Veterans from Tesla, Northvolt hatch plan to mass-produce huge batteries to store solar and wind energy
Cameron Dales (L), president and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, and Landon Mossburg, the CEO of Peak Energy, on a hike in the earliest days of the company. The mountains of Colorado in the background inspired the name of the company, Peak Energy.
Photo courtesy Peak Energy
Battery industry veterans are coming together to launch Peak Energy, which aims to mass-produce giant batteries to even out production fluctuations from renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power generators.
Because Peak Energy is focused on scaling up production of battery technology that already exists, they don’t think of themselves as a traditional “startup.”
“A normal Silicon Valley startup is 10 years in the lab, come up with a better mousetrap and go to market. We’re completely the opposite,” Cameron Dales, president and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, told CNBC in a video interview Friday.
Peak Energy hopes to partner with a technology company (yet to be selected) that is already an expert in battery technology but does not have the capacity to scale manufacturing.
“In the battery market it turns out the rarest commodity is not the technology — there are many excellent ideas out there at academic labs and startups — but rather the ability to scale to manufacturing,” CEO Landon Mossburg told CNBC. “The difficulty of manufacturing scale up is one of the reasons you see so many ‘breakthrough battery technology’ announcements but very very few companies who actually reach market.”
Peak Energy launched in June and is coming out of stealth on Wednesday, announcing a $10 million funding round lead by Greg Reichow at Eclipse, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Before joining Eclipse, Reichow worked at Tesla for more than five years, where he was responsible for battery, motor and electronics manufacturing and then led global manufacturing. Also joining the funding raise is TDK Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of the Tokyo-headquartered multinational electronics company TDK.
“The No. 1 issue we face as it relates to expanding renewable energy sources is storage,” Reichow told CNBC. “This problem must be solved, but the existing approaches using lithium-ion and other technologies are not yet at a price point that enables the kind of scaling that society needs across sectors.”
Demand for grid-scale storage will continue to grow. The United States Energy Information Administration has projected that battery storage capacity will grow from 9 gigawatts in 2022 to 49 gigawatts in 2030 and then to 247 gigawatts in 2050. That’s a baseline projection that includes the Inflation Reduction Act and assumes no additional changes in U.S. policy throughout the projection period.
(L to R) Ryan Gibson, Eclipse Venture partner; Landon Mossburg, Peak Energy CEO; Aidan Madigan-Curtis, Eclipse partner and Cameron Dales, Peak Energy president and chief commercial officer, in protective gear at a battery factory clean room.
Photo courtesy Peak Energy
A stacked team with aggressive growth goals
Peak Energy is still in its very early days. There are about 10 employees and a business office in San Francisco.
But that headcount will triple in coming months, and Peak Energy aims to build its first prototype battery systems, with individual batteries bound together into larger systems using batteries sourced from a third party in 2024. By 2030, Peak says it will be producing “double digit gigawatt” quantities of battery cells for its own battery systems and for other applications.
That’s no small feat. It takes between $50 million and $100 million per gigawatt to build a battery factory, and a 30-gigawatt factory would employ between 2,000 and 3,000 people and be between 1 and 2 million square feet, Mossburg told CNBC.
It’s an aggressive and expensive buildout plan, but Mossburg has done this kind of rapid production scale up before when he worked at Northvolt, a battery manufacturing company that launched in 2016 in Sweden. Northvolt was founded by Peter Carlsson, who was the global head of sourcing and supply chain at Tesla from 2011 to 2015, and Mossburg joined 2017. After 18 months, Northvolt had 300 people, and grew to 4,000 people by the time Mossburg left four years later.
Cameron Dales and US Representative Rho Kana in 2021 at the Enovix battery factory in Fremont, Calif.
Photo courtesy Cameron Dales
Of course, Peak Energy will have to raise more money to fund this kind of expansion. A lot more.
