A new startup is claiming it can deliver a dramatic improvement over existing battery designs. Stories like this often elicit rightful skepticism from readers. While battery technology absolutely improves over time, virtually all of that improvement comes from enhancements to existing Li-ion chemistry rather than brand-new ideas. That’s actually one reason why this announcement might lead to something: The underlying battery chemistry is already known to work and the company behind it, Form Energy, is targeting a specific industrial application: grid-scale batteries.
Form Energy recently gave The Wall Street Journal access to its executives and engineers, but the company isn’t in full production yet. It’s headed by Mateo Jaramillo, a former Tesla executive who was Director of Powertrain Business Development from 2009-2014 and became Director of Tesla Energy in that same year. Jaramillo founded Form Energy in 2017 with the goal of developing a battery that would help decarbonize the electrical grid.
Any grid that receives a large percentage of its electricity from renewable sources will need some type of storage system. Form Energy has designed an iron-air battery that it claims will be able to “fully retire thermal assets like coal and natural gas.”
Image by Philip Keith
There are some significant advantages to using iron-air chemistry compared with lithium-ion. First and foremost, iron is cheap. It is the fourth most abundant element in Earth’s crust, behind oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. Lithium, in contrast, is the 33rd most abundant element on Earth. Iron is actually the most common element on Earth by mass, but the vast majority of our planetary reserves are locked inside the core. Iron-air batteries would be far less expensive than lithium-ion batteries; the WSJ reports Form Energy believes it can cut the fully assembled price of its batteries to less than $20 per kWh. The paper reports current conventional batteries cost between $50 and $80 per kWh.
The downside to iron-air batteries has historically been low energy density and high weight. By aiming for the industrial and grid-scale market, Form Energy avoids the last issue: Industrial plants are much more likely to have the reinforced floors and structural support necessary to deploy an iron-air battery. By 2023, the company wants to field a 1MW battery capable of discharging continuously over six days. While such a battery would take several days to charge — iron-air batteries are not fast chargers — it would provide enough energy to buffer against a substantial, days-long outage.
Form Energy isn’t trying to reinvent the idea of batteries. It’s working on a specific product for a target market by improving a chemistry that’s known to work. The challenges of iron-air batteries are real, but the fact that they’re made from a less-reactive metal compared with something like lithium-air is probably a mark in their favor for long-term commercialization and affordability. According to global data, the top six nations with proven lithium reserves possess a total of 64.6 million tonnes of lithium (a tonne is ~1.102x heavier than a ton). Australia alone has 48 billion tonnes of iron reserves.
Put differently: We won’t run out of iron ore before we run out of planet, in the literal sense. Lithium is a little harder to come by. One critical barrier for new battery technology to overcome is the high cost of initial ramp-up compared with established technologies. There are still a lot of questions around the design, but an affordable, scalable, non-toxic, and long-running battery technology would find a home in modern facilities, especially at under $20 kWh.
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