Form Energy's manufacturing breakthrough

Speaker A: Latitude media covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.

Speaker B: We went from quite literally batteries the size of a cup like a coffee cup, to batteries that are now £80,000 in a shipping container. And you know that journey is not going to be linear.

Speaker A: I can tell you that lithium ion batteries are storing energy for the grid in increasingly large volumes. But to solve for all of the grid's balancing needs, we, we could use energy storage with a much longer duration and a lower price point.

Speaker B: If you can make a battery for $20 a kilowatt hour, you get the hundred hours and you have a very entitled place to bring a ton of value to the grid. It is differentiated, it enhances the value of all the rest of the systems in there and it makes the entire portfolio of resources, whatever they are, operate more efficiently and the whole thing is cheaper.

Speaker A: Matteo Jaramillo has been in the battery industry for over 20 years, including seven years building Tesla's storage business from the ground up. But he knew that replacing a gas peaker plant with an electric peaker would require a fundamentally different approach to chemistry and to cost.

Speaker B: When we started the company, we thought the probability of success was fairly low. Like uh, go invent a new type of battery that is going to solve the multi day duration problem. Okay, that sounds amazing. There is no risk free version of that. Right?

Speaker A: I'm Laura Pierpoint and this is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We've already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy. But many of these technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don't have decades to get these solutions commercialized. We have years. In today's episode, we're speaking with Matteo Jaramillo, CEO and co founder of Form Energy. Form is on the cusp of bringing its massive long duration batteries to utilities around the country. But to make it happen, the company had to overcome immense manufacturing hurdles. Form Energy is commercializing a new class of iron air storage for the grid. Its batteries work by oxidizing and reducing iron, literally rusting and unrusting the most abundant substance on earth. After years of R and D and proving the tech, Form Energy recently completed a 1 million square foot factory on the site of an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia. And with demand surging on grids around the country, utilities and hyperscalers are more interested than ever. But it hasn't been easy. I talked with Matteo about the grueling realities of scaling up manufacturing, using AI to drive Material science discovery and what it really takes to build the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition. Matteo, thank you so much for joining us here on the green blueprint. I'm so excited to have you.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Lara.

Speaker A: Okay, so let's start at the beginning. I think you know, form energy is probably about as close as it gets to a household name among climate and energy tech companies. But for the uninitiated, can you tell us a little bit about what form Energy does? What is the problem you're solving and how are you solving it?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, first of all that's a high compliment. I think probably the circle of folks who knows this is you know, my family and then some deep, deep tech energy nerds. But uh, appreciate otherwise known as the whole world. Right. But uh, but yeah we are. Form Energy is uh, commercializing iron air batteries for the electric grid. And probably the first question is well, why does the world need a new battery? Uh, there's, there's a few of them out there including lithium ion which is doing a great job at storing energy for the grid and increasingly large volumes. Um, and indeed that was sort of where I cut my teeth in the market. I've been in batteries now for 20 plus years. I was at Tesla working exclusively on lithium ion for seven plus years. Um, but what I saw there was there's an opportunity for something that is much longer duration and by direct implication therefore much lower cost. Um, because uh, absent that cost point and therefore duration, um, you really can't compete with uh, gas which uh, is sort of the large incumbent technology in the grid in the US today. And so we set out form, uh nine years ago to uh, discover um, scale up and manufacture the kind of battery storage that would repeat that would compete rather with gas. So where we are today is um, we have sort of created this category of what we call multi day duration storage and the device, um, we're really trying to not use the word battery because maybe it evokes the wrong thing. It's um, not a gas peaker but it's an E peaker. And uh, so that sort of notion is one that we're really starting to put out there and be sort of front footed on, um, you know, going, going straight after that application. Um, so that's informed us, um, we have invented the E peaker and we are selling it into the market.

Speaker A: By epeek or you mean that you're addressing data center needs or what specifically do you mean by that?

Speaker B: I just mean instead of a gas peaker it's an electric peaker.

Speaker A: Electric peaker. That's where you get an E. Got it. Okay, very cool. So, you know, we'll get into some of the market dynamics around batteries and E peakers, as you say, um, a little bit later. But one quick question, which is that when you founded the company almost 10 years ago, I feel like it was like the wild west. There were like 80 battery technolog technologies out there. That's probably actually a drastic undercount. But very different things from redox flow batteries to lithium M ion to LFP to all of these different technologies. Is there still a vast landscape of technologies or are you starting to see that field narrow?

