The one thing that saves the world now could be in the form of renewable energy. People are now looking into this because of its ability to go green and its capability of protecting the planet.
Unfortunately, renewable energy isn’t always available for everyone. Hence, countries have now started to look into how this form of energy can power the rest of the world.
And speaking of renewable energy, what was unveiled after years of work was an energy startup in Massachusetts. The company has claimed that in a few years they can actually produce, at scale, “the battery you need to fully retire coal and natural gas plants.”
Of course, storage can also be a hindrance. This is a major challenge to those looking into renewable energy. They say that the new battery technology, which they’ve dubbed as the “Holy Grail,” could actually help store power. This time, they’ve ditched lithium, one of the most abundant minerals on Earth, for iron.
Battery startup companies are considering to create a battery system that can reliably store the energy generated when the sun is out during the day or the wind is blowing. The battery is the perfect storage for those times of stillness and darkness when no energy source can be found. A deep-dive into Form Energy’s inner-workings by the Wall Street Journal talked about this great quote that there is a “Cambrian Explosion” going on in the sector of batteries and energy storage. GNN has looked and reported on this story and followed its process in every step. The experts have begun to analyze new tech from hydrogen cells, to aluminum lava, to giant towers that lift and drop enormous metal weights.
How Renewable Energy Works
Form Energy’s battery makes use of the chemical reaction that creates rust, i.e. iron and oxygen, to store energy. This stored energy will be held in a kind of technology known as stage transition. This has the ability to harvest the energy given off by matter when it’s stressed or changes form. For instance, this happens when gas changes to liquid, or when a giant weight is lowered, held, and dropped again. It’s a matter of comprehending these technologies without being an expert in thermodynamics or chemistry. It’s all knowing and accepting the fact that since matter is energy, energy can be stored and released in ordinary elements as they change from one form to another.
Form wrote on their website and explained this process. The company said, “Our first commercial product using our iron-air technology is optimized to store electricity for 100 hours at system costs competitive with legacy power plants. This product is our first step to tackling the biggest barrier to deep decarbonization: making renewable energy available when and where it’s needed, even during multiple days of extreme weather, grid outages, or periods of low renewable generation.”
Ted Wiley, COO and President of Form Energy explained, “We’ve completed the science. What’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants.” Wiley also added, “The modules will be one-tenth the cost of any technology available today for grid energy storage.” The company is located in Sommerville, Massachusetts.
So, what’s Inside the battery cells? The men and women behind Form Energy explain how the process takes place by pointing out how thousands of tiny pieces of iron are exposed to oxygen and rust, but when the oxygen is removed, the iron-oxide goes back to iron. By being able control the change and the process involved, the battery can be charged and discharged.
According to WBUR News Boston, Form is planning to have their first 1 MW pilot project installed at the Great River Energy power plant in Minnesota. Their goal is to complete this by 2023. Form is relatively unknown firm, but there are major investors behind it such as the Italian oil giant Eni, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ subsidiary Breakthrough Energy, and iron giant ArcelorMittal. The latter just committed $200 million in a series D funding round in the hopes to acquire non-exclusive supply rights of iron for the company’s batteries.
There are wonderful ideas of how to bring renewable energy storage to world markets out there. Admittedly, not all of them will survive or attract the funding needed. While their dreams have yet to become a reality, the process does sound promising.
However the free market, by choosing one firm’s goods and services over another’s, naturally has the ability to transfer the talented labor on to other sectors. Hopefully, this can also be better utilized. Hence, as soon as a small pool of battery firms attract much of the investment money needed, hundreds of innovative energy experts and enthusiasts will be given the chance to tackle other substantial problems in the society, and perhaps, even the world. For now, this looks like a situation that everyone can benefit from.
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