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There are a lot of new battery technologies out there vying for a piece of the battery storage pie. Originally, traditional NMC battery cells were used to make battery energy storage systems (BESS), but today LFP batteries have become the preferred choice because they cost less and minimize the risk of thermal runaway events, which is the polite way of saying “fires” if you are a public relations professional. But whichever battery technology is used, it can only supply electricity back to the grid for about four hours. Form Energy, headed by former Tesla engineer Matteo Jaramillo, is making batteries that can keep on supplying the grid for up to 100 hours. Now it says it will build an 85 MW/8500 MWh battery storage system on the site of a former paper mill near Bangor, Maine.
Form Energy does something no one else is doing. Its iron/air battery harnesses rust as an energy storage medium. According to Recharge News, in discharge mode, thousands of tiny iron pellets are exposed to the air, which makes them rust — the iron turns to iron oxide. When the system is charged with an electric current, the oxygen in the rust is removed, and it reverts back to iron. Three years ago, Form Energy executive Ted Wiley said, “We have completed the science. What’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants. At full production, the modules will produce electricity for one-tenth the cost of any technology available today for grid storage.”
On its website, Form Energy explains its technology this way:
“Each individual battery is about the size of a washing machine. Each of these modules is filled with a water-based, nonflammable electrolyte, similar to the electrolyte used in AA batteries. Inside of the liquid electrolyte are stacks of between 10 and 20 meter-scale cells, which include iron electrodes and air electrodes, the parts of the battery that enable the electrochemical reactions to store and discharge electricity.
“These battery modules are grouped together in modular megawatt-scale power blocks, which comprise thousands of battery modules in an environmentally protected enclosure. Depending on the system size, tens to hundreds of these power blocks will be connected to the electricity grid. For scale, in its least dense configuration, a one megawatt system requires about an acre of land. Higher density configurations can achieve greater than 3MW per acre.
“Our battery systems can be sited anywhere, even in urban areas, to meet utility scale energy needs. Our batteries complement the function of lithium-ion batteries, allowing for an optimal balance of our technology and lithium-ion batteries to deliver the lowest cost renewable and reliable electric system year-round.”
Form Energy Chooses Maine
Form Energy is developing the site outside of Bangor, Maine, which is unusual in the industry. Typically, an energy storage installation is done in conjunction with a particular utility company. The installation is being made possible by $147 million in financing from the US Department of Energy, part of a $389 million grant package announced last week to strengthen the New England energy grid in anticipation of the large influx of renewable energy Maine expects from offshore wind farms in the near future.
“The New England grid is moving quickly to address its vulnerabilities from a reliability standpoint and its ability to bring on additional low cost renewables,” Form Energy co-founder and CEO Mateo Jaramillo told Canary Media. “Having multiday-duration storage gives them more levers to solve that complex challenge they have for their grid.” If things go according to plan, the Maine project will hold 8,500 megawatt-hours of energy — more than any existing battery plant in the world today. Some pumped hydro storage systems do have a higher total capacity, but they are expensive to build, require more land, and take a decade or more to complete.
The Form Energy installation in Maine is huge in comparison to the projects the company has agreed to build for a handful of utility companies to date. Minnesota’s Great River Energy inked the first deal with Form, and is slated to get its pilot project early next year, Jaramillo said. Customers like Xcel Energy and Southern Company will receive Form installations after that. Even signing those contracts is a feat, given utilities’ typical reticence about trying new things, Canary Media says.
Form Energy recently completed construction on its factory in the old steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, and is working through production trials for its commercial product there. Absent any commercial projects in operation, Form is building trust for its new battery technology by collecting performance data from the systems it has installed to date.The grant application also entailed rigorous vetting from DOE experts and third-party engineering studies.
The Maine installation marks the first time that Form has chosen to develop its own project instead of contracting with a utility customer, and not coincidentally, it’s the most ambitious so far. “This is a very natural next step in terms of scaling up and deployments,” Jaramillo said, adding that it’s actually not a huge outlier compared with other projects Form is working on but hasn’t yet publicized. “There will be other utility projects that get announced that are the same size or larger,” said Jaramillo.
Why Form Energy Chose New England
The New England grid needs all the help it can get. The region has limited supplies of fossil gas, thanks in part to environmental attitudes in the state of New York, which has blocked new pipelines. This has forced the region to supply itself with liquefied natural gas imports because the century-old protectionist law called the Jones Act makes it prohibitively expensive to ship in cheap American gas. That stress becomes especially risky in the winter, because home heating gets first dibs on the fuel.
When a cold spell strikes, and gas runs low, power plants switch to burning oil, which sets back the region’s ambitious commitments to reduce its climate-altering emissions. The region’s independent system operator, which runs the grid, has modeled likely scenarios in which the grid could run out of power for extended periods of time, and there are a lot of ways that could happen.
The Form Energy project in Maine could guarantee a long term power supply in a corner of the region that is stretched thin when demand soars, particularly in the winter. Maine has pursued an ambitious policy of promoting heat pumps. That policy has been very successful, but now it is essential that there be enough electricity available to power them all. Normally, a modern American grid would use methane as the backup fuel, but given the regional limitations, it pays to have on-demand power that doesn’t rely on it.
Now that the federal money has been committed, Form Energy needs to finalize a lease with the town, engage locally for permits, and file for interconnection to the grid. Once the paperwork is done, Form expects to employ 100 workers for construction and then five to 10 for long term operations. The company is targeting a 2028 completion, “if not sooner,” Jaramillo said.
The Takeaway
Grid professionals may be hesitant to gamble on Form Energy’s novel technology, but the company certainly is not. It is putting its technical prowess on the line for all to see. 85 MW may not be a big number in the energy storage game, but 8500 MWh certainly is. We are seeing companies like Natron get into the energy storage area with sodium-ion batteries that are cheaper the LFP batteries, but Form Energy promises to be cheaper still.
The one thing that gets our hackles up here at CleanTechnica about energy storage is press releases that tout how many homes their systems can supply. The truth is, data centers and crypto are sucking up most of the new renewable energy and storage coming online. At some point, we will need to ask ourselves whether AI is more important than a habitable planet. We are pretty sure we know what the answer should be.
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