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  • What do you think of when you think of a battery?

  • For most, it's what we use to power devices

  • for both work and play and maybe even your car.

  • Over the past few decades,

  • they've gotten way more powerful,

  • long lasting and affordable.

  • But all of this is just a prologue

  • to what the next batteries are going to do.

  • As we drive to increasingly renewable power driven grid,

  • we also need to be able to store energy and release it later

  • to cover those periods of weather intermittencies

  • that are driving this new grid that we're in.

  • It's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity

  • and it's imperative that we figure out the solution here.

  • How we store energy on a massive scale

  • is in many ways the central challenge

  • of the fight to stop climate change.

  • And the solutions we're coming up with

  • might not be what you think.

  • The need for massive batteries

  • stems from an aspect of electricity

  • that we don't often think about.

  • So when we make electricity,

  • we produce it and we use it almost instantaneously

  • because of this inability to store.

  • When we turn on a button or switch on a light,

  • at that very moment somebody somewhere has generated

  • electricity for you to be able to do that.

  • That exact electricity that's making that light

  • just had to be produced somewhere within about a minute.

  • It's very, very new, the power that we use.

  • If there's not enough electricity being produced,

  • we get what we all know

  • actually, which is called a brownout.

  • Which means there's not quite enough electricity coming in

  • to power stuff.

  • And if you have too much electricity,

  • that will also bring down the system.

  • So you can't produce a lot more than you're using

  • and you can't produce a lot less than you're using.

  • For most of the grid's history,

  • this hasn't been much of a problem.

  • We've got our power from steady, reliable sources

  • like coal plants and hydroelectric dams.

  • But now of course, that's all changing.

  • We can adjust the coal fire power plant,

  • how much electricity it's making,

  • but we can't adjust how much wind a wind turbine is making.

  • Wind and solar power

  • can't always give us the juice right when we need it.

  • But if we could save up energy from renewables

  • and release it when it's needed,

  • clean energy could be as reliable as coal.

  • The amount of energy storage we need is going to grow

  • because we are going to have to rely on solar and wind

  • which are more intermittent, but it's also going to grow

  • because the pure amount of electricity

  • that we are going to use going forward is going to grow.

  • So dozens of companies are working on gigantic batteries

  • hoping to store enough energy to kick our fossil fuel habit.

  • And one of the biggest batteries is this mountain.

  • FirstLight Power, we are today,

  • the largest portfolio of operating renewable energy

  • and energy storage in the New England region.

  • We are using a mountain as a giant battery

  • and that's what we do here.

  • Being here, inside Northfield Mountain,

  • it's an incredibly unique facility.

  • We are carved out of the inside of a mountain,

  • it is a facility that dates back 50 years

  • and yet at the same time is ideally situated

  • to drive the energy transition of the future.

  • So pump storage is the oldest form of energy storage.

  • It's essentially transferring water

  • from an upper reservoir to a lower reservoir

  • and back and forth throughout the day.

  • Our lower reservoir is the Connecticut River

  • which is flowing by about a mile from where we're standing.

  • And then our upper reservoir is a man-made dam, essentially,

  • on top of a mountain.

  • Water is pumped up to the upper reservoir

  • and stored for whenever it's needed later.

  • And then it flows down through turbine generators

  • to generate electricity.

  • If that sounds like a giant battery charging

  • and discharging, well, exactly.

  • So what we're looking at here

  • is one of the four units at Northfield in pump mode.

  • So right now we are pumping water from the Connecticut River

  • to the upper reservoir.

  • Later on, we'll use that same water

  • spin the machine the other direction

  • and generate electricity.

  • When we're standing at Northfield Mountain,

  • we're talking about 1,200 megawatts of instantaneous power.

  • We can provide enough power

  • to support roughly a million New England homes

  • on any given day.

  • Pumped hydro storage is more than a century year old.

  • It was initially used to be able to just generate hydropower

  • when you wanted it and then in the '70s

  • when you had the creation of nuclear power

  • where power plants had to be run all the time

  • even when there wasn't demand for electricity,

  • pumped hydro storage became

  • the stores of excess electricity.

  • Atomic energy, the reality for homes and factories

  • and schools all over the world.

  • But today with the nuclear industry in decline,

  • the mountain has had to find a new niche to fill.

  • So rather than pairing with nuclear power,

  • we're a great pair to solar or wind

  • or other intermittent renewables.

  • Offshore wind has been a long time coming in New England.

  • It's been on the drawing books for a number of years,

  • but we are now seeing the first very large projects

  • come to fruition.

  • So the opportunity for a facility like Northfield Mountain

  • is to provide that balance to large scale offshore wind

  • and store it for times when that electricity is needed.

  • Unfortunately, mountain-sized batteries

  • do have some unique limitations.

  • The trouble is that pumped hydro storage

  • requires a specific kind of geography.

  • Typically, hills with either a river

  • or lots of access to water

  • in a form of rainfall that is consistent

  • to be able to make it an economical project

  • that you can build and then operate for decades to come.

  • And that's not always feasible

  • because of the lack of mountains or lack of water.

