The company has begun expanding its recently completed long-term battery storage systems plant in West Virginia, doubling production space to nearly 1 million square feet and raising annual manufacturing capacity to at least 500 megawatts, as proposed in the U.S. Several commercial-scale implementations are underway. — Startup Form Energy has secured $405 million in new funding from some prominent backers.
The Massachusetts-based company says its pneumatic iron technology has limited but important use in enabling continuous discharge of clean energy into the grid for 100 hours at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries. the company said. Form Energy’s system takes in oxygen and converts the iron to rust, and when it exhales the oxygen it converts the rust back into iron. In the process, the battery is discharged and charged.
“When a building rusts, a bridge rusts, it releases (energy) very slowly,” Foam Energy CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo told Newsweek when announcing the funding. He spoke on October 18th. “What we’ve done is use that reaction to make batteries and build a device that can be deployed in mass quantities.”
The company’s air-iron process results in material costs for each battery cell of less than $6 per kilowatt-hour for storage, and an overall battery system cost of less than $20 per kilowatt-hour. Researchers believe renewable energy can be added to this figure. The storage could completely replace traditional fossil fuel electricity, Form Energy told The Wall Street Journal.
The latest funding round brings the startup’s total raised to date to more than $1.2 billion and includes new investors T. Rowe Price and asset manager and manufacturer GE Vernova. Existing investors include Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, MIT’s The Engine Ventures, Energy Impact Partners and several others, Form Energy said.
In addition, GE Vernova has separately agreed with the company to “strategically cooperate in areas that support the manufacturing business and commercial deployment of GE’s iron-air battery systems,” including engineering, supply chain operations, financing, procurement, and research. said Katherine Krall. Foam Energy spokesperson.
The first phase of the factory involved a construction team from design firm Stantec, she said. Nicholson Construction, the North American division of France-based Soletanches Bassy, is also involved as a foundation contractor, according to a web post. The new factory is located on the site of a former steel mill built in the early 1900s, which is “known for building debris, basements, slag deposits, and numerous other obstructions of steel, wood, and brick debris,” Soletanche said. Bassey said.
Gabriel Kura, co-founder, managing director and board member of investor Prelude Ventures, said the new funding “will enable us to reach full commercial production. “This is the lowest cost way to meet capacity requirements.” “As demand increases,” he said.
The round is also one of the largest for a clean tech company, as sector underwriting has slowed this year due to still stubborn inflation, high interest rates, geopolitical tensions and the rise of artificial intelligence vendors as investment targets. market monitor Pitchbook said.
Form Energy’s production plant also won a $150 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy on September 23 with support from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as well as two previous grants from the West Virginia Economic Development Authority. We also obtained $15 million in forgivable financing.
“Ready for mass production”
The company said it has more than 13 gigawatt hours of battery storage installation projects scheduled to come online in 2025 and 2026, ranging from 100 MW hours to 8,500 MW hours.
“After seven years of intense research and development, product engineering, testing and validation, and recent prototyping, our 100-hour iron-air battery system is ready for serial production and commercial deployment,” Jaramillo said. said in a press release.
The company plans to install an 8,500-megawatt-hour battery storage system at a former paper and pulp mill in Lincoln, Maine, more than any other existing site in the world and the first to be completed without contracting with a utility customer. It is said to be the first time. “This is a very natural next step in terms of scaling up,” Jaramillo told the media. The total project cost is not disclosed, but includes a $147 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy awarded in August.
Also in August, Minnesota-based Great River Energy selected Mortenson Construction as the EPC contractor to begin construction of the 1.5 MW grid-connected Cambridge Energy Storage Project in Cambridge, Minnesota. Nominated. This is a foam energy system and is expected to be operational by the end of the year. 2025, Krall said.
Form Energy has not announced contractors for the two 10MW Xcel Energy projects or the 15MW project with Georgia Power, scheduled to be installed in 2025 and 2026, respectively. The company’s energy storage technology has also been proposed for a 1GW system in Ireland, which has been described in the media as Europe’s first large-scale iron-air project.
Energy sector research firm Wood Mackenzie and industry group American Clean Power Association said in a recent report that the United States is on track to deploy about 12.7 gigawatts of storage capacity in 2024.
