 So you guys are the die-hards, and we're so happy that you're here. We've got an awesome panel. So today, we've really talked about what the requirements are for storage, how those requirements vary depending on where you are geographically around the world. And this last panel, we're going to tie it all together talking about, you know, what are the technology options and how are we going to scale those? To get to where we need to be. So just some brief introductions before I invite our speakers up one at a time. The panelist today, we have Professor Yixue, who is the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and newly announced faculty director, I guess inaugural faculty director of the Sustainability Accelerator within the new school at Stanford. We have Professor Adam Brunt, Associate Professor of Energy Science and Engineering and also faculty director of the Natural Gas Initiative. James Klausner, chairman and co-founder of Red Blocks, sorry Redox Blocks. Chris Graves, founder and CEO at Noon Energy. And last but not least, Eric Fleckton, COO at Energy. So I would like to go ahead and invite Yixue up to the podium to kick us off with the first presentation. Well, thank you Naomi. Long duration storage has been a very important, exciting topic. Precourt Institute plan to do this workshop for quite a while now. I want to spend the next maybe 10 minutes or so to share with you just the perspective of using metal hydrogen gas batteries. So let me go through the analysis I have, roughly the scale we are talking about. So based on the electricity consumption with solar and wind integration, 100% clean electricity. Assuming we store the electricity for 72 hours, that's about 200 kilowatt hour you're talking about. I mean, this is simple estimation. There's different timescale. This will be very compressed, but just give you an order of magnitude you're looking into. So what does this mean? This is using $100 per kilowatt hour system level cost. This will give you $20 trillion. If this needs to produce in 10 years, every 10 years you need to change. Well, that's $2 trillion per year. We also in the same time, the mobile application, 1.4 billion car running on the road, if you all electrify to the level of 70 kilowatt hour per car, this is another $100 trillion per kilowatt hour. So about $10 trillion market. Let's add this together. You're really looking into the orders of magnitude, 300 kilowatt hour batteries adding together. Our yearly production of the battery right now, after 33 years of lithium-ion battery ramping up, the current production, including the plant capacity, it's only one kilowatt hour per year. It takes 300 years to produce this. How do you speed up this? And then this gives you, you can calibrate yourself. Our production capacity per year probably need to scale 10 to 30 acts very soon, very soon. And this is from battery perspective. You're going to learn about other storage magnets from panelists as well. So let's look at the cost. The longer the duration, then the less time you are going to use. And the lower the capital cost you will need to be, for example, to go to seasonal. Very likely you need to, you've got to go to $5 per kilowatt hour. I don't see any battery technology can really get there, right? So and you've got to look at other storage technology and it's very likely we can go to week to week, maybe a few weeks and that level battery has the cost potentially go down to $20 per kilowatt hour. I haven't seen anything yet that could recently allow you to go below 10. And then the lifetime, if you use one day per cycle, right, that's you need 11,000, you do three days per cycle, that's much more cycle life you need. And you need to be maintenance-free at all climate conditions, very low temperature, very high temperature. Currently you all know lithium-ion require air conditioning and your solar is probably in a very hot environment. Your wind may be very cold. It needs to be very safe. Accidents keeps coming in based on the battery, cradle to cradle, recyclability. And also, by the way, that 300 kilowatt hour battery require many billion tons of materials to make it. And two days ago in Alumajandas Kino, you all heard about, we only probably have six industries. We know how to generate billion-ton scale of stuff, right, oil and gas, steel, cement, agriculture, the water we consume. And we don't know how to produce organic solvent, get to, you know, a billion ton. Probably not even 100 million ton level. So this probably is telling you long duration storage, very long time scale, get to billions of time scale. Lithium-ion batteries might be out because you don't know how to produce even electrolyte to get to that level. So this got us thinking, I've been working on this for about 15 years and I'm working on many technologies. Let me highlight one. First of all, can we have something that has very long lifetime? It's actually not easy to do, you know, to really gather technology can run 30 years. How do you prove that? Together with my students in POSA, we brainstorm about this. Then we ask the question. We said, what's the longest life battery ever invented by human history? What's the end of chemistry? What's the cathode chemistry? Well, it turned out to be hydrogen become water. That's the negative electrode of the fuel cells, very long life, a million cycles. And the positive electrode is nickel hydroxide become oxyhydroxide. We said, can we put this together to form a batteries? We invented the nickel hydrogen and then later we find out we were not the first person to do it. NASA has been using that and Hubble telescope for 30 years already, but people forgot about this chemistry. But the cost was too high. NASA used platinum as catalyst. So we placed the catalyst with transition metal and produced this beautiful chemistry. We showed that this can run in the lab at a time, 10,000 cycles up to that you still have 95 percent capacity retention. And we estimate this can allow you to get to the battery cost roughly 80 dollars per kilowatt hour at scale. This can get you 30,000 cycles. But that's a really good starting point. If you can get below 100 dollars per kilowatt hour with such a long cycle life, you are talking about per kilowatt hour storage cost is a cent or two or less. So that's very exciting to us. And then we say it's still a cathode chemistry. That's even cheaper. Instead of using nickel oxyhydroxide, can we use manganese? You will reduce the cost by 10 times in the materialist level for the cathode. The lab, if you can do iron, that would be even better. So we don't know how to make the iron to work yet, but however we figure out how to make manganese to work. So first time we invented manganese hydrogen gas batteries. We show this can run really forever. Very, very exciting. This chemistry can work well. And three years ago, I spun our company in the venue. They're really building the big battery cells like this, this big vessel, and really showing how long cycle life and the product level. And another key feature is safety. Every time you think about hydrogen gas, you think about, oh, that's not safe. Well, it turned out to be, after all the safety testing we found, this is probably safest battery you can see in the human history. You can put into fire, it never catch fire. It passed the UL standard, the highest standard of safety. And you can shoot a bullet on it, nothing happened. And this now allows you to do building integrated storage, not only the whole battery farm. And then this liquid solution with potassium hydroxide in there, the freezing point is below minus 40 degrees Celsius. It will work to very low temperature. It also works so well in high temperature, plus 50, plus 60 degrees Celsius. It doesn't degrade the performance particularly at this high temperature. So this is very exciting now. You don't need to have air conditioning to maintain it. Now the whole thing becomes simple. And the vendor is shipping out this shipping container or product. Yet it's even better now. You probably don't even need shipping container because you don't need air conditioning. You just build a roof and then you just pile up all these battery cells in there. Very little maintenance. So with that, let me summarize the scare we need is gigantic. And the dollar per kilowatt hour cost needs to be low. The longer the duration, the lower the cost you will need. And it looks like mid-metal hydrogen gas is very promising. I'm a person, my whole life has been working on lithium ion. I'm kind of like, well, you know, lithium