The Hottest Thing In Energy Storage

Published May 11, 2023, 4:05 AM

Andrew Ponec is co-founder and CEO of the energy storage company Antora Energy. 

Andrew's problem is this: How can you store renewable energy in a way that is cheap enough and reliable enough for industrial use? He thinks the solution may be storing that energy as heat, in big blocks of graphite.

Pushkin. Let's do a classic good news bad news top to the show. Today. Good news, wind and solar power are now cheaper than power from fossil fuels. Bad news, sometimes the sun goes down and the wind does not blow. The energy transition, the shift to carbon free energy, may be the most important problem of our time, and the most important problem within that problem may be energy storage. How to take that sweet, sweet carbon free energy we generate when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and store it for use whenever we want it. We do have some ways to store energy for some uses. Lithium ion batteries are good for cars, for example, but they are way too expensive for lots of use cases. Think of factories making energy intensive things like steel or aluminum. They use tons of energy, they compete over every last cent, and it is nowhere near cost effective for them to use lithium ion batteries. So to bring the energy transition to industry, we're gonna have to figure out new ways to store energy, ways that are not only reliable but also very very cheap. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Andrew Panik. He's the co founder and CEO of the energy storage company and Torah Energy. Andrew's problem is this, how can you store renewable energy in a way that is cheap enough and reliable enough to convince giant global industries to abandon fossil fuels. Andrew is really into the techno economics of the energy transition. Basically, find new technologies that move us away from burning fossil fuels and that make economic sense. He dropped out of Stanford to start his first company, and that company helped make big solar installations a little bit cheaper. Then he went back to Stanford to finish college. And he assumed at the time that there was an energy storage solution on the way, that lithium ion batteries would just keep getting cheaper and cheaper until they were so cheap they'd meet all our energy storage needs. Then one day he learned he was wrong.

Those are some of the best moments in life when somebody tells you that you're wrong, and you go and you reevaluate and you find out, man, I was wrong and that person was right. And so this particular moment for me was actually speaking with a guy named Matteo Harmio, and he was coming out of Tesla's energy business. And so Tesla, you know, obviously most famous for making electric vehicles, but also has a very strong business putting lithium ion batteries into stationary energy storage to support the grid. And so you know, here I was coming with this hypothesis, Hey, lithium mion's going to do it all. And he had just left Tesla at that point and essentially said lithium he can't, can't do it all. We need something that's going to be far cheaper than lithium mine.

And was he saying, not only are they not cheap enough now, but they're not gonna get cheap enough exactly.

And that was the key point.

What's the floor on the price?

The floor in the price really comes from the materials. Eventually, the cost of lithium in batteries is going to be approaching just the cost of the lithium, you know, the copper. So there's a long way it can still come down, and we think it will, but that floor is still above where it needs to be forevery other just.

The lithium and the copper. I mean, it won't work for a lot of things. It'll be too expensive. Okay, So now you've got a problem to solve. You realize, oh, lithium mine's not going to do it. What do you do?

Look at everything under the sun that might be able to do it. So we, you know, we, and we in this case is myself and one of my two co founders that started working together around this time. We started going through every technology that you could imagine that could store energy. We looked at hydrogen, we looked at compressed air, we looked at gravitational energy storage, various types of new electrochemical batteries that are not lithium ion that might be able to store it for cheaper and you know, we made sort of toy models of all of these things to try and figure out, you know, what the cost floors for those technologies would be. And the one that really jumped out at us was thermal energy storage.

We're we're gonna spend the whole rest of the time on thermal energy storage. But you rattled off a bunch of other energy storage technologies that are in use in various places or that people are trying, and so can you just talk about the sort of broader landscape of energy storage for a sec I mean, like what is the what's it look like? What seems promising to or not promising?

So you know an example, you know, there are lots of other electro chemistries, a lot of other different types of batteries said are not lithium ion that I think are super fascinating, definitely worth people pursuing, and could end up being the solution for a lot of these problems.

Iron I mean the guy, the guy from Tesla who who told you lithium I wasn't going to get there, right, he has like an iron battery company, now right? Is that that's right? That's right?

Yeah, yeah, you know, very interesting company doing doing iron. Actually there are a few companies doing iron based batteries of any sort.

And interestingly, iron is cheaper than lithium. I mean, is that the core proposition there or part of it?

Yeah, that's that's a that's a huge, a huge part of it. And so a lot of interesting things going on there.

You know.

An example that we just decided to kill entirely from our search was gravitational energy storage. This was one where just the energy density was so low that we didn't see a future part. There's there's a wonderful te Just.

To be clear, Gravitational energy storage means when you have power from whatever, a wind, turbine, move something up, put pump water up a hill, and then when you need power later, let the water flow down and spin a turbine or something that's gravitation.

