 Good morning from Stanford University. My name is Will Chu. I'm the co-director of StorageX Initiative. And together with my co-director, Professor Itwei from the Material Science Engineering Department, we're delighted to bring to you another exciting panel discussion. So today is a very special event. Those of you who have participated in some of these in the past know that we occasionally have focused discussions where we discuss the option of X. So this is the StorageXX. And today's discussion is going to be focused on long-duration storage. We already had a similar discussion at the end of last year where we heard from academics and the national labs specifically from George Crabtree and Mike Aziz on the chemistry side of long-duration storage. Today, we're delighted to assemble a very exciting panel from three leading companies, pioneering innovations in this area. So we're going to hear today from leaders at FormEnergy, Energy Vault, and EnerVenum. Ian and I are truly delighted to host this panel and really to offer a perspective that is comprehensive and in-depth. We'll hear about the importance of understanding the electricity grid and the value of energy storage. We're going to hear about mechanical energy storage as an avenue for long-duration storage. And then we're going to hear exciting, very durable low-maintenance chemistry for storage as well. So without further delay, I'm extremely delighted to introduce our first speaker, who's going to kick us off. So Dr. Marco Varara is from FormEnergy where he directs its grid modeling effort and Marco has a distinguished career in the area of energy storage and analysis, holding senior positions at 24M and IHI. And he also has a PhD from MIT's Nuclear and Engineering Department. And he has been with FormE from the very start as his co-founder. So Marco, we're very delighted to hear from you and for you to set the scene for our discussion today. Marco, go right ahead. Thank you, Will and Yi and the rest of the team and I'm really honored to be part of this panel and really kind of tee up these important discussion around this excited topic and just be kudos for this initiative. You guys are pulling together, super exciting and really we need this kind of forum to propel the industry forward. So incorrectly, like you said, in today's discussion I'm gonna try to give an other view of the importance of modeling tools for future grids to understand the needs and plan for and procure for future grids. And also I'm gonna try to cast a light on the cost and not using the right tools and the right approaches. That's very important because as we drive towards deep decarbonization on it as soon as possible, honestly timeline, making the right decisions using the right tools makes the difference between supporting and deploying the right technologies and getting to the goal or not. So that's where I'm gonna be focusing the conversation today. Now, let me start with some acknowledgments. The work that I'm gonna be presenting today is not only my work and it is not primarily my work, it's the work of my team. And I'm really proud to be working with a fantastic team at FormEnergy. And in particular, I wanna thank Scott Berger, our analytics lead, really led the majority of the analysis that I'm gonna be presenting today. So just I'm gonna put a sort of a marketing plug in here. The presentation today will not focus on FormEnergy proprietary technology. Of course, we are developing some very exciting innovation in the space, something that we think will bring to market a truly disruptive, low-cost, multi-day electrical storage solution and missing piece in a 100% decarbonized world. Having a battery that essentially unlocks multiple days of electrical storage capability costs effectively transforms completely the picture and in the land of possibilities essentially. And so please have a look at our career page. We're growing fast and we welcome super talented and ambitious professionals to join our team. All right, let's set the stage. The electricity world is changing quickly. As you can see, this is just looking at the United States and the States that have adopted or proposed 100% goals on a timeline that varies more or less in the range 2040 through 2050, which in the world of electricity is very, very soon. We're talking 20 years, one cycle of infrastructure deployment down the road and we had these important goals, which are now arbitrary, they're essential to meet our climate change mitigation targets. What does it mean in terms of actually how many people are affected by these policies? Well, more than 35, more than a third Americans are affected by these policies and the up and coming policies will affect an additional 20%. So we're talking about 50% of the American population affected by these policies. We're talking of a huge user base. And we're starting to see this, of course. We have seen this for a few years now and it's super exciting, right? The push to deploy more renewables and to an extent now more recently, short duration storage, if you wish, is exciting. We're aiming in the right direction. But this means also we're at the really cost of an energy transition and we can already start seeing some of the problems arising. Deep renewables typically drive higher volatility and risk in energy markets. Here is an example of a very business side. I'll try to give you the gist of it. Essentially, if you look at 2018 in the Southwest Power Pool, which is one of the power markets in the United States with the largest amount of wind, and you look at the distributional prices of energy prices across seasons and through the full range of hours of the season, and then you look specifically at the hours where there is more renewable penetration, well, those hours exhibit much higher volatility and depressed pricing. Now, volatility is equivalent to risk because essentially the potential revenues of incremental renewable generation are a risk and that drives the cost of financing and deploying additional renewable generation. So problem number one, increasing renewables, increasing intermittency, increasing market volatility, increasing risk, reduced incentive to deploy additional renewables. Problem number two, when we overlay transmission constraints and we all know how difficult it is to build new transmission from renewables to rich areas to low pockets, you start seeing congestion. You start seeing too much renewable being generated upstream of a bottleneck. And you can see again in this busy and very analytical slide the correlation of wind generation and congestion. Congestion depresses the value of electricity or pushing into the grid, pushes back on new renewable integration. So in a high renewable world, what we expect is higher volatility and potentially depressed pricing, which is further exacerbated by transmission constraints. It doesn't stop at that. So here is a case study, for example, again, going back to a very analytical tool which is representing the distribution of prices. If you look back at the Southwest Power Pool, which is the area that we're using for this analysis, and you look at the distribution of prices across the market in blue, or the distribution of prices for a specific wind farm in orange, you see how bad those prices are at the source of renewable generation. They're downshifted, they're depressed, and they're much more volatile. The renewable revolution, in other words, is cannibalizing itself. There is also another big problem. And that is reliability. So far, we've been looking at the problem from a standpoint of, say, market economics. In other words, the kind of problems that renewables are bringing to power grids from a standpoint of the value of that electricity and the risk of the revenues of renewable generators. But really, we need to consider also the reliability aspect. So can we run a grid mostly on renewables? And what kind of reliability problems can we expect in a mostly renewable grid? Well, influential studies that are starting to look at grids with large amounts of renewable generation point to the multi-day reliability problem. In other words, when you're running a grid promoting all renewables, and you're retiring the majority of fossil fuel assets, dispatchable assets, reliable assets, now you're much more exposed to weather events. And some of those weather events extend through multiple hours and multiple days. So what are we gonna do about that? Are we gonna shed customer load? Are we gonna ask people to not use electricity for several hours or several days in a row? The cost of those events can be staggering from a societal standpoint. So we need to start also accounting for different types or reliability conditions and plan and procure for it. That's where long duration storage comes in, right? And in fact, some of the yearly influential studies that are looking at futures with large amounts of renewable generation. For example, the reason we released a study by the California Energy Storage Association show that California could use tens of gigawatts, 55 gigawatts of long duration storage in a deep