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say that Cambrian moment there where there's that explosion of a bunch of different approaches, it has consolidated uh, to some degree. And what you're not seeing, especially in the last couple of years of sort of the brand new companies that are coming out, you sort of have a few that have been able to sort of hold on or you know, you know, get through. Um, but, but you certainly don't see, um, the investment cycles in the new chemistries partially because the landscape is starting to feel fairly settled. Like lithium ion is going to get super, super cheap. And so unless you can point to, you know, beating lithium ion at its own game, then there's really no point. And then I, I think where we were perhaps, uh, slightly prescient was identifying just how cheap lithium ion was going to get and how far away you had to be from that on cost, um, to, to have an entitled position in the market. And, and for us, you know, the, the goal, as we said from the very beginning of the company, we always were targeting something that would be $20 a kilowatt hour all in at the system level. Um, and, and that we feel is still very much the entitlement there that we're, that we're headed towards. Um, and that's sort of far enough away from lithium ion to, to uh, be differentiated enough that you don't have to worry about it. Um, uh, but yeah, we haven't seen a lot of brand new entrants in that space and unfortunately some companies have gone away in the meantime as well. So it does seem to be sort of settling out a bit, uh, in ways that maybe were not super easy to predict.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally. But it sounds like you all had the right idea on coming up with something that is very low cost compared to lithium ion and that does the thing that lithium M ion is bad at, which is long duration storage. What led you Ultimately to Iron Air versus some of the other technology options out there.

Speaker B: Cost, pure, pure costs. Um, in the end, the duration is the valuable thing. And to provide that duration, 100 hours plus uh, four straight days of discharging at the rated power, um, you need to be in a very different cost regime from anything else that's out there. In our case, what is the chemistry just wrote briefly, we are oxidizing and reducing iron, rusting and unrusting iron. Um, so you start with iron, which is you know, the most abundant substance on earth, just about and um, the most mind metal by a few orders of magnitude. And uh, and you oxidize it from obviously air out of the, or oxygen out of the air, uh, which is free. We don't, we don't need to scrub it or purify it or, or you know, um, enhance uh, it in any way. And so you're starting with a raw cost of materials that's less than a dollar per kilowatt hour. Right. This is as compared to, let's say unprocessed minerals for lithium ion that sitting on a table is 30 bucks a kilowatt hour or something like that. So you're sort of in a fundamentally different regime. And the trick of course then is to keep it cheap. It's really easy to start with something that doesn't cost very much and then synthesize it to extreme purities and strange morphologies. And of course you add costs on top to get the performance. And the real innovations that we've had over the last nine years is to um, continue to keep the cost entitlement while driving performance up, um, uh, throughout the development cycles. Uh, but really because of cost, that's really what it comes down to.

Speaker A: Right, okay. And so you've got a very strong engineering team that's doing this with you. You also did something pretty unusual when you started your company, which is in addition to standing up this engineering team obviously to work on your technology, you also stood up an analytics team to help understand and really define the business cases for these batteries. So can you say a bit about why you did and what the journey has been like for that team?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, even before we picked the chemistry to work on, which of course ultimately became Iron Air, um, we built software tools. This is my co founder, Marco Ferrara, who himself was an energy trader for a number of years. So he really understood the energy markets and funnily enough he has a PhD in uh, nuclear fusion engineering from MIT is not doing that. Yeah, um, but uh, Marco Built these what we call complex CO optimization modeling tools, what the utility industry would call capacity expansion modeling tools. Um, and he built them with uh, capabilities that went beyond what the industry was currently using. In other words, um, sub hourly resolution data, multiple years of uh, non standard meteorological, um, data coming in multiple decades of time series of data, um, and sort of doing the CO optimization that way as opposed to really simplifying the problem. In other words, take an average week out of a year and solve for that, which is what they had been doing. Um, so go do the optimization with hard math and modern compute, um, and you get very different answers about what kinds of storage are then therefore entitled, um, to bring a lot of value on the grid. What duration matters, for example. That was one of the key questions we tried to answer up front. You know, how many hours do you need to functionally compete with the gas resources? Um, and once you know the duration, of course, then cost and all sorts of other figures of merit, um, come in, uh, that you need to be able to take into account. But, but with that um, analysis that Marco built, you know, with lots of sensitivities that we could evaluate, we sort of had a treasure map. And what, what popped out of that analysis was very clearly if you can make a battery for $120 a kilowatt hour, you get the 100 hours and you have a very entitled place to bring a ton of value to the grid. It is differentiated, it enhances the value of all the rest of the systems in there and it makes the entire portfolio of resources, whatever they are, operate more efficiently and the whole thing is cheaper, um, including the cost of this new asset. And so, um, that was sort of a real insightful, um, just roadmap that we had for what we should go build. And in fact that helped us down select to Iron Air in the first place. Um, it was very clear that Iron Air was entit title to go do those things. And we like that. And then of course that was the basis with which we had the conversations with customers from day one, essentially. So even before we had picked hardware, we were engaging with utilities and saying, hey, our analysis suggests that we should go build this kind of battery. What do you think? Um, uh, and that let us just have a really productive conversation, um, with potential buyers from day one, essentially.

