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Title: 'World's Largest Battery' Soon At Google Data Center: 100-Hour Iron-
Air Storage

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/02/28/...

Interesting Engineering reports: US tech giant Google announced on Tuesday
that it will build a new data center in Pine Island, Minnesota. The new
facility will be powered by 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy from wind and
solar, coupled with a 300-megawatt battery, claimed to be the 'world's
largest', with a 30-gigawatt-hour (GWh) capacity and 100-hour duration... The
planned battery would dwarf a 19 GW lithium-ion project in the UAE... Form
Energy's batteries work very differently from most large batteries today.
Instead of using lithium like the batteries in electric cars, they store
electricity by making iron rust and then reversing the rusting process to
release the energy when needed... Form's iron-air batteries are heavier and
less efficient than their counterparts; they can only return about 50% to 70%
of the energy used to charge them, while lithium-ion batteries return more
than 90%. However, Form's batteries have one distinct advantage. They are
cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, costing about $20 per kilowatt-hour of
storage, which is almost three times as cheap... It will store 150 MWh of
electricity and can supply to the grid for up to 100 hours, delivering about
1.5 MW at peak output. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for
sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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