decarbonized scenario. Now, that's a huge amount. The California peak load is around 60 gigawatts we need about as much in long duration storage. Then long duration storage is still broadly qualified in the context of the study as anything north of eight hours, I believe. So we need to become also a bit more precise of different classes and different categories of long duration storage and their corresponding applications. But yet, this is a huge number and something that we need to start thinking seriously about now, because we won't build 55 gigawatts all the night, it'll take time to de-risk the technologies and deploy the technologies towards the energy needs. So the question is, do we have the right tools to understand what we need and procure for long duration storage in future grids? And this is where I think my presentation will get really nerdy and really in the weeds. But it's important. I'll try to keep a high level. I'll try to bring forward the main points. But it's important that we understand that these tools and these modeling practices affect profoundly how the grid evolves and whether we steer the ship in the right direction or not. So grid planning models and processes affect everything. Affect, for example, the way federal and state agencies allocate incentives or create markets. It affects the way regulators think about cost effectiveness of different portfolios. It affects the way utilities procure resources. It affects pretty much everything. And so it's important that we look at the right, we use the right tools and the right practices. There are several classes of tools and today particularly I'm gonna be speaking to capacity expansion models. They're the tools by which essentially these entities design and plan and procure for future grids. And there are different classes of these tools. There are open source tools that everybody can sort of access and review and operate assuming the right level of proficiency. And then there are proprietary tools and there are of course commercial tools by the big vendors in the space. Now let's focus for a second on the typical approach to capacity expansion, which is again the way we plan for and procure for future grids. These are complex tools. These tools try to model future scenarios on the grid. They try to model consumption of electricity, renewable generation, portfolios of various types of assets, in some cases transmission constraints, et cetera, et cetera. And they try to answer the question, what is the cost minimizing portfolio and operation that essentially leads to reliable supply of electricity for electrical consumers, for society in general. As you may imagine, they deploy different types of optimization frameworks, the most advanced of which are mixed integer linear programs. And because sometimes the size of these problems is very large, they must take some compromises. And one of the typical compromises is to select only a small time slivers out of the full year to then model the optimal portfolios based on the reduced time sample. And then to, in some cases, stress test those portfolios against a variety of possible different conditions, weather conditions, low conditions, fuel cost conditions, et cetera, et cetera. And that's in the spirit of sort of testing the robustness of the selection against a variety of possible features. So let's remember these two important characteristics of current approach. Time reduction is one or sampling, if you wish. And the other one is the two-step approach of first designing a portfolio and then stress testing the portfolio. And so let's run it to ground. And what would be the form energy? And this is also public information that is available in a utility dive article that Scott and myself recently co-authored with E3, a very valued partner of ours, as well as in a white paper that you can download from our website. So let's stress test these two typical approaches that are industry standard to capacity expansion against former. Former is form energy software for the optimal planning of future grids. We're gonna stress test the first, the cost and consequences of time reduction. And then we're gonna stress test the cost and consequence of the two-step approach, portfolio design and stress testing. And I wanna say in this case, we're gonna stress test those approach. We're gonna study those two approaches considering a reference case of the regional energy deployment system by the National Renewable Energy Lab, in particular, their time sampling approach. This is now to cast a negative light on that tool. There is a spectacular tool with a scope that is geographically vast and temporally extended. It's a great tool, but what we wanna do here is to look specifically at the cost of some simplifications and the cost that that may have in terms of planning future grids. So first of all, let's look at the value of not doing time sampling, of looking at the full chronology of a year in a grid that runs primarily on renewables. So intuitively, we may agree that if we run a grid primarily on renewable electricity, we must capture the full chronology of the renewable output. And if we don't do that, we're gonna miss some of the important dynamics of their resource. It was okay to perhaps use a time sampling approach or a time reduction approach, if you wish, in a world that was running primarily on fossil fuels because those resources were entirely dispatchable, but that may not be the case anymore in a world that runs primarily on renewable electricity. And in this case, the metric that we're looking at is the levelized cost of energy. This is data from the analysis of an anonymized but real utility portfolio, where we looked at a utility portfolio. We looked at their goals of increasingly decarbonizing and incorporate incremental amounts of renewable electricity. And we did the capacity expansion exercise in one case over the full year, looking at the full 8760 of renewable generation or time slices. And so you can see that if you design that portfolio, based on a full year, the 8760 case, you arrive to a certain cost of supplying electricity. And here there is a range depending on various cost assumptions. So between $38 and $41 a megawatt hour, electricity to the customers. If you use time samples, according to the methodology in the RL reads tool, you arrive to a different cost, which is lower, $29 to $33 a megawatt hour. However, if you take the portfolio that you've designed with a time reduction technique and you run it against a realistic 8760, so a full year hourly resolution scenario or weather data, you end up with a higher cost. And that is because number one, you're running more often fossil fuel generation that you were originally designing for. And number two, occasionally, you may not procure the right resources and you may incur in loss of load, which is of course expensive. So here is an example where clearly, there is an important benefit and there are financial consequences in using a full 8760 approach or a time reduced approach. Secondly, what about the kind of portfolio that you end up with? And this is extremely important and relevant for new technologies like long duration storage. Well, also, this should be intuitive. If you look at the year, if you reduce the scope of a year to just select representative days, and so you use the time reduction technique, well, you end up essentially not capturing the value of long duration storage because you lose the chronology of the renewable resource from day to day and use the possibility of really leveraging the benefit of long duration storage on multi-day storage. And so here is an example where if you do the analysis on a full 8760, you end up with a portfolio that includes large amounts of long duration storage and that is lowering costs that if you were designing the same portfolio just on a reduced time base. So another very important takeaway is that if we don't use the right methodology to model future grades and plan for future grades, we end up not deploying the right resources, particularly long duration storage. And finally, we spoke about this before, if you do an analysis and you plan a portfolio based on the select days, you may end up not accounting for multi-day reliability events and you may have to incur loss of load, whereas if you analyze the full time, the full year with the right resolution, you may have deployed long duration storage and essentially carried through multi-day renewable events or weather events reliably and without loss of load for consumers. So let's tackle briefly the second point that I made, which was about essentially the cost of a two-step approach, designing a portfolio and that's stress testing against a variety of scenarios versus co-optimizing a portfolio considering from the onset, the full spectrum of possible scenarios. You can see here, again, a business that I apologize and yes, this content is very technical, consequential but very technical. You can see on the right here in number of scenarios. The first one represents a co-optimized portfolio. So in this case, the portfolio