(Bloomberg) -- There may be no better time to launch a utility-sized battery that lasts four days than the aftermath of back-to-back hurricanes.
Form Energy Inc. has developed a battery that can feed electricity to the power grid for 100 hours straight, 25 times longer than most grid-tied batteries today. Now, the startup’s first factory — built on the site of a former West Virginia steel mill — is making cells and modules to be installed at power plants starting next year, from Colorado to Virginia. They will arrive at a moment when the power grid faces an inflection point. Electricity demand is rising from new factories and data centers even as extreme weather events — like hurricanes Helene and Milton — trigger massive blackouts. It’s a potent selling point.
“You’re trying to cover weather events that are lasting three or four days, right?” said Form Chief Executive Officer Mateo Jaramillo. “In many ways, the challenge of this new grid that we’re building is to build a grid that is larger than the weather.”
Investors have bet big on Form’s timing and technology. The company, based near Boston, has raised $1.2 billion. The funding is all the more remarkable considering global climate-tech financing has dropped nearly 50% compared to the same period last year, according to research from BloombergNEF. Although venture capital at large has suffered due to high interest rates and macroeconomic headwinds, climate-focused companies face the added challenge of developing capital-intensive hardware that may be the first of its kind — a big risk for investors.
Form’s most recent, $405 million round will likely be the last, said Jaramillo, a veteran of Tesla Inc. The company aims to reach profitability in three to four years. For now, however, the focus is on starting production and working out the $760 million factory’s inevitable kinks. “You don’t wake up on Christmas morning and all your presents are under the tree, and all of a sudden, you’re in production,” said Jaramillo, during a tour of a Form engineering center in Berkeley, California, where employees assembled one of Form’s large battery enclosures near plastic tanks of liquid electrolyte. “It’s a continuous, grinding process.”
Electric utilities have been deploying big batteries at breakneck speed, both to soak up excess renewable power from solar and wind farms and help prevent blackouts on the increasingly strained grid. Most of those batteries use versions of the same lithium-ion technology found in laptops and electric cars, and they typically supply electricity for four or five hours before needing to recharge. Form’s battery, in contrast, relies on iron and air. When discharging, iron within the battery’s cells reacts with oxygen to form iron oxides — better known as rust — in a process that releases energy. When recharging, the process is reversed, separating the iron and oxygen. The battery, in essence, breathes.
The result is a battery that can discharge without interruption for days on end. It’s easy to see the appeal. In addition to hurricanes, extreme heat waves can strain power supplies for days or weeks, as can deep freezes like the deadly 2021 winter storm that crippled the Texas grid.
But time is both a pro and a con for Form. Just as its battery can discharge for 100 hours, fully recharging takes 100 hours as well. And the batteries are big. Each thin, rectangular cell measures a meter tall, with 30 cells stacked together into a module, and 10 modules packed into an enclosure the size and shape of a shipping container. Twenty enclosures deliver one megawatt of power, or enough for 750 typical homes.
The company is working to squeeze more energy storage capacity into each enclosure. And even as its factory begins making cells and modules for customers that include Xcel Energy and Georgia Power, Form is developing a second-generation battery that will begin ramping up in 2026, said Zac Judkins, the company’s vice president of engineering.
“That will really be the product that the factory blows up in scale with,” he said. The current battery, Judkins said, will “prove to the world that iron-air is what Form promised, really get into the market and show that this thing works.”
Jaramillo sees the different battery technologies — lithium-ion and iron-air — as complements rather than competitors. In addition to providing days of electricity during emergencies, Form’s batteries can help utilities deal with periods when the supply and demand of electricity aren’t evenly matched, dispensing power during heat waves and soaking it up during mild, sunny weather when solar plants generate more than the grid needs. That means energy companies won’t have to overbuild renewable power facilities just to ensure they can cover the highest electricity demand they’re likely to face on the hottest of days.
The US government sees enough promise in Form’s technology that the Department of Energy recently offered the company up to $150 million to build out the factory, located near Pittsburgh in West Virginia’s northern panhandle. And awareness of the grid’s growing needs should give the company tailwinds as it enters production, Jaramillo said. “If you want to be right about one thing most, it’s that the market is ready for you when you’re ready for it,” he said. “Getting the timing correct there is what is giving us a big push to get this up and running.”
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