Connect with us

Published

on

An artist rendering of Form Energy’s battery system.
Rendering courtesy Form Energy

A secretive start-up called Form Energy says it’s developing and scaling the production of a new type of rechargeable battery that can store electricity for 100 hours.

Form hasn’t publicly demonstrated its technology or shared proof that it works. Nonetheless, the company has lined up more than $360 million in funding, including a new $240 million round that closed Tuesday, and partners and outside experts are optimistic about its potential.

One notable funder is Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which includes tech celebrities Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Richard Branson as investors. In one of his blog posts, Gill Gates touted the importance of Form Energy’s work, writing that it was “creating a new class of batteries that would provide long-duration storage at a lower cost than lithium ion batteries.”

Its first utility partner, Minnesota-based Great River Energy, describes their work together as a pilot project that could be an “important contribution to grid reliability and energy affordability should they achieve commercial success,” a spokesperson says.

In order to be at net-zero by mid-century, meaning that the globe is absorbing as much greenhouse gases as are still being emitted, solar and wind capacity will need to quadruple and investments in renewable energy will need to triple by 2030, according to comments from United Nations Secretary General António Guterres.

For that to happen, there also must be a ramp up of long duration battery storage. There has to be a way to provide electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. That’s the market Form Energy is attempting to serve.

No public data, lots of faith

Until recently, the company had been operating under the radar. In October 2019, CEO Mateo Jaramillo, a former Telsa vice president, noted his own reticence to speak with the media.

“As you’ve maybe seen, there isn’t a lot of press about us. And we’ve tried to tamp down anything other than what’s necessary,” he told CNBC at the time, speaking at the Tough Tech Summit in Boston, in the backyard of the company’s headquarters in Somerville, Mass. “There’s just a fraught history with battery startups over the last 15 years. Which is why that hesitancy in general. The industry is a little weary, I would say.”

Despite the company’s early tendency to skirt the spotlight, it’s had no trouble raising funds. On Tuesday, Form Energy announced it had closed a $240 million Series D financing round, led by the decarbonization XCarb innovation fund of the global steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal. Form Energy and ArcelorMittal are working together to develop iron materials for Form’s first commercial battery technology which “ArcelorMittal would non-exclusively supply for Form’s battery systems,” according to a statement. Breakthrough Energy Ventures also participated in the round.

However, Form has released no public data to verify the performance of its long-duration battery technology. (The company prefers the term “multi-day storage” to differentiate it from other companies working on shorter-long-duration batteries.)

The Form Energy battery.
Photo courtesy Form Energy

“We have been doing extensive testing internally. But you asked about public data. There is no public data, we don’t publish public data. We’re a private company, so we don’t need to,” Jaramillo told CNBC in a phone conversation in August.

“We are extremely transparent with our partners … about the testing that we have, the cells that we’re building and testing … but all of the structure of our experiments and exactly what goes in there that’s quite proprietary,” Jaramillo said.

CNBC spoke with several of these funders and partners to learn what they saw in the company’s technology.

Great River Energy is working with Form Energy to implement a one-wasmegawatt battery storage pilot project in Cambridge, Minn. Form Energy’s battery technology depends on having access to iron, and a swath of northern Minnesota is called the Iron Range for its extensive deposits.

The management and technical teams of Form Energy and Great River have been collaborating for more than three years, says Jon Brekke, vice president and chief power supply officer for the utility.

“During this time, Form has shared with us plans, actions, and results of their technology development work that directly supports our pilot project,” Brekke told CNBC. “A shared vision of low cost, long duration storage led us to this pilot project. We see these efforts as an important contribution to grid reliability and energy affordability should they achieve commercial success.” 

While Great River Energy reports to have seen evidence of Form Energy’s battery tech working, the California Energy Commission, from which Form Energy won a $2 million dollar grant, has not.

