 Good afternoon, and welcome to today's energy seminar. Actually, a little bit of backstory. One of my favorite things about this class is each quarter we have our student course assistant nominate their dream speaker. Usually it takes a while about a quarter to schedule it. So I'm pleased to announce that last quarter our course assistant, Paul Walter, nominated Bill Gross. And of course, so many people here already knew him. That was kind of accepted by acclimation and our little seminar planning committee. So I think Paul is actually registered in the class this quarter. So thank you, Paul. I'm very excited to introduce our speaker today in Paul's suggestion. That is Bill Gross, who's probably best known for being the founder and chairman of Idea Lab and more recently, the founder and CEO on the energy side of Heliogen. He's done a lot of startups, 150 to be to count to enumerate them. At least 50 of them have already been successful in IPO. This is a little bit like baseball player getting about 800% or 900% in contrast with the usual league leading 350 or 35% hits. So that's a fantastic record. He is truly a serial entrepreneur. Very grateful that he's spending more and more of his time now in energy and climate. So he will talk to us today about his entrepreneurial journey to solve climate change, wins, failures, and lessons learned replacing fossil fuels. Take it away, Bill. Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure to be here. Thank you for that kind introduction. Really excited to share my lessons learned with you and the story of how we got to today, which is really perfect timing for actually the world wanting to solve climate change, finally, which is a great thing. Well, my journey started a long time ago. I started getting addicted to entrepreneurship at a very young age. I was selling candy at the bus stop in junior high school. I was buying candy bars, three for a quarter or eight and a third cents at the Save On drug store in Southern California, and then marking them up to a whopping $0.09 so I could beat the student store price by a penny. And I made $400 selling those candy bars. I had a lot of fun doing that. And I wanted the money because I had just taken wood shop in seventh grade. And I wanted to buy some power tools so I could do some woodworking. And I used that $400 to go out and buy a old rusty shop Smith, this five in one power tool, which I de-rusted and rewound the motor and started using it to make all kinds of things like checkerboards and lamps and bowls. And I even made plexiglass telephones. I really had a lot of fun doing that. I used to go down to the Rose Bowl Swapmeat and sell these things. I took out a little tiny booth and sell these. But then I had a transformational moment. And it was during the 1973 energy crisis. Oil and Bargo caused gas stations on Ventura Boulevard to ration gasoline for $5 per day. You only could buy $5 per day of gasoline based on the last digit of your license plate, whether it was even or odd on odd or even numbered days. So my mother couldn't get enough gasoline to drive us to school. I started riding my bike to school eight miles to high school. And I started thinking on my whole ride there, this is ridiculous. There's some other country in the world that could decide to place an embargo on the energy we need to live our lives. We've got to solve this. And I started going to the library after school every day and reading everything I could about solar energy. And I started making little parabolic concentrators, first out of cardboard and tinfoil, then out of aluminum and glass. And I was reading popular science magazine and Scientific American and popular mechanics. And I saw these little ads in the back of popular science magazine, little classified ads you could take for $25. I took out one of those ads and said maybe I could sell these plans for the things that I'm making. So I named my little thing solar devices. I took out these ads and I sold little plans called the parabola and the sterling engine. And I sold these plans for $2.50 and $4. And I used to sit in the back of English class with my little peachy folder and open it up and draw how I was gonna make the parabola sectors and write out the words for my plans. And then I would go draw them up as carefully as I could and type them up on my little typewriter and sell these things for $4. And I keep my customer lists. I actually used to go to library too and learn everything about direct mail marketing. And this turned out to be useful to me later in life as you'll see in a moment. But I learned everything I could about how to test different propositions and what types of envelopes perform better than others and what types of stamps perform better than others. And I really had a lot of fun trying to learn everything I could about how to make a little business grow. Well, then I got accepted to Caltech and I think I might have even got accepted to Caltech because I had written about my application about my little solar energy business. And when I graduated from Caltech it was actually the exact month when the IBM PC was released. So I went down to my local computer land in Pasadena bought an IBM PC, learned how to program and I made a natural language interface for Lotus 123. Lotus 123 was the big selling spreadsheet of the time. In fact, Lotus was the first unicorn software company. They were the first billion dollar software company. Microsoft wasn't public at that time. They were only like languages and a basic company and DOS. And Lotus was a successful company. I made this product to work with Lotus 123 and Lotus acquired my company for $10 million after I had come out with that product. And that really gave me an exciting taste of the software business because I moved back to Boston. I stayed at Lotus for six and a half years and learned everything about that industry. And then when my son started kindergarten I started another software company called Knowledge Venture and that was to help kids fall in love with learning. And that company we grew and we sold that company for $90 million to Vivendi. And that was the exact year that Netscape had its IPO. And think about this, Netscape had its IPO. I was blown away by that. They had 30 million global internet users. Think about how small that number is today. It's almost laughable but I thought that was a huge number because now you could talk to those customers directly. So I had all these ideas for new businesses that you could start that would take advantage of this new browser. And I thought, I wanna start many of them. I don't wanna start just one of them. How could I do that? And that was my idea to start this technology incubator. It was 1996. We started this business idea lab basically as a business to create businesses. We would house all the shared resources for company creation and we would do multiple companies under one roof. And my concept was basically to model it after Edison's labs as a startup studio. And at the time, no one had done this before. I think we were one of the original startup studios but now it's been imitated by hundreds of people. And I'm really glad because I think it's a great model for causing innovation to happen. And what we do is we look around and we say, what are big problems in the world? Things that are big and broken and how can we use technology to fix them? And what we try to do is develop a process that enables that to unlock human potential. The whole structure is to enable people to come together and solve those problems. And we've worked very hard to improve that process over the last 25 