Wish I could answer more questions, but honestly the best way to learn more about our battery is to get involved! In addition to all the roles you'd expect on hardware and operations, Form also has openings on the software team (full stack, data eng, data platform). https://jobs.lever.co/formenergy
Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
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Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#52“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale
> "...what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants."
I'll make a note to check back in 20 years, then. :-)
I note they don't mention charge cycle durability - for grid, you'd want 10 000-ish cycles to 80% capacity. A bit of a red flag there.
Still, iron is cheap, plentiful, and environmentally benign. Even mining and refining iron ore isn't as bad as mining for many of the other chemistries, and we already mine a lot of iron, so there won't be shortages as it scales. I want this to work.
I note the web site[1] says its areal power intensity is about 3 MW per acre (presumably 300 - 450 MWh areal energy density, given the 100 - 150 hour claim), best case. They're not going to be installing this in Manhattan.
Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#53My biggest concern is round trip efficiency, as other iron chemistries are only around 50%, which severely limits arbitrage opportunities: https://www.alexhsain.org/blog/ironair This could be super useful for all sorts of backup situations, from homes to data centers to hospitals. And once they are installed generally, they can be combined together as a virtual power plant and start partially paying for themselves.
Nobody cares about cycle efficiency when the inputs are free, which they are.
The design of the energy markets will determine how free energy can be, as well as if there are any of the arbitrage opportunities I talked about.
The round trip efficiency of hydrogen is already something of a concern for grid backup power, as far as I know, ans that's only slightly less than 50%.
As storage costs decrease, those moments in time when there's oversupply of energy from solar and wind will become shorter and fewer. And (at least to me) it's really unclear what market designs will be viable if we were to have, say, 3x-5x oversupply of energy capacity so that renewables' minimums still meet our needs, and what new energy uses people will come up with when the can by intermittent energy for half a cent a kWh or something.
Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#54“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale
But why is that? Have they not completed the science? Or is scaling up the controllable elements of a lab environment for fullscale production really so difficult? I've seen the inside of some magical labs...Their actual setup when you stared real close and knew enough of how they were doing things was anything but.
> Or is scaling up the controllable elements of a lab environment for fullscale production really so difficult?
It's even more difficult than that. :-)
Ideas have negative value; lab prototypes also have negative value; pilot plants are worth a small fraction of what they cost - scrap value.
You get value from full scale production, and every bit of that value is paid for in the engineering required to get to full scale.
Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you buy a sample battery? The announcement is suspicious. "100 hours" is not a meaningful number for a battery. The numbers you want to hear are KWH/Kg, KWH/m^3, max charge and discharge rates, number of charge/discharge cycles before storage drops off, efficiency, and cost/KWH. "That project, announced in May last year, was originally due to be a 1MW/150MWh demonstration plant capable of outputting 1MW for 150 h…
> "100 hours" is not a meaningful number for a battery. It is a meaningful number... in the grid scale energy storage market. It's a term that summarizes many of the complex properties you mentioned. For a given energy storage technology, there is a certain duration that it tends to be most effective at. For traditional lithium ion batteries, that duration is about 4 hours. If you want to use lithium ion storage for…
I’m sorry, that really doesn’t make any sense.
There is several missing factors here, and it’s a useless metric. Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well - based on discharge rate. It can also do 10 minutes - based on discharge rate. 100 hours is literally useless on it’s own because it doesn’t tell you anything concrete. 100 hours….. of what?
It looks like a classic science writing article where they left all the important units off, misunderstood the whole thing the audience was looking for, and made it all super confusing and pretty useless compared to an actual paper.
Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#56“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale
Well, Great River Energy aren't tiny, although they aren't a huge company. They're headquartered near my home, and are big into renewables.
If they're planning a pilot plant to bring online in the next two years, then they have done their due diligence and believe the tech can work. It'll be interesting to watch.
Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#57Much longer WSJ article: https://archive.is/2I7aq
Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
To address slow charging, could you have an array of them, some charging and some discharging? But you would need maybe 7x more then, so they would need to be 7x cheaper to compete. (Not quite sure how the math works out to account for charge rates and weather.)
For that matter, why not have 7x the batteries at 1/7 the capacity? Or does the charge rate not depend on the capacity?
Charge rate is independent of capacity. A 3 C battery charges in 20 minutes, whether it's 1 kWh or 7 kWh. If you have 7 batteries, each charges in 20 minutes.
Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#59“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale
> "...what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants." I'll make a note to check back in 20 years, then. :-) I note they don't mention charge cycle durability - for grid, you'd want 10 000-ish cycles to 80% capacity. A bit of a red flag there. Still, iron is cheap, plentiful, and environmentally benign. Even mining and refining iron ore isn't as bad as mining for many of the other…
I share most of your skepticism. Do you know if they’ve published a technical paper on any of the numbers?
Re: Form Energy reveals the chemistry of its long-duration battery
#60The main thing of interest (to me anyway) that seems to be missing from the articles I can see on this is references to energy density. Is it equivalent to Lithium Ion? Better? Worse?
There's some tantalising research from a few years ago that suggests it could get way better energy density, but the same comes up frequently with battery technology.