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This battery can be used continuously over a multi-day period and will enable a reliable, secure, and fully renewable electric grid year-round,” said Form Energy.

Or as Greg Lydkovsky, global head of R&D at steel giant ArcelorMittal — Form Energy’s latest investor — put it, the technology “holds exciting potential to overcome the intermittent supply of renewable energy”.

Form Energy president and chief operating officer Ted Wiley said: “We’ve completed the science, what’s left to do is scale up from lab-scale prototypes to grid-scale power plants.

“[At full production], the modules will produce electricity for one-tenth the cost of any technology available today for grid storage.”

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.

Wiley said that a 300MW “pilot” project for Minnesota-based Great River Energy will be commissioned in 2023.