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“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 a

by 2sk21 5y ago

“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

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
Graphene can do everything! Except get out of the lab.
Retric 5y ago
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.
cogman10 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.html https://phys.org/news/2017-11-renaissance-iron-air-battery.h...
  - coder543 5y ago
    > "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 5y ago
      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.
      - coder543 5y ago
        > > 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-is-long-duration-storage-explained https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/so-what-exactly...
musingsole 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    I don’t think functional prototypes have negative value…
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      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.
ahmedalsudani 5y ago
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.)
epistasis 5y ago
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.
m3kw9 5y ago
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.
7952 5y ago
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.
motohagiography 5y ago
The whole point of venture funding is to scale though. Once the science is done, it's just an engineering problem.
- smt88 5y ago
  "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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tuatoru 5y ago
> "...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/ https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
- not_exactly__ 5y ago
  I share most of your skepticism. Do you know if they’ve published a technical paper on any of the numbers?
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  There are vast amounts of scrap iron in salvage yards all across the country. Might not need to mine anything at all.
Accujack 5y ago
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.
ta988 5y ago
A lot of us here also like reading things for the sake of curiosity.
achow 5y ago
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-world-is-ready-for-a-billion-dollar-battery-disrupter/ https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/ess-is-betting-the-worl...
hinkley 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Why would anyone care at all about portability for grid storage? This makes no sense.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
jonplackett 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  I could do with a bit of that rust turning back to iron on my car.

by 2sk21 5y ago

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

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

Retric 5y ago

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.

cogman10 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.html https://phys.org/news/2017-11-renaissance-iron-air-battery.h...
- coder543 5y ago
  > "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 5y ago
    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.
    - coder543 5y ago
      > > 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-is-long-duration-storage-explained https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/so-what-exactly...

musingsole 5y ago

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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  I don’t think functional prototypes have negative value…
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    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.

ahmedalsudani 5y ago

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.)

epistasis 5y ago

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.

m3kw9 5y ago

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.

7952 5y ago

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.

motohagiography 5y ago

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

smt88 5y ago
"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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tuatoru 5y ago

> "...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/ https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/

not_exactly__ 5y ago
I share most of your skepticism. Do you know if they’ve published a technical paper on any of the numbers?
throwawayboise 5y ago
There are vast amounts of scrap iron in salvage yards all across the country. Might not need to mine anything at all.

Accujack 5y ago

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.

ta988 5y ago

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

achow 5y ago

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-world-is-ready-for-a-billion-dollar-battery-disrupter/ https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/ess-is-betting-the-worl...

hinkley 5y ago

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 5y ago
Why would anyone care at all about portability for grid storage? This makes no sense.
- hinkley 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.

jonplackett 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
I could do with a bit of that rust turning back to iron on my car.