Dutch startup Ore Energy has secured $43 million in Series A funding to expand production of iron-air batteries that can store electricity for up to 100 hours at roughly one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion alternatives. The round, led by Plural and HV with participation from existing investor Positron Ventures, brings the company’s total funding to $61 million.
The Amsterdam-based firm, which employs about 50 people, aims to address a growing mismatch between Europe’s abundant wind and solar generation and the grid’s ability to absorb it. According to the company, approximately 72 terawatt-hours of renewable energy are curtailed each year because there is nowhere to store it when conditions are favorable, representing roughly $8 billion in wasted power.
The technology operates on a simple principle: charging converts rust back into iron using electricity, while discharging allows the iron to rust again, releasing energy. Because the system uses only iron, water, and air — no lithium or cobalt — it avoids reliance on imported critical minerals and can be manufactured locally. Company executives have framed the primary competitor not as other battery makers but as natural gas plants, which currently fire up during multi-day lulls in wind and sun.
Demand for long-duration storage is accelerating. Global data center electricity consumption is projected to reach 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, driven by artificial intelligence workloads that create sharp, unpredictable spikes in demand. At the same time, utilities are unprepared for the volatility introduced by both renewable intermittency and AI-driven load growth.
Ore Energy has already signed a 1 gigawatt-hour supply agreement with Dutch energy supplier Budget Thuis and is running pilot projects with French utility EDF. The company targets gigawatt-hour-scale production by 2028 and hopes to make iron-air storage a core component of European grid infrastructure by 2035. For utilities, the proposition replaces payments to curtail wind farms or operate gas turbines with the ability to buy cheap power when it is plentiful and dispatch it days later. For data centers, multi-day storage enables reliable renewable power without outages.
The funding remains modest compared with U.S. rival Form Energy, which has raised more than $1.2 billion and is valued at $3.4 billion. Form Energy is building a factory in West Virginia aimed at producing 500 megawatts of iron-air capacity annually by 2028. In Europe, companies such as iwell and Terralayr are also pursuing grid storage, though they focus on shorter-duration solutions. Ore Energy’s backers say the current round buys the company time to scale its manufacturing and demonstrate the technology at commercial scale.
As Europe races to decarbonize its power system while accommodating surging electricity demand from AI, the ability to store renewable energy for days rather than hours could prove decisive in displacing fossil-fuel backup and eliminating costly curtailment.
