The Grid Storage Launchpad in Richland, Washington sits inside a 93,000-square-foot research facility run by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. On June 1, PNNL commissioned a new prismatic battery cell production line inside it, a 1,400-square-foot dry room housing 16 pieces of manufacturing equipment. The line is the first of its kind operated by any U.S. national laboratory. It manufactures rectangular batteries encased in rigid metal housings, a format that is drawing serious interest for grid-scale energy storage because of its packaging efficiency and thermal management. Until now, battery validation in the DOE complex had been stuck at coin-cell scale, small, coin-sized prototypes that cannot faithfully represent how chemistries perform in real utility applications.
Adam Jivelekas, the operations manager at the Grid Storage Launchpad, said the new line lets researchers 'create, test and demonstrate real-world prismatic cells at an industrially relevant scale.' The manufacturing sequence includes slurry coating onto copper and aluminum foils through calendaring, slitting, notching, Z-stacking, tab welding, cell enclosure sealing, and electrolyte filling, the full production sequence that a commercial manufacturer would need to scale. The facility is housed in a dry lab where humidity is lower than the driest places on Earth, a requirement for manufacturing battery cells without moisture-induced defects. The production line is funded by the DOE Office of Electricity as a national user facility, which means private-sector partners and external researchers can contract to test their own cell designs alongside PNNL's internal validation work.
Cassidy Anderson, a materials scientist at PNNL, said the lab plans to test 'a couple new chemistries in that format, including both lithium- and sodium-type chemistries.' Sodium-ion batteries are particularly significant because they use abundant raw materials and avoid the supply-chain bottlenecks that constrain lithium-ion production. Neither chemistry has been validated at prismatic scale in the DOE complex before. The distinction matters because coin-cell performance does not predict prismatic performance reliably, thermal gradients, cell resistance, and failure modes diverge substantially at larger form factors. By validating chemistries in a format closer to commercial cells, PNNL researchers can generate performance data and safety benchmarks that developers can use to make investment decisions about scaling to full-size manufacturing.
This timing is not incidental. The Energy Information Administration projected on February 20, 2026 that developers will add 24 GW of utility-scale battery storage to the U.S. grid this year, compared with a record 15 GW added in 2025. The storage build is accelerating, but the supply chain for advanced battery chemistries, particularly domestic alternatives to lithium-ion, is immature. Current testing infrastructure forces developers to validate new cell designs either in small lab formats that do not reflect commercial performance, or by funding expensive pilot manufacturing runs at commercial contract manufacturers. PNNL's line offers a third path: validation at industrially relevant scale without the capital commitment of a full pilot line.
The strategic read: this is infrastructure for reducing foreign supply-chain dependence while establishing domestic performance benchmarks that commercial manufacturers can reference. The facility does not manufacture cells for the grid directly, it is a validation and testing center. But by positioning PNNL as the only DOE lab that can test prismatic chemistries at scale, the government is creating a bottleneck on the validation side of the supply chain. Private companies developing sodium-ion, lithium-iron-phosphate, or other advanced chemistries now have a path to generate credible performance data without leaving the United States. That changes the calculus for domestic manufacturers deciding whether to invest in scaling their own production lines. Watch whether private partners adopt the facility at scale, whether sodium-ion cells meet the performance targets required for grid deployment at price parity with lithium-ion, and whether this validation capability accelerates the timeline for domestic battery manufacturing commitments beyond the current announcements.