Battery Awards 2026: Winners Announced Across Battery Innovation, EV Design, and Grid-Scale Storage
What the awards are and why they matter
The Battery Awards 2026 were announced on 26 October 2026 at The Battery Show North America in Detroit. Organized by the show's editorial team and distributed through GlobeNewswire, the awards recognize outstanding innovation across sixteen categories spanning battery chemistry, manufacturing, software, safety, grid-scale storage, and electric vehicle technology. Unlike many industry lists that celebrate single companies, these awards treat the whole stack as one system: cell chemistry, pack design, manufacturing automation, software-defined degradation modeling, thermal safety, and grid integration all appear on the winner list.
The winners matter because they reveal where capital and engineering attention are concentrating as the battery sector approaches the end of this decade. With lithium-ion no longer the only game in town, the list includes sodium-ion anode-free cells, hybrid flywheel-battery storage, nonflammable electrolytes, AI-driven formation data platforms, and 800V test hardware for commercial aviation. The full list, published on the awards' official page and circulated to industry subscribers, reads as follows (GlobeNewswire announcement).
Full list of category winners
Battery Innovation of the Year
Mana Battery won for an anode-free sodium-ion cell that replaces traditional graphite or hard-carbon anodes with a plated-sodium architecture. Sodium-ion cells are cheaper to build than lithium-ion cells because sodium is more abundant and the chemistry avoids cobalt and nickel. Mana's anode-free design pairs a sodium-metal negative electrode with a conventional cathode and a solid electrolyte interphase engineered to resist dendrite growth. The win signals that sodium-ion is moving beyond pilot plants and into commercial-grade productization.
Sustainability
Honda Mobile Power Pack e won for its portable battery-swap system, designed to deliver power to remote worksites, disaster-relief operations, and emerging markets where grid connection is unreliable or absent. The swappable packs can be transported by small truck and charged from any standard outlet, offering modular storage without permanent installation.
Battery Manufacturer of the Year
Torus won for the GigaOne system, a hybrid flywheel-plus-battery installation now operating at grid scale. The device pairs kinetic energy storage in a spinning rotor with lithium-ion battery modules, giving operators both fast power response for frequency regulation and longer duration for energy shifting. Torus describes it as bridging the gap between supercapacitor speed and battery endurance.
Grid-Scale Energy Storage Project of the Year
Gotion Illinois won for its Manteno gigafactory, a $2 billion lithium-ion cell plant in Illinois that marks one of the first large-scale domestic cell-production facilities in the United States. The factory is designed to supply both grid-storage system integrators and EV battery pack assemblers, reducing reliance on imported cells for stationary storage projects.
Materials Innovation
Elementium won for IonPrime electrolytes, a nonflammable liquid electrolyte formulation engineered to enable high-voltage cells with longer cycle life. Flammability is a persistent safety concern in lithium-ion batteries, so nonflammable liquid electrolytes address one of the field's oldest constraints without abandoning the liquid-electrolyte manufacturing base.
Software and Digital
SandboxAQ won for AQVolt26, an AI-driven battery simulation and degradation-modeling platform. Rather than measuring cells only in a lab, AQVolt26 uses quantitative modeling to predict how packs will age under real-world cycling, letting manufacturers tune formation and testing protocols before hardware is built.
Manufacturing Technology
syntrotec GmbH won for FormationIQ, an automated battery-formation data platform. Formation — the first charge-discharge cycles that condition a cell after assembly — determines long-term performance and yield. FormationIQ reduces cycle-time variance across thousands of cells, improving consistency in high-volume production lines.
Supply Chain
Amprius won for silicon-anode lithium-ion cells built at U.S. production volume. Silicon anodes store more lithium than graphite, raising energy density, but they swell during cycling and degrade quickly. Amprius's win reflects progress in scaling silicon-anode manufacturing domestically for aviation and premium EV applications.
Pack Innovation
Echion Technologies won for X-Pack, a niobium-based anode material. Niobium anodes offer extreme power capability and long cycle life, targeting fast-charging applications where cells must accept high current without overheating or plating lithium on the surface.
Battery Management Systems
Associated Environmental Systems won for its Fusion Series modular BMS, which integrates cybersecurity features and real-time diagnostics. Connected BMS hardware increases the attack surface of battery systems, so the award recognizes cybersecurity as a first-class design parameter rather than an afterthought.
