Ore Energy Raises $43 Million to Build Europe's Iron-Air Battery Manufacturing

Ore Energy has raised $43 million in Series A funding led by Plural and HV, with participation from Positron Ventures, to scale its iron-air battery technology and establish its first manufacturing facility ahead of a targeted gigawatt-hour production scale by 2028. The Amsterdam and Delft-based company's batteries store renewable electricity for up to 100 hours at what it describes as ten times lower cost per unit of energy capacity than lithium-ion, using iron, water and air rather than lithium or cobalt. The round brings Ore's total funding raised to more than $61 million.

 

Why Iron-Air Chemistry Targets a Gap Lithium-Ion Cannot Economically Fill

 

Ore's batteries generate electricity through the rusting and unrusting of iron electrodes, a chemical process built entirely from abundant, low-cost materials rather than the geographically concentrated critical minerals that lithium-ion batteries require. That distinction matters specifically for long-duration storage, since lithium-ion's cost structure, driven largely by the price and supply constraints of lithium and cobalt, becomes prohibitively expensive when scaled to store electricity for many hours or days rather than the shorter discharge windows lithium-ion typically serves well.

Batteries capable of discharging over 100 hours address a fundamentally different problem than the short-duration batteries dominating current grid storage deployment: bridging multi-day gaps in renewable generation, such as extended low-wind periods or winter stretches with limited solar output, rather than simply smoothing hour-to-hour fluctuations. Building that capability from materials that avoid critical mineral supply chains entirely, rather than merely using less of them, is what allows Ore to claim a fundamentally different cost structure rather than an incremental improvement on existing lithium-ion economics.

 

UPCOMING WEBINAR

How Two Sustainability Teams Used AI to Get Audit-Ready

Online, 18 August 2026 · Cleaning spend data, building audit trails and meeting what auditors expect

 

Why Curtailment Represents Quantifiable Financial Waste, Not Just Inefficiency

 

The release cites European Commission Joint Research Centre estimates that Europe wastes approximately 72 terawatt-hours of renewable electricity annually due to grid bottlenecks, equivalent to Austria's total annual electricity demand, with losses projected to rise to as much as 410 terawatt-hours by 2040 without intervention. That waste stems from a structural mismatch: wind and solar generation is inherently variable, producing surplus power when conditions are favourable that the grid often cannot absorb or transmit, while falling short during low-generation periods, with no mechanism currently in place to store that surplus for later use at the scale required.

The financial dimension of that waste is concrete rather than abstract: the UK has spent almost £6 billion since 2011 paying renewable generators to switch off when their output exceeds what the grid can handle, with wasted wind energy alone projected to cost the UK £8 billion annually by 2030 absent grid infrastructure investment. Across Europe, the 72 terawatt-hours of annually wasted renewable electricity is valued at nearly €7 billion at current wholesale prices, a concrete monetary figure that reframes curtailment from a technical inefficiency into a direct economic cost borne by the energy system.

 

RELATED EVENT

Reuters Sustainability Europe 2026

London, 20–21 October 2026 · 400+ sustainability, finance and procurement leaders on regulatory uncertainty and Scope 3 data

 

How AI-Driven Demand Growth Intensifies the Underlying Problem

 

Global electricity demand from data centres is projected to more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, with AI-optimised data centres alone projected to more than quadruple over the same period, according to figures cited in the release. AI training and inference workloads cause large, rapid swings in power demand, a volatility pattern that compounds the existing mismatch between variable renewable generation and steady demand, since a grid already struggling to store surplus renewable output now faces a second source of demand volatility layered on top.

European data centre electricity demand specifically is projected to increase by 45 terawatt-hours by 2030, adding pressure to grid systems at precisely the moment the continent needs to accelerate its broader industrial and energy transition, a convergence the company positions as strengthening the commercial case for long-duration storage technology capable of absorbing renewable surplus and delivering it reliably when demand requires it.

 

UPCOMING WEBINAR

Moving Sustainable Procurement Beyond Cost to Strategic Value Creation

Online, 09 September 2026 · Balancing cost, managing supplier risk and building long-term value

 

What the Early Commercial Deployments Signal

 

Ore has already signed a 1 gigawatt-hour deal with Budget Thuis, a Dutch challenger energy and telecoms utility, and conducted pilot projects with French utility EDF to demonstrate the technology's performance in real-world utility settings. Securing commercial agreements with established utilities, rather than relying solely on demonstration projects, suggests the technology has moved beyond pure research validation into genuine utility-scale commercial interest, though the gap between a 1 gigawatt-hour signed deal and the company's stated 2028 target of gigawatt-hour-scale manufacturing capacity indicates the company remains at an early stage of proving it can deliver at the volumes its long-term ambitions require.

Plural partner Ian Hogarth framed long-duration storage as one of the biggest unsolved challenges in the energy transition, positioning Ore's technology as both critical domestic infrastructure for Europe and a potential export technology, while HV's Maxi Pethö-Schramm tied the investment directly to Europe's ability to compete in energy-intensive industrial sectors going forward. Whether Ore's manufacturing facility successfully validates production at the scale needed to reach its 2028 gigawatt-hour target, and whether the iron-air chemistry's cost advantage holds up as the company transitions from pilot-scale deployments to full commercial manufacturing, will determine how significant a role this technology plays in addressing the curtailment and grid capacity challenges the funding round is explicitly targeting.