resources for this utility has been designed across a variety of possible futures and possible scenarios, different weather events, weather years, cost of resources, et cetera, et cetera. So the optimization problem is bigger, but again, the solution is much more cost-effective. Why? Because essentially a portfolio designed with a co-optimized approach achieves the lowest levelized cost of electricity. All portfolios that have been designed essentially with only one specific scenario in mind and then oversized or complemented to essentially be robust against a variety of scenarios. You can see that on the left, that is the co-optimized portfolio achieves a levelized cost of electricity or energy of $38 a megawatt hour. And then you can see a variety of other portfolios that have been designed essentially only with respect to one possible future and then augmented perhaps to deal with a variety of other futures, ultimately leading to a higher cost of electricity and suboptimal procurements. So again, maybe I went too fast. It was a whirlwind of very technical content, but I guess what I would like for the audience to take away is that there are important consequences in not using the right planning tools and methodologies. If we don't use them, we end up with systems that are more costly, less reliable, and also importantly for the conversation that we're having today, do not incorporate and do not incentivize the right technologies in the power mix, particularly long duration storage. And so what are the recommendations to system planners and consultants and the important stakeholders that they start asking important and targeted questions about which tools, for example, are being used, the features of those tools, the abilities of those tools to capture the full variability or renewable resources, not only in a typical year on an hourly basis, but across weather years and weather conditions. And also the ability of those tools to truly look at problems such as reliability, a problem such as robustness against weather events and really kind of the reality of what a grid running on mostly renewable generation will look like. And so I hope again, this has been useful and that these forum of really deep thinkers of the future of energy and energy transition will take this message to various stakeholders. It's important that we are really together in changing the way grids are planned and procured for. Marco, thank you very much for that wonderful presentation and indeed set the scene for our discussion today. So we have a number of questions and let me, let's have a short Q&A with you, Marco, before returning with the whole panel for a larger discussion. So Marco, can you talk a little bit about the distribution of the value of energy storage as a function of the storage duration? And could you also comment on the regionality of that in your analysis? Yeah, that is a great question. So to me, it is more of the, probably the easiest way to get to the question of distribution of value across duration. So there are two parts, distribution of value across duration and then regionality of that. So the best way to get to the question of distribution of value across duration is perhaps to look at equivalence in the fossil fuel kind of asset class. We do have pickers and we do have mid-married plants and we do have baseload plants. And they had different cost structures, right? The baseload plant tends to have a very high fixed cost by a very low variable cost. Intermediate plants are somewhere in between. Picker plants are more on the low fixed cost, very high variable cost, right? And in a grid that runs primarily on a combination of renewable fuel and then some flexibility assets such as storage, you will see different classes of storage essentially serving the same functions as today, pickers, intermediate plants and baseload plants offer. And so in terms of how much value is there in the picker category, say the short duration storage or how much value is there in the long duration storage intermediate plant and baseload category is difficult to say. I can only say that there is value in all three buckets. Thank you, Marco. Let me ask now a more technical question from your analysis. So you emphasize on the importance of the events of low and high generation and how they are spread out over the whole year. Yeah. I wonder if you have analyzed the importance of the time series. So specifically I'm asking, we could consider two distributions of events in terms of the sequence, right? So they all come out to the same distribution, but in one case maybe you have, low generation, low generation, low generation. And another one you can mean low, high, low, high, low and all comes out to the same in terms of the histogram but the time series is different. Does that? That's great. And that is the reason why it's necessary to either adopt the full chronology, to not break the chronology, maintain the chronology or to come up with time reduction techniques that somehow can preserve that chronology. Modern reduction is an important tool in the toolbox because sometimes you get to problem sizes that are difficult to solve, particularly if you have integer variables in there. But the way we then apply that time reduction that must be really thoughtful or not losing the chronology, because you're right. If you have a sequence of very high and very low generation, you won't intuitively long duration storage. If you have a sequence of high, low, high, low, maybe short duration storage is more suited. So preserving the chronology makes the whole difference. Great, Marco. Looking forward to seeing more of those results when you produce them. I think we just have time for maybe one or two more questions. There's a questions on how you model for rare events. So you talk about things varying across the year, but certainly we're seeing gradual trends over 10 or so more years. And as these assets will be, investment will be made over decades, how do you consider these rare events and how do you value storage in these rare events? Yeah, that day is great. That is a great question, Will. Tale events in high renewable futures are consequential and are very expensive. So that's where, for example, the typical statistical approach of saying, these events are rare, they're for a negligible and we can go to just a typical meteorological year type of approach fail. Because this is the case of, yes, a tale event may be rare, it may materialize only two or three times in 10 years, but when it happens, it's so costly. And so it's almost like we need to bring forward and into the industry a different way of planning for reliability. And that's the work that, for example, in California is starting to happen around a different definition of what reliability means in high renewable futures. And now we should plan for it and procure for it. Say the worst possible situation right now that the conversation is gravitating around looking at reliability from the standpoint of the probability and cost of multi-day weather events. And that's what you should design for. You should design specifically certain assets that are capable of carrying essentially reliably load during multi-day weather events. By the way, this is applicable in general, in normal meteorological condition, it is even more relevant in climate change type of meteorological conditions where the extent and the severity of multi-day weather events will become increasingly costly. Yeah, this is definitely food for thought. I'm afraid we don't have more time for questions but we will come back and try to ask more of our audience this question in the panel discussion. So Marco, thank you very much for your excellent contribution and we'll come back to you in a bit. And now I hand things off to Yi who will introduce the second speaker. Well, thank you, Will. Thank you, Marco. This is Yi Chui, co-director of Storage X as well as recently I took on a role as the director of a prequel institute for energy. Let me welcome the next speaker, Andrew Padrati. Andrew is a co-founder and CTO of EnergyWatts. Certainly before that, he has been served as founder and CTO of a number of technology companies before. He is the inventor of more than 25 patents, worldwide for a variety of silver engineering energy related applications. Andrew has a master's degree in structural engineering. With that, I'll let Andrews talk to us about what's going on and EnergyWatts. Thank you, Yi, for the pleasure to present this very nice event, Storage X. So I will run through our technology as to the idea, a little bit on the ideas that has been the process of generating new ideas. EnergyWatts is being founded by Will Gross, myself and our CTO, Robert Picconi. Because Bill was always obsessed, I would say, from the fact that storage is key, it's a key word today to enable renewable energy. So we started with this in mind to explore what kind of technologies are around to store energy. So there are chemical technologies, so many old batteries types. There are hundreds of chemistry, actually, possible. This is all the thermodynamic