Updates from Form Energy
My hot take no one asked for
I don’t want to sound pessimistic. But Form Energy has benefited immensely from the MIT / Yet-Min Chiang / Mateo Jaramillo / Ex-Tesla hype-sphere, and I will wait to be excited about their technology when I see it working, at scale, for a long time, at an affordable price. I have had a cursory look at their patents and my hot take on their iron-air battery approach is “mo’ phases, mo’ problems.” As in handling solids, liquids, gases, multi-phase flows, heterogenous catalysts with a triple-point interface to manage, etc. sounds like a nightmare when trying to sell a low-maintenance, 20-year warranty energy storage product. Not to say it can’t be done, but it sounds like a hard starting point.
Another reason for my hesitation is that one of their first “products”/services was a grid modeling software tool “Formware”, the output of which seemed to be “you need 100 hours of energy storage, which happens to be the actual product we told our investors we would sell.” I do happen to think long-duration storage is useful to have on the grid, and 100-hour options, especially electrochemical ones, are rare to nonexistent now.
Form is hiring a degradation engineer…
I don’t really need to comment on this—not a great sign for intrinsically long battery lifetimes.
Form Energy is hiring a Sr Battery Modeling Engineer to develop our beginning of life and degradation cell physics models.
. . .
Compensation $128.7K – $159.7K
Also an experimental role, which overlaps a lot with my skills… [1]
What an eye-wateringly high salary 😅 it might even be a fun team/viable tech, but I remain to be convinced on the latter, and I would rather work on open-source batteries than closed, proprietary solutions. Better for my mental health to be out of corporate tech America, if not for my bank account. Sometimes I wonder am I shooting myself in the foot by not “selling out” and going to industry, even for just a little bit . . . but I do believe in golden handcuffs, so there. (if you would like to support my open, non-proprietary R&D, you can help me directly or my current project! I’ll be quitting my postdoc to go full-time as an independent researchers in October)
They have a patent for a MOVING SEAL
I actually got this update since I have a paper alert for Jarrod Milshstein, whose thesis I relied upon heavily during my own PhD. He’s done some great work and his presence at Form gives me confidence in their team, despite my previous tone would could be interpreted by some as pessimistic.
For a 20-year, cheap and low-maintenance energy storage solution, however, the patent titled “Rolling Diaphragm Seal” does not instill me with confidence. Seals and joints, especially moving ones, are notorious trouble spots.
Abstract: Systems and methods of the various embodiments may provide a battery including a rolling diaphragm configured to move to accommodate an internal volume change of one or more components of the battery. Systems and methods of the various embodiments may provide a battery housing including a rolling diaphragm seal disposed between an interior volume of the battery and an electrode assembly within the battery. Various embodiments may provide an air electrode assembly including an air electrode supported on a buoyant platform such that the air electrode is above a surface of a volume of electrolyte when the buoyant platform is floating in the electrolyte.
But again, as always… I wish them the best and I hope it works! Society could certainly use it.
[2]
They might be pivoting to steel production…
They received $1,000,000 to work on (alkaline?) echem steel production in the ARPA-E ROSIE program. [3]
Form Energy (Somerville, MA) will leverage its patent-pending breakthrough to directly produce iron powders from alkaline iron ore slurries in a first-of-a-kind powder-to-powder process. Using domestically available iron ore feedstocks, the process has the potential to produce greenhouse gas emission-free iron at cost parity with today’s carbon-intensive ironmaking methods.
I’ve heard, from a knowledgeable yet likely biased source, that one drawback of a process that produces an iron powder is that you still need to remelt it at high temperature (e.g. chuck it into an electric-arc furnace) to get to the same intermediate (pig?) iron, which is very energy intensive. So it’s not necessarily an immediate obvious improvement compared to other non-directly CO2-emitting iron ore reduction technologies.
Quino Energy has 10 kW / 100 kWh organic RFB, partnering with Electrosynthesis Company
. . . a company developing water-based organic flow batteries originally invented at Harvard University, announced its 10 kW / 100 kWh prototype is now operational, using material produced using its zero-waste, continuous flow production process that achieved Manufacturing Readiness Level 7 (MRL) earlier this year. The Company also shared plans to expand its production footprint into the European Union and prioritize field pilot development and commercial sales on a global scale . . .
. . . 6 kW / 24 kWh pilot system and two other 1.5 kW / 6 kWhsystems currently operating . . .
. . . first real example of U.S. domestic manufacturing of flow battery active material, and is a testament to how easily Quino Energy’s innovative zero-waste production process can be scaled up to achieve lower costs. With the average household in America using approximately 29 kWh of electricity per day, Quino’s 100 kWh pilot can supply a home’s entire electricity needs for more than three whole days or three homes for one day. This is an energy storage capacity roughly equivalent to more than seven fully-charged Tesla Powerwalls combined . . . [4]
This is tech from the Aziz group at Harvard. Pretty cool to see their rapid progress! I agree with the decision to use existing stack tech and not reinvent the wheel. Keen to see cost and lifetime data. I reckon the system relies on ion-exchange membranes, and is asymmetric. Wishing them continued success.
P.S. definitely easier than inventing new technology—reduce that enormous per-US-household average consumption of 29 kWh! Still looking for an idiom to express the gist of “reduce consumption to reasonable levels before pinning hopes on yet-undeveloped future technologies.” Shout if you have something for this.
References
Citation
@online{pollard_smith2024,
author = {Pollard Smith, Kirk},
title = {The {Flowdown} \#2},
date = {2024-08-10},
url = {https://dualpower.supply/posts/flowdown-2/},
langid = {en}
}