[2sk21]

“We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants."

I can't even count the number of lab-stage announcements that I have seen in HN. This will be of interest only when they can get it to scale

[cogman10]

This is quite a bit more promising than a lot of those projects. They are actually manufacturing the batteries for a battery plant. That's quite a bit further along than a lot of battery announcements are.

[Animats]

Can you buy a sample battery?

The announcement is suspicious. "100 hours" is not a meaningful number for a battery. The numbers you want to hear are KWH/Kg, KWH/m^3, max charge and discharge rates, number of charge/discharge cycles before storage drops off, efficiency, and cost/KWH.

"That project, announced in May last year, was originally due to be a 1MW/150MWh demonstration plant capable of outputting 1MW for 150 hours straight" hints that the discharge rate may be very low.

Previous work [2] indicates serious limits on charge/discharge cycles. Like 20-30 cycles.

[2] https://phys.org/news/2017-11-renaissance-iron-air-battery.h...

[coder543]

> "100 hours" is not a meaningful number for a battery.

It is a meaningful number... in the grid scale energy storage market. It's a term that summarizes many of the complex properties you mentioned. For a given energy storage technology, there is a certain duration that it tends to be most effective at. For traditional lithium ion batteries, that duration is about 4 hours. If you want to use lithium ion storage for longer durations than that, then you're making substantial sacrifices in cost effectiveness, utilization rate, etc.

Obviously one of the huge areas of research is long duration energy storage, to smooth over energy availability fluctuations that last weeks or months. Some might argue that Form Energy is addressing medium duration energy storage, and there isn't really any technology suited for true long duration energy storage yet.

If Form Energy's technology works out, then they're saying they've developed a battery technology that is 10x more cost effective than lithium ion on a per kWh basis, but that the technology cannot discharge as quickly as lithium ion, which makes it better suited for medium duration energy storage. You could do the same thing with Lithium Ion, it would just be cost prohibitive... 10x as expensive, supposedly.

What I've shared above is my understanding from following lots of news about green energy tech for years now, but I'm not an expert who can answer a bunch of additional questions... but your comment about 100 hours not being a meaningful number isn't accurate. It is meaningful to the target audience.

[lazide]

I’m sorry, that really doesn’t make any sense.

There is several missing factors here, and it’s a useless metric. Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well - based on discharge rate. It can also do 10 minutes - based on discharge rate. 100 hours is literally useless on it’s own because it doesn’t tell you anything concrete. 100 hours….. of what?

It looks like a classic science writing article where they left all the important units off, misunderstood the whole thing the audience was looking for, and made it all super confusing and pretty useless compared to an actual paper.

[azernik]

100 hours = (kWh/kg) / (kW/kg) - ie capacity divided by the most cost-effective discharge rate.

[ComputerGuru]

I agree but that’s a highly misleading number because there’s a conflation of scenarios. Capacity is one thing, useable capacity at the requested discharge rate is another. You can’t pick and choose which numbers to use.

[amelius]

What if the discharge rate versus cost plot is mostly flat?

[coder543]

> > You could do the same thing with Lithium Ion, it would just be cost prohibitive... 10x as expensive, supposedly.

> Lithium ion can do ‘100 hours’ as well

Did you reply to the wrong person? I already addressed your entire comment several different ways in my original comment, and you didn't address anything I wrote in mine, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm not the best at explaining things?

> 100 hours... of what?

Cost effective energy storage solutions that can discharge for 100 hours at maximum operating output. "Cost effective" is absolutely the key factor. Lithium ion is not currently cost effective at such durations. It is cost effective at about 4 hours, but some sources will say anywhere from 2 to 8 hours.

If you aren't familiar with a particular industry, it's perfectly logical for that industry's shorthand to sound like total nonsense. You (and most of HN) are not the target audience for a statement like "100 hour battery". Grid scale energy storage operators are the target audience, and they understand what that means. It means slow batteries, which also implies cheap, because no one would buy slower battery technology if it weren't a lot cheaper. Form Energy explicitly declares the technology to be 10x cheaper. We'll see if that holds up in reality.