Speaker A: And is there a lot of variability among utilities and geographies around how your batteries are being used? Are you finding that there's kind of one way that folks are tending to approach this?

Speaker B: This? No, there's, there's a few cons, very consistent use cases. Um, what does vary is how often they sort of tap into the different use cases. Um, and, and as you would imagine that varies by, by geography. It also varies by, by market structures. Um, so you know what kinds of market designs are in place. Um, the easy obvious one is just reliability event. You've got a multi day weather event you just want to discharge. Right. So of course, famously winter Storm Yuri in Texas in 2001 and you know, four days of black 21 I should say. And, and you know, four days of blackout that cost tens of billions of dollars in damage. If we had been there, we would have just discharged flat out. Right. For, for those four days. And there you go. Um, you know, the other is just tight grid capacity. Uh, ten days in a row. You're operating within the reserve margins. Right. You don't want to add any incremental stress to the grid. You, you operate almost exactly like what a gas beaker would do. You discharge only for 10 hours a day, 10 days in a row. Right, Something like that. Um, and uh, and then the other is just how do you enable these new large loads to come, uh, online faster? Um, this doesn't have a neat tidy graph that I can point to, uh, like the first two use cases. But um, in that case, um, you know, bringing those large loads primarily from data centers could be industrial loads, um, without sacrificing reliability and increasingly getting those new loads even approved in the first place by the communities in which they're, they're located because you're able to bring not just the reliability, you're able to keep costs under control, um, and you're not bringing any local, uh, emissions as well, which is a big concern of communities too. So it's all of those use cases as we see it, with some slight variations in between.

Speaker A: Very cool. Okay, so let's get into everything leading up to building your first factory in West Virginia, which is an incredible accomplishment. So maybe m. Say a little bit about the early days of the company, how you kind of got your first customers and when you ultimately were ready along with your board to make the decision to build a factory to mass produce your batteries.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we started off as a, um, pretty focused R and D company, Primarily scientists and PhDs studying electrochemistry at a subscale. Um, once we sort of got through the fundamental traps there for any electrochemical device, you have to be able to make it at a relevant scale or it doesn't matter. And so next step was designing a relevant Scale. Well, what would you try and make? Um, so we added engineering, um, that was in California, R and D was in Boston. And then after a couple of years of that sort of saying, okay, we feel like we've done all we can do at the relevant scale, but using prototype production methods, in other words batch methods or very, very sort of small continuous methods. Um, the next step is of course to make it. There's no shortcut there. At some point you have to make it at the relevant scale without knowing for sure exactly how well that's going to go. Right. Um, and you can do a lot of testing ahead of time and pilot production and it still doesn't give you perfect sense for how well that's going to go. So um, we made that decision in uh, I guess it was 2022, uh, that we thought we were ready to go land a factory and start to scale things up. Um, and uh, by the end of 2022 we had selected west, uh, Virginia is where we were going to go do that. Um, the state stepped up with massive support. Um, and we were excited to go there. Um, we are in weirden West Virginia, which, the Northern Panhandle. Uh, for folks who don't know where, where that is, it's roughly 45 minutes from the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So just, just uh, west of there. And we built uh, what today is a million square foot factory. So we're operating about half of that, uh, first 500,000 square feet. Um, and we landed production equipment as we were finishing the building. So we wasted no time doing that. We knew, we knew the, the machine sets that we were going to be using and so we started to land those and operate it. And we've been doing that for the last couple um, of years. Um, so that's been uh, if I look back around the challenges of the company, uh, it's never linear to start off with a brand new electrochemistry and say we're going to commercialize this. We went from quite literally batteries the size of a cup like a coffee cup to batteries that are now £80,000 in a shipping container. And that journey is not going to be linear, I can tell you that. Um, but, but uh, I would say the biggest challenges candidly were, were the manufacturing scale up of the electrode. Manufacturing. Right, that, that's sort of the, the thing that every battery company needs to be able to do. And um, and so that was, that was where we spent a lot of time, a lot of money, uh, and uh, a lot of just effort, grit and you know Ingenuity and tears, travails and everything else. Um, but yeah, that's been the journey, sort of to get to the manufacturing stage, um, that we just got through, and from here, scale up.

