There's real long-duration energy storage now. Can it find a market?

There’s no mass market for LDES yet — nothing like the hundreds of gigawatts we may eventually need — but there are several localized markets, adding up to several gigawatts of needed capacity, which is more than enough to keep Form busy from 2025 forward.

To achieve clean energy targets, many jurisdictions will have to overbuild renewables, increasing curtailment, or wasting of renewable energy. LDES could reduce or eliminate curtailment, allowing renewables to produce at full capacity whenever the weather is aligned.

In terms of its function on the grid, the best way to think of Form’s battery is not as storage, but as the equivalent of a carbon-free natural gas plant. Rather than methane, it runs on renewable energy as fuel, but from the grid’s perspective, it provides basically the same service, which is reliable, dispatchable generation that can run for 100 ... See more