Someone unfamiliar with computer science who overhears a conversation about "garbage collection" would likely be very confused. "Computers don't emit garbage! RAM is reusable, how could bytes of RAM become garbage?" But, obviously garbage collection is a real thing with computers, even if it sounds like nonsense to someone outside the industry who just knows enough to know what RAM is.

Here's an article[0] that talks about long duration energy storage, and they even mention Form Energy. Relevant quote from the article:

> Lithium-ion batteries have absolutely dominated new storage construction in recent years. But they rarely can deliver their full power capacity for more than four hours — that’s what people mean when they say “discharge duration.” Batteries technically can go for longer, but it generally costs more than it’s worth in today’s market dynamics.

One more choice quote:

> Batteries cannot yet compete with gas plants in providing prolonged power for multiple days. But a cost-effective 24-hour duration storage system could handle longer demand peaks, and a 48-hour system could do even more.

It's all about cost effectiveness.

[0]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/so-what-exactly...

[jazzyjackson]

Bystander here: I thought your first explanation was perfectly clear, battery nerds don't want to hear nothing but Watt Hours.

[lazide]

Huh, that is almost as ridiculous as using nameplate disk capacity units that sound the same, but are are different than the ones used and reported by the operating system.

In your first comment you seemed to be talking right by the person, but I guess not.

Thanks for the correction.

[neohaven]

That cost-effectiveness discussion was enlightening. I find you have a knack for explaining what people don't see, by the way.

Open question, which maybe you might have info about, I'm just curious if maybe anyone crossed something on this; I wonder if that characteristic is inherent to specific energy storage tech; for example in Li-Ion IMR/INR batteries, this might be in part because of the voltage sag and discharge characteristics? In other words, a battery that sagged less under load and had a flatter discharge curve would have a wider range of acceptable durations? For example : https://www.richtek.com/battery-management/img/battery-disch...

This graph gives a general idea of how battery performance degrades the more load you put on Li-Ion batteries, the kind in flashlights, vapes, etc. The ICR18650s of the world et al.. They are not great for energy storage, long term, frankly. The harder you discharge them, the more the voltage sags, requiring even harder discharge to maintain a proper power output, leading to more heat, and power loss in spiky demand conditions. Leaving them on but at low-power for a very long time seems to be more efficient, but by the time you hit that low of a power-delivery, they become less cost-effective, because you could do the same with a hydro plant, a reservoir, and pumps. Li-Ion batteries need management circuits, balanced charge, can be overcharged, can be drained 'till they turn into a brick. They're far from idealized batteries that discharge at all rates consistently at equal voltage all along their Wh rating. A Constant-Power drain on Li-Ion heats up and degrades way worse at low charge or low battery condition, etc.

In other words, kWh is never the be-all-end-all of energy storage. If you want long, sustained power in tiny sips, I'm pretty sure nothing beats these ZnO batteries for hearing aids that use oxygen (or is it air?) as fuel. What seems to really matter is the ability to push out kWh on a consistent basis is, as far as I can tell, and we have no really good solution for this?

[specialist]

Nicely done. Thank you.

Am total noob. Been learning from The Limiting Factor on youtube that many different Li-ion chemistries have different use cases, ideal applications, knock-on considerations.

Why Tesla intends to use different chemistries for car, cybertruck, semi, powerwall, etc. Why others are choosing different chemistries, like Apple and lithium-titanium, for their particular needs. (Such subtlety. Total nerdgasm. What a time to be alive.)

So your explanation makes perfect sense.

[warble]

Battery engineer here. 100 hours doesn't mean much by itself

[lowercase1]

Anyone can take a battery and just decrease the discharge rate and claim "long duration storage".

The hard part is making it cheaper per kWh.

If they made it cheaper per kWh then they should say that

[coder543]

> If they made it cheaper per kWh then they should say that

They do say that. Quote from the article:

> at less than 1/10th the cost of lithium-ion

"100 hours" isn't an advantage for this technology. The advantage is the cost effectiveness. "100 hour battery" mostly means that it will take 100 hours to discharge one of these batteries (of any capacity) at the maximum discharge rate that the technology allows. Obviously that is a huge downside compared to lithium ion, which is able to respond to grid energy needs with much higher power density!