Speaker A: I think one of the things you said to me one time is that having success gives you the opportunity to solve the next problem. That's actually what it feels like to be in the valley with this. Ah. So let's dig in on this. Okay, so thinking about your decision to build this factory in West Virginia, first of all, there's a strategic decision. And one of the things that I'm seeing happen now, particularly for companies that are in the battery space, is they're looking at manufacturing in China and basically finding creative ways to partner with manufacturing capacity there. Um, so you all made the very clear decision to manufacture in the United States. Was there a moment where you were considering either some sort of joint venture with overseas companies or contract manufacturing, or was it always very clear to you that you needed to be manufacturing in the United States?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, it was always very clear that we needed to manufacture in the US For a couple of reasons. One, um, there is no existing manufacturing supply chain for an iron air battery. We were inventing that from, from the, from scratch. Um, I don't mean we were inventing the machine sets. I mean we were putting it all together for the first time. There was no incumbent that we say, oh, give me, give me the, the line that makes a, uh, uh, discharge cathode. Right? Like, that doesn't exist. We had to sort of piece together different machine sets from different existing industries and get them to do what we needed them to do. So that was sort of point one on why us. Point two is we were still improving and inventing the electrochemistry as we went. And it's never as discrete tasks to say, oh, the electrochemistry versus the manufacturing. In fact, those are in many ways the same problem. Like, and you can't say that you've solved the electrochemistry until you're making it at a relevant scale. You know, relevant, uh, throughput with relevant yields, with relevant costs. Like, that's when you know you're done. I say done. That's when you know you actually have. Have an understanding, I would say, of your electrochemistry. And so that notion that we would be making, you know, something overseas while developing it here, that just, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Um, and. And then third, you know, for any company you're trying to do things, especially hard tech, where, where costs are high, you Want to get through your iteration loops as quickly as humanly possible, right? Your learning cycles. And so having everything on site, um, that you own, that you control, you can work 24 hours a day if you want, um, was really, really important. And so for all those reasons, um, plus we all believe that we should be manufacturing again in the United States. And there was a good chance to do that, um, were reasons why we never really considered something overseas.

Speaker A: Super interesting. I want to dig in a little bit on your sort of three points because one of the things that I see happening to me, very surprisingly is that a lot of companies are locating their first manufacturing facilities in California. And the reason is usually that, that it's like they've got a team that tends to be California based because this is where a lot of this work is happening. And so despite all of the insane, and I do mean insane challenges of manufacturing or building anything in California, people make that decision to locate somewhere within the state. But you all decided on West Virgin. So what was that decision like?

Speaker B: Yeah, we, we did consider California. Um, I'm a native Californian, so every criticism I have of California comes from a place of love.

Speaker A: Ditto.

Speaker B: But it is not, you know, it is not an easy place to do the kind of work that we're uh, going to have to go do. Uh, and we knew that. And um, you know, California has some labor advantages. There are some fantastic engineers there, uh, and we have a multiple hundred person engineering sort of center of excellence right now in Berkeley. Um, but uh, but has a really huge housing problem too, which is a labor problem on the other side of things. And so, you know, you don't, there's no free trade off I guess on that front. Um, and uh, and so we really liked uh, the, the option that we had with West Virginia, which was to put up a building that we needed very, very quickly. We had a huge amount of support, um, from, from the state of West Virginia, as I mentioned. Um, it was also very linear to sort of put that deal together. Right? One challenge with California, it's big and it's hard to get sort of attention of the folks at the right time. Um, the entire state of West Virginia was super well aligned. The, you know, the town of Wharton, the Hancock county, the Senate, the House, the governor, like, the senators, like everybody was super aligned for our success and they were all, you know, there to help and make sure we sort of got what we needed to get going. Um, and that's something that's pretty hard to replicate frankly. Um, uh, additionally, it's on an old steel mill. Uh, it's a phenomenal piece of infrastructure, just the site itself. So, uh, Weirton Steel was one of the largest steel makers for a century in the United States, has a tremendous legacy there. Um, it's right on the Ohio River. There's 30 barge slips. There are two rail lines, one that comes directly into the property, one on the other side of the river. Uh, highways with easy access to huge portion of the market generally. Um, and a great labor pool as well. Deep, ah, industrial experience there and of course, you know, the ties to sort of the broader Pittsburgh region. So there were a lot of really good reasons to locate there. And in the end it just made a lot of sense for form, um, to make that choice.

Speaker A: So cool, uh, big success in opening the factory. And that leads you to the privilege of solving the next set of challenges. So let's dig in on what gets hard as you're starting up and testing and working through sort of the first manufacturing capabilities that you're bringing online. Um, what were some of the things that you learned quickly?

