Google announced this week it’s developing a new data center complex south of Minneapolis to be powered by a practical utopia of clean energy: lots of wind, solar, and, notably, the world’s largest battery storage system.
While the battery business is now booming, most storage systems provide power in four-hour durations, or increasingly, eight hours. But the Form Energy technology Google will utilize aims to dispatch up to 100 hours of power at a time. Form’s iron-air battery technology offers multiday durations intended to keep the power on during prolonged severe weather events, peak summer demand, or just a particularly cloudy week that weakens solar power.