years. The very first 12 companies we had in 1996 were these and some of those went on to go public which gave us the funding to continue to run idea lab over the years. And now over the last 25 years we've had more than 5,000 different ideas. We filter those ideas down before we start the company because a lot of those ideas are not very good ideas they're just initial concepts. But from that we chose 150 companies to start and we've had 50 successful IPOs and acquisitions from those. Now through that time though we lived through some very, very tough times. We lived through the whole dot com crash. That was a very tough time but then we started companies even after that even in bad times it's a good time to start companies. We started a company in search where we invented keyword search advertising. We started a company in robotics. This was a indoor navigation robot that we eventually sold this company to iRobot. We started companies in three printing this company desktop factory. We started companies in automotive transportation. This was a streamlined vehicle called Apptera that we had created and we started companies in solar. And we really came back to my true love with solar. Once I realized I had the resources to build a machine shop, to hire engineering talent I really discovered I wanna go back to what I was doing as a teenager but now do it properly and you'll hear more about the things I'm working on in a moment. But first I wanted to share with you some of my lessons learned that are applicable across entrepreneurship in general but some things that I took away that I'm applying to my recent endeavors. So Idealabs actually having its 25 year anniversary this coming Sunday. And for that I've tried to come up with the 25 biggest lessons that I've learned over the last 25 years and share those. And I'm gonna start sharing those one a day starting next Sunday but it will take too long to share all 25 of those with you right now. So I picked top five things that I'll share with you right now and you'll see how they're applicable but I'd love you to come back if you're interested and hear more of them. But these are the top five things that I wish someone had told me 25 years ago before I started Idealab. Well, the first thing is finding great timing. How important timing is. You might have an idea ahead of your time and you might be ridiculed for it but if you have an idea at the right time it really, really can make a big change in the world. Now almost all great ideas will be ridiculed at first and then possibly violently opposed once you start threatening people. And then if you persist through that period it can be accepted as self-evident. If you make an idea go through all three of those stages then you really have changed the world. You've made the world, you've made something come into being that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Now it's really great to make that happen. It's really hard to make that happen but the part about finding great timing is looking around and seeing if the world is really ready for what you have. And I would say back in 1973 when I was working on solar energy the world wasn't ready for what I had. Back when I tried it again in 2000 the world wasn't really ready. When I tried it again in 2010 not really ready but today the world really is ready. A number of factors have come into play to really, really make the timing great for clean technology and it's really a great frontier. I'll talk more about that in a moment. Second idea, finding product market fit. You've heard this term before it's a really, really critical term. Getting customer delight having people pull from you what you're making as opposed to trying to push it on them is super, super important. But what I learned was it's very, very hard to get that right out of the gate. Meaning you have to iterate to get that. You have to start with your premise but then you have to test, test, test like crazy. And that goes back to my early direct mail testing I used to do where you change one little variable at a time and see if that works better. It's almost like AB testing but it's AB testing on your concept and on your market. I really, really think that's important. Sometimes it only takes a very small twist to take something from not so exciting to very exciting but your job as an entrepreneur is to find it. And I have this Mike Tyson quote on here. It's kind of funny that I have a Mike Tyson quote in a story at a Stanford presentation but his great quote is so relevant to this. It's everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And of course that's relevant for boxing but it's really, really relevant for business. And I call the getting punched in your face in business is your customer saying no or your customer not taking what you want or you're not finding product market fit that's getting punched in the face. But adapting to those punches and iterating based on them is what it takes to get successful. And I didn't know that when I started I really thought that you could come out with the idea just go with it straight out and everybody would love it right away. And that's not, that almost never happens. It's very, very rare that it happens. And even when that doesn't happen sometimes the story gets told after the fact like that happened that's not really true. So I really, really want to stress how important finding product market fit is. And then similarly along the similar lines is being remarkable. There's a great quote from someone I work with saying advertising is a tax on being unremarkable. And by that he means the cost that it takes to try and convert someone to wanting your product if it's not remarkable on its own is often more expensive than the profit you can make on that product itself. So finding a way to make your offering exceptional really, really thinking through in the customer's mind what would make this exceptional and finding a way to stand out is much, much more important than I ever realized. And then number four, building a complimentary team. Well, you've all heard about diversity and how important that is and getting other ideas from other people and people different than you. I didn't really understand that. When I was first starting my businesses I was just trying to find more people like me. I was trying to hire friends of mine from Caltech and other people, great engineering people and other great minds and great passionate people who are hard workers and great work ethic. But I eventually learned that that wasn't enough that you actually need people with complimentary skills to fill in the gaps that you don't have that one person can't have all the right things to make a company succeed. And I'll give you a quick example just looking at these four sort of exaggerated caricature personality types. If you start off with an e-skill like the entrepreneur the e-skill is what's required to start a company. The e-skill is the person with the idea with the invention with the concept and the e-skill is always what has to start the company because you can't start it with something else. And if this axis is time and this axis is success the e-skill can start out and grow and make some progress but eventually if the e doesn't get anything done if the e doesn't produce anything or finish anything the company will eventually fail. So the company needs to bring in some p-skill. The p-skill can come a little bit later it can come from the e. So the entrepreneur can also be someone who knows how to finish things but if the entrepreneur is just a dreamer better get some p-skill. The p-skill could