioners: downstream customer numbers keep growing but application scenarios and core customer groups are unchanged from last year, with growth mainly from existing customers' rising demand rather than new scenarios; the lack of industry standards is cited as the primary bottleneck for adoption.