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There are many new battery technologies vying for a piece of the battery storage pie. Traditional NMC battery cells were originally used to create 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 “burn” if you’re a public relations professional. But no matter what battery technology is used, it can only feed electricity back into the grid for about four hours. Form Energyled by former Tesla engineer Matteo Jaramillo, makes batteries that can power the grid for up to 100 hours. Now the company says it will build an 85 MW/8,500 MWh battery storage system at the site of a former paper mill near Bangor, Maine.
Form Energy does something that no one else does. It iron/air battery uses rust as an energy storage medium. According to Charging newsIn discharge mode, thousands of tiny iron granules are exposed to air, causing them to rust — the iron turns into iron oxide. When the system is charged with an electric current, the oxygen in the rust is removed and it turns back into iron. Three years ago, Form Energy CEO Ted Wiley said, “We’ve got the science down. What we have to do is scale from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants. At full production, the modules will produce electricity for one-tenth the cost of any grid-scale storage technology available today.”
On her website, Form Energy explains its technology as follows:
“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 the liquid electrolyte are stacks of cells, 10 to 20 meters in size, containing 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 into modular megawatt-scale power blocks, which consist of thousands of battery modules in an environmentally friendly enclosure. Depending on the system size, dozens to hundreds of these power blocks are connected to the electrical grid. For scale, in the least dense configuration, a one-megawatt system requires about an acre of land. Higher density configurations can achieve over 3 MW per acre.
“Our battery systems can be placed anywhere, even in urban areas, to meet the energy needs of utilities. Our batteries complement the function of lithium-ion batteries, creating an optimal balance between our technology and lithium-ion batteries to deliver the lowest cost renewable and reliable electrical system year-round.”
Form Energy chooses Maine
Form Energy is developing the site outside Bangor, Maine, in an unusual move in the industry. Typically, an energy storage installation is built in partnership with a specific utility. The facility is being made possible by $147 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, part of a $389 million grant package announced last week to bolster New England’s energy grid in anticipation of the large influx of renewable energy Maine expects from offshore wind farms in the near future.
“New England’s electric grid is rapidly addressing its vulnerabilities in reliability and its ability to deliver additional low-cost renewable energy sources,” said Form Energy co-founder and CEO Mateo Jaramillo told Canary Media. “Having multi-day storage gives them more options to solve the complex challenge for their grid.” If all goes according to plan, the Maine project will contain 8,500 megawatt-hours of energy — more than any existing battery plant in the world. Some pumped-storage systems have higher total capacity, but they are expensive to build, require more land, and take a decade or more to complete.
The Form Energy facility in Maine is huge compared to the projects the company has agreed to build for a handful of utilities so far. Minnesota’s Great River Energy signed the first deal with Form and is scheduled to get its pilot project up and running early next year, Jaramillo said. Customers including Xcel Energy and Southern Company will get Form plants afterward. Even signing those contracts is a feat, given utilities’ typical reluctance to try new things, Canary Media say.
Form Energy recently completed construction of its facility in the old steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, and is conducting production testing for its commercial product there. With no commercial projects underway, Form is building confidence in its new battery technology by collecting performance data from systems it has installed to date. The grant application also included rigorous screening by DOE experts and outside engineering studies.
The Maine installation marks the first time Form has opted to develop its own project rather than contract with a utility, and not coincidentally, it’s the most ambitious to date. “This is a very natural next step in terms of scaling and deployments,” Jaramillo said, adding that it’s actually not a huge outlier compared to other projects Form is working on that haven’t yet been announced. “There will be other utilities announced that are as large or larger,” Jaramillo said.
Why Form Energy chose New England
The New England grid needs all the help it can get. The region has limited supplies of fossil fuels, thanks in part to environmentalism in New York State, which has blocked new pipelines. That has forced the region to supply itself with liquefied natural gas, as a century-old protectionist law, the Jones Act, makes it prohibitively expensive to ship cheap American gas. That stress becomes especially risky in the winter, when home heating is the first to get the fuel.
When a cold snap hits and gas runs out, power plants will switch to burning oil, setting back the region’s ambitious pledges to cut climate-changing emissions. The region’s independent grid operator, which manages the grid, has modeled likely scenarios in which the grid could go without power for an extended period of time, and there are many ways that could happen.
The Form Energy project in Maine could provide a long-term power supply to a corner of the region that is overburdened when demand rises, especially in the winter. Maine has pursued an ambitious policy of promoting heat pumps, which has been very successful, but now it is essential that there is enough electricity available to power them all. Normally, a modern U.S. grid would use methane as a backup fuel, but given regional constraints, it pays to have on-demand power that doesn’t rely on it.
Now that the federal money is committed, Form Energy must finalize a lease with the city, obtain local permits and apply to connect to the grid. Once the paperwork is completed, Form expects to hire 100 workers for construction and then five to 10 for long-term operations. The company is targeting completion in 2028, “or sooner,” Jaramillo said.
The takeaway meal
Grid professionals may be hesitant to bet on Form Energy’s new technology, but the company certainly isn’t. It’s putting its technical prowess on the line for all to see. 85 MW may not be a big number in energy storage, but 8,500 MWh certainly is. We see companies like Sodium carbonate are entering the energy storage space with sodium-ion batteries that are cheaper than LFP batteries, but Form Energy promises to be even cheaper.
The only thing that makes our hair stand on end here, CleanTechnica There are press releases about energy storage that tout how many homes their systems can power. The truth is, data centers and crypto will soak up most of the new renewable energy and storage coming online. At some point, we have to ask ourselves whether AI is more important than a habitable planet. We pretty much know what the answer should be.
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