Safety
Parker Lord won for CoolTherm SF-1000, a fire-retardant coating that suppresses thermal-runaway propagation in lithium-ion cell tests. By slowing heat transfer between cells in a pack, the coating buys time for suppression systems and reduces the risk of pack-level fires.
EV Charging
Eaton won for its Battery Configuration Switch, a smart switch that reconfigures pack architecture during charging to optimize charging speed and cell safety. The switch lets a pack shift between series and parallel arrangements depending on charger power and cell temperature, improving both speed and longevity.
Startup
Firoozeh Flow won for a flow-battery chemistry platform targeting long-duration storage for utility markets. Flow batteries store energy in liquid electrolytes held in external tanks, making duration a function of tank size rather than cell count — attractive for multi-hour or multi-day grid storage.
Aerospace
Bloomy Controls won for its 800V Battery Cell Simulation Tower, a high-voltage test rig that lets engineers validate 800V battery packs and cells under commercial-aviation conditions before flight hardware exists.
EV Design
Paysafe Envision won for the GEN4 Formula E car, an electric racing platform built around a 900V architecture and advanced battery thermal management. Motorsport remains one of the fastest ways to stress-test high-voltage battery systems, and lessons from the track regularly migrate into production EVs.
Lifetime Achievement
Robert Galyen won for a 45-year career spanning ATL (now part of CATL) and the global battery energy-storage market. His recognition anchors the list in the history of lithium-ion commercialization, from early notebook cells to today's grid-scale deployments.
Why sodium-ion and anode-free cells matter now
Sodium-ion's presence on the winner list is not a curiosity; it is structural. Lithium supply chains remain geographically concentrated, and lithium prices are volatile. Sodium is available almost everywhere, and sodium-ion cells can use aluminum current collectors on both electrodes instead of copper on the anode side, reducing material cost and simplifying recycling streams. Mana Battery's anode-free architecture goes further by eliminating the anode host material entirely, plating sodium directly during charge. If the cycle-life challenge can be solved at volume, anode-free sodium could undercut lithium-ion for stationary storage and entry-level electric vehicles.
The trade-off is energy density: sodium-ion cells today hold less energy per kilogram than lithium-ion, which limits their role in long-range passenger cars. But for grid storage, where weight matters less than cost per kilowatt-hour, sodium is already competitive. The Battery Awards 2026 recognize that a multi-chemistry future — lithium for range, sodium for cost, flow batteries for duration — is more realistic than any single-chemistry dominance story.
Grid-scale storage: hybrid flywheel-battery and gigafactories
Two winners on the grid side illustrate competing visions for balancing renewable grids. Torus's GigaOne combines a flywheel with lithium-ion modules. Flywheels respond in milliseconds, ideal for frequency regulation, while batteries cover minutes-to-hours of energy shifting. Coupling them in one enclosure lets operators bid into both fast-response and energy markets without buying two separate systems.
Gotion Illinois's Manteno gigafactory represents the opposite bet: massive lithium-ion capacity built domestically, feeding both stationary storage and EVs. The two approaches are complementary rather than rivals — hybrid systems optimize the grid's fastest timescales, while gigafactories supply the raw volume of cells that long-duration storage deployments will consume.
Software, materials, and safety: the full innovation stack
The remaining winners show that chemistry is no longer the only differentiator. SandboxAQ's AQVolt26 models degradation before cells are built, turning battery development from a trial-and-error process into a predictive one. syntrotec's FormationIQ applies the same logic to manufacturing, cutting variance in the formation step that determines cell quality. Elementium's nonflammable electrolyte and Parker Lord's CoolTherm coating attack the safety problem from both ends: preventing thermal runaway and slowing its spread if it happens.
Together, these awards describe a battery industry that is no longer just about making a better cell. It is about software-defined performance, cybersecure battery management, fast charging, aviation-grade voltage platforms, and manufacturing at terawatt-hour scale.
The big picture
The Battery Awards 2026 codify a sector in transition. After more than a decade of lithium-ion dominance, the conversation now explicitly includes sodium-ion, hybrid flywheel-battery configurations, AI-augmented production, and cybersecurity as a design parameter. Organizations investing in multi-chemistry roadmaps, domestic manufacturing capacity, and software-defined cell performance will likely lead the next phase of electrification. Readers can explore more Battery Tech coverage [here], including earlier reporting on sodium-ion pricing, grid-storage deployments, and EV charging standards illustrated by Formula E technology and grid-scale storage hardware.