Speaker B: Yeah, so in our factory, and this has been true from the very beginning, there's sort of three very different manufacturing environments, um, that we're managing sort of simultaneously. One is a pretty automated, ah, high precision, I would say, portion of it. And that's the electrode manufacturing. So in our case, we make two electrodes from powders. So, uh, one is the iron anode, maybe that's obvious. The other is a discharge cathode. Um, and so this is sort of also known as a gas diffusion electrode, or a membrane, if you will, that keeps gas on one side and liquid on the other. And in our case has a reaction happening in the middle of it. So, you know, very sensitive piece of technology, um, that has to, you know, last for tens of thousands of hours and, you know, no pinhole leaks and, uh, you know, have very high performance and all sorts of things. Um, and so that's probably the hardest part to get right. And I'll circle back around to that. And then we have sort of a, you know, sort of relatively automated, but with some humans in loop sort of cell assembly. So these are sort of classic, you know, welding and, uh, sort of assembly operations, um, that you would sort of maybe envision looking at like an automotive type type environment. And then the last one is, you know, very manual assembly for the complete, um, integrated sort of systems, you know, the shipping containers, if you will. And that looks more like RV style manufacturing. So, you know, human assisted lift, um, sort of, you Know, getting things in, but a lot of wiring and you know, connectors and you know, these kinds of things. So, so very different manufacturing environments. And the hardest part is that first one, right? Getting, getting those electrodes to be performant, um, at scale, at, at rate, uh, with yields, right. All these things, uh, simultaneously. And the reason it's hard is because it's a sort of a compounding Goldilocks problem 25 times in a row, more or less, right. So everything's too hot or too cold or uh, too much mixing or not enough mixing or too much pressure, not enough pressure. And Goldilocks is never happy. Uh, you got to get. Nothing is ever just right. Um, but you do in the end, of course, have to get it just right. And so those are sort of the fundamental challenges when you're doing things at a scale that maybe that chemistry has never been done before because you've never been exposed to those effects of getting up to that scale. And you have to relearn things, um, as you go. And um, so that was sort of the real challenging part initially of getting that right. Um, we ended up making more than 100,000 electrodes. Um, so these are meter scale devices, uh, so 60 miles worth of material kind of flowing through the factory. Just try and put a number on it. Um, and until you gain process control, you can't say you're really done with your battery. Uh, and so that's really what, what we had to do. Um, and there aren't any shortcuts. Either it works or it doesn't. And again, at the rate with the volume, with the yields and cost entitlements, um, so there were just a ton of learnings along the way, a ton of very systematic designs of experiments, tons of root cause analyses, um, uh, and just kind of tunneling your way through the mountain, so to speak.

Speaker A: Because this is a case where you're building, you're on a timeline, you want to get the manufacturing up and running. Presumably you've got delivery dates for customers and things like that. How do you think about the decision? Did you ever have to literally pause or freeze everything and kind of do some re engineering, or were you able to really keep things moving and simultaneously make the engineering and fundamental changes you needed to make? How did you think about that sort of time trade off there?

Speaker B: Well, let me expand the scope of challenges there for a little bit. Um, because while we were working our way through the challenges on the electrode, it turns out that the sort of system cell and system of design was not nearly where it Needed to be to sort of scale up that first version of the design. And so we realized fairly early on that we needed to go fix that. And there's a timescale to fixing it and implementing it. And that's more by tooling lead time than uh, design validation and then tooling lead time that's not like kind of get the chemistry of the work. That's this particular part doesn't work this way in the manufacturing environment and therefore leads to this condition as a deployed asset. We need to fix it. Let's make sure we go fix it. Um, and so we were sort of simultaneously working on both ends of the problem, right? The electrode manufacturing and then the sort of cell and system design. We got the first design to work and to prove 119 hours on discharge and hit our round trip efficiencies and that kind of thing. But we also knew that it was not going to be the version that, that in the end would be cost entitled that we wanted to scale, uh, given all the sort of mitigations and belts and suspenders we had to put in to sort of get it to that place. Um, so we were also doing that. Um, so both of those challenges were sort of on the same timeline, right. To work out all the challenges on the electrodes while we were fixing the system design and making sure that it was really robust going out.

Speaker A: Okay. And so, and ultimately these are kind of like different, almost like generations of batteries that you're building. Right? So can you say a bit about sort of like where, like how different is where you started? I don't know if like the cup size analogy is the relevant starting point, but maybe how different? Like when you, when you like open the factory in 2024 and you're like we're going to go build this battery and you have an idea for what it's going to look like. How different is what you're doing now? Have a lot of things really fundamentally changed about what you're building and are they still changing or is it.