But it doesn't really matter, if the price is right. Long duration energy storage is all about lowering the cost per kWh by developing technologies that have lower power density in exchange for also lowering cost per kWh of storage. Lithium ion isn't cost effective for long duration storage right now.

Also, people in that industry know that surely no one would proudly advertise a "100 hour battery" if it weren't significantly cheaper than lithium ion on a per kWh basis, so the term "100 hour battery" also means (to the right audience) that the batteries have to be cheaper than lithium ion.

Whether Form Energy will succeed in their claims at scale is TBD. I hope they do well, because cheaper energy storage is immensely helpful for decarbonization of the grid.

[Animats]

> Also, people in that industry know that surely no one would proudly advertise a "100 hour battery" if it weren't significantly cheaper than lithium ion on a per kWh basis

Or they just have a slow-discharge technology and are trying to create the illusion it's good for something.

> at less than 1/10th the cost of lithium-ion

That's just a PR statement at this point. They haven't built many batteries.

If the materials cost for a lithium-ion battery went down 90%, battery cost would only go down 50%.[1]

The number of "it's going to be really cheap" battery claims far exceeds the number of really cheap and usable batteries that actually ship.

[1] https://qnovo.com/82-the-cost-components-of-a-battery

[dtgriscom]

This is the key statement: with this number, more isn't better. It just clarifies which class of discharge rate you're competing with. When discussing batteries which take at least 100 hours to discharge, this battery looks to be the most cost-effective.

[Dylan16807]

> Also, people in that industry know that surely no one would proudly advertise a "100 hour battery" if it weren't significantly cheaper than lithium ion on a per kWh basis, so the term "100 hour battery" also means (to the right audience) that the batteries have to be cheaper than lithium ion.

That seems like a stretch or an unwise convention. It could have some other advantage instead. Loudly proclaiming a disadvantage doesn't tell you what's good about a product, or what circumstances it's useful in.

[__sy__]

thank you for all the great comments in this thread. I'm a former Li-Ion researcher (Yi Cui group). I'm less familiar with grid storage. Would you be open to chatting a bit more about this? My email is in my profile. Thank You!

[amelius]

> It's a term that summarizes many of the complex properties you mentioned.

Ok, then would you be so kind to show how to compute these properties from this single term?

[coder543]

Would you be so kind as to show how to reverse a hash? A summary is like a hash; it throws away information deemed irrelevant to the task at hand, but it is still related to the input information. So, no, I won't show how to do that, because it's impossible, and I never claimed otherwise.

I just love these "gotcha!" comments that pop up on HN so frequently. I'm having to explain what it means to summarize information.

Hashes aren't useless or meaningless, they just aren't a substitute for the full information if you need the full information. I'm sure that if you're a serious potential customer, you can contact Form Energy and get whatever detailed information from them that you need. Otherwise, you obviously only get the information they choose to disclose publicly.

Your desire for more information doesn't somehow make "100 hour battery" a meaningless statement. When you see the mpg rating of a car, that is a summary that has thrown away detailed test results that could tell you more about the fuel economy of the vehicle under various conditions. EPA testing involves multiple test "cycles" that represent different conditions, but you don't typically get to see the results of each cycle. People still like to see mpg ratings and compare them.

[specialist]

> I'm having to explain what it means to summarize information.

It is what it is.

FWIW, I use HN as batting practice, to refine my talking points.

A terrific recent example is Scott Galloway advocating breaking up big tech. Observing his message craft over the years is instructive, inspirational. He now says stuff like "oxygenate the market". Brilliant.

Choice of metaphor matters. "The different between the right word and almost right word is the different between lighting and a lightning bug." -- Mark Twain (from memory)

Keep going. You're doing great!

[amelius]

I didn't ask for exact values, and never expected them.

But if you say "summary", then I'd expect at least to get some info in the right ballpark. Otherwise it is not a summary, but just some alternative bit of (possibly relevant) information.

