Insight
Jaramillo: Electrochemistry is not solved until manufactured at relevant scale and cost
“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…”
Opinion
Jaramillo: Lithium-ion cannot solve long-duration storage due to costs
“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…”
Disclosure
Jaramillo: Form Energy targets roughly $20/kWh system costs
“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…”
Disclosure
Jaramillo: Form Energy is targeting a $20/kWh all-in system cost
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Jaramillo: Iron-air raw materials cost under $1/kWh versus $30/kWh for lithium
“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.”
Insight
Jaramillo: A 100-hour battery at $20/kWh drastically lowers grid portfolio costs
“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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jaramillo: Form Energy's initial battery design proved 119 hours of continuous discharge
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Jaramillo: West Virginia provided $290M in financing for 750 jobs by 2028
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jaramillo: AI tools compressed months of electrochemistry development into just days
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jaramillo: Form Energy has nine years of iron-air chemistry operating data
“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.”
Disclosure
Jaramillo: Form Energy's $750M plant will produce 50 GWh annually
“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 …”
Assertion Supported
Jaramillo: Form Energy's active materials cost under $1 per kWh
“The chemistry is very, very low cost, so it's less than a dollar per kilowatt hour for the active materials.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jaramillo: Electricity supply is a primary limiter of AI industry growth
“One of the main limiters for the growth of the AI industry today is electricity. They just can't get enough.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jaramillo: Lithium-ion's falling costs make competing battery chemistries nearly pointless
“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-if
Jaramillo: Form Energy's batteries could have discharged continuously during Winter Storm Uri
“If we had been there, we would have just discharged flat out, right, for those four days, and there you go.”
Assertion Supported
Jaramillo: Form Energy won a $150M DOE grant for manufacturing equipment
“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.”
Opinion
Jaramillo: Multi-day intermittency is the key obstacle to full grid decarbonization
“There are multiple days of interminencies associated with any of the types of those kinds of generation wind, water, or solar, and so solving those becomes a key challenge for getting to a very deeply decarbonized electric system.”
Insight
Jaramillo: Bespoke power infrastructure projects cannot achieve cost efficiency
“You can't really get cost efficiencies by having bespoke projects. They have to be fairly standardized in the factory environment, in the manufacturing environment. To really drive costs down.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jaramillo: Tesla stationary storage was a short engineering putt repurposing auto modules
“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…”
Insight
Jaramillo: Traditional Utility Modeling Averages Away Weather Extremes and Renewables Variability
“If you look at the way that the utility industry does it and has done it for a very long time, it is that averaged approach that they take to try and forecast how to build this portfolio of assets to meet the growing demand that they're going to need. And if y…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jaramillo: Grid will almost certainly require multiple distinct long-duration storage types
“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.”
Insight
Jaramillo: Deploying hundreds of gigawatts of grid storage requires government involvement
“Anything at that scale that you're talking about, it doesn't matter what duration you're picking there for long duration, at that scale, you know, hundreds of gigawatts, there's no realm in which having something That large show up on the grid does not involve…”
Disclosure
Jaramillo: Form Energy built grid software tools before selecting iron-air chemistry
“In fact, even before we picked The chemistry to work on, which of course ultimately became Iron Air we built software tools.”
Assertion Supported
Jaramillo: Form Energy is operating half of a 1-million-square-foot factory
“And we built what today is a million square foot factory. So we're operating about half of that first 500,000 square feet.”
