Mateo Jaramillo, Form CEO and co-founder, said he doesn''t consider the company''s technology to be long-duration storage, instead preferring the term "multi-day storage." The capacity of the Form battery to dispatch energy for 100 hours, he said, "puts it in a different category" than the broad definition of long-duration storage, generally defined as systems with at least 10 hours of duration.
Jaramillo, who previously led Tesla''s energy storage arm, said he considers the Form Energy technology as "complementary, not in competition" with shorter-duration lithium-ion batteries.
That balance, experts say, will be essential to transition the grid to renewable energy. While lithium-ion batteries can store energy for hours and distribute it throughout the day, a 100% renewable grid will need larger storage systems to tackle the day-to-day or seasonal variability in renewable production. While there are a variety of long-duration technologies on the market, the high cost and infrastructure difficulties have limited widespread penetration.
Mark Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford University, said a $20/kWh cost — if the commercial costs end up that low — would be a "substantial breakthrough" that "would enable the rapid transition to 100% clean, renewable electricity on a worldwide scale, while avoiding blackouts, at lower cost than previously thought."
BloombergNEF found that lithium-ion battery pack prices fell to $137/kWh in 2020, with projected costs close to $100/kWh by 2023, and manufacturers like Tesla and CATL have dropped prices as low as $80/kWh. A March study published in Nature Energy found that the energy capacity cost of long-duration storage technology must fall below $20/kWh in order to reduce total carbon-free electricity system costs by at least 10%. Capacity costs would have to drop even lower to displace nuclear and natural gas plants, the study found.
The company will partner with Minnesota electric cooperative Great River Energy on a test project for the iron air exchange battery, with construction expected in 2023. Jaramillo said that other test projects are in the works but have not been announced.
"Early on, we had an indication that this type of technology had great potential," Jaramillo said. "Now we have to prove the bankability of the asset itself, proving that it is durable and meets the needs of the utilities. The only way to compare one type of storage to another is in real-world operating conditions."
Besides the investment from ArcelorMittal, Form Energy has been backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the Bill Gates-led climate investment fund. A November 2020 Series C funding round raised $76 million, including investments from Energy Impact Partners, Temasek and NGP Energy Technology Partners III.
"The overall question for me is how to decarbonize society in the most affordable way," says Nestor Sepulveda SM ''16, PhD ''20. As a postdoc at MIT and a researcher with the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), he worked with a team over several years to investigate what mix of energy sources might best accomplish this goal. The group''s initial studies suggested the "need to develop energy storage technologies that can be cost-effectively deployed for much longer durations than lithium-ion batteries," says Dharik Mallapragada, a research scientist with MITEI.
In a new paper published in Nature Energy, Sepulveda, Mallapragada, and colleagues from MIT and Princeton University offer a comprehensive cost and performance evaluation of the role of long-duration energy storage (LDES) technologies in transforming energy systems. LDES, a term that covers a class of diverse, emerging technologies, can respond to the variable output of renewables, discharging electrons for days and even weeks, providing resilience to an electric grid poised to deploy solar and wind power on a large scale.
"If we want to rely overwhelmingly on wind and solar power for electricity — increasingly the most affordable way to decrease carbon emissions — we have to deal with their intermittency," says Jesse Jenkins SM ''14, PhD ''18, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University and former researcher at MITEI.
In their paper, the researchers analyzed whether LDES paired with renewable energy sources and short-duration energy storage options like lithium-ion batteries could indeed power a massive and cost-effective transition to a decarbonized grid. They also investigated whether LDES might even eliminate the need for available-on-demand, or firm, low-carbon energy sources such as nuclear power and natural gas with carbon capture and sequestration.
"The message here is that innovative and low-cost LDES technologies could potentially have a big impact, making a deeply decarbonized electricity system more affordable and reliable," says lead author Sepulveda, who now works as a consultant with McKinsey and Company. But, he notes, "We will still be better off retaining firm low-carbon energy sources among our options."
In addition to Jenkins and Mallapragada, the paper''s coauthors include Aurora Edington SM ''19, a MITEI research assistant at the time of this research and now a consultant at The Cadmus Group; and Richard K. Lester, the Japan Steel Industry Professor and associate provost at MIT, and former head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering.
"As the world begins to focus more seriously on how to achieve deep decarbonization goals in the coming decades, the insights from these system-level studies are essential," says Lester. "Researchers, innovators, investors, and policymakers will all benefit from knowledge of the cost and technical performance targets that are suggested by this work."
The team set out to assess the impacts of LDES solutions in hypothetical electric systems that reflect real-world conditions, where technologies are scrutinized not merely by their standalone attributes, but by their relative value when matched against other energy sources.
"We need to decarbonize at an affordable cost to society, and we wanted to know if LDES can increase our probability of success while also reducing overall system cost, given the other technologies competing in the space," says Sepulveda.
For their study, the researchers surveyed a range of long-duration technologies — some backed by the U.S. Department of Energy''s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program — to define the plausible cost and performance attributes of future LDES systems based on five key parameters that encompass a range of mechanical, chemical, electrochemical, and thermal approaches. These include pumped hydropower storage, vanadium redox flow batteries, aqueous sulfur flow batteries, and firebrick resistance-heated thermal storage, among others.
"For a comprehensive assessment of LDES technology design and its economic value to decarbonized grids, we evaluated nearly 18,000 distinctive cases," Edington explains, "spanning variations in load and renewable resource availability, northern and southern latitude climates, different combinations of LDES technologies and LDES design parameters, and choice of competing firm low-carbon generation resources."
While breakthroughs in fusion energy, next-generation nuclear power, or carbon capture could well shake up their models, the researchers believe that insights from their study can make an impact right now.
"People working with LDES can see where their technology fits in to the future electricity mix and ask: ''Does it make economic sense from a system perspective?''" says Mallapragada. "And it''s a call for action in policy and investment in innovation, because we show where the technology gaps lie and where we see the greatest value for research breakthroughs in LDES technology development."
Not all LDES technologies can clear the bar in this design space, nor can there be reliance on LDES as the exclusive means to expand wind and solar swiftly in the near term, or to enable a complete transition to a zero-carbon economy by 2050.
"We show how promising LDES technologies could be," says Sepulveda. "But we also show that these technologies are not the one solution, and that we are still better off with them complementing firm resources."
Jenkins spies niche market opportunities for LDES immediately, such as places with a lot of wind and solar deployed and limits on transmission to export that power. In such locations, storage could fill up when transmission is at its limit, and export power later while maximizing use of the power line capacity. But LDES technologies must be ready to make a major impact by the late 2030s and 2040s, he believes, by which time economies might need to be weaned completely off of natural gas dependency if decarbonization is to succeed.
"We must develop and deploy LDES and improve other low-carbon technologies this decade, so we can present real alternatives to policymakers and power system operators," he says.
MIT researchers have analyzed the role of long-duration energy storage technologies and found that large storage systems have the potential to lower electricity prices in a carbon-free grid by up to 40%, writes Eric Roston for Bloomberg.
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