Ore Energy has raised $43 million to establish its first manufacturing facility for iron-air batteries, moving the Dutch company from pilot projects towards an attempt to supply multi-day electricity storage at commercial scale.

The Series A was led by Plural and HV, with participation from Positron Ventures, and takes Ore Energy’s total funding beyond $61 million. The company plans to use the capital to expand its manufacturing, commercial, and operational teams, validate its production process, and prepare for gigawatt-hour manufacturing in 2028.

Ore Energy’s battery stores and releases electricity through the reversible oxidation of iron — in simpler terms, rusting and reversing that process. Its core materials are iron, water, and air, avoiding the lithium and cobalt used in many conventional battery systems and allowing the company to propose a supply chain based largely within Europe.

The system is designed to discharge for up to 100 hours, giving it a different role from lithium-ion batteries commonly used to balance a grid for minutes or several hours. Ore Energy says its cost per unit of stored energy can be one-tenth that of lithium-ion technology in long-duration applications, although that figure remains a company estimate rather than a demonstrated commercial result from a large operating fleet.

From pilot hardware to infrastructure

The company has progressed beyond a laboratory concept. A pilot at EDF’s research facilities in France completed a 100-hour cycle under an EU-supported programme, while Dutch energy supplier Budget Thuis has agreed to purchase 1GWh of capacity, beginning with a planned 400MWh phase in 2028.

Those commitments give the fundraising a stronger industrial basis than a battery announcement supported only by chemistry tests. The next stage will nevertheless expose a different class of difficulty: factories must produce consistent systems, projects must connect to constrained grids, customers must finance assets with long operating lives, and maintenance costs must remain predictable after repeated charge cycles.

Iron-air storage is not intended to replace every existing battery. Lithium-ion systems remain better suited to many short-duration and fast-response applications, while pumped hydro, flow batteries, compressed-air systems, hydrogen, and other emerging technologies compete for longer-duration projects. The commercial question is whether Ore Energy can occupy the gap between short-term balancing and the much longer periods when renewable generation remains low.

That gap is becoming more visible as electricity demand rises. Data centres, electrified industry, transport, and heating are adding loads at the same time as wind and solar supply a larger share of generation, leaving grids to manage periods of surplus alongside hours or days when output falls.

AI demand meets the power system

Ore Energy has deliberately connected its pitch to the expansion of AI infrastructure, arguing that data centres require dependable electricity while creating large and sometimes volatile loads. Yet a battery does not make electricity generation unlimited: storage can move available power through time, reduce curtailment, and ease some network constraints, but it cannot compensate indefinitely for insufficient generation or delayed grid investment.

Long-duration storage therefore forms one part of a broader industrial system rather than a self-contained answer to Europe’s electricity problem. As the AI bottleneck moves into the power room, data-centre developers are combining storage, grid equipment, generation contracts, and power-management software in an effort to obtain capacity without compromising reliability.

Co-locating iron-air systems with wind and solar farms could allow generators to retain electricity that would otherwise be curtailed and sell it when the network can accept the output. For industrial customers, the same capability could reduce exposure to short-term price volatility, although the economics will depend on market rules, utilisation, connection charges, and the difference between low and high electricity prices.

Chief executive and co-founder Aytac Yilmaz described expensive energy as “the biggest barrier to growth”, linking the factory plan to the power requirements of manufacturing and computing. The argument is plausible, but Ore Energy must still show that its equipment can be manufactured, installed, and financed cheaply enough to compete with established alternatives.

The first factory and the initial Budget Thuis delivery will therefore be more revealing than the headline storage duration. If production begins on schedule and the systems perform through repeated multi-day cycles, Ore Energy will have converted abundant materials into a potentially useful European infrastructure product. Until then, the Series A finances the difficult transition between a successful pilot and a dependable grid asset.