ion. Now I need to, it looks like I'm saying bad things about lithium ion. But lithium ion is great for transportation. For great scare, maybe something else is needed. Maybe just multiple solutions depending on the timescale storage you need can come together. With that, I will pause right here. Thank you for your attention. It's my pleasure to invite Adam up to the stage who I think is going to switch gears and talk about bulk chemical storage. Yeah, that's where I'll end up Naomi. Yeah, thanks. I think you teed up a couple of the things that I want to talk about. I decided to take kind of a step back perspective on long-term storage and what do we think we're going to need and then hopefully end up at some areas that I think are promising. Human energy demands are clearly seasonal and they always have been. So we need material processing, food production and storage tend to vary over time. We need heating for surviving in hospital locations, cooling. That's a more recent comfort related thing that we do. I sometimes call this with students, I call it the Northern Hemisphere problem. The definition of the Northern Hemisphere problem is easy. It's that most people live in the Northern Hemisphere and most economic activity is in the Northern Hemisphere and demand is therefore seasonal. If we were latitudinally spread out in a more even way, you could imagine a really simple solution where excess summer energy in the North goes to people in the South, et cetera, with essentially North-South laterals, but we don't really have that kind of diversity across the planet, right? Actually the vast majority of people and economic activity are in the Northern Hemisphere. So we're faced with these seasonal issues. What does this end up looking like? Here's a, I wanted to sort of get empirical. Here's a monthly EIA residential total induced energy. So this is power plus natural gas 1973 to 2022 inclusive for the years. Each year is normalized by the average of that year. And so you can see in the, in December and January, we're at about 1.75, 1.5 to 1.75 our average. And then in the summer, modulo the small peak from air conditioning there in the middle in July, we're maybe at 0.6 or so. Commercial is actually a little bit more extreme. So commercial varies. That gets up to 2x or more in the winter. Industrial and transport are quite even seasonally over the course of the year, as you might expect. So we got residential and commercial swing wildly over the course of the year. What do we actually do to deal with this now? I started to say, and I still think this is true, this has got to be the least sexy and the least sort of understood part of the energy sector. The number of people who focus on underground natural gas storage and come to places like Stanford to talk about it is small, right? This is not a hot topic to be working on. But there are almost 400 active storage sites with a working capacity of almost five trillion cubic feet. So you say it again, five trillion standard cubic feet, right? It's at pressure, so the actual working volume is less. But five trillion standard cubic feet, that's five quadrillion BTUs or five exajoules. That's about five percent of U.S. primary energy use. And down here at the bottom you can see the sort of working gas flows. So let's examine what this looks like. This is net production in the U.S. of gas production minus exports plus imports. So this is basically production net of exports for dry gas. You can see it's month by month is actually quite even. And you might expect this, right? Because you invest in a well, you're going to kind of produce it evenly. If you can produce it now and sell it all the better, you don't necessarily want to wait. What does our actual consumption look like of natural gas? And this is natural gas for all sources in the United States. That's the blue line there. So you can see we've got two winter peaks here, the winter of 2020 and the winter of 2021. So that's production and net storage flows. So actually what we're looking at here is this dome here is moved from the summer to the winter each year. 2020 to 2021 the empirical amount was about 2.1 trillion cubic feet or 2000 BCF or kilowatt hours thermal almost about 0.6 trillion or 600 billion kilowatt hours thermal. So that was empirical storage in the United States. You see similar volumes in Europe and elsewhere. Okay, so what the heck are we going to do about this? Heat pumps are applicable in many locations and getting them to be applicable, I would say in most locations. So let's just assume all heat demand can be replaced with a heat pump. That's probably optimistic, but let's just say for residential and commercial, we can do that. With a coefficient of performance of three, that's again optimistic because in cold temperatures you're going to get some degradation, but it's not terrible. My system's about that that we just installed. So a factor of three reduction on that. Now you're talking two times 10 to the 11th or about 200 billion kilowatt hours of electric. So that's what we're going to work with. We're 220 million megawatt hours. Okay, so what the heck are we talking about here? We're talking about 16.1 billion Tesla power walls. I have a power wall. It's great. I'm an advocate. I'm actually going to maybe expand my system. But I don't know much. I'm a simple man. I don't know much, but I know that we're not installing 16.1 billion Tesla power walls in the United States. Happy to take any bets on that. As you mentioned, the economics are greatly disadvantaged for these kinds of systems by this few discharge cycle situation. These aren't actively used. They're slow charge, slow discharge over the course of seasons. And we've done this sort of activity over centuries, but it used to be firewood. You would sort of stack up firewood in the warm season, and then you'd spend it down. That's just not the kind of operation that these kinds of systems are built for. What does look like that? You'd say hydro looks like that, and it really does. Hydro is this seasonal scale massive storage. So we're still looking at this 220 million megawatt hours of electric. Right here, you can see monthly hydro output is something like 20 million megawatt hours per month. So about 10 months of hydro output. So now we're starting talking about the right scale here. 10x the current flow capacity discharged over like a three month period instead of over the course of the year. You'd have to shift all the flows to the winter. And this really is in direct contrast to the current system. The current system, really people think of hydro as an energy resource. That is true, but it's also a massive water management issue, flood control, agriculture, recreation, drinking water, downstream protection of cities on rivers and things like this. So we really don't run it primarily as an energy. We don't schedule it energy first. We schedule it other sources or other services first. So I'm a little skeptical that we could shift that there. Pumped hydro maybe makes more sense. We're just going to need to scale it. So here's a gross output electricity sent out. We're probably talking like a 50 to 100x scale up. Again, if we're, you know, we're trying to talk about, I think with, you know, long duration storage or this seasonal kind of effect, you just have to keep coming back to five trillion cubic feet, five trillion cubic feet, five trillion cubic feet. It's literally landscape scale. So pumped hydro makes sense in the sense that you can imagine creating reservoirs at this kind of landscape scale. Water, you know, I think there's some issues with the energy density of water, but you know, that said, this is, you know, maybe making sense, but we'd have to scale it up a lot. Actually, I think that prior estimate, maybe underestimating the scale of the problem, that delta, that old yellow wedge was relative to a flat, a seasonally flat baseline. So natural gas is coming out of the ground at an even rate, and then we have a seasonal demand. If we overlay and say, I'm going to produce the same amount of energy, but now I have this light red bar there, which is, I'm going to take the seasonal variability in solar output that we see in, for example, California and essentially modulate the natural gas output monthly. What we're actually likely to be doing is coupling a demand system where demand is winter heavy to a solar-rich energy system where output is winter weak or output is summer heavy. So the delta, actually, I think may be larger, and in this case it just comes to be about 2x, right? You