In June 2020, the California Energy Commission, the state’s primary energy policy and planning agency, granted Form Energy the money to be used for pursuing the development of energy storage technologies that do not require lithium.Grants are awarded on a competitive basis, meaning they are scored based on their technical merit,” Michael Ward, spokesperson for the California Energy Commission told CNBC.

That said, the California Energy Commission “has not seen specific performance data on the iron-air technology yet,” according to CEC researcher Mike Gravely. It expects to “receive that data when the system is built and tested” at a test site at the University of California at Irvine.

Form Energy’s air electrode, a component of its battery technology.
Photo courtesy Form Energy

A co-chair of the investment committee at Breakthrough Ventures, Carmichael Roberts, said the firm would not comment on the performance of Form Energy’s technology. However, he told CNBC the caliber of the personnel gave the Breakthrough team the confidence to invest.

“When we started Breakthrough Energy Ventures, we knew that long duration energy storage was going to be an important part of the portfolio. When we learned that Yet-Ming and Mateo were each creating a new battery company, we saw it as the perfect opportunity to bring together two of the world’s leading experts, and Form was launched,” Roberts told CNBC. Yet-Ming Chiang is a co-founder and the chief scientist at Form Energy, and a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1985.

“We knew that the core technology had great potential, but more importantly we had faith in the team that could deliver it,” Roberts said.

The rechargeable iron-air battery Form Energy is not the only technology the company has pursued.

In 2018, Form Energy received $3.8 million from the federal government’s Department of Energy as a part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (abbreviated as ARPA-E). But that was for a different battery based on “aqueous sulfur battery chemistry,” Form told CNBC.

“We chose to focus on an iron-air battery as our first commercial offering both because of its promising performance in the lab and because the iron-air chemistry positions us to tap into the global iron supply chain that already exists to support steel manufacturing,” the company said.

How iron-air battery tech works

The essential ingredients in Form’s battery are iron, air and water, all readily available and low cost. The battery works with a process the company calls “reversible rusting.”

To charge, an electric current converts rust back to iron and the battery breathes out oxygen. To discharge, the battery takes in oxygen from the air and converts the iron to rust.

Each battery is filled with a non-flammable electrolyte liquid, similar to the electrolyte used in AA batteries and is about the size of a washing machine, Form Energy says. Thousands of the washing machine-size battery modules are clumped together in power blocks and depending on what is needed, tens to hundreds of power blocks can be connected to the electricity grid.

A diagram of the Form Energy iron-air battery technology.
Form Energy

The technology is not new. “You can get something to rust, obviously. Rust happens all the time,” Jaramillo told CNBC. “To better control that process and to control it at its least cost, most performing points is an altogether separate matter.”

Experts agree that the technology has promise.

“There is obvious economic potential if iron can substitute for expensive precious metals such as cobalt, nickel and lithium,” says Stefan Reichelstein, an accounting professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business whose recent work includes studying the cost competitiveness of low-carbon energy solutions.

“But the information disclosed thus far leaves open the key question: What is the unit cost of storing (and discharging) electricity in relatively few — rather than daily — cycles each year?” he added.

The cost question

Form Energy aims to have its battery cost less than $20 per kilowatt-hour, the company tells CNBC. If the company can deliver on that cost goal, it would be a meaningful advance, experts say.

“From an economics point of view, Form’s announced cost target of $20 per kilowatt-hour is in line with what we found in our study published in Nature Energy to be the cost level required for long-duration energy storage to play a significant role in decarbonization of energy systems,” Nestor Sepulveda, who holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in developing methodologies that combine operations research and analytics to guide the energy transition and cleantech development, told CNBC.

By comparison, lithium ion batteries cost between $100 and $200 per kilowatt-hour, explained Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford.

Form Energy’s iron anode, a component of its battery technology.
Photo courtesy Form Energy

“If the cost is actually $20 per kilowatt-hour, that would be a breakthrough and allow the rapid large-scale transformation of all electricity world wide to clean, renewable (wind-water-solar) electricity,” Jacobson said.

