A startup that makes giant iron-air batteries that store enough power to last several days has raised a new round of funding valued at $750 million.
Form Energy, which has now raised more than $2 billion in total, plans to use the money to boost manufacturing at its Weirton, W.Va., plant and for its first wave of commercial projects, including a project for the utility Xcel Energy in partnership with Alphabet's Google.
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Demand for Form's iron-air battery system has accelerated with the upswing in demand for electricity, driven by the boom in artificial-intelligence projects. AI requires huge data centers , which can use as much electricity as some cities .
While conventional lithium-ion batteries can discharge power for a handful of hours at a time, Form's batteries are designed to last 100 hours. That is enough to help utilities power through dayslong grid emergencies, such as a winter storm.
Form's batteries use iron, water and air, and operate on a principle it calls "reversible rusting." The battery takes in oxygen and converts iron to rust. It then reverses the process, turning the rust back into iron and breathing out oxygen to charge and discharge the battery.
Form's batteries would operate like certain natural-gas-fired power plants known as peaker units, which can be relied on during a relatively small number of days each year. They tend to operate during the coldest or hottest hours, when demand for electricity skyrockets and the power grid is stressed, said Form's chief executive and co-founder, Mateo Jaramillo.
"We set out to commercialize the kind of energy storage that is competitive in all the features with a gas peaker [plant]," Jaramillo said. "In many ways, what we have created is an e-peaker, an electric peaker."
Form's batteries could also soak up electricity from various plants, including nuclear facilities, which operate continuously even if they lose money during periods when wholesale power prices plummet, said Vineet Khanna, investment analyst and vice president at T. Rowe Price.
"When you add a 100-hour battery you actually increase the sort of value of everything else that you've already built," Khanna said.
Investors in Form's latest round of financing include T. Rowe Price, Sequoia Capital, Janus Henderson, Franklin Templeton, TPG Rise Climate, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, Coatue and GE Vernova.
Form has a backlog of commercial projects that jumped earlier this year, to 80 gigawatt-hours from 20 gigawatt-hours. The largest, with Xcel Energy, involves installing 300 megawatts of Form's batteries to support the grid and a Google data center planned for Pine Island, Minn.
Because the batteries can provide 100 hours of power, the system will be capable of storing and delivering 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, the company said.
Other companies signing up for Form's batteries include Crusoe, which is building AI data centers for Oracle and Meta Platforms among others. Crusoe expects to use 12 gigawatt-hours from Form batteries starting in 2028. Renewable-energy developer FuturEnergy Ireland is working with Form to build an iron-air battery system in the northwest of Ireland by 2029.
For much of the past two years, the company has been ramping up manufacturing in Weirton. Around 80% of Form's battery content is sourced from the U.S., with the rest coming from Europe and Asia.
"We have zero reliance on China," Jaramillo said.
Form was founded in 2017 by a team of battery-storage veterans, including Jaramillo, who helped develop Tesla's Powerwall battery-storage system and worked on some of its earliest automotive powertrains, and Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded A123 Systems, a lithium-battery pioneer.
David Cahn, a partner at Sequoia Capital, said Form has worked for years on difficult technology.
"There's been this real shift in the venture landscape in the last few years," Cahn said. "AI has made it so easy to build software. Things that are easy to build are no longer valuable. And so, actually, I think there's been a shift toward hard problems."
While China dominates battery manufacturing, Cahn said he hopes Form will emerge as a "national battery champion" for the U.S.
Write to Jennifer Hiller at jennifer.hiller@wsj.com