could argue about wind versus solar. My assessment of the situation is that solar is growing increasingly important. The magnitude of the resource is at least 100x. Accessible resource, the cost curves are bending faster. It's less intrusive. There's lots of advantages of solar. So I think a solar-rich future makes a lot of sense. So maybe our sort of yellow wedge we need to fill in is actually a little bit bigger than we're talking about, so we're not at 16 billion power walls. We're at 30 billion power walls. Okay, so what the heck are we going to do? An obvious thing is to overbuild renewables. This is clearly going to happen. We're already going to do this for redundancy at smaller timescales anyway, and so we can do this, right? So we can build extra capacity so that in winter months you get more output, and then you just kind of eat the loss in the summer. You say, well, I'm just going to curtail it. I don't really need those summer kilowatt hours. Totally doable. We are definitely going to do this. You got to be really careful about the LCOE calculations, right? Because a barrier in an LCOE calculation is essentially a usage factor, right? So if you're building solar and you're only going to use it, you only really need the electrons that are coming out in November, December, and January, because that's when you're short, this really degrades your economics, right? And so in our simulations that we've run, we make very cheap renewables. It still wants to build storage, right? Because basically building those last units become brutally expensive, right? Because they're not used very much. So I think this is going to be done. The more of this we do, one thing to note, the more of this we do, the bigger that hump between the solar dome and the monthly solar dome and then the sort of monthly demand curve becomes, the bigger the excess becomes in the middle of the year, that actually increases the weight, the arbitrage weight on somebody trying to do long-term, or the arbitrage benefit of somebody trying to do long-term storage, because you're essentially loading huge amounts of essentially free electrons under the system in the summer that a long-duration storage system is going to be increasingly incentivized to grab, right? I think there's got to be some kind of chemical storage. I just really don't see how we can do this without something that looks like chemical storage. I don't know if your system is closed loop or not, and if you would consider that a chemical storage or a battery storage, but I really think it's, I have a hard time imagining we can't do this without chemicals. They're easy to move. We can pump liquids and gases. We can compress things. If you think about these 400 storage sites with basically landscape scale extent, right, they cover huge acreages. We're storing 5 trillion cubic feet of gas, right? If you can imagine creating synthetic chemicals and injecting them, I think this makes a lot of sense. The energy density of chemicals is wonderful, much better than hydro elevated, gravitational potential energy, et cetera. I don't think we need to be super sophisticated about this. I don't think we need incredibly selective catalysts where we're making pure ethane, or pure some bespoke molecule. I think if we get a mix of reduced chemicals, as long as they don't condense underground, I think this, you know, I think we could have kind of a mix of things. It could be a syngas with hydrogen and synthetic methane and, and sort of, we don't need, it needs to be cheap. It doesn't necessarily need to be the most pure stream, right? It's not a chemical process. It's a, you know, we're generating energy so we can burn a fuel mixture, right, that we generate. There is costs associated with conversion, but I think even at modest levels over, overbuild, which we're going to get because we already kind of have them, we're going to have a lot of low cost electrons. So I think the idea that we need to have some terribly efficient chemical conversion mechanism is not right. I think it needs to be cheap, but I think we're going to actually have, you know, it's that cheap, you know, efficient is nice to have, but, but cheap is more important because we're going to have an excess of summer electrons. We already do in California and it's coming, coming to the rest of the world very quickly. Thermal storage, I, you know, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of, you know, it's not a hot thing. Oh, I'm out of time here. Okay. So, you know, thermal storage isn't, this is not like a hot topic, but if you think about it, you know, oh, somebody said, well, long-term storage, it needs to be dirt cheap. Well, what's cheaper than dirt? We got dirt, right? So maybe if, if storage needs to be dirt cheap, we should actually use dirt. So we've got earth under our feet. That's a thermal storage medium, right? And so they're all geothermal heat pumps that have accessed this. I think the cost and reliability have not been there to date. And so, but if we could reduce the cost, you can imagine this very long-term gentle storage where in the summer you're extracting excess heat out of your house, putting it underground, warming the earth, you have this giant thermal battery under you, right? Our cities could get very warm underneath them. And then you slowly draw that down over the winter, right? And so I think this, you know, I, I don't know, I think there needs to be more work on, I know there's startups working in this area, but maybe there needs to be more attention here for this kind of gentle, long-term, dirt cheap sort of storage, you know, of interest. So that's it. Those are my thoughts. Sorry for, I ran over a little bit. James Klausner is up next to talk about thermal storage. Where are you, James? Oh, there, oh. I thought you'd disappeared on that. Okay, great. Thank you very much. I'm James Klausner, and I come from a company, Redox Blocks, which is a startup company that came out of my laboratories from University of Florida and Michigan State University. We moved our headquarters to San Diego, and we also have business offices in Dornburn, Austria, going after the European market, and we also have some facilities in Bend, Oregon. And our last speaker, Adam, to quote, unquote, said, thermal storage is not a hot topic. No pun intended, right? Well, let's see if I can make it a hot topic. So what does Redox Blocks do? We're looking towards decarbonization and using our thermochemical energy storage technology for global decarbonization, and we take a systems level approach and look at various opportunities where thermochemical storage can fit in and decarbonize various entities. So there's basically two business sectors we're going after. One is industrial heat and provide a zero carbon industrial heat solution, and the other is grid scale electricity storage. And this workshop has been mostly focused on grid scale storage and the grid. Our early entry market for sure is industrial heat just because we can get into that market at a much smaller scale. We look at grid scale storage. You've got to be a much larger scale to be relevant, and that's a longer term market. So we have different strategies for those different sectors. But essentially, the value proposition that we bring is we can be a drop in replacement for natural gas combustion. And the advantage that brings is if you put in electrification and storage, you do not have to pay the capital cost of a new piece of equipment. You can just retrofit it with electrification and storage, and you save that capital cost on an electrified piece of equipment. And how can we do that? We deliver high-temperature gas at 1500 Celsius, which is about the same temperature as combustion gas, and so we can be a direct retrofit. And then we provide the advantage of storage is we can grab electricity while it's being curtailed, store it, and deliver it as high-temperature heat for various applications. So what is thermochemical storage? Most people haven't heard of this type of storage, but essentially we're taking renewable electrons from the grid. We dissipate those electrons into high-temperature heat, and that heat is around 1500 Celsius. And we drive a chemical reaction, it's a manganese-based solid-state compound that's in a spinel phase. And when we heat it up to 1500 Celsius, it goes in the forward reaction that's shown, which is highly endothermic. And it releases oxygen, so we get oxygen out, pure oxygen out as a byproduct, and it goes into a chemically reduced state. And in the configuration that we're developing, we