In West Virginia, a former steel mill is now home to a cutting-edge battery plant
In West Virginia, a former steel mill is now home to a cutting-edge battery plant
Form Energy uses iron-air technology to store energy far longer than a lithium-ion battery can.
BY Adele Peters
Last April, when a tin mill closed in Weirton, West Virginia, it was the last remaining part of what was once a sprawling steel works. Over the last five decades, as the American steel industry declined, the town lost thousands of jobs.
But in July, a new factory opened on the same site and started to bring hundreds of jobs back. Instead of turning iron into steel, it uses the metal to make a new type of battery.
“We’re reversibly rusting iron,” says Mateo Jaramillo, CEO of Form Energy, the company that built the factory. The battery technology, called iron-air, reacts with oxygen to store and release energy. It’s designed to store energy for around four days—something that standard lithium-ion batteries can’t do economically.
Storing energy for days
“When we started the company, we saw that as being the next frontier: how do you cost-effectively attack that opportunity in the market?” says Jaramillo, who previously led work on energy products at Tesla. “It’s a growing need. As we have more and more renewables on the grid, of course that means the grid tends to be weather-driven. And increasingly, we have more volatile weather events on our grid that we need to be able to address, and they tend to last multiple days.”
When the startup began developing its new battery design in 2017, the team set a goal to be able to store 100 hours of energy in a battery. That’s long enough to cover the typical outage after a hurricane, wildfire, or other extreme weather event. Right now, the number of batteries on the grid is quickly growing—over the last four years, the U.S. added the battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors. But those lithium-ion batteries can typically just provide energy for around four or five hours. That can make solar power usable in the evening after the sun goes down, but can’t fill larger gaps.
The concept of an iron-air battery isn’t new, and the Department of Energy funded research on it in the 1970s. But the batteries are too heavy to be used in vehicles, and wouldn’t make sense in products like electronics. It’s only now, as the amount of renewable energy on the grid has tripled over the last decade, that there’s a clear use case for the tech.
“We didn’t have to prove from zero that the science was sound,” says Jaramillo. “We had to go build a mechanistic understanding for exactly what was happening and why, and make sure that we could control it and repeatedly build devices that could hit that specification. But it wasn’t a question of whether or not, fundamentally, it could work.”
The finished product is a 40-foot shipping container filled with groups of battery cells. Inside the cells, a plate of iron is submerged in water with dissolved salts. When the battery discharges, it pulls in oxygen and the iron starts to rust over the course of 100 hours. When it charges, the oxygen is removed from the iron so it goes back to unrusted metal. The basic materials are cheap. There’s another advantage: unlike lithium-ion batteries, these batteries don’t risk catching on fire.
Why the company came to the former steel town
When the company began planning its first factory, it considered locations across the country. Weirton was a fit because it had access to rail infrastructure and barges, a workforce with industrial experience, and the state of West Virginia offered economic incentives worth $290 million to redevelop the steel mill.
“It was a complicated site compared to some other sites—we had to build a building from scratch, and we had to do some site remediation,” says Jaramillo. “But it was worth it.”
The project has helped begin to transform the town of Weirton, which spent more than a century centered on the steel works. “Basically, the town grew up around the mill, and not the other way around,” says Weirton city manager Michael Adams. At its peak, the mill had around 13,000 workers “all making pretty good money for the day,” he says. The town had a strong middle class. The steel mill helped fund parks and other infrastructure.
But by the 1970s, as competition grew from steelmakers overseas, the mill started to slow down. Layoffs grew in the 1980s. By the late 1990s, the mill was no longer the largest in the state (Walmart took that mantle, with jobs that were much less well-paid). When Form Energy decided to work in Weirton, it made a huge impact.
“Now, instead of people thinking, ‘Where are we going to go now that everything’s basically over?, the emergence of Form means [they’re thinking], Maybe we don’t have to move. Maybe we don’t have to take the kids out of school. Maybe I can get on with the new company and stay here where my family has been all these years’,” Adams says. “From an emotional standpoint, people have hope again.” After Form Energy opened its factory, Cleveland Cliffs, the company that had owned the tin mill, also decided to open a battery factory in the town, adding more jobs.
Form Energy’s factory has more than 300 employees now, and plans to have at least 750 by 2028. Right now, manufacturing lines are making battery cells and modules that will be sent for testing at a company site in California. Next year, it will begin making deliveries to customers, beginning with a utility in Minnesota.
Scaling up
Form Energy is positioned to quickly grow, with more than $1 billion in funding from investors (along with a Department of Energy award of up to $150 million under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s Battery Materials Processing and Battery Manufacturing program, and eligibility for tax cuts through the Inflation Reduction Act when it begins full-scale manufacturing).
It has around 15 battery projects in planning, including one in Maine that will be larger than any battery that currently exists on the planet. The project, with around 2,000 modules, will store 8,500 megawatt-hour of energy, or roughly enough power for around 70,000 homes for 100 hours. The Maine project will be built on another abandoned industrial site—a former paper and pulp mill.
At data centers, the batteries could potentially be used along with lithium-ion batteries to help store renewable energy. It could be a relatively fast way to meet the growing demand for electricity from AI without increasing emissions.
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