“It became abundantly clear that Weirton, West Virginia, that historic steel community that sits on a river and has the rich heritage, raw infrastructure and know-how to make great things out of iron, would be the ideal location for our first commercial battery production facility: Form Factory One,” Jaramillo said. Just in October, Form raised $ 450 million Jaramillo told Canary Media at the time that this money would go to doubling headcount, finishing validation and testing for the product, and building the first factory. And the company’s prototypes advanced quickly enough that investors poured in increasingly large sums to fund the precommercial development. They chose iron, which is abundant and low-cost relative to other storage materials. “To reach renewable energy independence, to meet supply-chain challenges, to run the grid reliably and affordably, we need new, domestically manufactured energy-storage technologies capable of cost-effectively storing electricity for multiple days,” Jaramillo explained at the announcement event in West Virginia Thursday.įorm assembled an impressive team of experts, many of them hailing from MIT, and scoured the periodic table for materials that could not just store energy but do it cheaply. Form co-founder and CEO Mateo Jaramillo left Tesla’s energy-storage business to tackle the problem of long-duration storage: How can we take renewable power, which doesn’t flow around the clock, and turn it into a reliable 24/ 7 power source? It’s hard to get more cutting-edge than iron-air batteries, a technology that has not yet been installed in a full-scale power plant. “We want West Virginia to be known forevermore as that energy state that always figured it out,” Justice said. Since then, Weirton has experienced “tough, tough times.” The new factory will change that, he said, while continuing West Virginia’s legacy as a crucial energy-producing state. West Virginia Governor Jim Justice (R) announced the deal with a childhood reminiscence about watching his hometown team play Weirton in the state basketball finals in 1962, when Weirton’s steel industry employed thousands and the town thrived.
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