Offshore

New England’s plan to boost offshore wind? A 100-hour battery

New England’s plan to boost offshore wind? A 100-hour battery
Form Energy's iron-air battery. (Courtesy: Form Energy)

New England’s plan to boost power grid capacity to support 4.8 GW of new offshore wind capacity includes a 100-hour battery from Form Energy.

The Department of Energy awarded $369 million to the Power Up New England project as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law’s $10.5 billion grid resilience program. DOE announced the program’s second-round award recipients Tuesday, which included a mix of transmission and energy storage projects across the country.

Power Up New England was proposed by a coalition of New England states, ISO New England, Eversource Energy, National Grid, developer Elevate Renewables, and Form Energy, which was not named publically when the federal funding application was first submitted. The project will include new and upgraded points of interconnection for offshore wind, as well as Form Energy’s iron-air battery system.

Form Energy said the 85 MW/8,500 MWh battery facility will be located at an EPA brownfield site and will be used to reduce transmission congestion.

Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said Power Up New England’s transmission upgrades will lower the cost of future offshore wind projects and help scale new technology, like Form Energy’s 100-hour battery.

The project partners will collectively spend $499 million in addition to the matching funds from DOE.

GO DEEPER: Episode 54 of the Factor This! podcast features Form Energy co-founder and CEO Mateo Jaramillo, a former Tesla executive pushing for deep decarbonization on the grid. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Form Energy quietly launched in 2017 as a startup with big ambitions. The company aimed to manufacture and deploy an iron-air battery capable of delivering days of clean power on demand.

The firm was targeting a problem that didn’t yet exist, but would become more pronounced as intermittent renewable energy resources displaced fossil fuel assets on the grid. Lithium-ion batteries could fill some of the gap as solar and wind output rose and fell, but only for minutes or a handful of hours. A multi-day, grid-scale energy storage solution would be critical for deep decarbonization, Form Energy’s founders posited, even though previous efforts failed to fully capitalize on the opportunity.

Slick project renderings and the promise of a 100-hour storage solution allowed the company to raise nearly $1 billion, which included support from the likes of Bill Gates. Form Energy claimed its iron-air battery could be deployed at system costs that would be competitive with conventional power plants and at less than 1/10th the cost of lithium-ion.

Little was known, or shared, about how the battery might perform in the field. As is true for many emerging technologies, the company’s marketing promises were met with some skepticism. But seven years after its launch, Form Energy says it is ready to prove its technology in primetime. The company has signed deals to deploy its battery with such risk-averse utilities as Xcel Energy, Southern Company, and Great River Energy, and broke ground on a commercial-scale battery plant in West Virginia.

Form Energy’s CEO, Mateo Jaramillo, is quick to dismiss the string of milestones as successes. The former Tesla battery executive acknowledges that the company has yet to put steel in the ground. But the momentum behind a critical technology advancement can’t be understated, either.

“I’ve been in batteries now for almost 20 years, and it is particularly gratifying to see a lot of real activity happening,” Jaramillo said on the Factor This! podcast from Renewable Energy World. “I don’t love the term hype, but there’s a lot of talking. And until we actually produce that, then we can’t say that we’ve gotten to where we want to be despite the long path that we have come down.”

Form Energy didn’t invent the iron-air battery chemistry, which dates back more than a half-century. The U.S. Department of Energy commissioned a study by Westinghouse in the 1970s to explore iron-air battery applications for transportation, but those didn’t end up being ideal use cases.

At a high level, the basic principle of Form Energy’s battery operation is reversible rusting.  The battery contains an iron anode, resembling an automobile’s brake pad, and an air-breathing cathode. They are submersed in an electrolyte water bath with a permeable separation between them. When the iron is exposed to the oxygen and air, it triggers a chemical process called oxidation – otherwise known as rusting. That oxidation process releases electrons that are separated and sent to the grid – providing electricity when demand exceeds supply.  When there is excess power on the grid, the process is reversed and electrons flow in, releasing the oxygen and causing the iron to unrust, taking it back to a metallic state.