realm with converting heat to electricity and back with heat pumps, hair lippification, supercritical CO2, many, many different processes are already in development or have been developed. There are all the mechanical realm, specifically the pump hydro, where actually pump hydro is today the most diffused way to store electricity. And that's exactly where we focus because we thought that we should try to leverage all the experience developed in pump hydro, but to overcome all the issues about the pump hydro. So try to enable this very simple idea of potential energy to make it capable to install it everywhere. So without all the limitation of topography that actually you cannot store pump hydro everywhere, unfortunately. And even also to try to even beat the round trip efficiency of pump hydro. And so to really make something interesting and something really simple. So we started the process, the idea with something very, I would say very simple. So just to check where you are if you just make something very, very, very stupid. So physically just a tank full of water. And obviously, if you do this, you end up with a solution that are obviously too expensive. You are not exploiting the steel and the material properly. And you can optimize a little bit with tippering and things like that. But obviously you end up with many issues. You have pressure that is changing so you cannot use regular turbine because of the height is changing during charge. You have very, very bad uses of material. So we start thinking, okay, we have to come up with something much better. And so the first, actually, I would say the first breakthrough was to study a little bit the material. So what's the best material to use for such an idea? And it's very important that every mechanical storage end up with a ratio between cost density, so weight divided by the strength. And still it's a good material, but not the best. Concrete is much better. Concrete has a lower strength, lower density, which is good. So lower strength, which is bad, but the cost is definitely unbeatable. So that's why concrete actually is material, construction number one in the world. And but yes, the issue that is capable of only taking compressive load. And otherwise you need to add steel. So we end up with an interesting idea to basically divide the pressure instead of having the full pressure on the lower end, we are supporting the water on the top end and basically making sort of floors. And this was something interesting and we start developing on that. And the main issue was that we're still using not perfectly material. So we evolved a bit with combination of steel and concrete. So still in tension and concrete, just in compression, but still too complex. You have too many piping, plumbing, bales and everything was really unmanageable. So we try to keep the same idea but trying to make bigger reservoir, always the floor ideas, but keeping the same reservoirs to reduce the amount of plumbing, but still we had a lot of bales and things on each trough. This was a pretty good design with this main brain trough, which are working just in tension and all the compression. But we evolved the game and we arrived to this idea, which is actually with this idea, we started the company. So we designed this and say, okay, we can go with this because we have very nice constant jump of height. So basically you discharge the top floor and you reload basically the middle floor. So that the differential height is always constant. So you are going down one floor and going down also one floor. So basically you keep your pressure drop constant, which is very good for pumping and two vines. You have only one veil per floor, which was also very interesting. And so we think, okay, with this we might be able to leave and so let's develop this. And we decided to start the company with this idea, basically. And then we realized that, okay, yes, fine, but still complex. We have too much material, too much construction material for just keeping the water. So why would us just use the material itself as a storage medium? So we'd get rid of water and try to use directly the material. So we began to look in some detail about just pure potential mechanical energy storage. So just a crane, okay, imagine just lifting a crane. Which is very interesting because converting mechanical, you don't have fluids, you don't have losses of two vines and fluids and fluid dynamics, much less friction. Motor generator are really very efficient. You cannot vibraphric acid drive. You can tune the power. So it's very interesting, but you cannot use only one weight unless you have a deep hole. I mean, if you have 1000 meter, then you can even use 180. But otherwise your power device, your lifting device or your power is too expensive. So we started to think, okay, we can stack. And this was the key idea of energy both because you can use weights and bricks. And every time you add the brick and height, this bricks has acquired potential energy. But it's also part of the structure that you can use to gain additional height and so on. So every brick is used twice as support the structure and as the medium to store energy. So the potential energy. And this turned out to be pretty interesting. And from what you can see from this slide, you can have a pretty high average height even with not much bricks. And you minimize your fixed bricks. So basically the bricks that you are manufacturing, but basically never moves because you cannot spread out indefinitely your load. Interesting, you can see from the numbering just as a demo, you see that you take the first brick, you have more flag time. And therefore you are putting the brick further away in the motion, horizontal motion. Yes, but you cannot go indefinitely. So you have to stack also the base at some point. So, but this was the main concept that started to take shape in the idea generation. We store many other, I mean, this is just a sub set. This is eight idea actually, but I think it was the 50s ideas or even more. But okay, we can take a crane and automate it and stack things. What you can do better to save steel. Boy, for example, you can do something symmetric so that you can have a balanced tower. You can use the bricks to stabilize the tower and you need somehow to make a continuous power out because what you do when one brick is landing, you have no generation. And then you have to go up again and grab the next one. So, and you want to get good power. I mean, you need the substantial amount of power. You cannot use just regular crane that can store maybe 50 or 100 kilowatt power, but for hundreds of hours. So we wanted to increase the power. And so we end up with something that is now it's the current design, which is a multi-arm crane. Okay, it's nothing special in terms of design because it's just taking six regular crane combined together and connected. And we basically orchestrate the motion of this crane so that it can be able to deliver continuous power. So I'm going to show the first proof of concept. So we did, okay, let's try it, how to solve all the motion because it's pretty complex. You cannot have a guy on the ground that for each brick is helping to locate properly the brick. You need to be very accurate. You need to be a repeatable. Should work in any weather and there is no contact. So every twisting, every pendulum should be accommodated automatically and should be adjusted automatically. So we run some math and we bought a very old crane, actually a second-hand crane, which was 40 years old. We refurbished it totally. So all the power electronics, motor, hoisting, trolleys, slewing, everything we replaced with our proper cabinet. We wrote our control software and we tried it. So basically it was somewhere, 2018, we proved that we were able to grab any barrel in that case, which is a barrel because it was very simple to take it in manufacture and to grab any barrel on each location on the ground and put it on top of the tower properly without any human interaction. In addition, we even tried to even stop any swinging occurring by wind or external forces by a sudden shutdown or by some other event. We were able even to stop the motion even if it was weighing alone, just using a camera system. So with that proof of concept, the company basically managed to raise substantial funding and we start a very quick construction phase from designing the real tower and to assemble. And you can see it's a pretty big tower crane but it's still a tower crane. I mean, it's a huge tower crane with, in that case, it's in our site in Switzerland where we have designed the foundation, temporary foundation, it's out of the ground foundation. It's just ballast so that you don't have to dig out so you can disassemble and sell it to a customer. And we continued to erect this for basically six months roughly to procure with COVID-19 over also was really pain but we managed to move forward. We have all the, see the cabinets and the power electronics and the white cabinets here are all power electronics drive so inverter, vibro frequency drive and mid voltage transformer