'Rust battery': GE Vernova joins Gates and Bezos backing new tech to store green power
Energy technology giant takes part in financing round for LDES pioneer Form Energy along with billionaire-backed fund
GE Vernova has joined the backers of long duration energy storage (LDES) start-up Form Energy, adding to a list of billionaire investors that already includes Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
US-based Form Energy is commercialising iron-air battery technology that aims to store energy at utility scale for 100 hours or more at system costs competitive with conventional power plants.
Global energy technology giant GE Vernova joined a $405m series F financing round that also included existing backer Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the energy innovation vehicle that counts Microsoft founder Gates and Amazon tycoon Bezos among a clutch of billionaire investors.
Jessica Uhl, president of GE Vernova, said: “To meet the urgent demands to modernise the grid and enable higher renewable energy generation, it’s essential to speed up the rollout of affordable technologies that can decarbonise the power grid while ensuring it remains secure, reliable, and resilient.
“Form’s innovative 100-hour iron-air battery systems can be a game-changer, and we’re excited to play a role in helping them achieve global impact.”
Form Energy, which has now raised $1.2bn, has built its first factory in the US and aims to have production capacity of 500MW annually by 2028.
Form Energy is billing its scalable, modular technology as the answer to one of the biggest challenges facing the energy transition – how to store renewable energy for long enough periods to compensate for prolonged high demand, or low wind and solar generation, timescales beyond the range of lithium-ion batteries that can do the job for shorter durations.
The company’s technology is based on the principle of “reversible rusting”. In discharge mode, thousands of tiny iron pellets are exposed to the air, which makes them rust (ie, the iron turning to iron oxide). When the system is charged with an electric current, the oxygen in the rust is removed, and it reverts back to iron.
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