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The spike in power demand from AI data centers over the past two years is not only driving up utility prices but also driving rapid, sustained growth in renewable power, especially solar. That’s despite the Trump administration's attempts to encourage more use of carbon-based fuels. This has largely been thanks to increased use of battery storage to overcome the intermittent electricity generation of wind and solar.

Last year, the U.S. installed a record 58-gigawatt-hours of battery storage, 30% higher than in 2024, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Much of that growth was led by packs using lithium-iron phosphate cells, a chemistry that’s been mastered by Chinese battery giants CATL and BYD. Its advantage has been both lower costs and reduced fire risks compared to the lithium-ion cells used in electric cars. The challenge with that chemistry, however, is that the U.S. lacks a soup-to-nuts supply chain to produce LFP cells domestically.

Mateo Jaramillo has a different solution, and it’s starting to catch on. A former Tesla battery engineer who’d worked on packs for electric cars and residential solar systems, Jaramillo created Form Energy in 2017 to develop a battery that could store power for extended periods using an abundant, domestically sourced material: iron. After about a decade of R&D and prototyping, his Somerville, Massachusetts-based company has shifted to commercial operations and begun shipping its first iron-air batteries that store electricity for at least 100 hours – with the added benefits that they have very long usable lives and don’t overheat or burn. Better still, nearly all the materials and components can be domestically sourced.

Production of the power units at Form’s Weirton, West Virginia, factory has only just begun, and already the company is finding more demand than it will be able to meet. Last week, Form also got its biggest order to date: a 300-megawatt battery system that will be used for a massive Google data center project in Pine Island, Minnesota, being built with Xcel Energy. Jaramillo wouldn’t confirm a report by The Information that Google is paying it $1 billion for the iron-air pack that will be larger than a city block when installed. He did say that Form needs to be price-competitive on a dollar-per-watt basis with the cost of installing natural gas turbines. Additionally, his goal is to deliver iron-air batteries at a $20/kilowatt cost by the end of the decade. Currently, the company, which has raised $1.2 billion and is likely to go public in 2027, has orders for more than 700 megawatts of packs. And surging demand for energy storage from data centers and utilities is even bigger than what Jaramillo anticipated when he shifted from EV batteries to storage systems.

“That was the bet that we made when founding the company nine years ago. But we didn't know data centers would be smack in the mix, driving that. But even in 2017, it was clear that data centers would be a meaningful percentage of the grid,” he said.

Registration is open for the 15th annual Forbes Under 30 Summit, taking place April 12–15 in Phoenix!

As sustainability becomes a bigger part of this year’s conversation, subscribers to this newsletter are eligible for a reduced $300 ticket (normally $350) to help ensure stronger climate representation across industries.

Join founders, investors, scientists and operators working at the intersection of climate, AI and industry transformation — and claim the discounted rate by clicking this link.

A Red State Turning Green: How Market Forces Are Building Texas’s Next Energy System

What comes to mind when you think of Texas? Friday night football under floodlights, wide horizons, brisket and country music - a fierce sense of independence. But also oil derricks against a burnt-orange sky and refineries lining the Gulf Coast.

Energy abundance is woven deep into the state’s identity. What is changing now is how that abundance is being produced. Texas is building one of the largest new energy systems in the Western world – not because it turned politically green, but because market forces are making clean energy the fastest and most scalable way to meet surging demand.

This shift is economic, not ideological.

Texas does not operate under California-style climate mandates. And it surely does not subsidize renewables as a political statement. But what it does have is the fastest-rising electricity demand in the country.

Between January and September 2025, consumption reached 372 terawatt-hours – up 5% year-on-year and 23% higher than in 2021. Data centers, electrification, advanced manufacturing and population growth are pushing the system harder.

Meeting that demand has required capacity at speed. Since 2023, wind and solar have been the fastest-growing sources of electricity in the grid of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages roughly 90% of the state’s electricity demand.

Jigar Shah, cofounder of Multiplier and former director of the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, on building up U.S. supply chains for a better grid

Electricity demand and grid shortfalls have become dominant topics. What’s the path to a cleaner, more robust grid?

What we're in the middle of right now is a bunch of extraordinary technology companies that have great ideas, who need support to scale up their supply chain here in the United States. So whether it's Heron Power, or Oklo and Holtec nuclear projects, whether it's Ford, which just announced a partnership with China’s CATL to manufacture utility batteries in Kentucky, every one of them needs help reimagining what it looks like for America to do big things. And in this case, that means who the small machine shops are that they can work with to get this done? Who is the design firm that you use to do these things? They’re all ASME members – people who have been working with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers since the 1800s. The question is, how do we help both sides rediscover each other?

America has lost a lot of its manufacturing base. Nobody's denying that, but we didn't lose all of our expertise. A lot of that expertise still exists. It's a little grayer, maybe, than it was 30 years ago. But if you've got these extraordinary entrepreneurs or folks at GE Renova or Westinghouse, the big companies, they all need help figuring out what this ecosystem looks like to be able to do big things.

Our country needs to have 3% electric power load growth every year. If you look at that big announcement the Trump administration made this month, around the 9.2-gigawatt natural gas plant that's getting built in Ohio by SoftBank, if that thing gets turned on, it’s still only 20% of all the load growth that PJM forecasts over the next six years. So where’s the other 80% going to come from?

That's what ASME Catalyze summit is about. This conference is about the fact that we have all these people who have all these great solutions and we need to catalyze them at a billion-dollar scale. This whole industry has been obsessed with how to make biochar, how to do carbon dioxide removal. How do you do a pilot project or a first-of-a-kind thing in the energy space? And we're like: No. How do you make 100 units a month out of this factory? How do you train a workforce of 100,000 people around the country whose job is to maintain this infrastructure? How do you get all the spare parts? Where do they get stored so that if something goes down, you can fix it in 12 hours and not have to wait eight weeks for the spare parts to get flown in from the Philippines? That's a lot of the stuff we're focused on.

What is your role with both the summit and what Multiplier is doing?

I was at the Loan Programs Office, and provided loans for $107 billion worth of projects, and then was working at the Department of Energy with the grant programs. We now have 400-gigawatt-hours of battery manufacturing that's operating in this country. We now have critical minerals processing that's being stood up in this country. We now have all these things that we started three years ago that are operating in this country. Now we have to finish what we started. That's a lot of what ASME is focused on: figuring out how to get its members who have this expertise – in things like electrical infrastructure – work to help get that last 20% of the hard stuff done.

What is that last 20%?

Figuring out how to build your supply chain, how to make sure you meet the Department of Energy’s Foreign Entities of Concern requirements. How do you actually finish the engineering of the parts so they work together, so that it's not just a one-off item, but something that could be mass-manufactured? All of the things that you have to do go from lab scale to a full commercial facility. How do you train the workforce so you don't have safety issues?

When you think about how many horror stories we've had over the last 15 years of people who've scaled up and they've had major injuries in their factory, they've had other issues, right? Because they didn't do things properly. There are people in our country who know how to do things properly and they are not the “move fast and break things” people. They're the “move fast and do things properly the first time” people.

For more, see Shaw’s assessment of the grid and advanced energy technology.

What Else We’re Reading

Southern right whales are having fewer calves; scientists say a warming ocean is to blame (Inside Climate News)

California becomes the first state to require climate change reporting (Forbes)

Germany accused of ditching climate targets as it scraps renewables mandate (The Guardian)

Global EV sales declined 3% in January, hampered by China and U.S. slowdown (Reuters)

The mass migration of monarch butterflies is at risk from climate change (Science News)

U.S. climate forecaster to be absorbed in weather agency reshuffle (Bloomberg)

© Forbes