Reliance Bets on Sodium-Ion at Its 40 GWh Jamnagar Gigafactory

Reliance Industries plans to begin operations at its battery gigafactory at the Dhirubhai Ambani Green Energy Giga Complex in Jamnagar in the second half of 2026, starting at 40 GWh per year and designed to scale modularly toward 100 GWh. What distinguishes the plant from India's other cell projects is chemistry: alongside lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP), Reliance is building on the sodium-ion technology of Faradion, the UK company it acquired in December 2022 for roughly $135 million. Early output is expected to focus on battery-energy-storage systems, and 15 GWh of the capacity sits under the national PLI scheme.

Why sodium-ion

Sodium-ion is the strategic part of the story. Lithium is scarce, geographically concentrated and almost entirely imported into India, which means a lithium-only battery industry simply swaps an oil dependency for a lithium one. Sodium, by contrast, is abundant and cheap, and sodium-ion cells sidestep the lithium, cobalt and nickel supply chains that China dominates.

The trade-off is energy density: sodium-ion stores less energy per kilogram than lithium-ion, which makes it a poor fit for premium long-range cars but a strong fit for stationary grid storage and entry-level mobility, where weight matters far less than cost and supply security. For a country building out vast amounts of solar and wind that needs cheap storage to firm intermittent power, that is a sensible place to start, and it is why Reliance is pointing the first cells at storage rather than vehicles.

Giga-scale and integration

The other advantage Reliance brings is integration. Jamnagar is being built as a single green-energy complex spanning solar manufacturing, cells and electrolysers, so the battery plant is one module in a system designed to make and store renewable energy end to end. At giga-scale, that vertical integration is where the cost advantages compound, because Reliance can in principle supply its own inputs and capture margin at every step.

The caveats are timing and maturity. Reliance's battery timeline has slipped before, and "second half of 2026" is the latest stated target rather than a delivered fact. Sodium-ion mass manufacturing is also still nascent worldwide, so Reliance is betting on a chemistry that is promising but not yet proven at the scale it intends. If it lands, though, a 40 GWh sodium-ion line is one of the more strategically distinctive bets in Indian energy, precisely because it refuses to depend on lithium.