From our bird's-eye view of the renewable energy industry, we often see positive developments for humanity before they become common knowledge. The purpose of this blog is to highlight the clean energy innovations and sustainability actions that are legitimate cause for optimism despite the very real threats to people and the environment posed by climate damage.
With its goal to generate 80% of electricity with renewable energy by 2030, Maine is exploring energy storage strategies to stabilize the impact of intermittent wind and solar power on its congested utility grid.
Like the rest of New England, Maine doesn’t have a single drop of fossil fuels and is forced to import roughly $4 billion per year of finite, polluting oil and gas for heat and power. Weaning itself off this expensive and environmentally destructive habit will require enormous investments in clean technology, particularly in the form of “long-duration storage” that can deliver massive amounts of electricity to the grid for multiple days when wind and/or solar are unavailable.
We think it’s rational cause for optimism that Form Energy, a Somerville, MA-based startup, announced in August that it plans to build the world’s biggest battery at the former site of a pulp and paper plant in Lincoln, Maine.
Form Energy’s storage technology involves rusting iron and reversing that rusting process to store up to 8,500 megawatt hours of power and then deliver it to the utility grid without interruption for up to 100 hours.
The technology itself is surprisingly simple, relying on the oxidation of iron (rusting) and then reversing that process:
Source: www.formenergy.com
Unlike the super lightweight lithium-ion batteries in cell phones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles, Form Energy’s iron-air batteries are extremely heavy, require lots of physical space, and are stationary. Form’s batteries are cheaper and safer than lithium-based batteries because there are no combustible components in iron air storage, and the raw materials are less than 1/10th the cost of Li batteries.
This is welcome news to developers of wind and solar projects who are struggling to connect their clean energy systems to the electric grid due to congestion and the high cost of building new grid capacity. Long-duration storage helps alleviate grid congestion by enabling utilities to instantaneously inject large volumes of “firm” power onto the grid when wind and solar projects suddenly stop producing power.
Somerville, MA-based Form Energy was started by a former Tesla battery researcher and an MIT professor, and the company just completed construction of its first manufacturing plant in West Virginia thanks to incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. Installation of the 85MW battery in Lincoln, ME, is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2028.
In addition to helping Maine meet its renewable energy goals over the next two decades, there’s a longer-term reason to celebrate Form Energy’s first large-scale, long-duration storage project related to keeping the lights on for the Dirigo State’s next generation.
At a recent presentation on Artificial Intelligence by Rebecca Emery of Seacoast AI, I asked Rebecca to use AI to answer the question, “How many years of fossil fuels are left?”
According to her AI query, roughly 80 years of oil and gas remain globally, and about 120 years of coal. My own Google search of the same question provided these two responses:
Source: Years of fossil fuel reserves left, 2020
Source: When will we run out of fossil fuels? - Freeing Energy
With the global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 and humanity’s energy demand forecast to grow by 50% more than what we use today, it is obvious we need to accelerate the transition away from coal, oil, and gas.
New technologies like iron-air storage, which make use of one of the most abundant metals on earth and are 100% recyclable, give us confidence that it is possible to run the world on renewable energy combined with electric technology. After all, it was less than 200 years ago that the entire world ran on hydropower, windmills, sunshine and whale oil, and people still made it to the North Pole!