be programming, product development engineering, execution, but you have to get that. But even when you get that you still eventually fail if you don't bring in some a-skill the administrative skill the ability to keep the trains running on time the ability to pay the bills the ability to collect the receivables the ability to open a bank account and keep it full all the other things that often the e-skill and the p-skill don't have you need to bring that into the company. And again, it's not like any one person is just one of these things alone but you need someone with a preponderance of that skill to make the company successful. And then finally you need to bring in the i-skill to really have a company running at prime that can run for a long time and grow. You need to bring in the integrator skill and the integrator skill is the skill to help resolve conflict. The integrator skill is the skill to help all three of these other people get along because really in the extreme these three kinds of people hate each other's guts because they just think about things differently they just don't look at the world the same way. So you really need to have all these things in good harmony to make a company grow. I didn't know that. I didn't know that till way too late. It's really, really important advice for a company's success to have this diversity of skills to really make it succeed. And then finally being persistent this might seem kind of obvious but this line here is really powerful to me. The emotional journey of creating anything great is going to have probably a dark swamp of despair somewhere along the line in the middle. There will be challenging days. It's how you manage that adversity and cross this dark swamp of despair to get to the other side that really matters. And what I've learned from advising so many companies from starting so many companies is to expect this to not give up when that happens because it really is a part of the game. And this dark swamp of despair happens for almost everyone. It's very, very rare that a company just goes up and to the right on day one. It happened to Steve Jobs. It happened to Walt Disney. It happens to everybody, almost everybody because making something that actually makes the world a better place that changes the world is challenging and it's gonna meet with resistance and it's gonna have problems along the way. So learning how to power through that is very crucial. So those are just five of 25 lessons. But I wanted to share those with you but also tell you how they're relevant in a moment to the problem I'm working on right now. So I said earlier, find, look for opportunities that are big and broken and then brainstorm technology solutions to fix them. Well, what's one of the biggest problems in the world today? It's the extra heat that we're adding to the earth. The extra heat that we're adding to the earth with what we're putting into the atmosphere is the equivalent of three Hiroshima bombs going off every second, not three Hiroshima bombs at all. Three Hiroshima bombs per second continuously. That's how much extra thermal energy we're adding to the earth because what we're doing to the atmosphere. So I really wanted to solve it. I was really trying to figure out what's my purpose? What can I do the best at? I saw these T-shirts that said my purpose is and I got two of these T-shirts, my son and I filled it out and my purpose is to solve climate change. Like how could I actually make a positive impact on solving climate change? And why it's so important? Well, we are really, really trash in the earth. We are putting trash everywhere into the sky. We're putting it on the ground too but here's some numbers that are shocking to me. Every person on earth makes about one pound of trash each day that they put into landfill. So seven billion people on earth, seven billion pounds of trash every day. Less well known than that is that each person on earth is putting 31 pounds of CO2 trash into the atmosphere. So we're putting 31 times as much mass into the sky as we're throwing into the garbage pan every day. It's unbelievable. If we could see it, we would be horrified. It's invisible so we don't but here it is visualized. This is how many cubic meters drawn to scale to a person of how much CO2 each one of us on average is emitting every single day. If we could see it again, we maybe would have acted sooner. Like if you saw that pile of trash on your back after a week or after a month, you'd say this is insane but we don't see it because it's invisible but we're pouring that into this thin sliver of our atmosphere and we're treating that like our landfill. And of course that's causing great change to the world. We're getting more severe fires, more severe droughts, more severe storms, much, much more worse to come but it's really, really amazing what we're about what we have done and we're about to do by pouring so much trash up into the sky. And of course it almost sounds trite but the solution is simple. The solution is really just four words but those four words are very hard to do. They are stop burning fossil fuels. Well, why is that so hard? Well, fossil fuels account for all of our comfort and convenience. We don't wanna change our lifestyles. Everything comes from the cheap energy that we're getting by burning fossil fuels. In fact, if you look at a graph over time this is a graph of GDP per capita pre and post the industrial revolution. So you can see this is 800 years here. You can see GDP per capita is chugging along, chugging along, chugging along, barely, barely growing. Then we learn how to burn stuff and it takes off like a rocket ship. It's because once you can burn things you get so much energy, so cheaply that it really does account for our convenience, our comfort, our productivity, our safety and of course dramatic GDP growth. And of course, in addition to that, it's a big industry. That's why it's so hard to combat. The global GDP is $86 trillion. Energy is 10% of that or $8.6 trillion a year. So you've got $8.6 trillion of annual spend on energy and every single penny matters in price because people really, really care about the cost of it. In fact, this is the graph showing what percent of market share or how much energy you get from different sources as the price goes down by one penny approximately and every penny you trim from the cost of energy, the market goes up by about a trillion dollars. So that's how valuable every shaving of penny matters and people don't wanna pay more. When, right before COVID, when energy prices had gone up, people would riot. People in France were rioting, people in Iran were rioting because prices of energy were going up a little bit. Basically what was happening is some of the subsidies were being taken away and people were protesting because energy mattered to them that much. So how can we make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuel? Cause that's really what matters. We will drop fossil fuel when we have a source that's cheaper. Well, I think there's one simple answer and it's use Moore's law, use computation and use automation. That's how we can beat fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are so cheap that we have to be very, very smart if we wanna compete against them. And it's mainly because exponential curves crush linear and nothing's ever gone down as much in price or as fast as the cost of computing power. And if you take a look at this, this is a graph of a few different commodities. You could look at beef, you could look at oil, you could look at coffee, you could look at anything and they all