As expansion begins at a recently completed long-life battery storage system factory in West Virginia to double production space to nearly 1 million square feet and increase annual manufacturing capacity to At least 500 MW, and commissioning several proposed US commercial-scale facilities. —startup Form Energy has won $405 million in new funding from some high-profile backers.
The Massachusetts-based company’s iron-air technology has a limited but key application in enabling the continuous discharge of clean energy to the grid for 100 hours at one-tenth the cost of lead-ion batteries. lithium, he said. Form Energy’s system absorbs oxygen to turn iron into oxide, then turns the oxide back into iron by exhaling the oxygen, discharging and recharging the battery in the process.
“When a building or a bridge rusts, it discharges very slowly [energy],” said Form Energy CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo Newsweek October 18 when announcing the funding. “What we’ve done is build a device that takes that reaction and harnesses it and allows us to make that battery and deploy it in very large volumes.”
The company’s iron-air process will allow it to spend less than $6 per kilowatt-hour of storage on materials for each battery cell, with a complete battery system cost of less than $20 per kilowatt-hour , a figure in which researchers believe that renewable energy more. Storage could completely replace traditional fossil fuel power, Form Energy said Wall Street Journal.
The latest round of funding brings the startup’s total raised to date to more than $1.2 billion and includes T. Rowe Price, asset management firm and manufacturer GE Vernova as new investors. Existing investors include Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures, MIT’s The Engine Ventures, Energy Impact Partners and several others, Form Energy said.
GE Vernova also separately agreed with the company to “strategically collaborate in areas to support increased manufacturing operations and commercial deployments of our iron-air battery systems,” including engineering, operations the supply chain, financing, sourcing and research, said Catherine Cral. a spokesman for Form Energy.
The first-phase plant involved a construction team from design firm Stantec, he said. It has also been involved as a foundation contractor for Nicholson Construction, the US unit of France-based Soletanch Bachy, according to a web publication. The new factory is on the site of an old steel mill built in the early 1900s, “with known obstructions of remaining buildings, basements, slag tanks and many other fragments of steel, wood and brick,” he said. say Soletanch Bachy.
The new funding “will allow us to reach full commercial production,” said board member Gabriel Kra, co-founder and managing director of investment firm Prelude Ventures. The Form Energy system “is the cheapest way to meet energy and capacity requirements as demand increases,” he said.
The round was also one of the largest ever for a cleantech company, with sector underwriting slowing this year due to still-stubborn inflation, high interest rates, geopolitical tension and increased sellers of artificial intelligence as investment targets, market monitor Pitchbook said.
Form Energy’s production plant also received a $150 million US Department of Energy funding award on Sept. 23, supported by the Jobs and Infrastructure Investments Act, and an earlier forgivable loan of $215 million from the West Virginia Economic Development Authority.
The company said it has more than 13 gigawatt-hours of battery installation projects coming on stream in 2025 and 2026, ranging from 100 MW-hours in length to 8,500 MW-hours.
“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 series 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 pulp and paper mill in Lincoln, Maine, which it said would be more than any existing global location and will be done without contracting for the first time with a utility client. “This is a very natural next step in terms of expansion,” Jaramillo told the media. Total project costs were not disclosed, but include a $147 million US Department of Energy grant awarded in August.
Also in August, Minnesota-based Great River Energy appointed Mortenson Construction as the EPC contractor to begin construction on the 1.5 MW Cambridge grid-connected energy storage project in Cambridge, Minn., a Form Energy system that will be operational by the end of 2025, Cral said.
Form Energy has not announced contractors for its two 10 MW Excel Energy projects or its 15 MW project with Georgia Power, slated for deployment in 2025 and 2026 respectively. The company’s storage technology has also been proposed for a 1GW system in Ireland, in what has been described in the media as Europe’s first large-scale iron-to-air project.
Energy sector research firm Wood Mackenzie and the trade group American Clean Power Association said in a recent report that the US is on track to deploy about 12.7 GW of storage capacity by 2024.
