Every year, Europe wastes enough renewable electricity to power a small country, not because there isn’t the infrastructure to generate the energy, but because there isn’t anywhere to store it until it’s needed.
This gap is becoming one of the most expensive problems in the energy transition, and as AI data centres push electricity demands to new highs, the need for affordable, long-duration energy storage has never been higher.
Dutch startup Ore Energy has just raised $43m to try to solve that problem with its batteries that can store renewable power for up to 100 hours without using heavy or rare-earth metals.
The raise builds on a recently signed 1GWh deal with Budget Thuis, a challenger Dutch-based energy and telecoms utility supplier, and pilot projects with EDF it started earlier this year.
Made entirely in Europe, Ore isn’t reliant on importing expensive materials like lithium or cobalt — and so doesn’t depend on Chinese battery supply chains. Instead, its batteries use low-cost materials — iron, water and air — and rust and ‘unrust’ iron electrodes to deliver energy.
The ‘plug-and-play’ energy storage system reportedly costs ten times less per unit of energy than lithium-ion for long-duration storage, making renewable electricity affordable and accessible.
“Expensive energy is the biggest barrier to growth, something European businesses and politicians know only too well,” Ore Energy co-founder and CEO Aytac Yilmaz said. “Affordable, renewable baseload power is the foundation for the next generation of manufacturing, AI infrastructure and industrial growth globally.”
Electricity demand from data centres is set to more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030, while AI-optimised data centres are projected to grow more than fourfold, adding to the existing demand for electricity as mobility, heating and industrial processes are moved from fossil fuels to electricity.
Ore Energy
“With the surging demand of electricity and a surge for cheap renewable generation, the grids need to transform and become decentralised and flexible, storing and releasing the excess generation of electricity when it is needed and ensuring the grids do not collapse,” Fabian Siegel, venture partner at LifeX Ventures and partner at Icecreek Energy, told Pathfounders.
One of the issues with wind and solar — which are some of the cheapest sources of renewable energy — is that they are not consistent in their output, and there is no proper way to store the surplus energy for later. If there’s a particularly windy period, for example, there is no way to store that excess energy for when, at a later date, there is a period of no wind. This sees large amounts of energy wasted — across Europe this amounts to around 72 TWh of renewable energy lost every year because the ageing grids cannot absorb surges in renewable output.
“With the cost of grid scale batteries dropping to levels that make them economically viable just recently, we are lagging 10-15 years behind the roll-out of solar and wind,” Siegel added. “The challenge is now for grids to transform and integrate flexible non-dispatchable generation with solar and wind with storage assets, while also serving surging demand.”
Ore Energy’s $43m Series A round was led by Plural and HV and brings its total raised up to $61m. This nudges it ahead of one of its US-based 100-hour competitors Noon Energy, in terms of funding, which has raised $45m in VC funding and government grants. However, the California-based startup recently landed a huge partnership with Meta to provide up to 1GW of energy storage through its carbon-based battery system.
Also in the US, Form Energy has similarly created a 100-hour iron-air battery, but is operating at a whole different scale. Just a few months ago, the startup received $1bn from Google and was reportedly in the process of raising a $500m round to add to its $1.4bn raised to date, according to PitchBook.
While there are clearly a number of iron-air batteries making big moves in the 100-hour space, Siegel says the technology is “promising” but ”not yet ready for commercialization”. He expects sodium-based batteries to be the next step, though sodium-ion’s lower energy density suits shorter- and medium-duration storage, while iron-air targets multi-day, long-duration grid storage, so the two are not mutually exclusive.
“If we want to meet the future energy demands of AI data centres while providing European industry with affordable, reliable baseload power, then we need long-duration storage,” HV principal Maxi Pethö-Schramm said. “Only then will Europe have the means to compete in the complex, energy-intensive sectors that will define the continent's future.”
Ore plans to use the funds to establish its first manufacturing facility. The goal is for iron-air to be the standard grid infrastructure for long-duration energy storage by 2035.
Company info:
Founders: Aytac Yilmaz (CEO), Rutil Özdemir (COO) and Yaiza Gonzalez Garcia (CSO)
Total funding: $61m
Headquarters: Netherlands
