New Iron-Air Battery Could Store Energy for 100 Hours

We’ve covered metal-air batteries – and their promise of absurd energy densities – and while Form Energy’s new iron-air battery won’t extend the range of EVs, it could help with renewable energy storage.

Form Energy is touting new iron-air technology to deal with 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.”

The company has been working on their iron-air battery since 2017, and it’ll be capable of delivering electricity for 100 hours at “system costs competitive with conventional power plants and at less than 1/10th the cost of lithium-ion.”

The key point is that Form Energy relies on some of the safest, cheapest, and most abundant materials on the planet – low-cost iron, water, and air.

And as the company notes, the tech will help deal with the biggest impediments for solar and wind power – extreme weather, grid outages, or periods of low renewable generation.

Of course, right off the bat, Form Energy’s tech precludes anything directly related to EVs – each battery is about the size of a washing machine and includes a water-based, non-flammable electrolyte, and said electrolyte features stacks of 10-20 meter-scale cells, which include iron electrodes and air electrodes.

From there, the company groups the battery modules together in modular megawatt-scale power blocks, and in a low-dense setup, a one megawatt system requires about an acre of land.

So yeah, definitely not for electric vehicles, but it could be a huge boon for solar and wind power.

“Our batteries complement the function of lithium-ion batteries,” the company notes, “allowing for an optimal balance of our technology and lithium-ion batteries to deliver the lowest-cost renewable and reliable electric system year-round.”

The system will be online by 2023.

Read more here.