and the central G part with the additional joint to tune the arm and grab different bricks of different position. Obviously the tower is symmetric but you can have some slight adjustment on each arm. So, and we managed to complete this construction and by putting together the all each level. You can see here, pretty interesting, the hoist on the left and right of the cabinet. You see this gray ring is the emergency break. So the emergency break, case of power failure for example, here you have the big range that can take. This is a 2.6 megawatt. So each hoist is 1.3 megawatt, no minute power with 1.6 megawatt power. So basically it's a crane but definitely way more powerful than conventional crane or container crane. But in the way it's a crane all the drive are regenerative. We go up with mid voltage cable to the top so that cable line are smaller and the cable torques. So a little bit like on windmill or plus minus 180 degree to accommodate all the motion requirement. We stole the jibs and so the action continued until we completed the construction. We did also all the commissioning now. It's almost done. So we are now beginning, we expect to begin by mid February the stress test. So basically continuously operating the system and we expect to finish it by March. But we developed everything and we added also a lot of more instrumentation that was required especially for the first project to acquire important data on the motion and operating parameter forces, cable tensions and release a lot of details that are in the system to assess and to fine tune future design. And here is the completed crane. So you can see the break. The break is very important because yes, the crane is key but more important are the breaks because the breaks are the real things that store such energy because it's the one that takes that releases potential energy and is the responsible, the whole structure actually. So the break is very important and I will run through a short video to show how it's made. So the break is really not just concrete. Actually it's not concrete. It's a, I would say it's a cement-based polymer or cement-based material where basically it's made out of almost anything. I mean, I would say this is interesting because we start to think about concrete but then a low performance concrete but then working with Samax, our partner, the well-established cement, the Mexican cement manufacturer, they have a very interesting technology to basically make sort of concrete out of dirt, of soil, of regular soil and any kind of soil and sand, sand, gravel, even clay. And that's enabled us to really excavate the material locally. You cannot afford to transport a huge amount of material locally to make a storage. You need to have this material right there on site and therefore this enables us to do that but more than that, you will see in the next, in the course of the presentation that can enable even additionally interesting things. So let's go shortly to the video that explain a little bit, a little bit the general concept. I mean, the working principle, which I think everyone understood is just potential energy. But the interesting thing is that you can see there are two hooks that are going down and two other stars and the other two are catching up. So basically you are always for a way that are being moved so that you have a continuous power and you see this is the fully discharged position and the fully charged position. So important as you see the brick and the brick are made out of dirt and you have a top deck and lower deck which is regular concrete. So everything is in contact, it's concrete, it's regular concrete, pre-cast concrete but the brick itself, 95% of the brick is just dirt. We need to add some, the mixer is some cement but very low amount compared to regular concrete and we need to add fiber, some fiberglass to increase a little bit something side strength. Okay, we need just compressive strength but obviously you need something side stress either and to achieve that we add these fibers and we squeeze everything. Basically with a huge press, we develop a 7,000 tonne press that can squeeze the material which is very dry and stays immediately. You can demold it immediately. You don't need to wait like concrete that takes a few days to get out before you can demold. This can be demolded immediately and then store in a curing yard to cure but the fact that it's always squeezed and pressed can be, it's stable already. Like a peel that they just squeeze and simmer it basically and the top and lower deck have you seen are made of regular concrete and pre-cast so they are just already hard and ready to use. So this is the process and this enables us to really go from one idea to the market. So basically how we can better use this technology for business. And this is interesting because we started with a general idea, okay, storage is required but then we understood that we might be able to do something more. And we thought about the circular economy and yeah, that's right. And the fact that companies and utilities is now thinking of recycling materials and then we will end it immediately on which kind of utility has some issues and which kind of material can we use and how can we leverage our peculiar technology. And we turn out that there is some interesting facts. So the first big problem is coal combustion residuals. And I'm thinking about the bottom ash, not the fly ash that there's some value market value but some bottom ash, which is typically polluted and we can take this material to make the breaks. And yes, this is doable. We've done it, we've done all the tests and we can combine with another very interesting fresh material which is blades and guess what, they're made out of fiberglass. And because we don't need very high performance we can really use this material nicely because our blocks doesn't require the quality of normal construction, silly construction. So we are now able to really combine these ideas and these capabilities to create blocks that really enable a circular economy. And imagine that you can install a storage system right where the commissioning coal power plant. I mean, coal power plant is transitioning. So we are phasing out and you have problems. You have residual to dispose, you have to dismantle but you have some very nice feature. You have already the grid connection and you have land. You have already permitting about very tall building because normally you are in the middle of nowhere. So this is a perfect match to enable a really smooth transition between cool and renewable where renewable really requires a lot of storage as properly pointed out by Marco. So summarizing, I mean, just to finish we have basically used a very established technologies. So crane industry, shipping industry, motor generator combined with really cool material science and software vision, which are okay but the core is really the brick and the material. And then with this we're really capable of creating a really nice storage that solves multiple problems. Not only the renewable penetration not just a neighbor renewable penetration but also some major environmental issues. I would like to conclude because we are proud of that June 2020 has been awarded by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer as the only industry storage company awarded in 2020. So we're very proud about that and so wanted to mention it again. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Andrea. This is a very, very interesting. There's a number of questions flowing in. Let me ask my question first. Certainly this is a mechanism. Well, I would like to think about and compare side by side with for example, battery technology for the storage. And you can you share with us, you mentioned a 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour. This is under the assumption of how many times you use per day, how many years this will last. Can you share with us a little bit on that? What's the assumption behind that? Yeah, basically it's very important because assumption are really key to that. So basically as you can imagine, our system is better suited for long duration. I mean we developed our system for long duration so 10 hour plus because the most expensive part for us is the power side. OK, so the crane and the lifting equipment. While the bricks are the cheapest part. And therefore our design started for long duration storage. As you probably mentioned, we rely on very established technologies. So the duration, the lifetime of our system is well about 30 years. You have some regular maintenance but it's very simple mechanics and you have to grease the pulleys. Every few years you have to replace some ropes and every 20 years probably you have to repaint it even. But all the blocks are basically concrete and cement base. So basically they last very long. And so yes, our assumption are basically 35 year lifetime. One cycle per day maximum and with basically 10, 12 hours. OK, this is our very first design. Now, actually we are increasing the power. So we are developing different products and always