"When we started the company, we saw that as being the next frontier: how do you cost-effectively attack that opportunity in the market?" says Jaramillo, who previously led work on energy products at Tesla. "It's a growing need. As we have more and more renewables on the grid, of course that means the grid tends to be weather-driven. And increasingly, we have more volatile weather events on our grid that we need to be able to address, and they tend to last multiple days."
"We're reversibly rusting iron," says Mateo Jaramillo, CEO of Form Energy, the company that built the factory. The battery technology, called iron-air, reacts with oxygen to store and release energy. It's designed to store energy for around four days-something that standard lithium-ion batteries can't do economically.
The startup began developing its new battery design in 2017, with the goal to store 100 hours of energy in a battery. That's long enough to cover the typical outage after a hurricane, wildfire, or other extreme weather event.
The concept of an iron-air battery isn't new, and the Department of Energy funded research on it in the 1970s. But the batteries have seen renewed interest with the increasing need for longer-term energy storage solutions.
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