Form Energy's Vision and its New Energy Storage Pilot with Great River Energy

Great River Energy, the second largest utility in Minnesota, is launching a pilot program with Form Energy to implement 1MW of renewable energy along with 150MWh of "long-form" energy storage in Cambridge, MN. For many, energy storage technology conjures up lithium-ion battery technology and four hour bursts of supplemental power for utility scale operations. However, Form Energy's early-development solution relies on long-duration batteries, based on "aqueous-air" battery technology that "leverages some of the safest, cheapest, most abundant materials on the planet," according to the company.

For this application, Form Energy will produce 150 continuous hours of rated power. The energy storage technology uses low-cost and high abundance sulfur in a water-based solution. According to ARPA-e, a governmental energy body, MIT research demonstrated that aqueous sulfur flow batteries represent the lowest chemical cost among rechargeable batteries."

Form Energy's CEO is Mateo Jaramillo, former Tesla energy excecutive and he officially launched the company's energy storage business back in 2015. Jaramilllo has had a long career in the energy storage industry, going back to his behind-the-meter work in New York in the 2000s.

So how will Form Energy's technology compete against lithium-ion?

In a recent 2019 Watt it Takes podcast, Jarmillo discussed how different energy storage techologies will have a place in the marketplace and revealed that their technology proposition started with "the fundamental physics issue with wind and solar curtailment, as it relates to battery energy storage. According to Jaramillo, the fundamaental question was "what kind of battery allows you to fully replace say natural gas (plants)."   

Envision a day when every #fossilfuel plant can be replaced with #renewables and #EnergyStorage. It’s here. https://t.co/if6TdNKIrv

— Katherine Hamilton (@CleanGridView) May 8, 2020

The ramifications are big with this type of storage and Jaramillo says in five years he hopes the technology can be fully realized as a bi-directional power plant solution. Besides the cell technology and hardware, the company has a software component called Formware, a proprietary software analytics platform design to help energy planners model future grids. The software was purpose-built to model high penetration renewables at the system level and determine how all types of storage enable cost-effective renewable energy integration to help provide easy integration, according to Form Energy. 

For a deeper dive on Form's technology via Jaramillo, listen to the podcast below starting around the 28 minute mark.   

>> Form Energy Press Release