Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: November 12, 2024
A modular iron-air battery that can feed power to the grid for 100 hours straight, made in the USA!
At their IRA-supported factory in West Virginia, startup Form Energy is now making a modular iron-air battery that can feed power to the grid for 100 hours straight.
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Reasons For Hope
Form Energy has long been a poster child for the Biden Boom. Thanks to Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, they’ve been able to build a factory in Weirton, West Virginia to manufacture their pioneering “reversible rusting” iron-air battery, and they recently received a BIL-funded Energy Department grant to expand it further.
“We are grateful to the Department of Energy for their leadership and support…
We’re excited to contribute to the growth of a clean, domestic energy economy and build a strong, local workforce here in West Virginia.”
-Mateo Jaramillo, Co-founder and CEO of Form Energy.
Now, they’ve opened the factory and launched their product: a modular iron-air battery that can feed power to the grid for 100 hours straight, over an order of magnitude more than most competitors. Form sees their new battery as a perfect complement to fast-charging but quickly-emptied lithium batteries, soaking up extra clean electrons during sunny days and discharging for days on end during extreme circumstances like multi-day climate disasters. The first wave of these batteries will be installed in grids from Colorado to Virginia in 2025, and Form is already working on a second-generation battery for 2026.
As grid-scale battery storage grows rapidly across America and the world (more than 20 GW, aka 20 nuclear reactors’ worth, has been built in the USA since 2020), the growth opportunities are extraordinary - and this is exactly the kind of deep-resilience cleantech ideal for this moment in the Anthropocene. We might just be seeing the dawn of a U.S. battery manufacturing titan of tomorrow, perhaps even an eventual homegrown rival to China’s colossus CATL! This is truly spectacular work.
Form Energy’s product launch is a brilliant case study showing that the BIL and IRA are working as designed, successfully sparking American cleantech innovation. Your Senators and Representative need to know about this.