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.