based on gravity but with the capability to operate quicker. So customers are asking now for asking more two and four hour storage. But as Marco properly pointed out, we need to understand that we need longer duration storage to further increase. So this is a problem, this is a time problem now but in the future we need longer duration storage. And that's what this product was designed for. In the meantime, we are also tacking two hours product and four hour product. Yeah, well thank you. So another question and also how I see in the audience also asked this question. In thinking about this brick coming back together certainly there is a strong wind, extreme weather condition. In California there's also potentially earthquake. So you guys must have thought about this. How do you handle this question? Yeah, definitely. So if you can bring up slide 43 in the backup slide. I'm glad you asked this question because this is very interesting. And on the wind side I can tell you it's we solved in the way that we don't have the wind issue because we disassembled the tower inside out. So basically the outer tower is the brick are taken from the outside and disassembled inside. So basically the tower is hollow. And therefore every brick is screened by the wall that is outside. In that way basically we cancel the wind issue even though I would say that it's not a big issue at least for example in California because the flight time is very short. I mean the flight time of each brick is less than one minute. So even at the maximum height. So basically it doesn't take enough time to begin swaying. And in any case we have vision systems that compensate for that. But very interesting is the seismic. This is a really cool thing because we started a project with Caltech and Berkeley and San Diego University and to realize that this was my first issue and three years ago actually when we started. Okay fine we have all this structure made of the blues bricks. Would this work for the seismic action? And I immediately thought that this was pretty cool because the fact that you allow the brick to slide one top of the other they dissipate a huge amount of energy. And this was my conjecture actually. And so we went to Caltech and tried to make some modeling. Some lab scale tests on top left you see the 1200 scale test at Caltech Shaker Table. Made out of basically the brick were made out of wood and metal and different weight ratio and friction ratio. And then we went to Berkeley and installed a big one at the center picture you see. There's a small guy on top with the harrow which is within John Harmon. It's the modeling guys. You see the size of the people. And it's been tested at one to 20 scale. So a much bigger scale. And the interesting thing is that the behavior can be predicted perfectly. And that's why we are writing now that important paper in a similitude journal on that item because we have discovered a new number, new dimensionless number, similitude number, like it's done in fluid dynamics, but for this specific kind of structure. And you can see from the video maybe we can replay it. Basically I'm gonna try to replay, yeah. See that this was the third earthquake actually. See how all the structure moves and the bricks basically displays, but they don't collect. This is rich crest, okay. This is rich crest earthquake, okay. So not a small earthquake. And this is very interesting because this is like an Asian structure in Greece that they've survived 2000 years of earthquake also. And actually they behave like this. And they allow the column to slide. And you know that the Greek temple as core made out of lead and that allows some movement, but can see because the columns are rotated one another. So each segment of columns is rotated. And that's exactly what happens also in our structure. And therefore it's very safe. And what happens when you have the earthquake? So this is a problem because the brick are not in the same position. So we have to disassemble the tower with the crane automatically and reassemble it properly with self-centering pins and all these kinds of things that I eventually showing the question session. I hope you have answered the question. Yeah, this is cool. So I have one last question then I'll circulate back to Will. So certainly, you know, from this concrete, this lifetime, you know, 30 years, 35 years is all good. Now you have this brick, right? Because you are moving your stacking. And once you stack, put it on, I mean, there will be some small stacking. I would describe this as a collision a little bit, right? But this whole thing, one cycle per day, right? So would you expect even the bricks could particularly making out of soil? And the concrete probably lasts for a long time but for the soil you compress it. Is there any concern of doing this 30 years, right? When you stack this together and a different weather condition, this rain and this type of soil pressing together, would that last so long? You know, we're talking about 30 years, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is exactly why we have this top and lower deck of the concrete. Basically, you're seeing from the picture in the video, basically we have a precasted regular concrete, so good quality concrete deck on top and on the lower part of the brick. So this is what got in contact, okay? So all the impact is very low speed impact. Obviously it's just 50 millimeters per second but basically you have some impact, obviously. And this is just concrete. So this is where you know, it's actually reinforced concrete. One of the rest of the brick is just subject to weathering. And this is a great job done by CMEX, is they developed this technique to develop roads in developing countries. So to make roads in developing countries, we are transporting too much material. So this technique has been already out there since I think more than eight, nine years now. And they have a lot of historical data. Naturally, roads are even much worse and heavily weathered compared to our bricks actually. And therefore they are confident that this material is very durable. And because of these tests and the live tests on real environment. Consider also these that we are speaking about polymer technology and things but actually the material is cement. The polymer and it is additive enables the cement to make a good matrix even with dirt and enable the tiny material to roll nicely and you can squeeze it. Actually you can achieve density of our brick which is twice the one of the world. So it's not as good as concrete, just 2.4 but still very much higher than loose material which is less than 1.5. So and with this, with the combination effect also of the fact that the polymer water hydrophobic there is no water that's going into the brick. And therefore there is no icing the icing and all these kinds of things. Actually I can see from the first picture of my deck in Switzerland we have the snow now. So all the bricks are outside in the snow. And so this is very interesting but in any case we have all the data for accelerated aging and icing the icing, thermal cycles and UV radiation but again UV degrees polymer but the binding effect is always cement matrix. Yeah, very good. I'll circulate it back to Will. Thank you so much, Andrea. We'll bring you back in the panel discussion, okay? Thank you. Well, let me add my thanks to Andrea as well. I really appreciate seeing the ideation process. It's always good to see how the idea came about. So our final speaker for today is a veteran in energy. In energy, Jorah Kahneman is currently the CEO of Enervenu right here in Silicon Valley. And he started working in ClinTech when the term was coined nearly 20 years ago as a partner in Accenture in a managing consulting firm. Then he moved on to various positions leading efforts at Sunpower, Primus Power where he was the chief operating officer and now at Enervenu. So Jorah, we're very excited to hear about Enervenu of course and look forward to the discussion with you at the end of your talk. Jorah, sorry. Thanks very much, Will. Thank you for having me and very interesting presentations that preceded me. I'm gonna begin, I think with our view of the market and I believe that you'll find it ties together some of what we heard quite well in the earlier presentations and then I'll present what we're doing and I believe you'll find that complimentary as well to some of the other solutions. So you've likely seen charts like this as we think about what's happening with the energy mix and the transformation to renewable energy over the coming decades and generally the analyst consensus is that roughly by mid-century we are opposed to be over 75% renewable and that's a pretty broad consensus or amongst the folks looking at this. So 56% roughly solar and wind and then add nuclear and hydro and then fossil fuels diminishes substantially. If we look under the cover to this we actually see a number of countries notably China who have announced plans to exceed this pace rather dramatically. China wants to reach 60% renewable by 2030 so just 10 years from now I believe they'll