Iron Air Battery - FORM Energy

 By Ian Page

Form Energy is a startup with backing from Gates and a large iron producer, with a particularly impressive group of people.  Otherwise I would have ignored the series of announcements. They claim to have made an iron air battery, with very good cycle numbers, and an ability to deliver energy for 16 days at a very low cost.

The basic idea is to allow air to react with iron making rust and electricity, and then recharge the battery by forcing the rust back to iron with electricity. These components are very cheap. There's very little actual information about this. It does not use lithium or nickel.

There are many issues that need to be resolved in such a battery

  1. How fast does the oxygen react with iron?  Iron in tiny particles reacts so fast that it catches fire in air, but normal lumps take time as the air has to fight its way through a layer of iron oxide.
  2. Stability of the iron anode.  Iron and iron oxide have different crystal structures. At the macro scale this results in the rust peeling off. Presumably they have found some way to make it stay in place.
  3. Regeneration.  If it was easy to apply electricity to rust to turn it into iron we presumably wouldn't be using blast furnaces to do the same thing.   Again this may be something to do with the size of the particles.
  4. The battery is presented as solving the long term storage problem and not competing with lithium ion in the 0-4 hour market. This makes the business case harder. There's lots of money to be made by moving electricity generation to electricity consumption periods, and more importantly it provides an income to help pay down the capital cost of the long term batteries and the power generation kit that is needed to join it to the grid. It's also interesting that a battery isn't aimed at competing which suggests that its response time to changes in demand isn't fast.
  5. It is apparently heavy and strangely the minimum module is about the size of a small fridge. This makes me think that there may be some significant ancillary equipment to make this battery work.

My feeling is that they have a lab bench product and want more money for the very difficult, risky  and expensive step of R&D to get to a prototype line stage.

However it looks like a good team, and if this battery works as they claim it could fill a major hole in the renewable electricity storage space so let's hope they get it to work.

BTW: They introduce a new measure;  megawatt hours per acre for storage. Nice.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pulsing industrial chemical reactions

By Ian Page From Nature 605 19 May 22 470. Chemical reactions are often a mixture of potential parallel reactions, and potential serial reactions. Chemists play with temperature, flow rate, pressure, proportions etc. to persuade just the one reaction they want to happen.
Read more

REN: Reperceiving the Grid Part 1

Image
2021.06.30 – Ian Page The grid is normally described as a cloud that delivers electricity as needed to a wide array of sinks/applications/users at an averaged price in control and buys services such as generation and storage from a variety of external suppliers. It has a very difficult job balancing the variable supply and variable demand with congestion on lines and keeping alternative lines to handle outages. Supply and demand are being balanced by market systems such as day ahead bidding for 15-minute periods as well as using inertia and battery systems to balance the system within the 15-minute periods. It's worth comparing this with the internet. The internet also has the need to maintain an instantaneous balance between packets coming onto the system and going out, packets cannot pile up.  Congestion appears as delays to streaming rather than brownouts or overvoltage. The internet also has sources that can deliver huge quantities of packets unpredictably and sinks that can de...
Read more

Serious Plan to Convert Australia's Largest Fertilizer Plant to Green Hydrogen to Save Money

By Ian Page – 2021.12.31 https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/30/high-gas-prices-lead-to-conversion-of-ammonia-plant-to-green-hydrogen/ I’ve written before that the high price of gas means that it's now cheaper to make hydrogen by electrolysis than from natural gas in Europe. This is the first actual plan I've seen and by a big industrial group. I hope it goes forward. Also:  Hyundai has given up on hydrogen powered cars citing technical issues, and lack of marketability after spending a fortune over many years. With Toyotas ambivalence and deal with a Chinese EV car firm to make rebrand-able EVs, hydrogen powered cars are effectively dead. This is good news because energetically it's a lousy idea, and batteries have gotten good enough to eat into the potential market. However, there is still potential for long distance lorries, although we are already seeing in Germany container lorries doing repeated medium distance trips from port to warehouse, trying pantographs on parts o...
Read more