Long Duration Battery Storage Developer Hits Milestones on Projects, Fund-Raising
Startup Form Energy's first factory to produce iron-air energy storage batteries at a former Weirton, W. Va., steel mill site was completed in September, with an expansion now underway.
Photo courtesy of Form Energy
As it expands a just completed long-duration battery storage system factory in West Virginia to more than 850,000 sq ft of production space by the end of 2025 and boosts annual manufacturing capacity to 500 MW at minimum—along with getting several proposed U.S. commercial scale installations under way—startup Form Energy has gained $405 million in new funding from some high-profile backers.
The Massachusetts-based firm's iron-air technology is for limited, but large-scale application in enabling continuous clean-energy discharge to the grid for 100 hours at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries, it said. Form Energy’s system intakes oxygen to convert iron to rust, then changes rust back into iron in exhaling the oxygen—discharging and charging the battery in the process.
"When a building rusts or a bridge rusts, it is very slowly discharging [energy]," Form Energy CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo told Newsweek Oct. 18 in announcing the funding. "What we have done is build a device that takes that reaction and harnesses it and lets us manufacture that battery and deploy it in very large volumes,"
The firm's iron-air process will enable it to spend less than $6 per kilowatt-hour of storage on materials for each battery cell, with full battery system cost of less than $20 per kilowatt-hour—a figure at which researchers believe renewable energy plus storage could fully replace traditional fossil-fuel power, Form Energy told the Wall Street Journal.
The latest funding round elevates the startup’s total raised to date to more than $1.2 billion and includes as new investors T. Rowe Price, the asset management firm and manufacturer GE Vernova. Existing investors include the Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures, MIT’s Engine Ventures, Energy Impact Partners and several others, Form Energy said.
GE Vernova also agreed separately with the firm to “strategically collaborate on areas to support the rampup of manufacturing operations and commercial deployments of our iron-air battery systems," including engineering, supply chain operations, financing, sourcing and research, said a Form Energy spokesperson.
The first-phase plant, completed in September, involved a building team of design firm Stantec, Massaro Construction as general contractor and The Thrasher Group as civil engineer, she said.
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Also involved as foundation contractor has been Nicholson Construction, the North American unit of France-based Soletanch Bachy, according to a web post. The new factory is on the site of a former steel mill built in the early 1900s, "with known obstructions of remnant buildings, basements, slag deposits and many other steel, wood, and brick fragments," Soletanch Bachy said.
The new funding "will enable us to get to full commercial production,” said board member Gabriel Kra, co-founder and managing director of firm investor Prelude Ventures. The Form Energy system “is the least-cost way to meet energy and capacity requirements as demand increases,” he said.
The round was also one of the largest for a clean energy technology firm—with sector investment slowed this year due to still stubborn inflation, geopolitical tension and more appeal from artificial intelligence vendors, said market monitor Pitchbook.
The Form Energy production plant also was selected on Sept. 23 to negotiate a $150-million U.S. Energy Dept. funding award, supported by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and received a previous $215-million forgivable loan from the West Virginia Economic Development Authority.
'Ready for Serial Production'
The company said it has more than 13 gigawatt-hours of battery installation projects that will come on line by 2028.
“After seven years of dedicated R&D, product engineering, testing and validation, and most recently trial production, our 100-hour iron-air battery system is ready for serial production and commercial deployment,” Jaramillo said in a press release.
The company plans to install the 8,500 MW-hour battery system at a former paper and pulp mill in Lincoln, Maine, which the spokeswomen said would be "the largest battery project by energy storage capacity in the world," as well as the first global project "contracted ahead of announcing a utility customer."
The total project cost was undisclosed, but includes a $147 million U.S. Energy Dept grant awarded in August. "This is a very natural next step in terms of scaling up,” Jaramillo told media.
Also in August, Minnesota-based Great River Energy named Mortenson Construction as EPC contractor to start construction of the 1.5-MW grid-connected Cambridge Energy Storage Project in Cambridge, Minn., a Form Energy system that is set to operate by the end of 2025, the spokesperson said.
Form Energy has not announced contractors for its two 10-MW Excel Energy projects or for its 15 MW project with Georgia Power—set for deployment in 2025 and 2026 respectively. The firm's storage technology has also been proposed for a 1-GWh system in Ireland, in what is described in media as Europe’s first large-scale iron-air project.
Energy sector research firm Wood Mackenzie and trade group American Clean Power Association said in a recent report that the U.S. is on track to deploy about 12.7 GW of battery storage capacity in 2024.