Absolutely, absolutely yes, And this is actually one of the backbones of our grid today. And this is a great technology, but it's one of those things where most of the good sites to do that, most of the good places where you can put a dam and have two reservoirs that are really different in height over just a few miles away from each other, like most of their sites have already been taken.

So like a good idea, but not a lot of room to do new stuff there.

Exactly great idea, we kind of tapped out the resource.

Okay, what seemed like a bad idea. When you're looking at different energy storage ideas.

I don't want to speak ill of any particular energy storage but I'll just say there's a wide variety and even within one broad category, there's often companies that you know, in our view are taking really great approaches or some that are taking approaches that we just sort of scratch our head and wonder about.

There. I'm curious, but I respect, I respect your civility. I appreciate it. So you look at these different technologies and you arrive at thermal, which basically means heat, right, using energy when you have it to heat something up and store energy in the form of heat. So why do you land there?

Yeah, thermal has a few things going for it that really caught our attention. The first is that it has the potential to have an extremely low cost floor, so you can take some of the cheapest materials, most abundant materials on Earth and get them hot. You don't need a lot of complex processing, you don't need any special metals or fancy materials. It's just stuff getting hot. So it has the ability to get to really really low cost. That was the first thing. The second thing was it had very high energy density, so a relatively small thermal battery could store a lot of energy. And it really became apparent that there's not one energy storage problem, there's really two. The first energy storage problem is the one that everybody thinks about, which is you have excess wind and solar at some times you need to store it some how, and then you need to get it back as electricity for the times that you don't have enough electricity. But the other storage problem is the one of heat, and heat is you know, I would say has been historically an underappreciated part of our energy system. We think a lot about electricity, but we often don't think as much about heat. But it turns out about half of the energy we use globally is in the form of heat.

So the kind of heat you're talking about, just to be clear, it's not just like making offices or factories the right temperature for people, right, it's like wildly intense amounts of heat you need to whatever, forge steel or something. Right, it's like great, big hot industrial kind of heat. Absolutely, And fossil fuels are really good at that, right, Like, they store an incredible amount of energy. They give you a lot of heat whatever you want it, Like, it's hard to beat.

I mean, if fossil fuels weren't great, we wouldn't be struggling so much to make the energy transition happen on the timeframe that we need it to. And so, yeah, fossil fuels are generally pretty cheap and they have the ability to have that energy on demand.

And these are the kind of commodity industries that are fighting over sents. Right. The marginal cost is everything, and so if they're going to use something other than fossil fuel, it absolutely has to be as cheap and as reliable.

Exactly, And those two things we always think about as far as what our customers need. They care about two things. They care about the energy being cost effective, and they care about the energy being available when they need it.

So you land on heating up blocks of carbon, right of graphite? How do you arrive there?

Yeah, well, we made a spreadsheet with just every cheap material that we could find on Earth and everything from just like rocks, you know, just like different types of rocks.

Let's see, rocks are cheap, rocks.

Are cheap, super cheap, you know, rocks, sand, bricks of various sorts. You know, we looked at all sorts of metals. Iron. Can you just store it in enough iron or steel.

Just to heat up iron, to just heat.

Up iron exactly, maybe even to the point that it's molten and it's liquid, you know, can you just heat up liquid iron? So lots and lots of different things there, and you know, we tried to look at you know, what's the cost, what's the energy density? How much energy do you store per amount of material? We looked at, are there any you know, safety challenges, corrosion challenges, toxicity, all of those sorts of things went into it.

Andrew and his colleagues eventually decide to use graphite, just like what's in a pencil. In a minute, Andrew explains why they tried very hard to convince themselves not to keep going, and then kept going. Anywhay, that's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. So now you've got Now you've got your thing, You've got your big idea. Let's heat up graphite. Let's store in by heating up graphite. Is this the moment when you try and knock yourself down where you're like, let's let's prove that we're wrong. Which I like that as just a way of life. I like that philosophically, I like it intellectually.

Yeah.

Yeah, we went through and we said, before we actually start this company, we're going to spend one solid month looking for every problem that we can find. Is there any way we can kill this idea? Before we invest the next decade of our lives into trying to commercialize that.

And what were some of the most compelling Devil's Advocate cases against this company?

Yeah, so the first one is just can we get enough of this stuff and can we do it, you know, at a reasonable costs. And what we found really quickly there was that the graphite and carbon supply chain is enormous. So whatever we were doing for the next decade, even if we were getting to tear what our scale, was going to be a rounding error on the size of that industry. So that was really important to us.

Was there anything that almost made you not do it? Anything where that was uncertain but you decided on balance it was worth trying anyway.

The hardest part was how to move the heat? And so with this there are two ways you can imagine it. You could try to move the graphite, and we actually looked at some crazy concepts early on, like could you move this hot graphite in some way?