“We’re running a playbook which I and the rest of the executive team initially demonstrated and deployed at Northvolt,” Mossburg told CNBC. Northvolt also started with a small seed round of funding and ended up raising more than $9 billion in a combination of equity and debt. Mossburg was involved with securing all of that financing except for the most recent $1.2 billion announced in August.
Dales has similar experience. He was an early employee and co-founder of the equipment business Symyx Tools at material sciences innovation company, Symyx Technologies, which went public in 1999, and in 2009 joined the battery company Enovix.
“I thought naively, ‘Well, how hard could batteries be? It’s just a plus and a minus, everybody has a Duracell. How hard could it be?’ Little did I know, 14 years later, I would still be there,” Dales told CNBC. Enovix was making very high energy density batteries at a battery factory in Fremont, California, and is building another one in Penang, Malaysia. The company went public in a billion-dollar-plus SPAC deal in 2021.
“Peak Energy’s team comprises of two industry veteran leaders who have scaled a battery company before,” Anil Achyuta, who lead the investment for TDK Ventures, said in a written statement shared with CNBC.
So, too, for Eclipse.
“Landon and I worked together at Tesla and I know what he’s capable of delivering,” Reichow told CNBC. “After leaving Tesla, he went on to build a battery company as an executive at Northvolt. Similarly, Cam was a core part of the founding team at Enovix and was instrumental in helping them build the business. These are proven executives that have built battery companies in some of the hardest spaces and that makes them unique.”
Why Peak Energy is focusing on sodium ion
Peak Energy is focused on making large sodium-ion battery systems to pair with wind and solar energy production facilities. Large grid-scale batteries can capture the energy generated from renewable sources, then hold that energy and dispatch it later when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.
Peak Energy will make individual battery cells, about the size of a loaf of bread, says Dales. Then those loaf of bread battery cells get wired together to make modules, which would be about the size of a filing cabinet. Then those filing cabinets will be assembled into a battery the size of the back of a tractor trailer truck, then deployed near a solar or wind farm, 50 to 100 at a time.
One hundred blocks can power 62,500 homes for four hours, Mossburg told CNBC.
An artist rendering of the Peak Energy battery system.
Rendering courtesy Peak Energy.
The most typical battery technology right now is lithium ion, used in cellphones and electric vehicles, and they are prized for their energy density. Sodium-ion batteries are less energy dense and heavier — bad for mobile devices or cars, but less relevant when it comes to grid-scale batteries.
“Weight, and therefore energy density, is much less important in a stationary storage system. The fact that these batteries are less energy dense isn’t really a big consideration for this application,” Reichow told CNBC.
What does matter when you are talking about storing huge quantities of energy is the cost.
“A much more important consideration is the cost per unit energy that you’re able to store and that is where sodium ion, we believe, will have a big advantage over lithium ion in the future,” Reichow told CNBC.
It’s too early for Peak Energy to commit to a specific price for its battery systems, but a Tesla Megapack battery system costs about $1.3 million without installation, and Mossburg says he thinks Peak Energy can be at roughly half of that cost with its system.
In addition, lithium-ion batteries can be a fire hazard and the electric vehicle makers are eating up all available supply, Dales told CNBC. The problem utilities have is “the minute Ford or GM needs more batteries, basically their contracts for lithium ion just get canceled and the suppliers just go for the car, because it’s today the largest market,” Dales told CNBC.
Also, China dominates the battery market and supply chains right now. “They’re the dominant player in batteries generally — by far — they are massive in terms of battery production,” Mossburg told CNBC. “And they’re positioning to do the same with sodium.”
Alun Thomas, Head of Manufacturing Engineering at Peak Energy, inside a battery production machine.
Photo courtesy Peak Energy
While Mossburg says he thinks it is a benefit for the world for the United States and China to continue to trade, and Peak Energy is willing to work with Chinese partners, there are geopolitical risks associated with depending on China completely. Peak Energy’s plan to manufacture in the United States is a geopolitical advantage, he says. (It’s also more climate-conscious to make these giant batteries in the U.S. as opposed to making them in China and shipping them to the U.S.)