Battery tech at the $20 per kilowatt-hour price point “would eliminate the need for natural gas or any other type of combustion fuel for backup power,” Jacobson told CNBC. “It would break any chance of nuclear power from playing a role in an energy future. It would end coal, fuel oil, and natural gas as fuels for electricity generation.”

Sepulveda, who is currently working as a consultant, is a bit more conservative about what $20 per kilowatt-hour means.

He said the threshold is meaningful “with very high penetration of renewables (not our current levels).” So in order for $20 per kilowatt-hour to be meaningful for the quest for carbon reduction, there will have to be more renewable energy production on the ground. “The question then becomes, is there a market in the near future for these technologies? I think that the answer is that there is going to be a niche market for long-duration-energy-storage in the short-medium term, but a big one in the long-term.”

Even while “$20 per kilowatt-hour is very cheap,” Sepulveda and his co-authors determined it the price of long-duration battery storage would need to be less than $10 per kilowatt-hour to “meaningfully displace” other forms of firm energy generation, which refers to energy technologies that can be counted on to meet demand when it is needed in all seasons and over weeks or longer.

The demand for multi-day-battery technology depends on the development of other technologies, too.

“While it seems plausible that iron-air batteries are less expensive than lithium-ion batteries, the more interesting comparison will be with other seasonal storage technologies, for instance, hydrogen conversion,” Reichelstein said to CNBC.

Continue Reading

Environment

Survey Sunday: we asked WHY you chose home solar, you answered

Published

on

By

Survey Sunday: we asked WHY you chose home solar, you answered

For the last few weeks, we’ve been running a sidebar survey about some of the factors that are convincing Electrek readers to add home solar power systems to their homes. After receiving over a thousand responses, here’s what you told us.

Our last survey focused on the loss of the 30% federal home solar tax credit that’s set to expire at the end of this year. One of the commenters expressed frustration with the question, saying that – tax credit or no – there were still plenty of other good reasons to go solar.

When our readers share their great ideas with us, we listen, and our most recent survey asked, “The federal solar tax credit ends after December 31st, but there are still plenty of reasons to go solar. What’s YOUR reason?”

Why YOU choose solar


By the numbers; original content.

Perhaps the most surprising result of this survey is that, with just 32.6% of the votes, “Lowering my monthly utility bills” wasn’t the biggest overall reason for people choosing to go solar. That result proving, if nothing else, that Electrek readers might be willing to spend a little more to do something positive for their environment and their community.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

“Energy independence and less reliance on the grid” was the top reason readers would add a solar system to their homes, with over 25% reporting that they were convinced about the value of solar because, “It’s the right thing to do, climate-wise.”

The final surprising result was that just 2.33% of respondents – just 25 Electrek readers – said that the improved resale value of home solar was your primary decision-driver.

Surprising, perhaps, not because of the solar panels themselves, but because it really is a buyers’ market these days, especially in sun-rich markets like Texas and Florida, which have flipped the script in recent months, posting huge inventory numbers and plunging real estate prices throughout the 2025 hurricane season.

“With a rate of 6.5% for a $1 million loan, the [monthly] payment is now significantly more than it was two years ago—$6,300 versus $4,200,” according to Ron Shuffield, the Miami-based president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices EWM Realty. “When we have this conversation with our sellers, they say, ‘Well, why can’t I get what my neighbor got two or three years ago?’ And then we say, ‘Well, because your buyer does not have the same amount of money.’”

In that context, I’d expect sellers would at least try to differentiate their properties with features like home solar and battery energy storage. But, then again, what do I know? You guys know stuff – let us know what you make of this little look into the minds of your fellow readers and what conclusions you’d draw in the comments.

Original content from Electrek.


If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them. 

Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Environment

As Anthropic tries to keep pace with OpenAI, it’s also taking on the U.S. government

Published

on

By

As Anthropic tries to keep pace with OpenAI, it's also taking on the U.S. government

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in 2025.

Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is doing all it can to keep pace with larger rival OpenAI, which is spending money at a historic pace with backing from Microsoft and Nvidia. Of late, Anthropic has been facing an equally daunting antagonist: the U.S. government.

David Sacks, the venture capitalist serving as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, has been publicly criticizing Anthropic for what he’s called a campaign by the company to support “the Left’s vision of AI regulation.”

After Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, AI startup’s head of policy, wrote an essay this week titled “Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear,” Sacks lashed out against the company on X.

“Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering,” Sacks wrote on Tuesday.

OpenAI, meanwhile, has established itself as a partner to the White House since the very beginning of the second Trump administration. On Jan. 21, the day after the inauguration, Trump announced a joint venture called Stargate with OpenAIOracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in U.S. AI infrastructure.

Sacks’ criticism of Anthropic hits on the company’s very foundation and its original reason for being. Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in late 2020 and started Anthropic with a mission to build safer AI. OpenAI had started as a nonprofit lab in 2015, but was rapidly moving towards commercialization, with hefty funding from Microsoft.

Now they’re the two most highly valued private AI companies in the country, with OpenAI commanding a $500 billion valuation and Anthropic capturing a valuation of $183 billion. OpenAI leads the consumer AI market with its ChatGPT and Sora apps, while Anthropic’s Claude models are particularly popular in the enterprise.

When it comes to regulation, the companies have very different views. OpenAI has lobbied for fewer guardrails, while Anthropic has opposed part of the Trump administration’s effort to limit protections.

Anthropic has repeatedly pushed back against efforts by the federal government to preempt state-level regulation of AI, most notably a Trump-backed provision that would have blocked such rules for 10 years.

That proposal, part of the draft “Big Beautiful Bill,” was ultimately abandoned. Anthropic later endorsed California’s SB 53, which would require transparency and safety disclosures from AI companies, effectively going in the opposite direction from the administration’s approach.

“SB 53’s transparency requirements will have an important impact on frontier AI safety,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post on Sept. 8. “Without it, labs with increasingly powerful models could face growing incentives to dial back their own safety and disclosure programs in order to compete.” 

Anthropic didn’t provide a comment for this story. Sacks didn’t respond to a request for comment.

U.S. President Donald Trump sits next to Crypto czar David Sacks at the White House Crypto Summit at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 7, 2025.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

For Sacks, the priority in AI is to innovate as fast as possible to make sure the U.S. doesn’t lose to China.

“The U.S. is currently in an AI race, and our chief global competition is China,” Sacks said in an onstage interview at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. “They’re the only other country that has the talent, the resources, and the technology expertise to basically beat us in AI.”

But Sacks has adamantly denied that he’s trying to take down Anthropic in the process of lifting up U.S. AI.

In a post on X on Thursday, Sacks contested a Bloomberg story that linked his comments to growing federal scrutiny of Anthropic.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he wrote. “Just a couple of months ago, the White House approved Anthropic’s Claude app to be offered to all branches of government through the GSA App Store.”

Rather, Sacks claimed that Anthropic has cast itself as a political underdog, positioning its leadership as principled defenders of public safety while pursuing a public campaign that frames any pushback as partisan targeting.

“It has been Anthropic’s government affairs and media strategy to position itself consistently as a foe of the Trump administration,” Sacks said. “But don’t whine to the media that you’re being ‘targeted’ when all we’ve done is articulate a policy disagreement.”

Sacks pointed to several examples of what he sees as adversarial actions. He referenced Dario Amodei’s comparison of Trump to a “feudal warlord” during the 2024 election. Amodei publicly supported Kamala Harris’ campaign for president.

Sacks also referenced op-eds the company ran opposing key parts of the Trump administration’s AI policy agenda, including its proposed moratorium on state-level regulation and elements of its Middle East and chip export strategy. Anthropic also hired senior Biden-era officials to lead its government relations team, Sacks noted.

