Been waiting for this break out moment for Form Energy’s long term storage technology.
Could this be it? in the cutting edge Tech Center of ..Minnesota?
Form Energy invented a novel iron-air battery to store clean energy for much longer timeframes than conventional lithium-ion batteries can. The startup is still constructing its first commercial project, in Minnesota, but today revealed it has clinched a potentially game-changing follow-up in the same state to support a Google data center.
The utility Xcel Energy will install 300 megawatts of Form’s batteries in Pine Island, Minnesota. It’s a big battery installation for the Midwest, but developers have built several grid storage plants elsewhere with more megawatt capacity. What shoots this project into the energy-storage stratosphere is that it will dispatch energy for up to 100 hours straight — enough to pump clean energy through multiday weather patterns that would limit renewable production. That unique capability means the Pine Island Form plant, fully charged, will hold 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, an astonishing amount for the grid as we know it.
The deal is also notable in that it proves Form has found commercial traction even before its first installation for a utility customer is complete. That outcome was possible because Xcel has seen Form develop its technology for years, said Form CEO Mateo Jaramillo, who co-founded the firm in 2017.
“Xcel in particular has been with us through every step of the journey — when the chemistry was in a very small bucket, essentially, to complete deployed systems,” Jaramillo said. “They saw the challenging things that we worked through. They saw us solve hard problems. They saw us come out the other side.”
The arrangement also offers one of the clearest examples yet of how tech giants could power their data centers with clean energy without raising costs for regular customers, if those companies care to try.
Under the agreement, Google will pay Xcel to build 1.4 gigawatts of wind and 200 megawatts of solar. Those resources make cheap, clean power, but they can’t match a data center’s 24/7 operating profile. That’s where the Form batteries come in: They can charge up whenever renewable production exceeds momentary demand and then deliver on-demand power for more than four days.
For anyone still concerned about climate change, that’s an enticing vision at a time when the titans of AI seem happy to toss clean energy out the window. Amazon and Meta have readily endorsed major fossil-gas-plant construction to power their AI sites. Just this week, SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy, which has been an avid clean energy developer, teamed up with the Trump White House to propose the biggest fossil-gas power plant in the world to help fuel the AI computing build-out. Other companies have turned to less efficient, smaller-scale fossil-fueled generators to hack together enough power for their data center plans, as chronicled by analyst Michael Thomas.
Xcel, which provides electricity to nearly 4 million people across eight states, also took great care in its statement to describe the data center not as serving the general AI arms race, but as one that “will support core services — including Workspace, Search, YouTube and Maps — that people, communities and businesses use every day.”
The companies also took steps to protect Xcel’s other customers from price impacts to serve the data center: “Google will cover any new grid infrastructure costs associated with the project and has planned carefully with Xcel Energy to ensure electricity in the area remains reliable and affordable for all of Xcel Energy’s customers,” the utility noted.
This arrangement lets Xcel pitch the data center as something that actually helps the broader Minnesota community: It will bring investment, construction jobs, and higher clean-energy generation — all without increasing electricity bills at a time when they’re rising fast in much of the country.
Potentially transformative new battery technologies tend to get trapped in yearslong cycles of small-scale pilots and demonstrations, before utilities feel comfortable spending their customers’ dollars on the new thing. Some caution is warranted, as far more novel battery startups have gone bankrupt than have built at multi-megawatt scale. And again, even Form has yet to finish its first commercial installation.
In this case, however, Google is picking up the (still undisclosed) bill. If the batteries don’t work as advertised, that could frustrate Google’s carbon accounting, but Xcel customers would not be on the hook.
Form demonstrated its capabilities with internal installations that Xcel could examine, Jaramillo noted. The startup has also been honing its production quality at its factory in the former steel town of Weirton, West Virginia — a process that required making 60 miles of electrode materials, he noted.
Long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy on Tuesday announced plans to deploy what would be the largest battery in the world by energy capacity: an iron-air system capable of delivering 300 megawatts of power at once while storing 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, enabling continuous discharge for 100 hours straight. The project, developed in partnership with the utility Xcel Energy, will help power a new Google data center in Minnesota that will also be supplied by 1,400 megawatts of wind generation and 200 megawatts of solar power.
Form expects to begin delivering batteries to the data center in 2028. The systems will be manufactured at the company’s West Virginia factory, which is expected to reach an annual production capacity of 500 megawatts by the end of that year.
The Google deal represents a significant play for scale from the startup, which has raised about $1.2 billion to date. By comparison, Form’s first commercial deployment with Great River Energy — slated to become fully operational this year — is designed to store just 150 megawatt-hours of energy.
Google will cover all the costs of the clean energy generation, battery storage, and related grid infrastructure for the new data center through a contract structure it developed called a Clean Energy Accelerator Charge, which ensures that regional ratepayers aren’t left footing the bill. While Form isn’t disclosing the expected cost of this battery deployment, CEO Mateo Jaramillo told me that the company remains committed to achieving a fully installed system cost below $20 per kilowatt-hour by the end of the decade.
This is indeed good news – when Form went a bit quiet a few years back and then appeared to have re-focused from the initial 150-hour goal to a firm 100 hours, it was still a product with scale and capacity.
For data centers, it would also be good for their batteries to be backup, but perhaps a combination of large-scale lithium-iron-phosphate plus these longer-term ones would also address the problem of rapid surges and dips on the grid that can happen from the rapid extremes of data center loads. Not sure how serious an issue that is with a cloud services data center vs. one that’s involved in training AI (very extreme shifts) but while Google says the Minnesota site is going to be hosting services we’re used to, they’re simultaneously shoving ai into things all the time.
But if they can get low-cost overnight wind and midday solar peak into their batteries and avoid spiking demand and prices, it’s progress.
“Hierarchical storage” is a term coined for data storage (e.g., very expensive fast RAM in front of a larger amount of slower RAM in front of a higher capacity on-board disk drive in front of a networked server, etc.), but it’s an architecture that works for energy storage (or, for that matter, inventory storage) just as well.