“You don’t want to be in a situation where a critical component of the energy infrastructure of your entire economy, which batteries are increasingly becoming, is principally sourced from a party that you can’t be sure you’re going to be friends with,” Mossburg told CNBC. “If the U.S. wants to continue to have a robust economy, especially an economy that can make things like cars or even like high-tech things, ceding an entire industry that’s this important to any other player — doesn’t matter if it’s China or anyone else — is a dangerous prospect.”
The first real gigantic battery factory in the world was the Tesla/Panasonic Gigafactory in Nevada, and Reichow led the development of that, Dales said. The second generation “arguably” was the factories that Mossburg built with Northvolt and that Dales helped build at Enovix, Dales said. Peak Energy is “taking that learning and the people who developed those factories and we are going after the third generation of factory design,” Dales told CNBC.
Go back a decade and most Americans had never heard of Huawei. Today, the Chinese telecom giant is a symbol of how quickly China can dominate a strategic technology sector and in the process create new national security and market threats for U.S. government and industry.
Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is now worried about another Chinese company that he predicts will eclipse Huawei in both scale and consequence: BGI. It is not building cell towers or smartphones for the 5G era. It is collecting DNA.
“If Huawei was big, BGI will be even bigger,” Warner said at the CNBC CFO Council Summit in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
BGI is one of the largest genomics companies in the world. It operates DNA sequencing laboratories in China and abroad. It processes genetic data for hospitals, pharmaceutical firms and researchers across dozens of countries, according to a recent report by the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.
The company began as a Beijing-based research entity, the Beijing Genomics Institute, tied closely to China’s national genome projects. It later expanded into a global commercial powerhouse, selling DNA sequencing, prenatal testing, cancer screening, and large-scale population genetic analysis, according to an NBC News report.
Through subsidiaries, BGI says it operates in the U.S. Europe, and Japan. In several countries, it helped built national genetic databases and pandemic testing systems.
A man visits the booth of BGI at the Healthy Life Chain area of the third China International Supply Chain Expo CISCE in Beijing, capital of China, July 16, 2025.
Xinhua News Agency | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
U.S. intelligence officials believe that global footprint gives BGI access to one the largest collections of genetic data on Earth. Lawmakers have warned that genetic data is not just medical information. At scale, it becomes a strategic asset spurring a “DNA arms race,” according to a Washington Post report. DNA profiles can reveal ancestry, physical traits, disease risk, and family relationships, and when linked with artificial intelligence, the data can also be used for surveillance, tracking and long-term biological research tied to national security, according to the Washington Post’s reporting.
At the CNBC event this week, Warner continued to press for more focus on BGI. “They are hoovering up DNA data,” Warner said. “This level of experimentation on humans and intellectual property theft, we all should be concerned about it.”
Congressional investigators have previously warned that BGI maintains close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese military, according to a report from the House Select Committee on the CCP. They argue that China makes little distinction between commercial data and state security needs.
The ‘super soldier’ fear
One of the biggest fears tied to BGI and China’s broader biotech push is the possibility of a genetically enhanced soldier. U.S. officials have publicly claimed that China has explored human performance enhancement and military biotechnology. U.S. defense analysts say China’s research spans population DNA collection, military databases, and AI-driven human performance modeling, according to a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by U.S. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe in 2020, when he was Director of National Intelligence during President Trump’s first term.
Warner directly referenced those concerns this week.
“It’s terrifying,” Warner said.
Troops make preparations before a military parade in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 3, 2025.
Xinhua News Agency | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images
Warner described China as a great nation and great competitor, and as a former telecom executive (he was among the founders of Nextel), he said what Huawei was able to execute on — producing good products at inexpensive prices before the U.S. and Western competitors were prepared — is a cautionary tale.
The BGI story looks uncomfortably familiar to Warner.
“Go back in time eight or nine years, and most people had never heard of Huawei,” he said.