It was like a hot block of carbon exactly, seems hard to move, seems like you don't want to be moving that.

We decided we really didn't want to move around these hot blocks of carbon or even like carbon, you know, gravel, or you know, some other thing that maybe would be would be easier. It all just ended up being really cluegy. The other way that you might do it is find a different material that's a liquid that can withstand those temperatures and that is compatible with graphite, and then pump that around. And so that was maybe a little bit easier to imagine than moving the hot graphite itself, but it ended up having a whole host of other problems. And the solution that we had that we weren't sure was going to work at all those light bulb moments was when you get stuff really hot, it starts to glow, it's emitting light, it's incandescing, and that light itself is actually carrying a tremendous amount of energy with it. It turns out that most heat transfer at high temperatures is actually mediated by light, by thermal radiation.

That is not at all intuitive, Right when you think of the hot thing, you don't think that it's the light that is actually carrying the heat, right, That is not the way it feels.

Yeah, So what that meant was that we could try to have a system that didn't use a heat transfer fluid that didn't use some liquid we were pumping around. If we were able to come up with the right geometries and systems to use light to move heat around in the system, we could theoretically have this really really simple, reliable, nice system. But we weren't sure if there were going to be any geometries or system designs that would work well enough to solve that problem. But we at least had a shot with this using light to move the heat.

So that part seems quite hard still right in this universe when you're thinking like will this work? Thinking like, well, maybe we could use light as the sort of vector to get the heat from the block of graphite to where we need it to be. Right like, that sounds complicated and hard. It's wildly hot. It's just the idea of light as the sort of pipe that sounds hard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was very hard to know if it would work. So we had to take a little bit of a leap of faith at that time that we would be able to solve that problem.

You take the leap of faith, you start the company, and where are you now? Have you solved that problem?

Yes, we are very very very happy to say that it worked out as well or maybe even better than we were hoping at the start. The ability to use light to move the heat within the system, and it really is just you know, clever use of void space within the system is the answer. You just need to have spots where there isn't carbon so that the light from certain areas of the system can travel to another area of the system because it's going through that that empty space.

I mean, what this might be a bad sort of analogy, but what it makes me think of as fiber optics, where you have basically an empty pipe, right and you're flashing light through it and you're sending data as light.

Yeah, it's not a terrible analogy. I mean, we don't have to have any material to kind of carry the light in where it's just void space. But it is. There are parts of our system that very much look like light pipes. It's you know, kind of a long void space that allows heat from deep within the system to be brought all the way to the surface of the system just by light kind of radiating through a cavity.

Through empty space, through empty space. So where are you now? So you have this thing it works, like, does it exist in the world for real.

We started small, We built smaller prototypes, things that were kind of bench scale. We moved up to stuff that you would you know, put in a ware house, and now we're actually nearing the completion of construction of our first pilot project. And so this is i think something that's a little bit bigger than a half shipping container, so kind of a big steel box that's filled with graphite blocks and then insulation, and that's storing megawatt hours of energy in the form of that stored heat. And this is going at a customer site in the Central Valley of California. The customers well Head Electric, and their business is largely to generate both electricity and heat for customers in California, and so they're providing us a spot to do this deployment. They have a very interesting location with a natural gas power plant with lithium ion batteries, with a solar farm kind of all co located. So it's a very interesting energy playground where you can see, you how are these things going to have to work together in the future. And that's where our deployment is today.

And is it running. Is it super hot right now in Fresno or wherever it is.

It is not running yet but will be in the next few weeks. It's it's just about finished construction and the team we are all so excited to be flipping the switch on that a few weeks from now because it's been an incredible amount of work and a very fun project for all of us.

So tell me if it works. What's going to happen when you flip the switch?

Hopefully not a lot. Yeah, it's always good when there aren't too many surprises when you turn things on, So you know, largely what's going to happen is you're going to be sending electricity into the box that's going to be heating up relatively slowly, heating up this graphite because the graphite can store so much energy. Even when we're putting in lots and lots of energy, you know, the temperature will slowly rise over ten twenty hours.

And at some point it gets so hot that it's glowing right like it's so like orange. I mean, is it like like you know what a fire is really hot? Does it? What does it look like?

It will be hotter than that?

Well, sure it'll be, yeah, but what is it? What's it look like?

It really looks white hot. If you've ever seen a picture of like a steel mill or something like that with the steel ribbon being poured out of something, it's that sort of like almost blinding, you know, white, like very very bright.

And then so you'll have that stored energy in the form of heat, and then what will happen to it.