basically have a packed bed of material. The pelletized material that goes in the packed bed is shown on the lower right-hand corner. And again, as Adam said, you need a deep dirt sheet material, and these are basically materials that we dig out of the ground. And so we can produce these pellets at about $600 per ton. Because we're storing energy chemically, we have a very high energy density, 2400 megajoules per meter cubed, which is the same energy density as lithium ion, although we're delivering heat, not electricity. So we want to recover that heat. All we need to do is bring air and blow air through our bed of pellets that are in a reduced state. The oxygen in the air reacts with the pellets, releases that heat. It's a highly exothermic reaction in the reverse direction and releases high temperature heat at 1500 C. And so you have oxygen depleted air now at 1500 C. You can send in to, in replace of combustion gas and whatever equipment you want to electrify and store energy. And so obviously, high temperature industrial processing is one application. Another application is just retrofit a combustion turbine with high temperature heat, drive that turbine, and put electricity back onto the grid. So we look at this as reversible combustion. A lot of the innovation is in that material, because it's very difficult to find a material that can reversibly go through oxidation reduction reactions. That's redox blocks, by the way, for many cycles. So one configuration that we have is essentially the system is extremely simple. You have a steel shell for containment. You have refractory insulation lining the interior. We have refractory brick surrounding the packed bed of materials. At high temperature, our material is electrically conductive. So when you want to charge the system, you have electrodes that either end of the bed, you bring electricity, charge the system, it acts like a giant resistor, heats up, we suck out oxygen, put it in a reduced state. We want to get heat back. We just have an air pump air through the system and we get heat back. Very simple system. It does a lot of things in a very compact and simple way. Likewise, we can have a similar type of configuration, except with an air pump we just put in a combustion turbine and we use that combustion turbine, the compressor to push air through the system and expand hot oxygen-reduced oxygen-depleted air through the combustion turbine to put electricity back on the grid. So if we combine this system with a combined cycle plant, we can get about 55% round-trip efficiency on the industrial heat side going from electricity to heats, about 95% round-trip efficiency. So one really grand proposition is to take existing assets such as a combined cycle plant that you might otherwise shut down or you might just have it sitting idle for most of the year and just bring it online for resiliency or you can convert that asset that already exists into an energy storage plant. By retrofitting with thermochemical energy storage, you can replace combustion with the high-temperature oxygen-depleted air coming out of the storage system and run that system to get extra capacity factor out of it. The other thing you can do, you can run it in a hybrid mode if you don't have renewables available, you can still burn gas through the turbine and put energy on the grid for resiliency, for grid resiliency. The other nice thing is it's an inertial asset which has benefits for grid stability. So if we compare just the metrics of this technology versus molten salt, we have about three times the energy density of molten salt. The material cost is about a quarter. High temperature is more than double and we have a very fast charge rate and the charge rate is very important. To the left is a 100 kilowatt pilot we have going on in Bend, Oregon right now. Upper right is the project we have in planning with a California utility at a two gigawatt hour scale and this shows you scale. Lower right is an industrial heat application for a foundry melt furnace and decarbonizing metals casting in foundry industry. Just real simple economics on energy storage. If I define R as the difference between my spread where my spread is the selling price minus the purchase price and R is S minus operating costs, the number of cycles for payback is simply the capital cost of storage divided by R which is the revenue I can generate per cycle. My profit is basing my capacity times R times number of cycles minus my initial investment. So what does that tell us? We need a low capital cost to make storage, give a business case around storage. We need a large spread. We need as many cycles as possible and we need a large storage capacity. So we want to cycle as much as we possibly can. So daily storage is a lot easier to make a business and it's still tough to make a business case than seasonal storage. You want to be able to have a large spread between what you're getting electricity for and what you're selling it for and therefore you need to be able to charge very quickly. Let me just say who we are. Many of you in the Bay Area know Dane Boyson who I recruited to be CEO of Redox Blocks. I'm a co-founder. Scott McNally actually is a graduate from Stanford as our VP for business development and we're a company in growth. We have a number of projects in the pipeline right now looking at deploying thermochemical energy storage and we couldn't do it without our partners. We're a small group but we have great partners to work with and hopefully we can start making a difference in deploying and growing this technology. Thank you very much. Our last talk is Eric Flexton, COO at Emergy and Eric's going to be talking to us about hydro. All right so it's user friendly. Well congratulations you've made it to the last speaker on the last day. I'll try not to take too much time. So Emergy who are we? I'm here to talk to you about. I'm going to share a lesson that I learn every day from our founder who actually I'm standing in for today Emily Morris. If you know the book Traction we got together because she's the visionary and I'm the integrator. Excuse me. So I'm the one trying to make the vision happen but she's the one that reminds me every day not to let facts stand in the way of where we're going and when we look at what challenges are in front of us related to long-term storage my goodness it's easy easy to get paralyzed. If you're like me I look to folks like our CEO and co-founder. I look to folks like many of you in this room to inspire me for what we can do to solve these problems. What Emergy is we're the crowd sourcing part of this. We're a very small fraction of what the solution is but there's an army of companies like us out here or out there that are hitting all these little pieces of the puzzle trying to solve what the bigger problem is and we're all working together to do it. So I loved hearing the last two presentations for sure where the where the rubber meets the road and some of those that I've talked to you today love hearing the ideas and you know just keep keep on it. So Emergy what are we doing? We are providing distributed hydropower. We're looking at how to utilize existing infrastructure to provide distributed hydropower and I'll tie this into storage here at the end. So there's existing water infrastructure all over the world. There's riverine structure. There's hydropower dams. There's irrigation systems. There's municipalities. You have this water that's just flowing downhill and it's energy. She talked to any of the folks that operate these systems. It's their dream to be able to pull the energy out of it and put it back into the grid or put it into their pumps to pump groundwater or put it into their pumps to redistribute somewhere else. So that's what we're doing. It's a we're taking a known technology. We're leveraging all of the hard work that many others have done in order to make this what we believe finally economical. And so as a company we recently finished our series a we got a good amount of funding to have some great investors behind us. We have a great slew of customers that believe in what we're doing in these irrigation districts and we're doing everything we can to take advantage of these existing existing resources. So you can see in the photo there they're like SUV sized vertical access turbines is the core technology. There's a typo there that's 20 to 50 solar panels each not 200 to 500. These are these turbines are generally five kilowatts to 25 kilowatts if you're wondering the size of an individual turbine. When you look at