The AI czar took particular umbrage to Clark’s essay and his warnings about the potentially transformative and destabilizing power of AI.

“My own experience is that as these AI systems get smarter and smarter, they develop more and more complicated goals. When these goals aren’t absolutely aligned with both our preferences and the right context, the AI systems will behave strangely,” Clark wrote. “Another reason for my fear is I can see a path to these systems starting to design their successors, albeit in a very early form.”

Sacks said such “fear-mongering” is holding back innovation.

“It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem,” Sacks wrote on X.

White House AI czar David Sacks: AI race is even more important than the space race

Anthropic has also stayed away from actions that many other tech companies have taken explicitly to appease Trump.

Leaders from Meta, OpenAI, and Nvidia have courted Trump and his allies, attending White House dinners, committing tens of billions of dollars to U.S. infrastructure projects, and softening their public postures. Amodei wasn’t invited to a recent White House dinner involving numerous industry leaders, the company confirmed to The Information.

Still, Anthropic continues to hold major federal contracts, including a $200 million deal with the Department of Defense and access to federal agencies through the General Services Administration. It also recently formed a national security advisory council to align its work with U.S. interests, and began offering a version of its Claude model to government customers for $1 per year.

But Sacks isn’t the only influential Republican tech investor voicing his critique of the company.

Keith Rabois, whose husband works in the Trump administration, waded into the mix this week.

“If Anthropic actually believed their rhetoric about safety, they can always shut down the company,” Rabois wrote on X. “And lobby then.”

 WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release

Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents

Continue Reading

Environment

Big MAN arrives: Italian logistics firm rolls out first MAN eTGX 6×2-4 rigid truck

Published

on

By

Big MAN arrives: Italian logistics firm rolls out first MAN eTGX 6x2-4 rigid truck

Italian logistics specialist Fratelli Foppiani Trasporti has become one of the first operators to deploy the new MAN eTGX electric trucks, taking delivery of a 4×2 semi tractor and a new, 6×2-4 rigid truck packing absolutely MASSIVE battery packs that are ready to get to work.

The Italian shipping firm ordered its MAN units back in 2023, making these among the first regular-production electric trucks from the German truck brand to be delivered to customers. The trucks seem to have been worth the wait, too – the 6×2-4 rigid unit packs a whopping 445 kWh modular battery pack while the 4×2 semi arrived with a massive 534 kWh pack, along with MAN SafeStop Assist, MAN OptiView digital mirrors, GM cab, regenerative braking system, TipMatic 4 semiauto transmission, and MAN Digital Services packages.

Those batteries will give the eTGX trucks more than enough range to handle Fratelli Foppiani’s existing 4×2 routes, which go primarily from Corsico (Milan), with routes including Rozzano, Voghera and Brescia. The rigid truck will operate from Busto Arsizio (Varese), serving areas across Milan and Bergamo, Italy.

“This delivery represents a fundamental step forward for sustainable transport in Italy,” said Marc Martinez, Managing Director MAN Truck & Bus Italia. “We are proud to have achieved it together with a long-standing partner such as Fratelli Foppiani, which has once again demonstrated vision and courage.”

Advertisement – scroll for more content

The trucks were delivered during a ceremony at the company’s Corsico headquarters this month, coinciding with the company’s 65th anniversary.

Electrek’s Take


Not shy about the EV part; via MAN.

MAN Trucks’ fleet advisors believe that, in most cases, an electric semi will pay for itself in about three years, thanks in part to Europe’s much higher diesel fuel prices compared to the US (about $6.80/gal compared to $3.70 here, last time I checked).

Doing that complicated fleet assessment math for me, while giving me one of the best headlines in the industry, is just one more reason I love these guys.

SOURCE | IMAGES: MAN Truck & Bus Italia.


If you’re considering going solar, it’s always a good idea to get quotes from a few installers. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them. 

Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Trending