2024 climate tech companies to watch out for: Form Energy and its iron batteries

Key indicators

• Industry: Energy storage
• Founded: 2017
• Headquarters: Somerville, Massachusetts, USA
• Noteworthy fact: Form has five founders, including MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang and Mateo Jaramillo, a former Tesla employee. It is the result of the merger of two separate companies when the founders realized they had the same vision for long-term energy storage.

Impact potential

Form showed that iron-air batteries can be built for one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries, largely because the basic materials used to make them are cheap and abundant. This low cost could enable utilities to use batteries in long-duration scenarios, storing energy for up to 100 hours.

Storage is a key issue in the implementation of renewable energy. Consumers need to have constant access to energy, and energy consumption varies throughout the day. However, renewable energy sources such as solar energy only produce energy at certain times, such as when there is no sun. Lithium-ion batteries, which dominate the battery market, are not a good option because they are expensive, have lower capacity, and may have a shorter lifespan than iron-air batteries.

Today, fossil fuels are often burned to make up for production gaps, which exacerbates climate change. If enough iron-air batteries store energy for these moments, the grid can move away from fossil fuels.

Reservations

Form was included in the 2023 edition of this list and has made continued progress: the company completed construction on a new factory in West Virginia earlier this year, but has not yet started producing batteries to ship to customers. The mold is currently undergoing production tests at the factory. While Form has significant orders from utilities across the U.S., it has yet to fulfill any and deploy its batteries on a commercial scale.