Speaker B: Well, I would say from like for all the electrochemical pieces, they have not changed going sort of through subsequent designs. Um, and that's because once you get that process control and you really understand the electrochemistry, you do not want to change it. Right. You want to keep it, you know, all the same. Um, the only changes we've made to the, to the electrodes, um, since we sort of started production was to make them a little bit slightly different form factor so that it's in fact easier to manufacture, um, but, but fundamentally the exact same material sets the exact same processes, the exact same people involved. Right. Um, what has changed is sort of how you then take those electrodes and put them in a, in a device, how you, how you combine them. But, but the fundamentals of all of the electrochemistry of an iron ore battery are very much the same. Um, but, but sort of the packaging of that, you know, all the parts that I mentioned, where we already had very high yields, you know, from the cell all the way through the complete system, you know, making design changes that still keep it super high yield, but lead to a much more manufacturable and reliable product, um, once it's deployed. And so just kind of, I'll give you one sort of example. Um, batteries need to be sealed. Ours happens to be air breathing. So there's some ways that we do a lot of ingress, but you do have to have seals. And we reduce the amount of seal path from the first design to the second design by more than 75%.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, if you look at the connections inside of complete, ah, enclosure, we reduced the total number of connections by 2/3. Right. So, you know, just those kinds of things. Also the different types of connectors that you even have, we also reduce those by 2/3. Right. So just like a lot of simplification, a lot of, um, feedback from the manufacturing process that we went through from, from the first time. How do you, how do you delete steps, how do you delete parts? Um, how do you simplify across the board while keeping performance and safety and everything else? Um, so those were kind of a lot of the lessons at the, I would say, cell and above parts of the system. Um, but we definitely did not change the sort of internal guts of what makes an iron air battery. An iron air battery.

Speaker A: Yeah. Very, very cool. Okay, so let's talk for a second actually about time pressure associated with all of this because. So you built the factory itself in a record amount of time. It was, I think, what, a little over a year that it took you to get it built? Is that right?

Speaker B: Nine months?

Speaker A: Nine months, less than a year. So really incredible. But now, so you're going through and you're making some of these changes. Were there moments where you got stressed? Were there moments where things legitimately took longer than you were expecting? Did you have to kind of manage expectations with your financiers or your board or your customers? Or were you able to do all of this and keep to a schedule that you were excited about it?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not sure I recall actually a time where I'm not sure I remember what it's like to not have stress.

Speaker A: Sounds about right.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah. I guess my only conclusion of that is, I guess I like it. I don't really have any other conclusion at this point. Um, uh, yeah, incredibly stressful, um, to kind of go through that period, um, and to have to work through those challenges and of course you know, be, be super transparent with, with our investors and our board about where we are and what those challenges are and what we think we need to do about them. Um, uh, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a challenging thing to do. Um, and, and especially when you know it's a relatively large company with a large factory. Right. That the carrying cost of that is extremely high. Um, and ah, and so there's a huge amount of responsibility and burden. I think that you know, we, the leadership feel and felt um, getting through that and you know, fortunately you know, I'm part of a team, uh, overall that you know, our response to challenges is to take total responsibility and ownership and say here's, here's where we are, here's um, what we're going to do about it and here's, here's, here's the plan to success and you know, our investors support us through that. Um, and thankfully you know we're in a much different position today. Um, but it was you know, 2ish years of you know, working in the salt mines a little bit. Um, and uh, and so that was yeah, super, super challenging. But um, I don't, I'm not sure there's another way. I mean in retrospect, are there things I wish we had done differently? Absolutely. You know, a thousand percent. Um, were we perfect? Definitely not. Um, at the same time, you know when we started the company we thought the probability of success was fairly low. Like go, go invent a new type of battery that is going to solve the multi day duration problem. Uh, okay, that, that sounds amazing. Uh, there is no risk free version of that. Right. Um, in fact it's a high risk proposition almost, almost by definition through every single stage that we've been through. So you know that it's part and parcel and like these are venture investors who, who know and understand, you know, risks and risk in a complex way that, that most folks don't. Uh, and that doesn't make it any easier to sort of, you know, get through that. You know, especially in your, when you're in the thick of things.