fluctuate over time. They go up, they go down, they go up, they go down but they all relatively hold. The only thing that goes down continuously you can see here on this green curve is cost of computation. It doesn't go down a little bit, it goes down a trillion times. I mean, obviously the number of transistors we can put in our chip has gone up so much and its cost gone down so much that if we can harness that somehow that's how I feel we can actually compete with fossil fuels. So I'm gonna show you two particular ways that we have worked to harness that. Now we need to do thousands of things. If we wanna really make a difference to all that CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere we need to do many, many things. I'm gonna talk to you about just two of them. Energy storage and converting solar energy to fuel. Those are two particular things I'm working on in a company called Energy Vault and a company called Heligen. But I wanna show you how we applied that process of thinking, the entrepreneurial process of thinking those five rules plus the other 20 that I'll share next week but also how we use Moore's law creatively to try and compete with that low cost of fossil fuel. So first let's take a look at why energy storage is so important. Well, solar and wind have both had dramatic reductions in cost. Wind because of the learning curve, solar even more because it partially takes advantage of Moore's law by silicon wafers and enhancements there. It's not computation per se but it's the same manufacturing techniques that were used to make microprocessors to drive down the price of the wafers and PD panels. But we've seen a 22 times price decline in wind and a 200 times price decline in the actual solar panels. And what does that mean? That means that we had a major tipping point in all of history in 2017. In 2017, for the first time in all of history we can make renewable energy electrons during the day cheaper than we could make fossil fuel based electrons from a generator plant. So basically wind and solar at two cents and three cents a kilowatt hour beat coal and oil and other fossil fuel plants by a penny or two pennies, it was remarkable. It's a huge, huge change and it's very, very impactful and of course wind and solar are being installed at very large rates. The problem is they're intermittent. The sun is mostly at noon or around noon, middle of the day and the wind is mostly at night and it might be windy, it might not be windy whereas a fossil fuel plant you can run continuously. So how do you make up for this intermittency problem? You need to have storage. It's basically because renewables have fundamentally won but at the wrong time of day, meaning you might not have it when you need it. So what do we do? We need to come up with low cost storage, a way to store energy, which when added to the price of solar and wind can yield based load power that's cheaper than fossil fuels. When we can do that, then we really can change the world because then there'll be no obstacle. Solar and wind are already being fossil fuels when they're running but how do we beat it when they're not running? Well, that's why we need storage so badly. Storage is very, very hard though. Storing electrons is very, very challenging. The three major ways to store energy are chemically with batteries of all types, thermally with hot or cold or mechanically with gravity, compressed air or fly wheels. And the price we need to get to is very, very low. We need to get to a very, very low cost to make that work because I told you we need to make the price of storage plus the cost of renewable energy less than fossil fuels. So we only have a few cents. If you can get solar for two cents then you need to make the storage for three cents if you want to beat five or six cents. And right now, fly wheels are 45 cents a kilowatt hour, flow batteries are 28, lithium ion batteries are 25 and even pumped hydro, which is the cheapest, pumping water up a mountain, letting it flow back down to turn a generator back in the other direction when it flows down is 17 cents. That's the cheapest right now. And we need to get to three. So we need a factor of almost six to get down or a factor of more than eight over lithium ion batteries. So we set out to see is there some way we could take the idea of pumped hydro a very mechanical system, but somehow add some new angle to it, including possibly Moore's law to drive that price down to get near that three cent number. So we took a look at pumped hydro. It basically needs a mountain with two reservoirs and that's 17 cents a kilowatt hour. The first idea we had is a company that we started called Energy Cash. And that was to lift gravel up a hill with something that looked like a ski lift with buckets. So we wouldn't need water. We wouldn't need a reservoir. We wouldn't have any evaporation, but we still would be storing energy with gravity potential. And we weren't able to make the economics quite work, but we built a full 50 kilowatt system to demonstrate this and look at this fundamental idea, but we couldn't make the economics work. And as I said, maybe the timing was wrong. This was back in 2010, 2011, when the price of solar energy and wind energy wasn't cheaper than fossil fuels. So even having storage that was cheaper wasn't really gonna make that much of a difference. This company actually went out of business, unfortunately. But I came back and started looking at it again because I saw how important this problem was and I thought that there would be a correct timing. Of course, it turned out to be now. But I started looking at this again a few years ago to see is there some other way to revive this idea, but maybe make it simpler, maybe not need a mountain, maybe make it more cost effective. One idea we looked at was building a mound of gravel. That was even more expensive because this pyramid of gravel is upside down the way you want it. You want all the mass in the top, not a small pyramid with the dot on the top. But of course, the pyramid won't hold up if you turn it upside down. Then we looked at building a big concrete silo. Maybe we could pump water up into a silo and have a pond on the bottom. That was too expensive. Then we looked at making a thin steel silo because that way steel is better in intention than concrete. That was still too expensive. But then we even looked at making a tapered steel silo where it was two centimeters thick on the bottom to hold the pressure at the bottom of the tank, but only one millimeter thick at the top where the pressure is much lower. That did save some money, but still only two cents. You can see we're trying all these different iterations. Again, this is going back to the iteration lesson I said earlier, trying and trying again to see if we can find some way to make it work. Pressure was killing us at the bottom of the tank here. Then we came up with the idea of dividing the tank up with little curved bottoms, almost like the bottom of a coke can or the bottom of a wine bottle or champagne bottle to hold the pressure. That did help and enabled us to not make the whole tower and hold the entire pressure of the height of the column of water, but break it up into floors or different heights. That helped. Then we looked at making optimally shaped elliptical metal cups with concrete spacers. We even looked at making a building out of aqueduct like arches inspired by the aqueducts in the South of France heading over to Rome. Really, really great ideas, but we still couldn't get cheap enough. Eight cents was pretty good, but it's not three cents. And then we even looked