About Form Energy
Form Energy was founded in 2017 by Mateo Jaramillo, Yet-Ming Chiang, Ted Wiley, and Marco Ferrara, several with backgrounds in battery technology and prior clean energy ventures including Tesla's stationary storage business, based on the recognition that while lithium-ion batteries, the dominant battery chemistry used in electric vehicles and most current grid-scale battery storage, are excellent at storing and discharging electricity over periods of a few hours, they become prohibitively expensive when used to store electricity for much longer durations, such as multiple days, a capability that becomes increasingly important as power grids incorporate more intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar, which can experience extended periods of low output during unfavorable weather conditions lasting well beyond what a few hours of battery storage could bridge.
Form Energy's core technology is an iron-air battery, which uses the reversible rusting and "un-rusting" of iron, an extremely abundant and inexpensive raw material, as its primary charge-discharge mechanism, a chemistry that the company argues can achieve dramatically lower costs per unit of stored energy than lithium-ion batteries for very long-duration storage applications, though iron-air batteries are physically larger and less energy-dense than lithium-ion for a given amount of stored energy, making the technology better suited to large, stationary grid-scale installations than to mobile applications like electric vehicles where compactness and weight matter more. The company has positioned its technology as filling a critical gap in grid infrastructure needed to support much higher levels of renewable energy penetration than current battery technology can economically support, since utilities and grid operators need storage that can reliably bridge multi-day periods of low renewable generation, a use case current lithium-ion battery economics don't support well at scale. Form Energy has begun construction of its first commercial-scale manufacturing facility in West Virginia and has signed agreements with several utilities to deploy pilot and early commercial installations of its iron-air battery systems. The company has raised very substantial venture funding from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, ArcelorMittal, and Prelude Ventures, reaching a valuation exceeding $2 billion.