Speaker A: Are there a couple of people on your team that were incredibly critical hires. Like, as you're giving advice to other companies who are entering this phase, like, what are the things that you did to get the right people and sort of right interactions among people in place in order to be successful?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, you know, if there's one area in particular that we should have leaned on earlier, you know, looking back the retrospective say, what could we have done better? I think we certainly could have brought a much more robust manufacturing mindset to the. To the design engineering work much earlier. Um, and that's, you know, that's hard. Like, you know, design for engineering is, you know, you. Or sort of design for manufacturing, rather like that. That's the whole point. Right. So, you know, there is no. Just like design for aesthetics or design for design purity's sake. Right. Like that doesn't, uh. There's no point to that. Right. We're not trying to win, you know, beauty contests here. We're trying. We're trying to win functional cost contests. That's what we're trying to win. And I could have done a better job early on bringing in that mindset part and parcel of the design, um, exercise. And I mentioned we were an R and D company, we added engineering within added manufacturing. And in fact, it needs to be much more integrated than that. Um, as you go at every step, it is never too early to really rigorously probe and test and push back on design from a manufacturing standpoint. Um, precisely. Because the only thing that matters in the end is the manufactured product. That's the thing. Uh, and so we could have. Should have done that, I would say more earlier in the process in a really integrated way. Um, and so, you know, that. That's overwhelming sort of my. Whelmingly, my advice, uh, to the extent I give it, you know, on these topics, is ensure that you're thinking all the way through, you know, to the manufactured product in a factory with actual machine sets that make things and a vendor base that can support it. Right. With material sets that support it, you know, with designs that can be made on tooling that is six weeks, not 28 weeks. And you know, like all of those things. Right. Um, are critical to sort of surviving that. Okay, go, go figure out how to make it phase of things.

Speaker A: Okay, let's talk about the financing for a second. How did you finance this plant to get it built? Because it is no joke getting the funding to do something like this.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we, uh, when we were looking at where to go for, for the factory part, the reason we are in West Virginia is because the State, um, provided $290 million of financing in exchange for 750 jobs by the end of 2028. Um, that let us go, go build the building and stand things up from scratch there. We could have gone to a cheaper, lower risk option there, just rented a building, sort of deal with the, whatever legacy type infrastructure you're dealing with there. We love that site for a lot of reasons that I, that I mentioned. Um, and we like the idea of sort of building our own factory if we could. Right. We didn't want to pay for it with equity, but, um, but, but given the support of the state, we were able to go do that. Um, and additionally we won a $150 million grant from the, um, Department of Energy in the U.S. uh, for the CAPEX equipment. So scaling up the manufacturing equipment. Um, this is out of the manufacturing and energy supply, uh, grants that, that were, um, part of the infrastructure bill. And, and so we're very actively invoicing on that project and scaling it up here. And then of course we do need to use equity dollars to, to finance beyond that because it doesn't, doesn't pay for everything. Um, and so it's a combination of those things. We have some equipment financing debt, but it's a huge piece of it.

Speaker A: Okay, so really big. On the government grants, were there any moments where you were nervous about the status of those government grants or have they been pretty stable, especially given your manufacturing focus?

Speaker B: Yeah, with the new administration, of course, every grant was reviewed. Um, and uh, we always had a very, have always had a very strong, um, open line of communication with the Department of Energy and, um, and then built one with the White House. Uh, so, so we didn't, you know, and we knew that, that we were supported there, so we just sort of wanted to let them get through their, their own reviews. But, um, in the end, yeah, none of our grants were affected. So, um. Yeah, I think that speaks to the acknowledgment, broadly speaking, um, that manufacturing energy storage out of, you know, 85% domestic contents, you know, batteries, uh, you know, for electric grid reliability and affordability and load growth, generally a good thing. And um, and it can be supported by, you know, any politician of any stripe.

Speaker A: Yes. And with really incredible results, which is so exciting. Um, okay, let's change gears a little bit because you all are also a little bit becoming an AI company. And it's so fun to say that because the first thing that pops into my head is like, oh, yeah, it's like all birds, you Know, you're manufacturing shoes now you're manufacturing, manufacturing AI. That's not exactly how it's working for you all though. And one of the things I love about this story is that it's not just about creating AI models or trying to sell things in an AI market. It's about actually using the results of the AI work that you're doing. So can you say a bit about how you're incorporating AI, what it's doing for you at this stage?