at lifting a weight with a crane, which is really, really bad because you have the whole cost of the crane holding up that weight and all the steel and all the cable to hold it. But then we had a eureka moment. It was basically idea number 51 almost, trying all these different ideas. And the eureka moment was playing around with my son in the shop at home with a little toy crane and stacking some blocks. And the eureka moment was stacking the blocks. Don't just lift one block, but build a stack. By building a stack, the crane is only holding the weight of one block at a time, not all the weight, and you're leveraging the capex of all that over and over again. But this was how we could feed in Moore's law. We could make a computer controlled crane that could use computer vision to automatically stack the blocks. Now a single crane like this was too expensive, but then we got the idea of having a symmetric crane. So we'd be lifting weights on the left and right simultaneously to lower the amount of steel required for the torsion on the main shaft of the crane. And then we came up with the idea of six multiple arms where there's always weights moving in a ballet like sequence. Again, all computer controlled with computer vision to automatically pick up the blocks because you can't afford a crane operator to do this. This idea looked promising enough finally to form a company. So that led us to form the company energy vault. We raised some initial capital, small amount just to build a prototype. We bought a used crane and we took that used crane and prototype lifting 55 gallon drums filled with cement just to see if we could automatically stack them and build a computer vision system that would make that work and it worked. That was enough to say, let's do all the math on the idea and come up with a system that would look like this. At a wind farm, you could add this crane, you could have the blocks automatically stacked. They would be in the low position when you are uncharged and then as you put energy in from the grid or from a wind farm or a PV farm, you build up this tower, now you have all the energy stored and then as you lower the blocks back down, you can get the energy back. It's a little bit like pumped hydro but it's actually more efficient. It's 85% round trip efficiency from the losses of the pulleys, the gearbox, the motor, the motor generator, the flexing of the cable but that's actually better than pumping water which is about 79% and almost as good as a battery which is about 89%. So it's almost as good as charging and uncharging lithium ion battery but it's way, way cheaper than lithium ion battery because we basically can make the blocks pretty much out of dirt because we just need mass. So you don't need expensive elements, you just need mass. To make the blocks really cheap, we came up with a really simple way of using a polymer to glue the dirt together basically that's cheaper even in cement and we only coated the blocks with cement on the top and the bottom so they'd be very smooth and flat. We even can use rubbish inside the blocks. We can use crushed up freeways or crushed down buildings. We can use recycled negative cost materials on the inside of the block because we just need the mass there and the end result is something that looks like this. This is an animation of a cutaway of it. The crane comes down, the two fingers go in, lift up the block, grab it. We had to make a grabbing mechanism but the computer vision is how it locates the block, lifts the block up and stacks it up on the top of the stack and now that's the stored energy and then when we wanna pick up that block and lower it back down we can lower it back down to get the energy back. So that was the concept. We made a rendering of what it would look like in this particular valley in Switzerland where we had the permit to go build this and this one tower 75 meters tall would store enough energy with the blocks to be able to make this entire village run on renewable energy overnight. And this is the concept and now I can show you a picture of the reality. So that's the actual crane now fully constructed in operation right near Lugano, Switzerland. And just to show you the scale of this because this is a little bit far away from a drone take a look at this as you get closer you can see the blocks on the ground there. This is now lifting up on the blocks and there's one of the 35 ton blocks being lifted up. The blocks move about one meter per second and they get all automatically lifted. Again, the cameras on the lifter locate the block automatically and stack them automatically. And again, just to show you what it actually looks like here's someone standing on one of the 35 ton blocks on the ground sideways. It's four meters tall left to right in this picture. You can see the two holes where the grippers come in and lift the block up and it's four meters by two meters by one meter and 35 tons. And after we introduced this to the world we got huge global demand. We have many, many billion dollars of demand because anyone with renewable energy farm of some kind can make that energy more firm and more valuable just by adding storage. And like I said, it's very, very hard to store electrons. We're not actually storing the electrons. We're storing it basically in potential energy by having a generator take the electrons, lift the weight up and then the generator makes electrons again when we lower the weight back down. So it's cheaper than chemical storage because we don't actually have to have chemicals that can have all the capability of holding the electrons directly. So that's energy vault and you heard the story of a lot of iteration a lot of trial and error a lot of coming back to the market when the timing was right and a lot of Moore's law because without computation we have NVIDIA cards doing all the graphics processing we have all the software control system doing the optimization of the movement of the crane we have to have anti pendulum code to take out wind forces on the crane all that stuff has to be done in real time. And again, computation is expensive to develop but free once you've developed it. So to replicate that it's very, very affordable to make each additional one and we can locate these almost anywhere because it uses a relatively straightforward crane system. Yes, we modified it on the top with our custom six arms but other than that it's crane technology that's been around for a long time and we're very excited about this potential. The next thing, solar energy to fuel. There are many, many places in the world that can't just use electricity. It's very, very difficult to electrify aviation. It's very difficult to electrify cement making, steel making, a lot of other industrial processes either need high temperature heat or need fuel all day long to operate. Well, if we want to take out that CO2 we have to have some way to make fuel from the sun. So we set out to do that. The fuel market is 25 times larger than the renewable electricity market. Renewable electricity is a great, great place to be but it's much, much smaller than the total size of coal, oil and gas. And if you want to fuel to replace those dirty fuels there's only one choice, it's hydrogen. Hydrogen is the only fuel which when you burn it produces zero emissions. The problem is usually when you make it it produces emissions because you usually make it from methane or from some other place that releases CO2. Hydrogen, fortunately, is the most abundant element in the universe. Last week there was a great, great talk here at Stanford on hydrogen and how abundant it is