Also, a hash is not a right analogy for a summary because typically hashes don't hold any bits of useful information, at least within reasonable computational limits.

[Izkata]

That isn't a gotcha comment. If it's a summary, you should be able to compare it to something else, or pick a baseline to reverse it. For example:

* What's the equivalent summary statistic for an iphone battery?

* If it has the same discharge stat as an iphone battery (just picked arbitrarily for calculation purposes), the 100-hour battery's capacity should be calculable.

[gumby]

Having worked in this sector I agree with everything you write, though I would add some qualifications:

For grid scale storage, kWh/kg and kwh/m3 (actually j/g and j/m^3) are, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant -- people aren't carrying power plants around, and grid scale investment is the classic Cap Ex/Op ex carry trade.

Also your $/kWh is an input to LCoS rather than a metric that can be used to make a judgement on its own; discouragingly, though LCoS is even mentioned in the article, it's only in a wavy.

[epistasis]

I think the difference that makes me optimistic about Form is that their executive team is extremely experienced with bringing products to market. This is no guarantee, and the publicity at this moment in time might be more about their recent round than anything else, but I have a much better feeling than a random new tech from an academic lab.

[tuatoru]

> "...what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants."

I'll make a note to check back in 20 years, then. :-)

I note they don't mention charge cycle durability - for grid, you'd want 10 000-ish cycles to 80% capacity. A bit of a red flag there.

Still, iron is cheap, plentiful, and environmentally benign. Even mining and refining iron ore isn't as bad as mining for many of the other chemistries, and we already mine a lot of iron, so there won't be shortages as it scales. I want this to work.

I note the web site[1] says its areal power intensity is about 3 MW per acre (presumably 300 - 450 MWh areal energy density, given the 100 - 150 hour claim), best case. They're not going to be installing this in Manhattan.

1. https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/

[throwawayboise]

There are vast amounts of scrap iron in salvage yards all across the country. Might not need to mine anything at all.

[not_exactly__]

I share most of your skepticism. Do you know if they’ve published a technical paper on any of the numbers?

[hinkley]

I started following battery tech at the turn of the century and this was old behavior even then.

Battery prototypes are the moral equivalent of announcing you've found a new chemical that kills tumors - in vitro.

Back then the advice from others watching battery technology? If their tech is 10 years ahead of the current state of the art, then either it will take them 10 years to produce it or they will produce it sooner by sacrificing capacity for safety/manufacturing concerns.

Another important thing to remember in any discussion about power - there is almost always a substantial premium paid for portability. If someone is feeding you PR about a stationary power system and comparing it to any household-name portable system, then you should smile and nod and keep track of your wallet as you back away slowly. They are the snake in the grass your ancestors warned you about.

[Jweb_Guru]

Why would anyone care at all about portability for grid storage? This makes no sense.

[hinkley]

Why would anyone favor lithium ion for grid storage? Makes no sense. So if someone is comparing their product to something that makes no sense, they aren’t making sense.

Are they confused, or just lying?

[Jweb_Guru]

I would pretty much agree except that lithium ion keeps being sold as a grid storage solution for some reason. But yes they should obviously be showing superiority to lead acid, pumped hydro, etc. as well.

[Retric]

This seems to be aiming to start a pilot project in 2 years which suggests it’s well past the lab stage. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume it’s going to fail, but that’s normal for startups.

[ahmedalsudani]

So what? Things that are still in the exploratory phase are also interesting.

People are free to upvote whatever content they find valuable.

(And the headline + post title are not misleading clickbait, which is often the case with such stories.)

[achow]

They don't seem to be first off the block. An advanced stage venture (mentioned in the article)..

[ESS] already has a factory pumping out flow batteries just south of Portland, Oregon. Its core product is the Energy Warehouse, which fits a rotund tank and several stacks of battery materials into a shipping container, along with the necessary electronics... During a June visit, I saw a test line in which robots prepared cells to be glued together into the battery stack that the proprietary iron liquid flows through.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/ess-is-betting-the-worl...