it globally there's millions of miles of engineered canals. We're also working on an RPE grant right now in order to get this into the riverine environment. But when you look at engineering engineered canals you have control of the water flow. You have zero almost zero environmental impact issues and the size of our systems can move very quickly because they don't they're exempted from FERC licensing. So we're looking at this global market. We're focusing in the western U.S. and a few international targets initially. But this is this is the market that we're looking at. So for applicable sites you know irrigation waterways farmers they're really interested in what we're doing. In above and below dams whether it's run of the river with a long open channel as a penstock or it is just the feed-in channels or the head races and tail races of dams. Some of these like working with the site in Laos they have you know 20 megawatt site they have 800 kilowatts of parasitic load and we can address all their parasitic load with these turbines up front. So this has real economic impact on a pretty broad array of opportunities. From the benefits clearly it's it is all existing assets so the infrastructure is minimal. The the owners and the users obviously they're getting the the revenue from the the generation and in the case of dams that I was talking about that lost potential they're capturing basically every every bit that they can get out of it. Let me go to the next slide here. So doesn't a lot of smart people in this room this is not complex technology there's nuance and what we've done in terms of this vertical access turbine to make it more efficient and there's a ton of nuance in how we are controlling the turbine to make it more more efficient. You essentially the turbine is driven by velocity and water depth those are the that's what that's what makes us work and the you know the the power output is the the cube of the velocity so we the faster the water goes the the better but we can still only get about 80 percent of the potential energy that's in that there are the kinetic energy that's in that water we can get that out into our generation and then there's some fraction of that that we lose and losses to get it to the get it to the wire so we're about 50 percent of what's in in the water that we can get out of it but it's the simplicity which is what drives our technology. This is a it's a concrete flume its own ballast is what keeps it in the in the channel itself and it's a cantilevered turbo and then on shore we have our controller and we use right now we're actually just using PV inverters so all that PE inverter development that's gone on over the years we're just tying that to the output of our power conditioning unit and our controller so that's the the simplicity part of our technology. What we're doing for these water managers is we're giving them two options one is to own it that's the option two here but they don't have a whole lot of funds in order to spend on energy and they they know water they don't know energy so what we're doing as a company and what's driving our business is that we are actually giving them the opportunity to just basically rent us their their channels to put our turbines into their waterways and pay them a fee and possibly sell them back the power at a discount from their existing rates or in some cases they don't buy the power at all we just sell the power and they get a fee for us for letting us use the water so these infrastructure water infrastructure owners now have this incentive to operate their their water infrastructure in a way that provides them some economic incentive and that's how we get to this point of where where we impact storage in the the regional storage dilemma I should say so these are some of the advantage that we bring again no construction we generate a new revenue that they otherwise wouldn't have this this point about giving them a more intelligent system we are now putting things into their water and knowing more about the water than they currently know and understand so we're giving them tools to better get water where it needs to be and deliver it to their own customers not only to produce energy but this also helps them in how they produce or how they meet the needs of their own their own customers um and their water supply needs um these are just some of the key things that we that has making our technology um cost effective today so that actually produces a value to um us to investors and also to those that are buying the power so these are kind of the key points that that lead to this final or the key notes that leads to this final point of resulting our systems can result an hourly daily or potentially even weekly um uh energy storage shifts and energy delivery um we are now giving the owners and operators and economic incentive that they didn't have before we're giving them um additional revenue and so they have flexibility through their own systems um through the impoundments that that already exist for when they're going to hold water when they're going to release water how much water they're going to release at any given time and how that relates to the economics of the power and the revenue that they can revenue they they can receive from the power they produce um in terms of what we're doing in in uh some of the advantages um or some of the things that are making this possible for us as a company is the knowledge and understanding of the water system infrastructure around the world this isn't something that um folks are cataloging but yet now this is what we're doing we're becoming the experts and uh having the greatest understanding of what uh what and where water is on a regional regional level and so we're using that working with working with um power needs and water district um water delivery needs looks like I need to I need to hurry up here in order to um uh help provide power on a on a regional very very localized level um but uh regionally and even globally so this is where we are today happy to say actually today we got a uh an award from an old green power um we're working um in projects in Denver and California uh Utah area um Utah yeah sorry Utah Nevada and uh New Zealand so without any further ado I'll I'll get quiet and we can I guess invite everybody back up here and have uh Q&A all right we covered a lot of ground but I don't think that we covered all of the technologies out there so you know it's it's amazing all the work that's going on in this space um so we're about half an hour um I'll maybe ask a couple of questions to get things kicked off but um you know this is your opportunity to uh dig in and ask your questions too so uh please start thinking about those okay um e I'm gonna I'm gonna start with um you know something you said right at the beginning you know you really laid out what an enormous challenge this is I mean it's it's mind blowing right um and the need to not just develop technologies that uh can meet the terawatt magnitude but also the need to do that really quickly and um you know you've you've had a lot of experience both on developing the technologies and bringing them to market so you know how are we going to do this and and what do you see as the main sort of market and regulatory factors that are impacting scale up if I use the um I think this is probably highly sector dependence what technology you are thinking about uh if I look at the the battery domain I think the current policy is highly supported investment going in it's gigantic notice one thing ahead of us the challenge is actually geopolitics uh that indeed make it uh you can say public attractive for for us domestically because IIA but in the same time it also make it challenging if you source internationally the supply chain uh want to reduce the cost I think that's one type of risk we have been facing right now I think each company probably not just the battery but also others needs to really generate the international strategies you need to look into how if you import something you know you have the tariff if you you couldn't get the IIA coming in what's the cost you get internationally versus produced locally you need to go into that very careful uh calculation in order to uh survive and the second thing is I think the mining industry the pressure is building up we're looking at lithium right lithium supply is going up now come back down and that at some point is going to going up again uh uh nickel uh as well uh nickel is not distributed uniformly so each of these from global supply chain