An energy startup plans to build the world's largest storage battery in Lincoln, Maine, to help ease the burden on the region's power grid. The project is funded by the US Department of Energy, which has allocated $147 million in grants to create an ambitious energy storage solution.
Project Details
< p>If current plans remain unchanged, the battery will be able to store 8,500 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy, representatives of the Form Energy company, which is behind the project, reported. According to Mateo Jaramillo, CEO and co-founder of Form Energy, the battery system will have the highest energy capacity of any announced in the world. The current record is held by Edwards and Sanborn Solar-plus-storage in California, which uses more than 120,000 batteries to store 3,287 MWh.
To put this 8,500 MWh of energy in context, Freeing Energy has calculated that this amount is enough for one electric car to drive 5,800 kilometers. If you could somehow connect the Form Energy battery system to this electric car (for example, put the batteries in the trunk), you could drive about 50 million kilometers on a single charge. This is enough to circle the Earth 1,228 times.
The best laptops have a capacity of about 65 Wh, which means that such a battery can store 130 million times more energy.
How it works
The battery will be built using a new iron-air battery system Form Energy, which works on the principle of “reversible rusting”. In short, when a battery discharges, it absorbs oxygen from the air and turns the iron inside the battery into rust. Then, when the battery is recharged, the process is reversed — rust turns back into iron and oxygen is released into the air.
According to representatives of Form Energy, the storage system will consist of several separate battery modules, each of which will be the size of a washing machine. Each module will contain approximately 50 cells, 1 meter high, containing iron and air electrodes, as well as a non-flammable water-based electrolyte solution.
Outlook
While the promise of the world's largest battery is enticing, the company already has six large-scale projects underway, none of which have yet been completed. The first to be completed — is a 150 MWh pilot project built in partnership with Great River Energy in Cambridge, Minnesota, followed by a much larger – 1,500 MWh in nearby Becker, due for completion by the end of 2025.
Maine's battery project is the most ambitious to date, more than five times the capacity of Great River Energy's project . This is also the first project that the startup implemented independently, and not in cooperation with other companies.
Advantages
Iron-air batteries have several advantages over traditional lithium-ion batteries used in everyday technology. For example, iron-air batteries contain no heavy metals, which means less environmental impact from lithium mining. They're also much cheaper to run than their lithium cousins: Form Energy claims that the iron-air battery “stores energy at less than 1/10 the cost of lithium-ion battery technology”.
But there is no chance that iron-air batteries will replace lithium-ion batteries in consumer electronics, according to the Institute for Environmental and Energy Research. While such batteries are useful for large-scale storage, they charge and discharge energy much more slowly than lithium-ion cells, which is not ideal for smartphones or electric vehicles. In addition, it is difficult for researchers to shrink batteries enough to fit inside these everyday devices.