World's biggest battery coming to Maine -- and it could store 130 million times more energy than your laptop

By Ian Stokes
published 21 hours ago

The novel iron-air battery system will store 8,500 megawatt-hours of energy once it is completed.



Skyline of Maine.
(Image credit: Walter Bibikow/Getty Images)

An energy start-up plans to build the world's biggest battery in Lincoln, Maine, to help ease stresses on the region's power grid. The project is being funded by the Department of Energy, which is putting $147 million in grants toward constructing the ambitious energy storage solution.

If the current plans remain unchanged, the battery will be capable of storing 8,500 megawatt-hours (MWh) of energy, representatives of Form Energy, the company behind the project, said in a statement Aug. 6.

The battery system will have the most energy capacity of any announced in the world, Mateo Jaramillo, CEO and co-founder of Form Energy, said in the statement. The current record is held by the Edwards and Sanborn solar-plus-storage project in California, which uses over 120,000 batteries to store 3,287 MWh.

To put that 8,500 MWh of energy into context, Freeing Energy estimates that a single megawatt-hour would provide enough power for an electric car to travel 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers). If you could somehow hook Form Energy's battery system up to that electric car, it could travel approximately 31 million miles (50 million km) on a single charge — enough to circumnavigate the Earth 1,228 times. The capacity in the best laptops, meanwhile, is approximately 65 Wh, meaning this battery can store 130 million times more energy.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/worlds-biggest-battery-coming-to-maine-130-million-times-more-energy-laptop