but how exactly on earth it doesn't, it isn't found alone. It is always connected to something else. It's either connected to fossil fuels that basically in hydrocarbons or it's in biological mass or it's in water. Obviously there's a huge amount of hydrogen in water but it takes a huge amount of energy to split it from all those things. Right now, hydrogen is so abundant but almost all of it is dirty. I say dirty meaning releasing CO2 because if you create it by splitting it off of CH4 which is where 99.9% of the hydrogen in the world today comes from is taking methane and splitting it by steam methane reforming, heating it up and splitting it off but that releases CO2. For all the hydrogen you get off, you release CO2 and it's basically a third the cost of splitting hydrogen from water. Now you can split hydrogen from water electrically but if that electricity is not renewable then there's no point because if you're gonna make CO2 in the splitting you may as well just split it off of methane. That's much cheaper. So you need renewable electrons that are cheap and always available to make electrolysis cost effective and that's what we set out to do. So we set out to make something which we're calling a sunlight refinery, something that can enable this energy transition. Our concept is a one six square mile modular plant that produces either five megawatts of electricity continuously all day long and I'll tell you more about how we do that or 850,000 kilograms of hydrogen per year. So we can produce green hydrogen affordably because we're running all day long and we have low enough cost electrons, low enough cost renewable electrons to make that work. So concentrated solar has been around for a long time. This is what concentrated solar normally looks like. A bunch of huge mirrors, they concentrate sunlight to a tower and you make steam. Well, steam is not quite hot enough to make electricity at high enough efficiency or to run around the clock to make hydrogen. So we wanted to go to higher temperatures and we were looking at the way people did existing CSP and we said we think there's a way to use Moore's law to dramatically improve on this. The reason is everybody's making these mirrors really, really large. The reason they're making them so large is they found a local minima on cost. That local minima on cost occurs very large because if you have to put a pole in the ground and you have to survey where that pole is very accurately and if you put that pole in the ground very, very straight and you have to use a crane to put that pole in the ground and they have to build a foundation to put that pole in the ground then you need to make the mirror very, very large to justify all those costs. But what about if there were some way that you didn't have to survey and you didn't have to calibrate and you didn't have to put a pole in the ground and you didn't need a foundation then you would want to make many, many, many small heliostats, many, many small mirrors but you need some self-organizing system that can control all those things because now you're not going to be able to control them from a clock drive because you know where the heliostat is. Now you have to use some kind of feedback system. So we worked on many, many iterations again hundreds of them, different sizes, different styles different methods of control and we finally came up with a way to make a computer vision system that would not only control the mirrors very accurately but it wouldn't require them to be precisely located and we could get way, way higher temperatures. We could get all the way not only above 1000 degrees centigrade but all the way to 1500 degrees centigrade and this is what the system looks like from above and this is what the control system looks like it is a series of cameras that look at the field in real time and do edge detection on all the mirror boundaries and look at the sum of the intensity of all the pixels within those boundaries and by comparing those pixel intensities among the four cameras which are located around the tower figures out how every mirror should be moved to perfectly correct for its placement in the field irrespective of any movement over time irrespective of any wind irrespective of any thermal expansion irrespective of any ground shift erosion anything and it's actually a closed loop control feedback system. So this uses a huge amount of processing power but who cares? We can buy an Nvidia card now for $399 that was basically perfected from cryptocurrency mining and virtual reality gaming that can do all this in no problem you can buy it at Amazon for $399 and yes it took a lot of software to do it but now once that's written it can move every mirror super precisely in a distributed way that gets the focus so much better and I'll show you what I mean by that. The focus on our tower is the size of a basketball hoop it's 18 inches in diameter and we can get all the light from all the mirrors and all the field into that tiny spot so we have a huge concentration ratio allowing us to achieve those temperatures but also it allows us to make the mirrors way cheaper because we're not required to make the system super stiff and rigid the accuracy is being achieved through feedback not through stiffness and that is way, way less expensive. So now we achieve these high temperatures through closed loop control and now we take that high temperature and we store it in rock again, gravel bed we heat up this gravel bed to a very high temperature the gravel bed can either be underground like this or it can be above ground like this we heat up the rocks and now the rocks stay hot for a week the rocks are very, very cheap thermal storage very, very cheap energy storage because again, it's rock it's $2 a ton for gravel from the local quarry and if you compare it to electrical energy storage again it's way, way cheaper lithium ion batteries are in the $150 to $250 per kilowatt hour range some day they'll be down in the hundred to $175 range maybe they'll even break a hundred storing in molten salt which is another way of storing thermally is $50 to $75 a kilowatt hour and gravels down your $2 a kilowatt hour so it's two orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries very, very inexpensive to store energy thermally in rocks but only if you start with the sun if you start with electrons it's very, very inefficient to take that convert to heat and then convert back but if you're already starting with heat then rocks are a great way to store that heat and only convert to electricity once when you need to on demand to make the energy that you need so the thing about this is we can have a what's called a high capacity factor we can be on almost all year long 85% plus capacity factor solar's down to low 20s wind is in the low 40s maybe even in low 30s maybe the low 40s if you go offshore but having a high capacity factor is what allows us to make hydrogen for a very, very low cost so we believe we can make the first hydrogen ever for lower than the cost of splitting it from natural gas so no CO2 emissions and lower than that cost and it really came about because of Moore's law Moore's law made the big difference because we can use less materials because we're using software instead of steel we can use less labor because we can make this in a factory instead of in the field we can use less calibration because we basically have no calibration is effectively always calibrated there's no pre-calibration phase because the closed loop control every 30th of a second it's being recalibrated with camera based software so what does this mean when