Form Energy

“We've broken ground. We're laying the foundation now. The building's getting tilted up over the rest of this year. And that is where we will produce our iron air batteries at volume.”

“That three quarters of a billion dollars, in the end, that should deliver a factory that produces about 500 megawatts per year which for us, these are hundred hour rated duration batteries, so so it can provide its rated power for a hundred hours, which means …”

“The way that we see the landscape playing out is you're gonna, you, you'll need several different distinct types of long duration storage almost certainly, and we're really targeting that multi-day storage.”

“We acquired a company called Fluidic Energy, later NAND Energy, which was a zinc air company. They had already spent 10 years and a hundred million dollars on just that air cathode side of things”

“Form has also brought in the enthusiastic support of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, and the company has raised nearly a billion dollars from investors who are eager to back a company with the potential to change the market for batteries.”

“We took essentially automotive designed modules and put them into the right enclosures and put them into the right, you know, control systems and, you know, thermal systems and that kind of thing. But relatively speaking, it was a pretty short engineering putt…”

“The chemistry is very, very low cost, so it's less than a dollar per kilowatt hour for the active materials.”

“So these are individual cells. So the equivalent of what you would hold in your hand with a AA battery or even a lithium ion battery for us is it's about a meter tall. It's about two thirds of a meter wide and about 10 centimeters deep. And so it's a very larg…”

“Well, we are making a type of battery, which is based on iron and air, so we are reversibly rusting the iron as the electrochemical process inside of the battery, which stores and gives off the electricity that we need.”

“The trick is building a device and delivering a system that keeps you as close to that entitled cost as possible, and for us, that will be roughly 20 dollars a kilowatt hour. We think we can go below that, but that, that's sort of the first target that we've g…”

“Form has inked deals with Georgia Power, Excel Energy, and Great River Energy for projects that could replace coal or gas plants.”

“We saw what happened with lithium-ion, and we saw the progress that it is making, has made, and will continue to make, and yet, we saw a very large opportunity still in the market, and that was to address something that lithium-ion just was not addressing, can…”

“Heirloom down in Tracy. Forum broke ground in West Virginia. I know there's a number of plants going up in that area.”

“In fact, those are in many ways the same problem. Like, and you can't say that you've solved the electrochemistry until you're making it at a relevant scale You know, relevant throughput, with relevant yields, with relevant costs. Like, that's when you know yo…”

“We ended up making more than a 100,000 electrodes.”

“Lithium ion is going to get super, super cheap. And so unless you can point to, you know, beating lithium ion at its own game, then there's really no point.”

“What popped out of that analysis was very clearly, if you can make a battery for a hundred, for 20 dollars a kilowatt hour, you get the hundred hours and you have a very entitled place to bring a ton of value to the grid. It is differentiated. It enhances the …”

“We got the first design to work and to prove a 119 hours on discharge and hit their round trip efficiencies and that kind of thing.”

“We won a hundred fifty million dollar grant from the Department of Energy in the US for the CapEx equipment. So scaling up the manufacturing equipment. This is out of the manufacturing and energy supply grants that, that were part of the infrastructure bill.”

“And we built what today is a million square foot factory. So we're operating about half of that first 500,000 square feet.”

“As it happens, we happen to have the world's most robust data set on iron air chemistry and tens of millions of operating hours, you know, going, going back, Nine years now.”

“In fact, even before we picked The chemistry to work on, which of course ultimately became Iron Air we built software tools.”

“If we had been there, we would have just discharged flat out, right, for those four days, and there you go.”

“The reason we are in West Virginia is because the state provided two hundred ninety million dollars of financing in exchange for 750 jobs by the end of 28.”

“I mean, quite, quite literally, we sort of were able to do things On electrochemistry in a few days that previously would have taken us a few months.”

“You're starting with a raw cost of materials that's less than a dollar per kilowatt hour, right? This is as compared to, let's say, unprocessed minerals for lithium mine that sitting on a table is, you know, 30 bucks a kilowatt hour, something like that.”

“The goal, as we said, from the very beginning of the company, we always were targeting something that would be 20 dollars a kilowatt hour all in at the system level. And that we feel is still very much the entitlement there that we're headed towards.”