overachieve and I think others will as well. That leads to a tremendous demand for energy storage and this is a chart that Bloomberg does every year. It always looks like where we are today despite all the growth that we've seen in the past few years is just almost infinitesimally small relative to the market opportunity ahead and then the chart always seems to go up and to the right but the magnitude each year they publish it increases significantly. So this actually year on year from the last time they published it to today nearly doubled the total addressable market here in terms of the expected number of batteries that are coming on the grid. So there's a lot of opportunity for batteries and this is all types this is stationary as well as mobile. But then let's take a look at how our electric power grid is transforming and I thought Marco did a very nice job of in-depth modeling of this. We take a step back and think about what's happening the electric power industry as we know it it's over a hundred years old and it's operated in essentially the same way for that period of time. Central station generation pushing electrons then over a transmission and distribution network to a point of variable load. And that's a pretty remarkable when you think about it because that supply chain if you will the value chain from generation through consumption of the power has no inventory in it. So there's no reservoirs, there's no battery there's no storage and somehow we have to balance the dispatchable or block oriented generation with the variability of the load and that's done through a sophisticated forward planning mechanism and then basically a little bit of frequency regulation to provide a tiny bit of inventory in that supply chain and it's complicated, it's been highly regulated and we frankly take it for granted it's a remarkable service that we're all the beneficiaries of and we're used to it and our economies around the world rely on it. Now let's introduce the variability and the complexity of renewables into that mix. And what we see is we see generation changing. So we're introducing intermittent generation mostly soothed through solar and wind. We're increasing the variability of load because actually at that end we're seeing solar panels come on at the point of use whether that's homes or businesses and so on we're increasing electricity consumption through electric vehicles and because it's overall cleaner especially if you generate with renewables. And then we're seeing deregulation enter so that the basically the generation and the transmission distribution and the consumption of power are more variable. I can buy my power in most parts of the world I can buy it from a variety of sources which adds to congestion across the electric grid. So most of the people associated with industry who are tasked with keeping the grid stable look at renewables as adding a huge amount of complexity and a lot of challenge. Now what I'm convinced is if we add all the things together we are looking at the very beginning still today of what will probably be the single biggest transformation of any form of our economy in our lifetimes. And it's gonna turn this model the grid as we knew it the central station generation pushed across power lines to variable load completely on its head. And I think we're not sure where there's a lot of folks who are guessing trying to figure out how is this gonna work? What are the implications? As we look at batteries here's what I think is gonna happen. Now we've seen an evolution back about a decade ago renewables were just beginning to become credible at least they were perceived as maybe in the future without subsidies solar could be economically viable when likely sooner than that batteries were essentially unaffordable. And then as recently as three years ago there was still a huge amount of focus just on the super expensive batteries and how can we profit from the most beneficial short duration say one to two hours of benefit of economic benefit from adding storage to really anywhere along that value chain that I showed on the previous pages. And those use cases have gradually expanded but it was as late as the beginning of 2018 that people were still asking, well, what am I gonna do with a bigger battery? I, boy, how would I do with a battery the last five hours? Now that thinking has evolved the battery prices have come down different technologies mostly lithium ion based fueled by the large volume of electric vehicle capacity that's come on board. And so today or last year the traditional use case is now expanding to roughly four to six hours. And there's a lot of contemplation around how longer duration storage 10 plus hours even weekly even seasonal would enter into the mix. Most of that thinking is focused on the current view or the legacy view of the grid where the generation side is viewed as blocks of power dispatchable blocks of power. Oh, I need peak capacity for four hours. I need it for six hours and then I'm gonna ramp it back down. And in this world where we add batteries all up and down the energy value chain. We have them at the point of generation we have them across the distribution network and then we have them at the point of use through dispatchable generation and then batteries. What we believe will happen is our grid becomes distributed. The grid gets turned upside down and it looks fundamentally different. We're now, I don't know if anybody can accurately predict exactly what it's gonna look like 10, 20, 30 years from now but it'll be different. And what we believe will be necessary at least as a part of this equation are batteries that behave very similar to the way we become accustomed to our cell phones and our power girls and our electric vehicles where they can be charged pretty quickly when there's excess power available. So I think charge within an hour to two to maybe four hours when I have a solar window or excess wind capacity, et cetera. And then let me discharge that battery as quickly or slowly as the market needs as the particular node where I happen to have my battery whether that's next to my home or somewhere on the distribution network or parked right next to a solar farm. So net net as we like a battery to be super flexible however, we'd also like it to be incredibly long lasting and today's batteries as we're all familiar with from our cell phones, the lithium ion ones they do tend to wear out and they actually wear out rather quickly when you consider the lifetime of power generating assets and so forth. So that's what's happening at a macro level if we then take a look at the economics of companies that are trying to solve this problem by creating solar plants, solar power plants like my team was doing in my past company and then pairing them with batteries. Generally speaking, the economics of a grid scale solar plant are roughly one third is the capital expenditure. That's the cost of the solar panels, the trackers, the inverters and then the batteries all the equipment, the development costs everything that's required to actually build the plant initially and get it up and running. Then a third a surprisingly large percentage of the levelized cost of the energy that comes out of the plant is the operating expense the maintenance, the cost that you need to keep the plant up and running over its duration whether that's 10, 20, 30 years, what have you and then the remaining third also surprising to many people is the cost of money the cost of the debt and the equity that's used to finance the construction and the operation of that plant. So a net levelized cost from a plant that looks like the picture here solar plus a bunch of batteries is typically around the world in the three to eight cents per kilowatt hour range and trending downward. Now, one of the key challenges is or the more I can trim my operating expense the more economical this becomes the lower that levelized cost of energy becomes. In addition, we have the challenge of many if not most of these plants tend to be in sunny locations many are located in deserts that see a very high temperature temperatures are reaching the 45 degree or more Celsius range easily in the summertime and then also dropping down quite well and then there's restrictions on we know today generally what we'd like and how we'd like to use this power but we're not sure about the future what if I wanna cycle the battery instead of once per day to shift my dispatch ability of the energy from daytime hours to nighttime but what if I wanna run it twice a day or I wanna do a by low cell high using wind in off hours I'd like the ability to do that and then of course there's a safety concern and also recyclability. So keeping all those things in mind we took a look at available technologies and certainly there has been a lot of improvements in lithium ion batteries over the years but it's candidly in the grand scheme of things it's been pretty slow and we expect advances to continue but today we're at roughly 10 year life for one cycle a day for a lithium ion battery that'll improve. So we looked at well