you can make green hydrogen in the desert? It means that Saudi Arabia could take only about 4% of its land area maybe take some land where there's nothing else that can be done there and in 35,000 square miles over here they can make equal amount of hydrogen in dollar value as all of their oil exports so think about this any sunny region can now be a fuel exporting region so this can actually have geopolitical implications because you can now make a fuel that you can move with electrons you can't move them that far a couple hundred miles before there's too much losses but once you have a molecule you could put it on a ship you could put it in a pipeline you could move it all across the world just like we move our fossil fuel all around the world on ships if the ship stopped right now civilization would stop because we would run out of energy very, very fast almost like the embargo that I told you about back when I was a teenager so my dream with heliogen is to build someday a thousand of those towers a thousand of those modules a thousand of those one six square mile units someday a thousand of them in North America and I can make energy for all of North America because I can move it around someday make a thousand towers in North Africa, Middle East and I can bring that power, the hydrogen into Europe and someday in Australia make a thousand towers and power Southeast Asia well think about these numbers if we could someday do 3,000 towers let's say by 2030 or by whenever my dream would be to do it by 2030 the energy produced by those towers and the CO2 avoided by 3,000 towers would equal 5% of all of humanity's annual global emissions so we actually have a chance to be a major, major impact on global emissions now 5% is not 100% we have to get to 100% but that one company alone could even conceivably do that is very, very motivating to me it's why I wake up every day excited about heliogen's prospects it's why we're able to recruit great people to the company and we are recruiting we definitely need more people to help us do this so we're looking for great talent in all areas in business and engineering and across the board, analysis, everything so we really, really want to make this happen and we're super excited to make it happen if I summarize the whole energy horizon in three short slides, I would say this we first got all our energy living in the biology era where all of our energy came from plants from our muscles and from animals muscles and we built civilization on that and then after that, we lived for many centuries on that and then we came into the chemistry era where we got all our energy from burning things I showed that to you earlier that's when the Industrial Revolution GDP per capita took off once we learned how to do that but I feel that we are now entering and we need to firmly enter the physics era the physics era is when we get all of our energy from the sun, wind, nuclear, anything but burning stuff if we can get all of our energy from physics and not chemistry even though there's some chemistry involved in the process we're doing but there's no burning of anything then we really, really will have made the world a better place, we really, really can power ourselves renewably and I really, really think it's an incredible time for that the timing is right I also think I have to say from a sweeping look at many years of entrepreneurship tough times, good times right now is the best time in history for entrepreneurship, why? There's more money available the whole world is reachable when you have an idea now you could reach the whole planet think back to Leonardo da Vinci in Milan if he had an incredible invention he could maybe, maybe make it to Florence and if he spent months on the horse he could get to Rome but now we've got the whole world you have an idea you can find the pockets of customer interest anywhere there are and there's four billion devices in the world always on users and then of course this energy transition is the biggest opportunity in history we're about to remake the entire energy system it's trillions of dollars of opportunity and it's good for the earth so it's really, really exciting also the world's at a place now where I'll coin an Andreessen Harwitz phrase permissionless innovation where you could just go do many of these things you don't need anybody to approve it like it used to be there were too many gatekeepers between the entrepreneur and the customer and now you can tell the world your story and go straight from your idea to end customer and that's really, really exciting and I pretty much feel every business can be disrupted with new technology so you can use your brain power to look for a problem in the world and it's every aspect of mobile data AI, computation power you can apply that to every aspect of life and really, really make an exciting difference so if you have an entrepreneurial bone in your body I really encourage you to tickle it and give it a try I'd love to help you if I can I'm completely, completely swamped and overwhelmed with energy vault and I'm running Heliogen right now I'm really trying to make that a success but if you write to me at Idealab I'll try and introduce you to someone who could possibly help you if you're interested but first I want to take questions from you and thank you very much you've been a great audience thank you so much Thank you Bill, that was fantastic you did indeed get a lot of questions and fortunately you probably anticipated some because someone asked in the beginning you answered before you were finished which is probably something you're used to doing a couple of little quips I don't know if these people are in the ridicule or the violently opposed category even I thought about this so on the energy vault stacking the blocks is that vulnerable to heavy winds and weather or earthquakes? It's not vulnerable to heavy winds and weather because the blocks are so heavy relative to their frontal area so that's not a problem they are vulnerable to earthquakes and we did have to do extensive simulations at Caltech, San Diego and Berkeley shaker tables to simulate an entire system and subject it to an 8.0 earthquake and prove that the way we're interlocking the blocks make sure they are safe and they are but it took a lot of design of the friction of the way they're connected the interlocking pattern and so on to make that survive but that was a very, very big challenge it led to some interesting new research I think Caltech and Berkeley will publish these papers soon about this new type of frictional absorption of energy in a typical steel building you've got resonance modes but there's not a way to absorb the energy by things actually sliding on top of one another so we don't design the surfaces to make that work but it does work but it took a lot of work, yep Wow, so spillovers at that so here's a two edge very perspicacious two edge question so you laid out the case for your way of making green hydrogen and so kind of the two edge sort what are the, and your review what are the barriers to make the 5% and if you think they're achievable why not go for 100% Well, I do want to go for 100% I just don't know if our company is scale enough to reach the size of this problem but I would love everybody to emulate this I want people to learn from what we're doing and copy it I want people to start other companies that go after this and we are not the only way to make green hydrogen so I'll tell you some currently very cost effective ways to do it waterfalls so in Tasmania there are waterfalls in Finland there are waterfalls well, if you have always