Ore Energy Secures €37.3 Million to Power Europe's Long-Duration Energy Storage Revolution

Amsterdam Startup Lands €37.3 Million for Iron-Air Battery Scale-Up

Ore Energy, an Amsterdam-based startup at the forefront of long-duration energy storage in Europe, has closed a €37.3 million ($43 million) Series A funding round to scale its iron-air battery technology. The round was led by Plural and HV, with participation from Positron Ventures. This latest injection of capital brings Ore Energy's total funding to €53.02 million ($61 million), signalling growing investor confidence in long-duration storage as a critical missing link in the renewable energy transition.

For technology professionals, IT decision-makers, and digital infrastructure operators, this development carries implications that extend well beyond the energy sector. Data centres — increasingly the backbone of cloud computing, AI workloads, and digital sovereignty initiatives — are among the most energy-intensive facilities on the planet. As European regulators push harder on sustainability mandates and data sovereignty, long-duration battery storage capable of bridging intermittent renewable supply with constant, high-density demand is no longer a nice-to-have. It is becoming a regulatory and operational necessity.

Iron-air batteries work through a fundamentally different electrochemical process than the lithium-ion batteries that dominate consumer electronics and short-duration grid storage. They breathe oxygen from the air to oxidise iron during discharge — a process akin to controlled rusting — and reverse the reaction during charging. The chemistry relies on some of the most abundant and inexpensive materials on Earth, which has long made iron-air an attractive candidate for long-duration storage, even as it has historically struggled to compete with lithium-ion on energy density and cycle performance.

Why Storing Renewable Power for 100 Hours Changes Everything for Digital Infrastructure

The critical differentiator for Ore Energy's technology is its ability to store renewable energy for up to 100 hours. To put that in context: most commercial lithium-ion battery systems operate in the four-to-eight hour range. Even the most advanced grid-scale lithium-ion deployments rarely exceed 12 to 16 hours of storage. At 100 hours, Ore Energy is operating in a category that currently has very few practical competitors at commercial scale.

According to research published by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), long-duration energy storage — typically defined as systems capable of storing energy for more than 10 hours — is one of the most pressing gaps in the global clean energy transition. Seasonal and multi-day weather events regularly cause renewable generation to fall short of demand for extended periods. Wind droughts, overcast weeks, and other meteorological patterns mean that solar and wind farms alone cannot guarantee baseload power without substantial backup capacity. IRENA's analysis, available at irena.org/publications, consistently identifies long-duration storage as a top-tier infrastructure priority through the end of this decade.

For operators of cloud infrastructure, enterprise data centres, and digital services platforms — particularly those committed to meeting sustainability reporting requirements under the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) — the ability to draw on long-duration renewable storage rather than diesel backup generators or carbon-heavy grid power is both an ESG imperative and an emerging competitive differentiator.

Iron-Air vs. Lithium-Ion: How the Technologies Compare for Grid-Scale Deployment

Understanding where iron-air technology fits in the broader storage landscape requires a clear-eyed comparison with the incumbent. Lithium-ion has dominated grid storage investment for the past decade, backed by supply chains scaled through electric vehicle manufacturing and a well-understood performance profile. However, as Bloomberg NEF has documented in its annual Energy Storage Market Outlook — accessible at about.bnef.com — lithium-ion's economics and supply chain dependencies increasingly present challenges for very long-duration applications.

Critically, iron-air batteries use iron, a material that is cheap, globally abundant, and free from the geopolitical supply chain risks associated with lithium, cobalt, and nickel. For European policymakers and technology operators focused on digital sovereignty and supply chain resilience — themes that have become central to EU industrial strategy — this is a significant advantage. The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act has placed enormous emphasis on reducing dependence on non-European supply chains for strategic technologies, and iron sits well outside the risk categories that regulators are concerned about.

What This Series A Tells Us About European Deep-Tech Investment Priorities

The funding round, led by Plural and HV with participation from Positron Ventures, reflects a clear shift in European venture capital priorities toward what the industry increasingly terms "hard tech" or "deep tech" — startups solving fundamental physical infrastructure problems rather than software-layer innovations. Plural, in particular, has become known for backing ambitious European technology companies at the intersection of software and physical systems, while HV has a track record of investing in infrastructure-adjacent ventures across the continent.

This is also a signal about where European policy money and private capital are converging. The EU's REPowerEU plan — the bloc's strategic response to energy security concerns — identifies long-duration storage as a priority technology for grid stability as the share of intermittent renewables grows. European startups that can demonstrate credible paths to gigawatt-hour scale storage are attracting both public funding mechanisms and private venture capital, creating a relatively rare alignment of incentives in the deep-tech space. The European Innovation Council and Horizon Europe programmes have both flagged energy storage as priority funding areas, as outlined on the European Innovation Council's official portal.

For small business owners, entrepreneurs, and IT decision-makers thinking about long-term infrastructure costs, the commercialisation of iron-air batteries at scale promises something concrete: cheaper, more reliable baseload renewable power. McKinsey's Global Energy Perspective — published at mckinsey.com — has repeatedly projected that long-duration storage will be essential to reducing the cost of 24/7 clean power to levels competitive with fossil fuels. If iron-air technology can be manufactured at scale, the cost-per-kilowatt-hour for storing electricity over extended periods could fall dramatically compared to current alternatives.

Digital Sovereignty Starts with Energy Independence

There is a thread here that speaks directly to the concerns of privacy professionals, policy professionals, and IT decision-makers engaged with European digital sovereignty: the infrastructure that underpins sovereign digital systems — domestic cloud servers, national AI compute clusters, open-source software platforms — requires reliable, sustainable, and ideally non-imported power. The geopolitics of the past several years have made European policymakers acutely aware that dependence on external energy sources creates strategic vulnerabilities that extend directly into the digital domain.

A data centre running on locally generated and locally stored renewable power — buffered by long-duration iron-air batteries — represents a meaningfully more sovereign infrastructure stack than one dependent on gas-fired grid power or on lithium-ion systems whose supply chains run through Southeast Asia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is not an abstract argument: GDPR compliance, data localisation requirements, and the EU Data Act all create regulatory pressure to keep European data on European infrastructure, and that infrastructure increasingly needs to demonstrate sustainability credentials under CSRD and the EU Taxonomy Regulation.