consideration uh there's certain policy regulation you will need to consider uh yeah I just pause right there are there other comments on market regulatory factors that are impacting you know getting this to scale from the other panelists well let's say from a making a business case point of view um storage is very challenging a business case can be made um it becomes a whole lot easier in country where there's a carbon tax that business case is is a much easier case to be made um we don't have that here and so um you'll see a lot less penetration and enthusiasm for storage unless the business case can be made yeah was the IRA you know kind of helpful enough what do we need come on well certainly the subsidy for storage um is really important and that helps a lot um but right now we can't say what that is because the rules um from the treasury department haven't come out yet so we don't really know what the rules are now we're waiting on those clarifications yeah for sure now we can add in something here this is what I learned through uh empress uh uh the my first startup company the CEO the the teams experience now pretty soon I'm going to learn from in the venues experience as well building our manufacturing plant I don't know what's your guys experience um the regulatory requirement can slow this down tremendously you can have the best schedule say I'm going to get this up and running in about a year maybe in reality this can be two to three years for new technology coming up you are really leaving on that three six months or for cash right so a company probably I don't know you do have a year cash in your company you can run for so long and this delay will probably impact this huge risk right there and how do you get into the environmental approval and then get into local communities you know signing up need to approve your your case to be a manufacturing plant so each step adding together will probably slow down the whole thing tremendously this needs to be considered when we talk about scale talk about speed and speed is also important without the speed your desire to go to go to scale fast actually will be kill you even faster because you want to go to scale fast without the speed yep not for sure when you're looking at scaling and you're you're tied to predicting what the what some of these regulations and things that are preventing you or maybe maybe incentivizing you the IRA's incentivizing us and some of the some of the definition is not there yet but when you're looking out five years from now 10 years from now the I think Dr. Chu was saying this morning the political opposition the political arguments of this of where it's going to be make it that much harder so if there can regardless of which maybe direction the winds are going to understand what you need to plan for is a key part of making business decisions to spend money how fast are we going to scale how confident are we going to be that something's not going to change next year so that lack of consistency is difficult to manage I'm changing gears a little bit you know Adam we talk a lot about the use of gas for seasonal storage and and various other chemicals can you talk a little bit about you know your view of how the gas and electricity systems are today and what would need to happen in terms of I guess integration in order for them to kind of really operate in a mode where we're able to leverage the gas for seasonal storage yeah so that's an excellent question you know I think we've got half of the piece very clearly right now and that we've got huge amounts of infrastructure that can take stored gas and we can store you know like I said cubic kilometers trillions of cubic feet of gas and then we can take that very flexibly very rapidly with very great responsiveness to the power side that's obvious we've got combined cycle gas turbines we've got simple cycle open or open cycle turbines we've got so we have well you know everything we need on the gas to power side you know as power becomes primary in use is electrify and you know homes businesses commercial industry switches to electrons which is happening rapidly you know I think we're essentially going to need that other the flip side of that right if we're going to make use of the gas infrastructure and so you know I don't know where we're out on that I know a lot of people at Stanford are working on this I think there's probably sort of a suite of opinions on that I guess I would say that that you know to reemphasize what I said before I feel like a coupling where you know as long as it's reason the capital cost is reasonable it's not clear to me that we need something like tremendously selective it's not clear that we need something that's you know creating you know 99.9 pure ethane that air gas is gonna or air product or someone's going to sell you in a cylinder as a reagent grade product right I think we can go you know kind of simpler than that and I think you know so I think we're going to need that and and something that you know that Chris said I think makes it makes a lot of sense I think with the gas system the gas storage system plus gas turbines if you think about that it's a massive system where we have greatly decoupled the energy side from the power side and that's a really important feature of like Chris's technology where you can essentially containerize or flow battery like technologies in general you can kind of you know you can decouple that right and that's one of the issues with the lithium ion batteries if you have these very different durations Tesla needs a very different duration from a from a home storage sort of system right you need to have a very different energy to power ratio and so I think essentially what this massive you know four trillion cubic feet of gas currently gives us is this huge energy resource that then we can bleed out through gas turbines or other uses over over time and so we're going to need something that looks like that and that's kind of why making use of that chemical infrastructure we've got makes a lot of sense I don't know what the molecule is going to be I don't know if it should be hydrogen should it be should we make synthetic ethane I don't know you what the what the right molecule is. Let's say natural gas paths to CCUS is so well okay so that's the other option so that's that's the other option to say for the time being forget storage earth is already storing the molecules for us pull them out burn them and stick stick the CO2 back on the ground so that's the other that's the other piece I gotta say you though the like I've been going to CCS or CCS adjacent conferences for a long time I'm fairly skeptical that like I don't know I just worry about the politics of CCS at least in the United States or places like California I just I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to for that to happen all right I'm gonna I'm gonna change gears a little bit Chris you know I've been thinking a lot lately about you know the sustainability issues kind of a holistic level and you've obviously you know come out of the electrolyzer world or the pure electrolyzer world and and you're thinking about this too can you talk a little bit about the importance of sort of thinking about the materials that we're using because we're talking about systems that we're going to have to scale up and you know I I saw you had your materials kind of what you're using it's like steel right it's just cheap steel can you talk about the benefits of that I'm sure you've thought about it a lot with regard to electrolyzers and this is maybe you can sort of cover that space and and share some of that yeah sure yeah I mean exactly like you said we come from that electrolyzer world and this is sort of like a packaged up the battery is sort of like a packaged up electrolysis fuel cell type of a system but the advantages there are that we the resource constraints are not something that we have to deal with in that same way right I'm not an expert on the specifics of the lithium nickel cobalt you know evolution but I know there are limitations there if you go down this road at least for the bulk storage then there's certainly no no resource constraint you know steel and CO2 of course very abundant I really like your Adams analogy about the natural gas storage being our natural gas caverns being storage right and and nature kind of stored that away for us for eons and now we're just gradually using it up so we need to do this in real time right so we're just kind of trying to do the same thing but not obviously not not