Interchange Recharged

Back in 2016, Mateo Jaramillo left Tesla, where he was leading the stationary energy storage business, and started looking for a new challenge to tackle. He took on long-duration energy storage -- not long duration like 8 hours or 12 hours, but days or weeks or more. In 2017 he came on the show to talk about it.

He formed a company, now Form Energy, that has been toiling on this problem in stealth mode. Apart from saying they were building a "metal air" battery, his team held the technology close to the vest.

That is, until last week.

The company announced a $200M Series D financing led by ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steelmaker, and in the process finally made public the technology, which is an iron air chemistry.

Full disclosure: Shayle led Energy Impact Partners’ investment in Form.

Shayle and Mateo discuss the technology itself and the counterintuitive economics that Mateo believes will make it work. They also examine how it beat out the alternatives and how it might complement more efficient, but more expensive lithium-ion. It turns out financial modeling was far more important than spec sheets in understanding the tradeoffs.

They tackle the critical question: Where exactly are the profitable applications of this technology before we hit very high 80% renewables?

They also talk about the semantics of long-duration storage vs. multi-day storage, why Mateo hates holy grails, and potential partnerships with tofu companies.

The Interchange is brought to you by Hitachi ABB Power Grids. Are you building a renewable plant? Looking for a battery energy storage system? Thinking about how to integrate renewables to your grid? Hitachi ABB Power Grids is your choice.

The Interchange is brought to you by LONGi Solar, the world’s leading solar technology company. A global market leader, LONGi has unmatched bankability, quality and performance validated by third-party laboratories, and has breakthrough innovation at both the wafer and module level.

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The US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office might be the most talked about -- and yet least understood -- part of the federal government’s efforts to support climate tech.

It has already invested more than $35 billion in everything from Tesla's first big factory to the first two nuclear reactors to begin construction in the U.S. in more than 30 years. It was crucial in getting the first multi-hundred-megawatt solar projects ever developed off the ground.

Today it has more than $40 billion of available loan capacity to throw at the next wave of climate technologies to scale.

And now, as of a couple months ago, it has Jigar Shah as the director. Previously, Jigar was the co-founder and president of Generate Capital. He also founded SunEdison. And, of course, he is the former co-host of our sister podcast The Energy Gang.

Jigar believes we have the technologies we need to put us on the right path toward decarbonization today. And further, that those technologies aren't as risky as the capital markets make them out to be.

Therein lies the arbitrage opportunity Jigar has pursued his whole career. And now he's got $40 billion of federal dollars to test it in a whole new arena.

In this episode, Shayle and Jigar break down the role of the Loan Programs Office and the specific financial products it offers. The backing of the federal government comes with the unique opportunities -- namely to move way faster on market opportunities than traditional debt markets can. But as Jigar explains, it comes with key limitations too.

They also cover the technology sectors that Jigar sees opportunities in -- everything from green hydrogen to small modular nuclear to virtual power plants. And they highlight the stage of companies and types of projects the office might be uniquely suited to support.

Plus, Jigar names the ideas he’s waiting to see (but that no one has pitched to him yet).

The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The road to solar glory has been littered with failed companies -- the ones you may know (Solyndra) and hundreds you probably do not.

Will the burgeoning hydrogen space follow a similar bumpy road? Hydrogen is at a similar phase of market and technological maturity, with similar levels of hype.

In this episode, Shayle talks to Raffi Garabedian, the former CTO of pioneering solar manufacturer First Solar and now the co-founder and CEO of Electric Hydrogen Co. (Disclosure: Shayle just led Energy Impact Partners’ investment in the company).

First Solar was one of the very few Western companies that survived the price pressure, commoditization and trade dynamics in the solar industry during its early growth phase. How did First Solar do it? And what does that tell us about surviving the heady-but-volatile hydrogen space?

Shayle and Raffi dig into that history, covering First Solar’s bet on mass-producible cadmium telluride technology, as well as the risky step of retooling manufacturing.

They also cover the parallels to hydrogen: How does a novel technology compete against dominant incumbents? How does that technology navigate the boom-and-bust cycles of an emerging market? How can an executive team pick the most useful metric for its creative teams?

The Interchange is brought to you by Hitachi ABB Power Grids. Are you building a renewable plant? Looking for a battery energy storage system? Thinking about how to integrate renewables to your grid? Hitachi ABB Power Grids is your choice.

The Interchange is brought to you by LONGi Solar, the world’s leading solar technology company. A global market leader, LONGi has unmatched bankability, quality and performance validated by third-party laboratories, and has breakthrough innovation at both the wafer and module level.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

America’s physical infrastructure is in the dumps. The American Society of Civil Engineers regularly gives the country’s infrastructure a near-failing grade.

We need to rebuild a lot of stuff. Hardening our roads, grids, buildings, transit systems has a climate context to it: we need to do it better and we need to do it cleaner.

This week, we are exploring the cleantech opportunities in physical infrastructure. What are the most compelling trends shaping the way we optimize our electrical equipment, pipelines, streets, homes and buildings?

This conversation is based on Shayle Kann’s piece, titled “The World Around Us.”

We’re breaking the conversation into four parts:

• The geospatial revolution: how the combination of new sources of geospatial data (satellites, drones, sensors), combined with the data revolution, will allow us to gain a real-time operational picture of our infrastructure and ultimately optimize it.
• The culture of resilience: how increasing natural disasters will start to make investing in resilience (via anything from batteries to building retrofits) mainstream.
• The re-platforming of our streets: how the arrival of new modes of transport (autonomous, micromobility, package delivery) will force us to rethink the orientation of our streets, which are currently designed for a single master – the passenger vehicle.
• The impacts of 100% clean: how all the commitments to 100% will force us to confront the biggest challenge we’ll face in electricity for the next few decades: how to unlock grid flexibility, particularly behind the meter.

Support for the Interchange comes from Schneider Electric, the leader of the digital transformation in energy management and automation.

Support for this podcast comes from PG&E. PG&E is helping to electrify corporate fleet vehicles. Get in touch with PG&E’s EV specialists to find out how you can take your transportation fleet electric.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.