Speaker B: Yeah, more than of course, AI data center demand driving our own, uh, growth, the demand for our product. Um, we are heavy users of the tools themselves, maybe no surprise. Um, and of course in all the typical corporate ways that you would expect to have efficiency for information retrieval and that kind of thing. Um, but being a company that has a very core function of material science, um, discovery and innovation, um, we found that the models now are quite capable in a way that we didn't expect maybe a year ago, I would say we, um, sort of around that time we sort of noticed a step function of the capabilities there. Um, again led by Marco Ferraro, who originally built those models that helped us sort of understand this space from a value perspective. Uh, and so now uh, those are being very actively implemented in the discovery process and in the improvement process. And specifically, um, we have built our own physics based models of each of the electrodes and then of the entire system for some time. And inevitably when you build physics, multiphysics models of electrochemistry somewhere it doesn't uh, correspond to the empirical results that you have. That's just sort of an accepted truth that's out there. Um, and what the models now are able to do is propose um, designs of experiments that help collapse that gap between the prediction of the multiphysics models and the empirical results, um, which we have started to utilize to great effect. And so that collapse means that you can actually um, have a mechanistic understanding of what's happening in a way that lets you drive performance forward because it now suggests new ways to really control the electrochemistry. And so we're noting a real acceleration here quite literally. We sort of were able to do things on electrochemistry in a few days that previously would have taken us a few months. And so the acceleration is really starting to pick up here. Um, and as everybody I think is generally aware, the world is segmenting out into data haves and have nots. Um, and as it happens we happen to have the world's most robust data set on iron air chemistry and tens of millions of Operating hours going back nine years now. Uh, and so that data set is now starting to provided some benefits to the sort of acceleration of, you know, what is possible, frankly, with this electrochemistry. And I would say that we definitively can say right now the frontiers are not clearly, you know, laid out in front of us. There's, we're able to push very, very far.

Speaker A: This is so cool. I really love this piece of the story because I feel like there, to be honest, from my perspective, there are so few concrete examples of AI really driving incredible value, particularly in a way that affects the things that you and I care about, like greenhouse gas emissions reduction. But this is it. This is something that it's actually tangibly helping you all get where you need to go. So do you think that this is going to be sort of a continued feature of the company's operational existence? Do you imagine a world where you're really continuously improving and relying on these AI tools, Or do you think it's like the AI is going to help you answer a set of questions and then you're going to really have your sort of optimized battery and hold the design relatively still at that point and kind of move forward?

Speaker B: Oh, uh, no, no, this is going to be forever. I think it'll just get, uh, more productive, more impactful, uh, and accelerate continuously. Ah, I mean, there's still so much that we don't know and we've already made a ton of progress and we're going to continue to really be able to drive the notion of what's possible. Um, just a quick brag on the team real fast. Today, uh, we discovered something that humanity did not know about, um, iron oxidation previously sort of in, in the discovery of, of this. And I can't get into too many more details, but that's pretty astounding, right, that humans have been sort of pretty deeply immersed about iron and, and, and oxidation of iron for, for a very long time. And so we actually are. And the reason we knew that is because we were getting results of, uh, of accessibility of iron. So milliamp hours per gram, sort of the, you know, per unit of, of iron, how much energy can it get in and out that was higher than the predicted, uh, theoretical limit of what you could get for that reaction. So we sort of said, well, something is not, you know, right here according to what we think we know. And we, when we go figure, when we went and figured it out, turned out that we had, you know, done something that had never been observed before. So, you know, those kinds of things I think will continue to be true. Um, uh, about this chemistry. And there's still just a wonderfully large amount of innovation still to be had on Iron Air, frankly.

Speaker A: Uh, so I just got goosebumps, which I'll tell you probably more than anything, what a huge nerd I am. That is so unbelievably cool. I don't know if it can be overstated how amazing that is, because I think one of the truisms in the world that we live in is we've always kind of framed out this tension between basic science and sort of applied problem solving, technology development. And what you just described is turning that entire paradigm on its head. Where here you are, you're a company, you're solving something really specific, you're operating in a business environment, and the tools that you're using are enabling you to make scientific discoveries. That's pretty wild, actually.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a super exciting time, I think. Overall, very cool.

Speaker A: Okay, well, I'm going to ask my standard final question to you now, Matteo. You've all raised a lot of money, so this isn't going to be as life changing for you, but If I had $100 million and could wire it into your bank account at your company tomorrow, what would you do with it?

Speaker B: What would I do with it? Uh, I would, uh, put it to scaling up as fast as we possibly can, uh, which is what we're currently doing. Do it even faster.

Speaker A: Yes, faster is always better. I love it. Matteo, thank you so much for joining me on the show. This has been a great conversation. So cool to hear about your scaling journey and all the things that you've accomplished in a very short time. Really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thanks, Laura. It's great to chat with you as always.

Speaker A: Matteo Jaramillo is the CEO and co founder of Form Energy Incorporated. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me, Laura Pierpoint. This episode was produced by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey and Steven Lacey. Ann Bailey is our Senior Editor. Sean Marquand is our Technical Director. Steven Lacey is our Executive Editor. If you'd like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to the greenblueprintattitudemedia.com youm can listen to the Green Blueprint at, ah, latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have a fellow clean energy or climate tech traveler who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. It.