on renewable energy from a waterfall you could connect to electrolyzer and make hydrogen pretty cost competitive right now the problem is there aren't enough waterfalls they're all used up so we're trying to make a waterfall a waterfall quote into desert we're trying to take desert land and effectively turn it into an always on system but combinations of PV and wind in critical locations where you can get a high enough capacity factor that could work new innovations to drive down the cost of the electrolyzer that can work other techniques now you can't fundamentally fake out water and split water for any less than X kilowatt hours per kilogram of hydrogen you can't do that but you can be clever about how you put in the energy you can be clever about how you recuperate the energy you can be clever about some of it being thermal not all electrical so we're working on things like that too but we won't be able to solve the problem alone because it's so big it's the entire energy system but I want to show the way that people can each make a meaningful impact and if we get 20 people doing 5% we did it or 100 people doing 1% then we did it so hopefully this is inspirational to others to go after this because we need a lot of people working on this now an interesting set of questions in one of your EP are you already thinking of enhancements to the basic helio strategy that could attract more customers in bigger markets yes so we are looking to do a whole bunch of things we're looking to improve the technology a few percent every year meaning come up with new ways to either get higher temperatures higher efficiencies anything we can do we're looking to do better manufacturing techniques to drive down the cost every year another thing that's happening in the world without us doing anything is people are finally putting a price on carbon the price on carbon was only about 10 euros per kilogram last year it's up to 40 euros per kilogram so it's $49 so now people are paying $49 a ton well if that goes up to a realistic price that will cause a lot more innovation too because now you can capture some of those externalities like right now the other industry isn't paying for that externality and we're not getting any credit for it you know we're working so hard to have no CO2 and no one's giving us any benefit for that well as the world starts to realize there should be a price on throwing trash in the atmosphere that will help even more of this and we're counting on that as well and of course there's a lot of good tailwinds right now obviously the new administration rejoining the Paris Accords other things are gonna cause a lot more demand California going all electric vehicles by 2035 GM announcing all electric by 2035 I think just this weekend Volvo announced all electric by 2030 so that's gonna mean a lot more demand for electricity moving away from fossil fuels of course if you make that electricity with coal that doesn't do any good so we wanna make that electricity renewably and that's why we're so focused on coming up with ways to make 24 seven electricity at a low cost. Before we get to our concluding question on advice for students because we got a lot of people who want your advice more specifically on this question of carbon pricing which was asked by a couple of people what kind of government actions do you feel are most helpful to people like you? Is it the quintessential price on carbon? Are there various subsidies when you're new to market that you need to get over the hook? How do you personally think about that with all your vast experience in this space? Well, I always try to start a business that doesn't require government subsidies because they can be ephemeral they can change with administration and you never know if the government's gonna run out of money I mean we had a crisis in this past year and maybe the government wouldn't be able to forward to do that because they have other priorities. So you can't count on that and that's why you wanna be competitive without them. However, if I were to ask for one thing and you say what would be the best thing you could hope for would be known stability because companies have to plan to raise capital you have to go to investors and tell them what your business plan is for X years out. And right now for example when I go out to investors I can't tell them what the government subsidy will be in 2025. If I even if it were low but I knew what it was that would help me build a plan that someone could believe in. So if there's one thing that people could do is encourage governments to make a plan and set it in stone for some amount of time it probably needs to be like a decade so that businesses can use that knowledge when they make their decisions and do their capital formation. I told you raising capital is easy raising capital is harder for hard tech companies. It's easier to raise money for a software only startup that doesn't have much capex. The energy transition is not like that. You pretty much have to put stuff in the ground you have to build hard assets. So having known government plan is very helpful and anything that anybody can do in the policy area whatever to stabilize that I think will make almost more difference than anything else but I'm looking forward to that happening and I think the new administration is looking forward to that. I think we probably have some Biden administration and Newsom administration advisors in this seminar on the end. That would be great. So please help us. We're here to make the technology happen. You help us put a good policy in place. Tremendous. So final question as I indicated we have a number of undergraduates who've reached out and asked what advice would you give them if they wanna make a difference in this space? Yes. How would you do that your career path in terms of staying in school, leaving school, going to graduate school, working for NGO, whatever what advice would you offer in that regard? Well, I wouldn't give any of I don't have any particular advice to give on school versus not school but my advice that I would give is if you are passionate about this find one area where you feel you have a superpower whatever that superpower is for something that you're passionate about. I told you, you're gonna have to stick through some tough times in anything that you do. So find something that you care about so much that you'll live through that period but there are so many different ways to make a positive contribution and there are so many different skills like I said with the complimentary skills every single skill is needed. So we have people at the company who their superpower is recruiting people like even as a recruiter you can contribute to climate change by bringing in people that we need to make the business work. So find your superpower find something that you care about and go for it because the timing is so good right now like I've never seen everything converge so powerfully around the world caring about this at one moment like this. So Superbale thanks for this extremely inspiring and energetic seminar. You've actually for me broken my all time enthusiasm record formally held by Jeff Bezos for the seminar I saw about 15 to 20 years ago. So we look for you to be worth about a trillion dollars in 10 years. And also in a way that helps save the world so to speak. So thanks once again and now we move on to the student up close and personal session. Thanks one last time. Hopefully we'll see you again in person as soon as we're lifted from the COVID quarantine which could be soon now. Yeah, thank you all. Thank you so much. Thanks.