Form Energy CEO on the Potential for a 100-Hour Battery

Well before the introduction of ChatGPT and Claude, Ireland underwent a data center construction boom similar to the one the U.S. is experiencing today.

That makes it a fitting location for Form Energy’s first project outside the U.S. Mateo Jaramillo, the CEO of the long-duration energy storage startup, described Ireland as “a postcard from the future” at Heatmap House, a day of conversations and roundtables with leading policymakers, executives, and investors at San Francisco Climate Week.

In a one-on-one interview with Robinson Meyer, Jaramillo went on to explain the potential of a 100-hour battery, calling it the duration at which you can “functionally replace thermal resources on the grid or compete with them.” Such storage capacity would not only bolster data centers’ power reliability but also speed up the transition from oil and gas to renewables.

Form Energy, which Jaramillo co-founded in 2017, is best known for its iron-air battery that can continuously discharge energy for 100 hours. In February, the startup announced a partnership with Google and the utility Xcel Energy to build the highest-capacity battery in the world, capable of storing 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported.

Despite the troublesome state of renewables deployment in the U.S., energy storage firms like Form appear to be doing well, thanks to record load growth. “When we founded the company, we didn’t anticipate the boom of data center demand that we’re currently experiencing,” said Jaramillo. “But we did bet on the overall mega-trend being pretty firmly in place, which is electricity growth.”

In addition to load growth, battery manufacturers are still benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy storage tax credits, which survived the deep cuts Republicans made to the signature climate law last summer. Jaramillo noted that customers can still claim a tax credit for purchasing energy systems, while a manufacturing protection credit also remains in place. “We absolutely qualify for both those things,” Jaramillo said. “In fact, 100 hours as a duration is written into the legislative text for the manufacturing [tax credit].”

Though batteries can help accelerate the retirement of natural gas plants by providing firm energy to supplement renewables’ generation, politicians’ fear of load growth seems to have forged a bipartisan consensus supporting batteries. For its part, Form Energy is focused on continuing to drive down the cost of its iron-air battery.

From “where we sit today,” Form Energy is “quite confident that we will hit that roughly $20 a kilowatt-hour cost within a very short period of time,” Jaramillo said.