Long-duration storage startup Form Energy thought that solving the problem of months-long grid storage would take a decade. But its last year of work advanced faster than expected.
Based on that progress, the team of industry veterans has fast-tracked development and raised a $40 million Series B, co-founder Mateo Jaramillo told Greentech Media. Italian oil and gas major Eni signed on as lead investor, joined by Capricorn Investment Group and most of the existing investors from last year’s $9 million Series A.
Those original investors include some big names, too: Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, Macquarie Capital, Saudi Aramco (which didn’t join the Series B), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology offshoot The Engine.
Jaramillo, who previously built Tesla’s energy storage program, teamed up with MIT professor and prolific battery inventor Yet-Ming Chiang and Aquion alum Ted Wiley to found the company last year, with the goal of creating a product to make renewable energy fully dispatchable.
Market for baseload renewables coming soon
Today’s lithium-ion batteries can shift solar power into the evening for a few hours, but they become prohibitively expensive as a tool for weeks or months of guaranteed power delivery. Form Energy tackled that problem in the lab with an aqueous sulfur flow battery chemistry and an undisclosed electrochemical solution.
Meanwhile, the team modeled the economics of a lower-carbon grid to discern where this new type of power plant could go to market, and then performed similar analyses for paying customers.
“It’s gone better than I could have guessed and as well as we could have hoped,” Jaramillo said. “We have gone and had all those conversations with the major industry stakeholders that confirmed this is of interest right now.”
Instead of the initial plan to study the markets and technology for five years and go to market in 10, the analysis showed that an addressable market for “baseload renewables” would arise in the next three to five years, said Jaramillo.
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