In the future we'll be selling that heat, But right now we're just going to be taking that heat out and making sure that we can hit all of the specs that our customers care about in the future. Can we provide heat consistently? Can we provide it at the right temperature? Are there any sorts of fluctuations or variability of this? Those are the sorts of metrics we're going to be looking for so that when we talk to future customers we can show them this is going to do the exact same thing that your fossil fuel burner or boiler does for you today, which is provide consistent heat twenty four to seven regardless of what's going on with the weather.

So when do you think you'll be doing it for real? When do you think you'll have a real, non pilot paying customer using your heat?

What we're looking at for the first like really large projects is likely twenty twenty five deployments, and these are the earliest. Plants we're looking at are ones that are located in the wind belts. So this is places like Kansas, Texas, Iowa that have a huge amount of wind power. The best economics in the world really for turning variable renewable electricity into industrial heat is in the Midwest US, and that's because there's so much wind that's been built out there over the last decade that you actually have wind that's being curtailed or sold at negative prices a decent chunk of the time. So you think about you know, maybe it's at nighttime, the wind's blowing really hard, there isn't that much electricity demand, There isn't enough transmission capacity to send that electricity to.

You can get for free basically, you just got to be able to store.

It, exactly. You can get energy for free, importantly, for only a small number of hours of the year. Yeah, so you can't get it for free all the time. But if you have something that can absorb that energy really quickly, you can just shove that energy into a box turn it into heat. Then that energy can be nearly.

Free in a minute, the Lightning Round, including one essential lesson about engineering and why Andrew went back to college after first dropping out, starting a company and selling.

Okay, let's get back to the show. We're gonna close with the lightning round. I want to do a lightning round. I want to ask you just a bunch of weird questions. I love it. I've heard you talk about this one class you took, I believe with Bill Day who's now at Nvidia. I've heard you talk about it as really influential on the way you think sort of broadly about really about engineering, right about the sort of discipline of engineering. What was the essential thing you learned from him?

Bill Ally was an incredible mentor incredible teacher. The thing that I really learned from him was how to boil problems down to their essence. And this is you know, in every field. Engineering is not unique this way. It's so easy to get sort of confused or you know, flustered by all of the complexity and a problem. But in most cases, a huge portion that complexity can be ignored because it isn't going to be important to the outcome.

With the weather, you prefer too hot or too cold.

I love too cold over too hot.

Same. I'll take a New York winter over in New York summer all day. Agreed. So you, if I understand it right, dropped out of college, started a company, sold it, and then went back to college. Why did you go back?

The funny answer is because I promised my parents I would go back to college.

Also true, that's true.

Also funny and true. But I absolutely loved my time at Stanford. I think it was one of the best experiences of my life.

Then the question is, so why did you drop out? Yeah?

So I was working with a team of incredible people and on this project that became my first company, Dragonfly, and it was it was not a choice. It felt so important to us to make sure that the technology we were working on got out in the world and made a difference that there is almost no question in our minds that that was the right thing for us to do. And that is what I advise people. When I've had people ask, you know, who are thinking about, you know, dropping out to start a company, I say, if you're questioning whether you should do it or not, probably just just stay in school.

If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying to solve in say, five years.

Ooh, probably in five years. International expansion is going to be one of the biggest parts of what we're doing. We see a pretty clear path within the US market and to some extent, the North American market, but we're not going to be satisfied unless we're making global impact. And so five years from now, that's what we're going to be doing. And that's hard. That's hard for any company, and it will certainly be hard for us as well.

I mean, the US market is very big. Like, if that's where you are, right, that's good. That's a happy story.

It might be a happy story from a business perspective, but it's not a happy enough story from a climate perspective. The US is less than ten percent of emissions.

I mean, I guess the related question is can other people just do what you're doing? Like how much YP do you have? If it works well, could a lot of people do it? And there's different ways to play that, right, That could be a happy story if what you want is for everybody in the world to do it, or it could be a sad story if you're like, oh, everybody's stealing ourp.

I love that framing.

How would you feel if lots of other people did versions of what you did and it worked.

I would feel great about that personally, and I think our team would as well, a lot of confidence in our ability to not just because we have IP, but also because we're going to execute well be the leader in this area. But if you told me that fifteen years from now, almost every industrial site around the world either has a thermal energy storage box with graphite in it or is planning to get one, and that somehow and Tora wasn't the supplier of those, I would still say, you know, we've accomplished our mission as a company.

Thank you for being so generous with your time. This is oh thank you was This was really a joy.

I loved all the good pressure and you know, making me say things that are not just you know, platitudes. And I think we got into some very real but interesting things as well.

Yeah. I love learning, so me to thank you for telling me things I didn't know. Yeah. Absolutely. Andrew Ponnick is co founder and CEO of and Torah Energy. Today's show was produced by David Jaw, edited by Sarah Nicks, and engineer by Amanda k. Wong. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.

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