CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 13 — Yet-Ming Chiang has spent nearly four decades quietly rewriting what a battery can be. The MIT materials science professor is a co-founder of Form Energy, a company that recently began deploying a radically different kind of battery — one that runs on iron and air, not lithium.
Think of it like this: if a standard lithium-ion battery is a sprinter, the iron-air battery is a marathon runner. It stores power for days at a time, not just hours. For a grid increasingly reliant on solar and wind — which don’t produce power around the clock — that long-duration storage is the missing piece.
Chiang’s career is a story of serial reinvention. In 2001, he co-founded A123 Systems, which helped kickstart the lithium-ion revolution for electric vehicles. That work earned him and the A123 team the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2019. In 2010, he co-founded 24M Technologies, which developed a semi-solid lithium-ion battery design that simplifies manufacturing.
Then came Form Energy in 2017. The company’s iron-air battery is a chemical throwback — it uses rust as its core reaction. When discharging, the battery breathes in oxygen and turns iron into rust. When charging, it reverses the process, turning rust back into iron. The practical upshot: a system that can deliver power for 100 hours at a fraction of the cost of lithium-ion.
Chiang holds over 100 patents and has published more than 300 scientific papers. His Ph.D. in materials science came from MIT in 1989, and he has stayed there ever since, pushing into new chemistries like lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and solid-state batteries.
The Electrochemical Society gave him its Battery Division Technology Award in 2012. But the deeper significance of his work lies in what it enables. Cheap, long-duration storage means a power grid can rely more on renewable energy without needing natural gas plants as backup. That’s an energy-security argument, not a climate one: fewer imports, more local control.
Here’s what it means in plain terms. A lithium battery can keep your house running through the evening peak. An iron-air battery can keep a factory running through a three-day wind lull. For utilities, that changes the calculus on how much renewable energy they can safely add.
Form Energy is now building its first commercial-scale factory. The company has announced partnerships with several major utilities. Chiang remains on the faculty at MIT, advising the next generation of battery scientists while his companies move his ideas into the real world.
The practical upshot for ordinary readers: the battery in your phone is not the future of energy storage. The future looks more like a block of iron that breathes.
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