not made eons ago to do it right right away so yeah but also just to say nothing against lithium ion and nickel hydrogen all that for a short duration I don't think it's going to be a single thing I think actually might be two things but the short duration would be providing a small fraction of the energy capacity of the system maybe five percent or something but actually be able to uh to do the bulk of the power capacity exactly because it's very cheap of course yeah some of these new batteries are very high c rate and you can do the peak power transients and stuff like that so some complementarity there for sure yeah so we're not in competition with each other right we're all going to be important my guess is there's going to be probably three classes would you say two or three classes like a medium very fast response a short in a or a fast response medium response in like a long long term weeks to I don't know that would be my guess yeah um just a couple more questions before we get to the audience one so James you know yesterday I moderated a panel on um heavy industry decarbonization can you talk a little bit about why heavy industry would go through this kind of pathway rather than just electrifying directly sure so um anyway our customers are not benevolent um they want a business case and you have to make a business case so um you know from what the way we're doing it using storage you can grab curtailed energy that's low cost as long as you can charge very quickly and then deliver energy that can compete with whatever other solutions there are and so that provides that provides a business case I think from a global perspective the the trending thought is that we're going to decarbonize industry by electrifying electrify electrify electrify everything um my experience getting my hands dirty and going on to customer sites is that the electrical infrastructure if they're using gas they don't have the electrical infrastructure to electrify to the um power and capacity levels that we need to go to and so I think the grid is not ready for all of industry to electrify at this point and in addition when you're building your economic case you have to factor in that you have to buy a transformer um that's going to be on the order of a million dollars or so to transition from a gas to electrified solution all right questions from the audience raise your hand and we'll come over with a microphone David with marata electronics you guys have laid out the problem it's very large we need to move very fast at the same time you're laying out a roadmap that's going to take some time so how do we accelerate some of these technologies faster so that we don't have to do more in the future feel free to jump in and answer that easy question ye share with you by experience you need to know the end first what does she say to get to the end uh the scaling problem right there this every detail component you need to put in for example cost reduction you might need to let at the beginning but you're going to find out later it's going to come back to buy two very fast as simple as a carry gas uh of decomposition something instead of using argon can you use nitrogen that may your cost difference tremendously but this can change things so you need to design your final product the processing we stay in mind and come back to do your r and d having that input very early on every component at the end matters we look at all the technology right here i've been listening and i say wow you know i can think of a number of questions i want to ask or have you considered this have you considered that this eventually all contribute to your cost work on those very early on otherwise this will come back to uh to hit you yeah i would also add that we have to be doing a lot of projects and the every project we do there's a learning curve and we learn more and allows us to scale and and get bigger and i think the investment from department of energy through ira has been very beneficial in bringing customers to the table that would not otherwise have come to the table and i think that's very important and once they come to the table they can see what the possibilities are and they're willing to go forward with projects with or without government funding but um to get them to the table that's been that's been really crucial hi uh jenny millen pre-court institute for energy so i have more uh curiosity questions here and i'll try and just ask one this one's for eric um does that technology affect the flow rates at all of the places that you're putting these to take out this kinetic energy and also have you done any um big systems analysis to look at other factors that might affect the flow rates like droughts and done that over over a period of time uh looking out into the future thinking about what the trends might be and what that would look like in terms of the energy you can get from this the easy answer on the first one is uh yes it does change velocity for sure um it doesn't although it's a hydrokinetic and it does so it's not a head based system it does cause some water level rise so there actually is a drop through the turbine as it goes as it goes through and it backs up and slows down in front and speeds up so you have to put enough space between them to get the velocity back in order to put another turbine in so you can't just back these up against one another so there's a limit to the array size um some canals you know the width there's only one turbine other canals you can have eight turbines across so these arrays can be tens of kilowatts to you know small digit megawatts um is the size there we're also looking in order to to maximize the benefit to these systems we're looking at some cases where we will line canals prevent water loss back in the seepage but that speeds up the water um and we can create more energy create money create revenue to pay for the lining so they don't lose the water um in other cases we're actually putting solar dragging solar so canal floating solar between our turbines cooling the panels preventing evaporation so there's a bunch of opportunities that we can take advantage of there in the second half of your question did i answer that no future trends that might affect the water oh that's right that's right so this is a very obviously our investors in our projects and the banks that we're working with this is a very significant issue that we have to talk about in some cases with climate change it actually the trends are that it's making the models better but when we look at a typical project we look at a 30 year um 30 year history so most of these districts actually even if it's handwritten they actually have a pretty good history um and so we can use that history to predict what the performance will be in the future recognizing that there'll be drought years there'll be high water years um that all the part of the economic performance all has to work hi yeah uh Wenning Zhang uh SCRB new energy so you and uh you're all talking about the speed and the scope and uh talking about so many technologies and from t r a l level i can see from all different the level right i mean and uh james probably you probably maybe t r a l level is pretty high i will see probably eight nine or seven and the yeast nr value probably maybe six or seven right i saw some demonstration i just want uh understanding from chris and also james uh what is your t r a l level and i see i see a lot of cartoons i have not see the prototype i just maybe for our audience to understand what is the level and how far how quick can bring to the market thank you i can go yeah i i think uh right now we're t r a l level six i i do think i did show a slide that showed a uh prototype in operation um right now but it's not in a commercial scale yet and for us at the industrial scale about a megawatt and 10 megawatt hour storage is about the minimum capacity that's industrially relevant and so um that's what we're working towards right uh i didn't include a slide on the with photos sorry about that so um if you search for our name though there's some news articles from a couple months ago that have some lab prototype photos so check it out but um yeah we're on the earlier t r l side compared to what was just what you just mentioned uh but we are working on uh towards the first demo system uh for real world field testing uh next year yeah where will that be uh we got started in california nearby yeah okay great questions i only can i ask a question here yeah please do i want to ask uh quiz a question so that's uh the the