Form Energy, the startup making 100-hour iron-air batteries, has this month begun deploying its first commercial batteries, CEO Mateo Jaramillo told Latitude Media. The batteries will be installed at Great River Energy’s multi-day storage project in Minnesota, which is expected to be fully operational next year.
The delivery of those first batteries is a hard-won manufacturing milestone for Form, which has spent the last several years “becoming a manufacturing company,” Jaramillo explained. That process has involved building a facility, landing production equipment, operating that equipment (and then “successfully operating” it) — and then hitting the necessary yields, quality targets, and cost trajectory, he added.
Since the beginning of this year, Form has produced approximately 100,000 electrodes, representing about 100 kilometers of material that has flowed through its West Virginia factory. That factory, which Form announced in 2022, was designed to ramp up to around 500 megawatts at full capacity.
But while Form was hammering away on manufacturing execution, the AI boom caused a significant shift in the energy storage market. Suddenly, the company found itself with more near-term demand than it had planned for, Jaramillo said. Volumes from projects currently in the pipeline “are more than what we were projecting building as a company for 2028, 2029, 2030,” he explained.
Now, with more than 200 MW of batteries under contract, Form is “starting to re-evaluate how we build more manufacturing capacity in that time.” Doing so will mean the company needs to raise more capital to expand its existing factory ahead of schedule. Form is already leveraging a more diverse capital stack, having raised over $1.2 billion from venture capital, growth equity, and strategic corporate investments.
The kind of expansion needed to meet the massive demand growth the company is experiencing will likely require “infrastructure-type dollars.” Raising infrastructure funding is a hurdle that often trips up companies building first-of-a-kind projects who find themselves somewhere between pilot and commercial scale — mired in the so-called “Valley of Death.”
Jaramillo, though, is optimistic about Form’s ability to raise additional capital. In his view, now is “a fantastic time to raise capital” as an energy storage company, thanks to the intense interest in AI and the unprecedented capital push that accompanies it. (He’s mostly alone in that take — investors and companies alike agree that it’s a particularly challenging time to be raising money in the clean energy space.)
The company is in a good position to leverage new debt instruments like infrastructure funding, he added, because they already have signed contracts, reducing the risk levels that tend to make infrastructure investors shy away from FOAK projects.
Manufacturing challenges
But getting to the point where new financing is on the table, just a year after Form closed a $405 million Series F, wasn’t easy; that’s the nature of setting up a first-of-a-kind manufacturing process for something like batteries, Jaramillo said.
“One challenge of batteries in general, as a manufactured good, is you can’t really make a legitimate claim to understand the electrochemistry you’re working with until you are making that electrochemistry at the relevant scale, speed and quality,” he explained.
Form’s manufacturing process is complex: They first manufacture both iron anodes and discharge cathodes, then assemble the finished electrodes into cells, cells into modules, and finally modules into systems. Within that process there are varying degrees of automation, Jaramillo explained: producing the electrodes, for example, is highly automated. Taking those electrodes and making cells and then modules is “semi-automated,” and the final step, producing systems, isn’t automated at all, he said.
In the last year alone there have been “immense learnings” on both ends of Form’s manufacturing process, Jaramillo explained.
The 100,000 electrodes Form has now made in its West Virginia factory is around the amount needed “in order to say definitively, ‘yeah, we can make this stuff,’” he said, adding that process control on the electrode side of Form’s production process is extremely challenging.
“You define very precisely every step that matters to yields and quality, you define the success parameter inside of that step, and then you control it through that success criteria for each step,” he explained. For each of Form’s electrodes there are around 100 unique steps that have to be controlled, defined, and implemented.
Jaramillo declined to offer specifics as to the manufacturing challenges Form ran into on the other end of their process, but said the company has iterated “three distinct times” on its system in the last year.
“Figuring out how the entire thing really does come together, how to do so in a way that enables it to have high uptime and high reliability, with no faults…these are the things that you can only really figure out once you put that complete system together,” Jaramillo said.
Market-side growth
Those first batteries to roll off the production line were the most challenging, but now that the snags have been smoothed out and Form has product in commissioning, the focus is on expansion.
Most of Form’s customers right now are utilities, particularly those working on large load interconnection tariffs and other means of flexibility for data centers, Jaramillo said. The uptick in interest in data center flexibility has boosted Form’s pipeline considerably, he added.
When it comes to getting large loads online as quickly as possible, “it turns out a 100-hour duration resource is extremely useful to be able to do that effectively,” Jaramillo said. He pointed to a Duke University study published earlier this year that found that there are around 85 hours a year in which data centers would need to be curtailed to some degree.
It’s an amount of time that fits perfectly with what Form batteries offer, Jaramillo said.
Form expects to finalize a number of deals “imminently” with utilities who are implementing large load tariffs, and those would be announced in the last quarter of this year or early next. “There’s a lot of under the radar work that is very concretely happening,” Jaramillo said, pointing to at least 12 Integrated Resource Planning processes around the country that are considering 100-plus-hour storage.
Today, Form’s finalized contracts total around 200 MW of capacity. The company is currently operating its 550,000-square-foot West Virginia plant with plans to expand to one million square feet by 2028 or sooner.
But Jaramillo said the other deals Form hopes to announce soon will require significantly more capacity. The company was already planning to expand to around 500 MW per year in the existing footprint. Now, Form is looking into the “densification process” of the factory — getting more megawatts per square foot than originally planned.
“We think we can drive that [output] meaningfully higher in the same footprint,” Jaramillo explained. “We don’t envision needing to expand beyond that first site anytime soon, but we do envision that down the line for sure.”
