Form Energy is building the world’s largest battery energy storage system in Maine

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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 make battery energy storage systems (BESS), but today LFP batteries are the preferred choice because they cost less and minimize the risk of thermal runaway (which is the polite way for PR pros to say “fires”). But whatever battery technology is used, it can only power the grid for about four hours. Form Energy, led by former Tesla engineer Matteo Jaramillo, makes batteries that can power the grid for up to 100 hours. Now the company is announcing plans to build an 85 MW/8500 MWh battery storage system on the site of a former paper mill near Bangor, Maine.

Form Energy is doing something that no one else is doing. Its iron-air battery uses rust as an energy storage medium. According to Charging newsIn discharge mode, thousands of small iron pellets are exposed to air, causing them to rust – the iron turns into iron oxide. When the system is charged with electrical current, the oxygen in the rust is removed and it turns back into iron. Three years ago, Ted Wiley, CEO of Form Energy, said: “We’ve done the science. What remains is to scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants. At full production, the modules will produce electricity at a tenth of the cost of any grid storage technology available today.”

On its 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, non-flammable electrolyte, similar to the electrolyte used in AA batteries. Inside the liquid electrolyte are stacks of 10- to 20-meter-wide cells that contain 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 power plant blocks, which consist of thousands of battery modules in an environmentally protected enclosure. Depending on the system size, dozens to hundreds of these power plants will be connected to the grid. In its least dense configuration, a one-megawatt system requires about one hectare of land. Higher density configurations can reach more than 3 MW per hectare.

“Our battery systems can be deployed anywhere, even in urban areas, to meet utility energy needs. Our batteries complement the functionality of lithium-ion batteries and enable an optimal balance between our technology and lithium-ion batteries to provide the most cost-effective renewable and reliable power system year-round.”

Form Energy chooses Maine

Form Energy is developing the site outside Bangor, Maine, which is unusual in the industry. Typically, an energy storage facility is built in partnership with a specific utility. The facility is made possible by $147 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, part of a $389 million stimulus package announced last week to bolster New England’s energy grid as Maine expects a large influx of renewable energy from offshore wind farms in the near future.

“The New England power grid is working quickly to address its vulnerabilities in reliability and ability to deliver additional low-cost renewable energy,” said Mateo Jaramillo, co-founder and CEO of Form Energy. Canary Media“Storage over multiple days gives them more options to solve this complex challenge for their grid.” If all goes according to plan, the Maine project will store 8,500 megawatt hours of energy – more than any battery power plant in the world today. While some pumped storage systems have higher total capacity, they are expensive to build, require more land and take a decade or more to build.

The Form Energy plant in Maine is huge compared to the projects the company has built so far for a handful of utilities. Minnesota-based Great River Energy signed the first contract with Form and is scheduled to launch its pilot project early next year, Jaramillo said. Customers like Xcel Energy and Southern Company will receive Form plants after that. Even signing those contracts is an accomplishment, considering utilities are typically reluctant to try new things. Canary Media says.

Form Energy recently completed construction of its factory in the old steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, where it is conducting production testing of its commercial product. With no commercial projects in operation, Form is building confidence in its new battery technology by collecting performance data from the systems it has installed so far. The grant application also included a rigorous review by DOE experts and third-party engineering studies.

The Maine facility marks the first time Form has chosen to develop its own project rather than contract with a utility. And, not coincidentally, it’s its most ambitious yet. “This is a very natural next step in terms of scale and deployment,” Jaramillo said, adding that it’s actually not a huge outlier compared to other projects Form is working on but hasn’t made public yet. ​”There will be more utility projects announced that are the same or larger in scale,” Jaramillo said.

Why Form Energy chose New England

New England’s power grid needs all the help it can get. The region has limited supplies of fossil gas, in part due to environmental policies by New York State, which has blocked new pipelines. This has forced the region to rely on liquefied natural gas imports to supply itself, as a century-old protectionist law called the Jones Act makes importing cheap American gas prohibitively expensive. This strain becomes especially risky in the winter, when household heating bills are the first to have access to the fuel.

When a cold snap hits and gas becomes scarce, power plants switch to oil, undermining the region’s ambitious commitments to reduce its climate-changing emissions. The region’s independent system operator, which runs the electricity network, has modelled likely scenarios in which the grid could be without power for extended periods, and there are many ways that could happen.

The Form Energy project in Maine could provide long-term electricity supply in a part of the region that is becoming scarce as demand increases, especially in winter. Maine has an ambitious policy of promoting heat pumps. This policy has been very successful, but now it is important that there is enough electricity to power them all. Normally, a modern American power grid would use methane as a backup fuel, but given regional constraints, it is worth having electricity on demand that is not dependent on it.

Now that the federal money has been committed, Form Energy must sign a lease with the city, seek local permits and apply to connect to the power grid. Once the paperwork is complete, Form expects to hire 100 workers for construction and then five to 10 for long-term operations. The company is aiming for completion in 2028, ​“if not sooner,” Jaramillo said.

The conclusion

Grid experts may be hesitant to bet on Form Energy’s novel 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 the energy storage business, but 8500 MWh certainly is. We’re seeing companies like Natron enter the energy storage space with sodium-ion batteries, which are cheaper than LFP batteries, but Form Energy promises to be even cheaper.

The only thing that gets us mad here is CleanTechnica about energy storage are press releases touting how many homes their systems can power. The truth is that data centers and crypto are soaking up the majority of the new renewable energy and storage that comes online. At some point, we’re going to have to ask ourselves if AI is more important than a habitable planet. We’re pretty sure we know the answer.