A former paper mill in the Penobscot County town of Lincoln will host a large scale battery storage facility partially funded with a $147 million federal grant.
Form Energy, the Somerville, Massachusetts company behind the development, claims the battery will be the biggest in the world in terms of its megawatt hour capacity.
"Today's announcement from the U.S. Department is really a game changing investment in both New England and Maine for our energy future," said Dan Burgess, Director of the Maine Governor's Energy Office.
"Longer duration storage like this technology are really a game changing technology to help manage the grid, reduce costs and help deliver more clean energy to Maine people." Burgess added.
Battery storage is seen as a crucial way to harness more renewable power. Solar, wind and other power sources can sit idle for periods, or have to pause operations to prevent generating too much unneeded power and overloading the grid, according to the Maine Governor's Energy Office.
Typical lithium-ion batteries can discharge power for a few hours. But the iron-air battery system Form designed can send electricity to the grid continuously for up to 100 hours, about four days. the 85 megawatt facility planned in Lincoln has enough capacity to power more than 60,000 homes according to the company.
Mateo Jaramillo, Form's co-founder and CEO said the Lincoln project can improve reliability to the New England grid and potentially lower energy costs.
Lincoln is one of a number of bottlenecks in the transmission system that make it hard to more electricity around, Jaramillo said. New storage capacity is intended to relieve that pressure.
Plus, the high tech battery may also help reduce New England's reliance on gas-fired power plants for electricity generation. In the coldest parts of the winter especially, gas supply can become expensive and unreliable, Jaramillo added.
The grid "is relatively fragile to any disruptions to the supply of natural gas and in particular for the power production in the winter to keep things warm, and there are reliability challenges that need to be accounted for precisely during those exact same periods," he said.
Form will bring funds to the project to match the federal grant, according to Jaramillo. There is no firm construction timeline yet.
Battery storage is part of a $389 million Department of Energy funding package for New England that includes money to connect offshore wind to the grid.
