Those of you who've been following the progress of renewable power integration onto our global
electricity grids will no doubt be only too aware of their biggest Achilles heel - something called
intermittency. In other words the obvious problem that the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind
doesn't always blow. There are various ways to get around that challenge including ambitious projects
like intercontinental distributed smart grids that can share electrons from where they're being
generated to where they're needed in the blink of an eye, even over distances of thousands of miles.
A grid like that is already being built out here in Europe but even so, the world is probably
decades away from any kind of fully integrated system. So in the meantime we have to find ways of
storing any excess energy that renewables produce so that we can use it when those renewables are
dormant. Pumped hydro does a good job in some parts of the world, and we looked at that in a
previous video, but it's limited by geography and it's hardly something you can just stick
on the back of a truck and deliver to a new site. Lithium-ion batteries are currently being embraced
in large volumes by grid operators all over the world. They work well in principle. They've got
relatively high energy density and efficiency, they provide instant frequency response and can
discharge their stored energy into the grid for about four hours at a time. But they're
still relatively expensive due to the scarcity of lithium metal resources and the sophisticated
internal protection systems they use in order to prevent dangerous overcharging and combustion. And
four hours is not a particularly long time either, so a great deal of research and development has
been going on to find cheap reliable and long duration energy storage solutions that also use
abundant safe reusable and sustainable materials. And now, after a long period in stealth mode,
a Massachusetts company has put their head above the parapet to announce to the world that they've
developed a storage solution using one of the cheapest and most abundant elements on earth,
and which can discharge power not for hours, but for days at a time. So will this be yet
another one to add to the cynics list of 'somewhere over the rainbow' technologies,
or could it turn out to be a realistic disrupter in the grid scale energy sector?
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. The company that nails the long duration
grid scale energy storage challenge on any kind of economically viable level is likely
to become a very large and very wealthy entity indeed, so it's hardly surprising
that furious research and development activity is going on in laboratories all over the world.
Form Energy Inc, have been quietly working away on their own solution for about four years
and they reckon they've now got a product that's ready to ramp up to megawatt levels
of production by 2023. The main two ingredients of their technology are nothing more fancy than
good old iron and fresh air. Both extremely abundant, easily accessible, and dirt cheap.
Good start! The iron air battery is actually a technology that's been known about for decades,
but until now there's never been a market force strong enough to attract funding for development,
partly because the batteries are very large and very heavy. You certainly won't be seeing iron
air batteries in smartphones or electric vehicles anytime soon - they're far too heavy for that.
And lithium-ion has pretty much captured that market already anyway. But for stationary, utility
scale, long duration energy storage, Form's Iron Air technology looks like it could be an ideal
solution. The basic principle of the technology is breathtakingly simple. It's something that Form
refer to as 'reversible rusting;. Each individual battery is a unit about the size of a washing
machine containing between 10 and 20 stacks of cells, each of which has an anode consisting of
pellets of metallic iron on one side and an air breathing cathode on the other side, all immersed
in a water-based non-flammable electrolyte much like what you'd find inside a standard AA battery.
As the battery discharges, oxygen from the air reacts with the iron via the liquid electrolyte.
That reaction reduces the air to hydroxide, and oxidizes the iron into iron oxide or rust, which
releases electrons. To recharge the battery an electrical current can be passed through the cells
which reverses the reaction, liberating the oxygen from the rust and turning it back into iron.
One of the biggest challenges was to find a cathode material that was impermeable to water but
was still able to breathe oxygen. In 2020, Form found that material at an Arizona based battery
company called Nant Energy Inc. They'd spent about 10 years developing just such a membrane
for a similar technology using zinc instead of iron. Form bought all the patents and an inventory
of thousands of cathodes from Nant energy, and that provided them with the last piece of their
development puzzle and enabled them to greatly accelerate their program. According to this 2019
article, the theoretical energy density of iron air batteries is around 764 Wh /kg. That's several
times greater than the best lithium-ion batteries on the market today. Lithium-ion batteries use a
process called intercalation. Lithium ions move back and forth through an electrolyte and fit
into empty spaces inside the crystal structures of the anode and cathode. That means the capacity
of a lithium-ion cell is limited by the physical volume of the two electrodes. Iron air batteries
don't move metal ions between the electrodes so they're not limited by intercalation in
available spaces in electrode lattices. They use an electrochemical reaction that simply deposits
rust onto the surface, so they're only limited by the electrode surface area. That greatly reduces
the mass requirement of the battery and leads to that much higher theoretical energy density.
At scale, Form reckon their batteries will store energy at about a tenth of the cost of lithium
ion. The nickel, cobalt, lithium and manganese minerals used in existing lithium ion batteries
translate to a cost of between fifty and eighty dollars per kilowatt hour.
Form say that using iron instead will mean spending less than six dollars per kilowatt hour,
and even when it's all packaged up into a full battery system the price will still be less
than 20 dollars per kilowatt hour. At that level the general industry consensus seems to be that
renewables plus energy storage could fully replace traditional fossil fuel burning power plants. And
when I say 'at scale' I'm talking about warehouses full of tens of thousands of washing machine size
batteries, all hooked up together to provide enormous quantities of energy storage. Form
say their least dense configuration would get one megawatt of capacity into about an acre of land,
with the high density configurations reaching three megawatts for the same amount of space.
By 2023, Form plans to deploy a one megawatt demonstration battery capable of discharging
continuously for more than six days, and they're already in talks with several utility companies
about potential battery deployments. The system can be cited anywhere there's a need,
even in urban areas, and the idea is not to supersede lithium-ion batteries, which
already provide a very useful function for short bursts of frequency regulation and grid stability,
but to complement them by delivering about 150 hours worth of continuous discharge.
That's a combination that, according to Form CEO Matteo Jaramillo, could completely displace gas
power on electricity grids and enable wind and solar to provide low-cost renewable energy that
can work alongside existing nuclear and hydropower plants to provide reliable carbon free electricity
all year round. Jaramillo himself has a pretty good pedigree, having spent seven years at Tesla
Motors, initially working in powertrain sales and site acquisitions and then spearheading
Tesla's move into stationary energy storage. His industry knowledge is complemented by a team of
highly experienced and very technically qualified colleagues including Professor Yet Ming Chiang
from MIT, who started working on long duration batteries back in 2012 as part of an energy
department collaboration and who co-founded a pioneering lithium-ion battery company called
A123 Systems Inc. Form is backed by Bill Gates' renewable energy investment company Breakthrough
Energy Ventures, and also by the steel-making giant Arcelor Mittal. who are one of the world's
largest producers of iron ore, and who are leading a 200 million dollar funding round to get Form
Energy's technology into full production and to establish collaborative links with all the major
regulators and electricity generators across the United States. There's a saying in the building
trade that the three most important factors for any project are for it to be fast, cheap and good
quality. The saying goes that you can have any two of those factors, but you can't have all three.
It's a similar problem in the energy sector. The three crucial factors there are affordability,
reliability and the absence of carbon in the process. Most electricity generation
can deliver any two of those factors, but long duration energy storage like the Form battery
looks set to help renewable energies like wind and solar deliver all three of them and actually move
the world towards the sustainable future we're all hearing so much about in the media these days.
If you've got some experience working in this field of technology or if you have views
on how you think utility scale energy storage should be rolled out in your part of the world,
then why not jump down to the comments section below and leave your thoughts there.
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