Antonio Baclig spent eight years as a researcher at Stanford University scouring as many battery designs as he could find in search of something cheap enough to transform the grid. He honed in on one from the 1980s that stores energy with iron and table salt, and founded the startup Inlyte Energy in 2021 to commercialize it anew.
“Our goal is solar-plus-storage baseload power that costs less than fossil fuels,” Baclig said.
Now Inlyte has secured its first major utility contract, a crucial step in proving the viability of the technology.
Southern Co., which owns the biggest utilities in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, has agreed to install an 80-kilowatt/1.5-megawatt-hour Inlyte demonstration project near Birmingham, Alabama, by the end of the year. Utilities need to see new technologies work in the field before they take a chance on large-scale installations, so this project marks a necessary, but still early, stage in Inlyte’s commercialization.
New types of batteries are notoriously difficult to bring from the lab to large-scale production. Many startups have toiled at this task for years, pitching anyone who will listen about the superiority of their technology. None have come close to unseating the dominant lithium-ion battery designs that have plummeted in cost over the last decade as China massively scaled up production. But researchers have concluded that lithium-ion batteries can never get cheap enough for the mass deployments of storage that will be needed to run a grid dominated by renewable energy.
The onus is on Inlyte, then, to avoid the lackluster fate of its peers and prove its exceptionality among the ragtag camp of lithium-ion alternatives. The company has three important things going for it: dirt-cheap cost of materials, a simpler-than-usual manufacturing process, and system-level round-trip efficiency on par with lithium-ion battery systems. (Round-trip efficiency is a metric for how much of the electricity stored in a battery can later be recovered. The technologies challenging lithium-ion tend to fare poorly on this front.) Plus, the work of researchers in prior decades has already helped speed Inlyte’s path to market.
New riff on a forgotten battery
Some battery-startup founders have spent years toiling away in a lab on a favored chemistry, only to spend more years figuring out how to turn it into a viable product. Baclig, a materials scientist, surveyed the annals of battery science and plucked something off the proverbial shelf that had almost hit the big time but not quite.
He landed upon the family of sodium metal halide batteries, first developed in the late 1970s. A British firm called Beta Research explored iron-sodium batteries but in 1987 pivoted to nickel-sodium because its superior energy density made it more promising for electric vehicles.
The sodium-nickel-chloride chemistry became known in battery industry lore as the ZEBRA battery, because it was developed by a group called Zeolite Battery Research Africa. It got some traction in the 1990s: Daimler Benz built cars with this kind of battery and test-drove them for more than 60,000 miles. A European company called Horien still manufactures the battery for specialized uses, like a NATO rescue submarine and uninterruptible power supply at industrial facilities that can’t afford to go dark for even an instant.
Baclig contends that the historical abandonment of iron-salt chemistries did not reflect an intrinsic failing in the technology, just a different set of needs at the time. Today, with record solar panel installations reshaping electricity systems around the globe, there’s growing interest in cheap, long-term energy storage. And power plants don’t need to cram as much energy into a confined space as electric vehicles do.
“We have to focus this on cost now. It’s not [primarily] about energy density,” Baclig said. With those new parameters, putting the iron back into the battery might just work.
Baclig reached out to the company that had pioneered the technology in the first place: Beta Research. That firm was looking for a new project to focus on as the Covid pandemic receded, Baclig said; after a year of conversations, he and Beta Research decided to join forces in 2022. Inlyte thus pulled off a rare feat among climatetech startups, or any kind of startup: successfully conducting an international acquisition before it had even raised seed funding. The startup subsequently closed an $8 million seed round in 2023.
Since then, the team has worked at a steady clip to dial in the best iron cathode for the grid storage job. They also scaled up the size of each cell, which, unlike in lithium-ion batteries, takes the form of a ceramic tube that gets filled with powdered iron and salt. The new tubes hold 20 times the energy of the previous, EV-oriented cells.
From there, Inlyte set about testing its new battery cells, culminating in a recent third-party engineering test of a 100-cell module. Engineers typically have to tinker and improve a newfangled battery to unlock the desired level of performance. In this case, Baclig said, “That was our first module, and it just worked. We’re building on something that has a long track record, so we don’t have to reinvent.”