Huawei rose by combining massive state support, global market access and aggressive pricing, not only outcompeting Western firms on scale and cost, but positioning itself inside the world’s telecom infrastructure before governments understood the security implications. Huawei was first placed on a U.S. trade blacklist in 2019, which banned U.S. firms from selling some technology to the Chinese tech giant over national security concerns. Chip restrictions on Huawei have since become even stricter.
But Warner said by the time the U.S. moved to restrict Huawei, “[we started to] lose a little.”
Much of the 5G backbone had already been shaped by Chinese technology.
During a separate interview with Javers at the CNBC CFO Council Summit, the Republican Chairman of the House committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Michigan congressman John Moolenaar, said “We’ve seen how they run the play of excess capacity, price manipulation, driving people out of business in different areas; they’re going to continue to run that play,” he said. “We want to be friendly with China, but China is not our friend. They are our foremost adversary,” he added.
The Soviet Union was a military and ideological competitor, but China, in tech domain after domain, Warner says — from telecom and 5G to AI, quantum computing and biotech — is a different kind of competitor.
Warner now sees BGI following a similar model in biotechnology. Like Huawei, BGI scaled rapidly with state support. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank Foundation of Defense of Democracies called upon lawmakers of both parties earlier this year to restrict BGI’s access to U.S. institutions.
Congress has been trying to pass various versions of the BIOSECURE Act, which would limit the ability of Chinese biotechs to operate in the U.S. Some U.S. hospitals and research institutions with ties to Chinese genomics firms are under federal pressure, according to the Associated Press, though some medical professionals within the U.S. say they risk losing key research support for core medical goals. BGI told the AP that the bill is “a false flag targeting companies under the premise of national security. We strictly follow rules and laws, and we have no access to Americans’ personal data in any of our work,” it said.
U.S. intel has moved too slowly, and disrupted key spying alliances
Warner said the U.S. intelligence apparatus has moved too slowly to recognize the biotech threat. He says that intelligence agencies focus too much on foreign governments and militaries, with less attention placed on commercial technology sectors. But in a world where technology supremacy is national security, Warner says more of our intelligence efforts need to reflect this shift.
Only in the past two to three years, he says, has the U.S. seriously expanded spying into AI, semiconductors, and biotechnology. Warner says we need a more “advanced approach” in this area, and he gave as one recent example when China’s largest chipmaker SMIC stunned U.S. officials by producing a six-nanometer chip despite sweeping U.S. export controls. The breakthrough showed that Washington had underestimated both China’s technical qualities and ability to work around restrictions. “We got caught off guard with the SMIC six-nanometer chip,” Warner said.
Warner is also worried that tracking China’s tech rise requires a type of deep cooperation with U.S. allies that the Trump administration has squandered, such as the global intelligence-sharing network called the “Five Eyes” alliance.
Those relationships are now under strain, he said, and key partners including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France have gone public in saying they are reluctant to share intel with the U.S. “They feel like we may be politicizing the intel product and that is not good news for America,” Warner said.
Underlying his concerns about the technology competition with China in areas including AI and biotech is the U.S. ceding the global lead in standards setting. For decades, the U.S. shaped the rules for wireless networks, satellites, and internet infrastructure. That dominance help Americans lead global markets, Warner said, but now China is aggressively positioning itself as the international standards setter.
Warner described the U.S. role in international bodies as one of the “secret sauces” in the era of America’s dominance of the global economy and technology, allowing the U.S. to leverage innovations occurring around the globe, “even if it didn’t arise in America.”
Across technology domains, influencing standards and protocols is critical to not only maintaining a competitive edge but also establishing ethical boundaries. “Will it be us or the Chinese?” Warner said. “The Chinese come in with clearly a less humanist approach. It’s been effective in lots of domains. We see it on standards-setting bodies. China floods the zone with lots of engineers, almost buying off the votes. We’ve got to reengage for American business and government,” he said.
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