battery the carbon CO2 it looks like you also use temperature do you use high temperature when i look at your presentation i think your presentation may be the similarity in terms of oh right um yeah we're we're not that hot but uh but there's a there's a hot zone exactly yeah as you as you might know uh salt oxide fuel salt related technology yeah the energy conversion is um is in that is in that hot zone um okay which is both uh you know it's like you pay with it's annoying there's heat management but it's also where enables it to be you know high router efficiency and and work as as described basically right so 600c 800c maybe you can not tell us inquiring minds want to know as a scientist just keep thinking i think got to be high temperature i was thinking about temperature range yeah it's already too parasitic load no for sure it doesn't need uh it doesn't need heat input though it's self-sustaining right so yeah okay great any other questions from the audience okay i so so you know earlier today maybe we can kind of use the last couple of minutes to to tie this together we were talking about um different requirements for storage and specifically you know around the world right different geographic locations i would love to get your thoughts your a ha's listening to that on how you imagine you know your particular technologies that you've been discussing today fit into that kind of geographic distribution of how we're going to have different storage um around the world in various different regions i'll start because i with water yeah i will i'll start because i have the the incremental impact but on a very broad scale um i mean i guess it's not necessarily an aha moment but it what we're trying to do and the impact that it has on storage is by giving um making tools inherent to the operation of an existing system so that it has a positive impact on the the time use of energy um so just the built in economics of the system today help levelize that particularly you know here in california excuse me california places that have time of use um uh expenses associated or rates associated with with uh power so i would say that there i i would say there's two cases um one is where you have operations in remote areas where you don't necessarily have a grid and um thinking about remote mining in australia where they have a lot of renewable assets and um need storage to um be able to scale and in australia for various reasons there's um growth in the mining sector so then i would say also in regions that have very high natural gas or have to bring in lng um storage will play an important role in thinking about asia and parts of europe um then south america where there's like chili um also remote mining regions that um storage is important asset to the renewables that they deploy yeah yeah uh this morning i was teaching so i didn't know what's discussed in geographic dependence i would guess there will be different temperature conditions at different places of the world from our customer for example for nicohydrogen why they like it as soon as they talk to us they say this is what we get out of lithium ion because our solar is so hot right there and then your your battery life for the lithium ion will reduce tremendously then you need to turn on the air conditioning so so much then your energy efficiency just go down so much they look at this very wide temperature range of performance high temperature low temperature maintenance free that's exactly what you need for the uh you know where you can generate energy that's one the second thing is the safety so so important a company you know higher in the executive level or local government official they could lose their job easily because of safety incidents so remember that safety is absolutely got to come out come up as one of the top field considerations into may so you want to have accident free of storage so that has been attracting customers a lot just within the the nation so in the venue already have purchase order pre-order adding together seven to eight gigawatt hour already so that's a huge purchase order right there so we see this from customer feedback they really understand what's on the field they need and I think all the technology eventually want to share is the audience right as a professor I like to publish science and nature paper and it's that top performance get your science in nature once you really talk about the real world problem and then there's seven eight ten things you need to consider all at the same time and then what's the technology really winning out you got to do it on the field then you truly understand what does it take I think that feedback will be very important coming back to that question is a scale speed you want to go to the scale your technology got to work first right so you want to have speed and then when the technology work the cost is attractive and then people will be willing to put an investment to scale with speed it seems to me that I my boy was sick this morning so I had to miss the I'm not a Stanford folk we're here sorry it strikes me that the the storage story is going to be like the renewable story and that there's going to it's going to be very very regional so you know Chris had a cumulative state of charge and discharge curve those are going to be wildly different in different parts of the world right and and actually they'd be even more different than you think because you go from like San Diego to London for example not only does your solar resource degrade but then you get this cumulative compounding effect of like it's also cold at the same right so you get you get this double effect of like when your solar resource is bad your heat demand is high and you're sort of your cumulative demand over the course of the year your sort of cumulative sizing duration curve you know really can change a lot and so I'd say it's it's it's super premature to say although you can do back to the envelope kind of stuff but I think it's probably really premature to say one region will need this and one region will need that I think the reality is different regions are going to need different mixes of different technologies just because you know the if you're in Costa Rica like well okay it's you know humidity changes a little bit weather changes a little bit but you're you know four degrees off the equator the seasonality that we see in the northern hemisphere doesn't exist right or if you're in Singapore Hawaii or something like that it's very even over the course of the year other places not so much right and so I think it's yeah I would say it's it doesn't need to be the same answer every even it's not necessarily a bad thing it's just each region will have to kind of deal with it right I can to say from our perspective we're pretty excited about trying to enable some locations that don't have a strong fossil grid already right so they can sort of you know you've probably heard about that they bypass the land lines and go right to cell phones kind of thing so but it's kind of a balancing act we have to weigh the logistical headaches of trying to do that soon and then also the IRA is here right yeah that's actually really impactful that big changes that just happen there so yeah well I you know I think having listened to the conversation throughout the day one of the things that I wanted to mention to sort of close this out while we have Anna from the DOE in the room is that you know for hydrogen and carbon management we have this national support right to do demonstration projects to really kind of accelerate trying these technologies right so you know I like this idea of being able to try things with low risk right we need to sort of successfully fail right in order to find the right solutions and so it strikes me that you know we've got so many different technologies that are going to solve different parts of the value chain and to the uninformed observer I think it's not clear that these aren't in competition with each other that each one is kind of got these niche this role to play right across the spectrum in terms of power and storage duration and so you know I think this sort of community needs to come together more often to really sort of emphasize that we're all working towards the same goal to provide reliability and to figure out how we put a value on that so that we can get more incentives in place and more opportunities to actually demonstrate these technologies in the real world so I with that I thank you all for your contributions and please join me in thanking our panelists