A 1MW battery storage system with as much as 150 hours of storage duration, using an as-yet unrevealed battery chemistry, is being deployed in a pilot by Minnesota electric utility Great River Energy.
Form Energy, a startup developing what it claims is an “ultra low-cost, long duration” proprietary energy storage system has remained tight-lipped on what’s inside its batteries since first coming to prominence in 2017 when it was the recipient of investment from MIT accelerator programme The Engine.
Form Energy was then known as Baseload Renewables and was in fact partly the brainchild of Yet Ming-Chiang, the MIT professor who also started up 24M, a maker of ‘semi-solid’ lithium-ion batteries made with thicker electrodes than other manufacturers’ devices that is claimed could reduce the cost of production by as much as 50%. Japanese technology manufacturer Kyocera selected 24M’s batteries for its residential energy storage systems and officially launched them at the beginning of this year.
Form Energy meanwhile has said since 2017 that it is working on two types of battery to meet the need for longer duration storage than lithium-ion is typically known for enabling: one is an aqueous-sulfur flow battery designed to provide several hours of storage at low cost, while little is known about the makeup of the other battery the company has developed, save for the fact that it is apparently an “aqueous-air” device that Form Energy said “leverages some of the safest, cheapest, most abundant materials on the planet. The company successfully closed a US$40 million Series B funding round in August last year and counts the likes of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Macquarie Capital and Italian oil firm Eni among its investors.
Just under a year before that Series B closing, Form Energy also netted close to US$4 million in funding from the US Department of Energy as the government sought out long duration storage technologies for up to 100 hours duration for demonstration through the DoE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Form Energy also has a partnership in place with Enel Green Power, and funding from the Enel Foundation, with the trio recently co-authoring a white paper on long duration storage and its viability for both integrating renewables and participating in energy markets.
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