  • Some of the obstacles facing large scale build out

  • of new pumped storage projects; one is cost.

  • These projects are billion dollar projects now.

  • They require ongoing significant capital investment

  • to make sure that they can continue to run reliably.

  • And eventually we will run out

  • of how much pumped hydro storage can do.

  • So we are going to have to need other solutions as well

  • to fill those gaps.

  • Form Energy is developing the kind of energy storage

  • you need to enable the complete decarbonization

  • of the electric system.

  • It's a battery that's dramatically cheaper

  • than anything else that's out there today

  • and is also made of materials

  • that scale to the size of the challenge.

  • Co-founded by former Tesla VP, Mateo Jaramillo,

  • Form Energy is making a new kind of battery.

  • They hope can store energy on a massive scale.

  • An iron-air battery.

  • When we talk about batteries

  • we kind of think of these black boxes,

  • but really what goes inside that black box

  • can be very different chemistries and different metals

  • that enable those batteries to do different things.

  • Take the example of lithium-ion batteries.

  • These are what go inside electric cars.

  • In a car, you want it to go fast

  • so you want it to draw electricity at very high rates

  • from the battery into the car and then drive it forward.

  • Lithium-ion batteries are super powerful

  • but relatively expensive.

  • Batteries that store massive amounts of energy on the grid

  • are going to have to be way cheaper

  • in order to build them at scale.

  • To be able to build a battery that is really cheap,

  • one of the things that you're going to require

  • is using materials that are very cheap.

  • Iron is really, really cheap,

  • and it's really really abundant in the earth's crust.

  • And if anybody's familiar with iron it's that it rusts.

  • So we are rusting and unrusting iron. That's the battery.

  • When iron takes on oxygen,

  • that means it's giving off an electron.

  • That process which is really a chemical reaction,

  • a nuisance for most of us

  • is also a process that generates energy

  • which could be converted into electricity.

  • And then when you want to store electricity

  • into that battery, you convert that rust back into iron.

  • And that's really how simple that battery is.

  • It's never been commercialized before

  • but it has been understood for about 50 years.

  • So this is the iron material,

  • which is in these pellets.

  • There will be many, many kilograms in each repeat unit

  • of the cell.

  • So I set this cell to charge, I'm putting energy into it.

  • And when we do that charge process, we unrust the iron.

  • The big things that you can see on the outside

  • of this battery are iron electrodes.

  • And then we generate oxygen.

  • So the oxygen comes off in tiny, tiny little bubbles

  • and they flow around on the inside.

  • We're standing in front of an incubator

  • full of subscale cells that we are testing.

  • So these are miniature versions of the big cell

  • that we use to test out different material combinations,

  • different designs,

  • different conditions that we cycle the batteries under.

  • And we have 2,000 of these all over this lab.

  • It is still the scrappy problem solving atmosphere

  • of a startup even though we're getting bigger

  • and constantly problem solving on your feet

  • trying things that have never been tried before.

  • Form Energy has been going strong

  • in the last couple of years,

  • raising more than $350 million to date.

  • But an entirely new battery chemistry like this

  • still has a long road ahead to prove itself.

  • It took about 30 years

  • from when the first lithium-ion battery

  • was put in a camcorder

  • to it becoming a mainstream battery that powers

  • all electric cars in the world.

  • Iron-air batteries are going to have to do that

  • but in a much more compressed period.

  • Form Energy has only been around for about five years

  • and it's going to have to show its commercial applications

  • within the next five years.

  • That's shrinking the development time down to a third

  • and that's no easy challenge.

  • So as we're commercializing this iron-air chemistry

  • for the first time,

  • the challenge is to demonstrate unequivocally with data

  • that it is a reliable durable piece of infrastructure

  • that scales to the existing infrastructure that's out there.

  • So we are already building at the intended production scale.

  • So this is a meter cubed device that we have

  • and we're already producing those devices today.

  • The idea of the energy transition can seem daunting.

  • The current energy system just works

  • aside from the whole melting the planet thing.

  • But the gigantic battery industry is growing fast

  • and other solutions are gaining steam as well

  • like storing energy with compressed air

  • or using hydrogen as a clean fuel.

  • A total carbon free grid is getting easier and easier

  • to imagine.

  • It's just a question of whether we can get there in time.

  • We are going to, I think as a society,

  • really have to embrace our ability to do big things,

  • to build a large energy infrastructure

  • if we're going to succeed

  • in what is the defining challenge of our time

  • and that is building a clean energy system for the future.

  • It's quite easy for us to know what success looks like

  • for Form Energy, and that is having the impact at scale

  • on the decarbonization effort for the electric grid.

  • And that is measured at no less than gigatons.

  • So billions of tons of carbon

  • that do not have to be released into the atmosphere

  • any longer.

  • It's really nice to be working on something

  • that I think is actually going to make a difference

  • in the world.

  • Makes me a little more motivated to do my work

  • to feel like it's actually going towards something

  • I care about a lot.

  • And as an engineer, that the problems I'm solving

  • are problems that matter.

What do you think of when you think of a battery?

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