[m3kw9]

Scaling industrial products is the equivalent to passing phase 3 drug trials. Everyone can do a lot in small scale(mouse models), but it’s a new game scaling it.

[jonplackett]

> The battery is said to work through “reversible oxidation of iron”. In discharge mode, thousands of tiny iron pellets are exposed to the air, which makes them rust (ie, the iron turning to iron oxide). When the system is charged with an electric current, the oxygen in the rust is removed, and it reverts back to iron

This sounds a bit like what red blood cells are doing during breathing.

[tim333]

I could do with a bit of that rust turning back to iron on my car.

[Accujack]

Well, Great River Energy aren't tiny, although they aren't a huge company. They're headquartered near my home, and are big into renewables.

If they're planning a pilot plant to bring online in the next two years, then they have done their due diligence and believe the tech can work. It'll be interesting to watch.

[motohagiography]

The whole point of venture funding is to scale though. Once the science is done, it's just an engineering problem.

[smt88]

"Just an engineering problem" is a massive oversimplification.

It's an engineering problem that requires financing. After that, you still need to figure out how to do it profitably at scale.

The vast majority of "the science is done" breakthroughs fail to be commercialized because they're too expensive or time-consuming to figure out how to scale, or the unit economics just don't work out.

[motohagiography]

There was a time I would have agreed, but when you seed 5-10 companies engineering a solution, if it's possible, one of them is probably going to succeed and take all. Unit economics are an optimization problem, which is literally what engineers solve, and you can hire them at scale. What doesn't work with climbing walls and beanbag chairs in the bay area might work remote, or somewhere outside the US.

If there is still science to be done, sure, higher risk, but even paying a few scientists to develop IP for 2 years is a rounding error on what investors put into novelty software projects.

[smt88]

> when you seed 5-10 companies engineering a solution

That's irrelevant to this particular article because the intellectual property for this development is owned by only one company.

> if it's possible, one of them is probably going to succeed and take all

> If there is still science to be done, sure, higher risk

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Your original comment implied by it's just a matter of spending enough on engineering. That's just not true.

So now you're moving the goal post and qualifying "it's just a matter of engineering" with "it's just a matter of engineering... unless it's also a matter of financing and other breakthroughs that may be needed".

> Unit economics are an optimization problem, which is literally what engineers solve, and you can hire them at scale.

Engineering doesn't just scale like that. You don't make a breakthrough in 1/10 of the time just because you hired 10x the engineers. There are lots of limiting factors beyond how many engineers you have.

> even paying a few scientists to develop IP for 2 years is a rounding error on what investors put into novelty software projects

This is just not true. The whole soft part of software is that you can shuffle around some code and have a completely different outcome.

Two years of scientific research on something hard (as in hardware) and also difficult/unprecedented is not comparable to building the next Slack or something, either in costs or the ability to staff it up. You could build a Slack clone today for <$10k and get to v1.0, and then it becomes just a marketing/sales problem.

To advance a new battery tech to a marketing/sales problem can't be done by a few people in a few weeks for $10k. It's orders of magnitude more expensive.

[musingsole]

But why is that? Have they not completed the science? Or is scaling up the controllable elements of a lab environment for fullscale production really so difficult?

I've seen the inside of some magical labs...Their actual setup when you stared real close and knew enough of how they were doing things was anything but.

[tuatoru]

> Or is scaling up the controllable elements of a lab environment for fullscale production really so difficult?

It's even more difficult than that. :-)

Ideas have negative value; lab prototypes also have negative value; pilot plants are worth a small fraction of what they cost - scrap value.

You get value from full scale production, and every bit of that value is paid for in the engineering required to get to full scale.

[iseanstevens]

I don’t think functional prototypes have negative value…

[tuatoru]

The cost of the great number of prototypes that fail to scale far exceeds the value of the few that do go on to be workable technologies.

[7952]

And yet despite the challenges batteries do get better. There is an economic situation where customers and vendors win from improvements in technology and that can spur innovation. That makes me optimistic.

[ta988]

A lot of us here also like reading things for the sake of curiosity.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Graphene can do everything! Except get out of the lab.