Form Energy has closed its Series D financing round, with investors including steel company ArcelorMittal putting US$240 million into the Boston-headquartered iron-air battery startup. 

Iron electrolyte flow battery company ESS Inc has become the latest energy storage industry player to target public listing of its stock, announcing a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

What could you do with a battery that can store and discharge energy for 150 hours and do it cost-effectively? CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo was happy to speak with Energy-Storage.news’ Andy Colthorpe about the applications and market opportunities Form Energy is targeting.

US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said yesterday that flow batteries are “good for grid storage” as her Department of Energy (DoE) announced funding to support domestic manufacturing for the energy storage technology.

Malta Inc, developer of a grid-scale electro-thermal energy storage technology, has closed a Series B funding round, raising US$50 million from investors that include Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

A large-scale vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) demonstration project in California which has been providing grid services on a commercial basis will now also trial the use of the technology for microgrid applications.

The lion’s share of new funding announced this week to help scale-up potentially disruptive technologies by the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) of the US government Department of Energy (DOE) will go to battery and smart grid technologies.

‘Liquid metal’ battery technology developed as a potential low-cost competitor for lithium-ion looks set to be used at a data centre under development near Reno, Nevada.

While lithium-ion continues to dominate big project announcements worldwide, three providers of long-duration non-lithium battery technologies have claimed various milestones in commercialisation.