what can we do what's out there that is perhaps significantly longer more robust in duration and it turns out there's a technology that has a demonstrated track record of over 30,000 cycles which is three cycles a day times 30 years with essentially no usage restrictions that's also very flexible and has similar power characteristics to lithium ion. And that technology is called nickel hydrogen and it's been in use in outer space applications since the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was originally conceived for aerospace applications specifically for satellites and things like the International Space Station the Hubble Space Telescope where there was a need back and this is back in the days basically before lithium ion came along and they needed a battery that could be put into outer space and do basically a solar plus storage renewable integration to power these satellites and things. And it had to be something that required no maintenance so had to last forever be very flexible and be a install and forget type battery. That's super cool. However, it was also ridiculously expensive and so expensive that back 10 years or more ago when I got into renewables and a lot of battery companies began to form to tackle but what do you do with solar? What do you do with wind when the sun's not shining and the wind's not blowing problem? It was just, this technology was ignored. And it wasn't until Professor Schwede Stanford and his team took a closer look at it and thought, you know, I think we can do this with lower cost materials. And then we've since built on those materials and re-engineered this type of battery for large scale manufacturing. So we now have a highly competitive metal hydrogen battery that is durable, safe, flexible, absolutely zero maintenance. This is install and forget. You don't have to touch the thing. It's a very affordable and it's based on this proven technology that has been successfully in operation for 30 years continuously in these aerospace applications. On the right hand side, you'll see a version of an early prototype. These are over a year old. It's basically a sealed cylinder with a stack of electrodes inside it. And at the top are terminals, you connect the batteries and there's a far more elegant design that we have now that I'm not able to show you publicly. But it's a incredibly simple device, very easy to put together, very easy to take apart for future recyclability at the end of its life cycle, for example. And it has a number of characteristics that are really exciting and make it super versatile in the battery world. For starters, it operates in a very broad temperature range, minus 40 to plus 60 degrees Celsius. Now you may be wondering if you've looked at the tear sheet for lithium ion battery, they'll give you a similar range. The difference is that that battery range is based on having air conditioning and other a lot of complex systems to keep the battery happy at an internal operating temperature, room temperature. Our chemistry allows us to be happy and comfortable across that broad temperature range. So we actually are just as happy in high desert temperatures as we are at room temperature as we are as things approach freezing. And then it's super durable with excellent overcharge capability. So it's kind of self-correcting and a much simpler battery to control. There's no fire risk, no thermal risk. It's very flexible in terms of the speed rate, the rate at which you can pump energy into it. You can charge it as fast as a 5C. Think of that as charging the entire battery in 12 minutes. Or you could charge or discharge at a trickle charge very slowly, very fast. Which gives when combined with the endless cycle life or 30,000 cycle life, it gives the customer a future-proof solution. So if I build a battery storage system right now anticipating one cycle a day, and then I choose because the environment changes because our grid is shifting and who knows, decide I need to cycle three times a day, I can do it. No additional cost. And there's really no problem with it. True, no maintenance affordable. We're using far lower cost materials. So we believe we will be able to continually meet the ever-declining capital cost of lithium ion batteries. And then we over-deliver with significant additional value for the stationary use cases. And that maintenance cost will show in a moment translates to very significant economic savings. So for example, if we model what we're seeing developed now around the world, a fairly standard 24 by seven solar plant, 24 by seven implies, I'm using solar during the day to push into the grid. I'm using excess solar to charge my battery. And then I'm dispatching that in the evening, night time and early morning hours when the sun's not shining to essentially create a more or less 24 by seven power plant using renewable solar in this case, married with the battery. The economics of that plant that are shown here for roughly 120 megawatts peak of solar in a battery that would store 300 megawatt hours are a levelized cost of energy of roughly five and a half cents per kilowatt hour. That's the whole plant solar and the storage for lithium ion. And then if we hold the assumptions the same and just simply swap in an inner venue battery using our technology, there's a significant levelized cost savings of nearly 20% in a use case where we cycle that battery once a day. If we actually just the battery piece of it, again, this is the same same assumptions, same capital cost, no maintenance costs essentially on the battery, that economic advantage just for the storage portion is over 40%. So it's quite substantial. This gets the attention of anyone building these plants who are looking at the internal retain rate of return on the project. And you can see it jumps from 4.4 to 7.4%. That gets an investor's attention. Now let's take that same project and say, what if in the future the power plant owner decides they wanna cycle the battery or they have to cycle the battery twice a day instead of once a day. You can see the economics get, it's more than doubles on the internal rate of return. The levelized cost of energy advantage jumps to 24% and then just the storage piece is in the 60% range. Same thing holds true for a pure grid steel storage application. This is one where it isolates the batteries connected next to the grid really anywhere on the grid. And then essentially by power at a high price, I started at a low price when there's excess energy available, sell it at peak times when the pricing is high, do that twice a day. You'll see because of the amount of times the battery gets used, the replacement cost and so forth that zero maintenance charge that install and forget capability has a significant advantage 58% in this case. And then if we decide, well, we're gonna, instead of twice a day, we're gonna cycle it three times a day that advantage jumps and it's into a range where it's now three times the economic return of what would be a traditional or a rapidly declining price lithium ion storage solution, which is predominant in the market today. And that same math works at a smaller scale too. That could be residential, it could be small commercial or it could be things like remote applications where we're seeing telecom towers powered by remote solar plus batteries installed by the thousands, if not the tens of thousands around the world. These tend to be in hard to reach locations. Often there's very few roads to get there, et cetera. And the cost of the maintenance role, the price of the truck roll to go do something like check on the battery pack or replace it or augment it or so forth over the life of this asset is very expensive, likely understated by the modeling that we've done here. So this shows a 37% advantage for the cost of storage. It's probably far more than that if you really were to put an appropriate price tag on the value of never having to maintain this or having batteries that last as long as the actual solar panels do and as the power electronics equipment in the telecode tower does. So since we have a largely academic audience, we had to include a little bit more about how our battery works. This is a simplified version of it again for those that are interested, we can get you under the tent and show you a little bit more of an actual real drawing but think of it as a cylinder, a canister that's roughly two liters in volume. Within that is an electrode stack and there's basically we have a cathode and an anode and we're building hydrogen as we charge inside the canister and then the reverse happens as we discharge. That's a very stable reaction, it's very simple. The materials are earth abundant or easily found. It's incredibly durable and it's incredibly resilient and it allows us to create this basically battery pack that's quite versatile. Again, performance characteristics similar to the flexibility that we're accustomed to for lithium ion but in a far more durable way and in a way that requires no maintenance. And that gives us the capability to match the market and the market tends to be quite sensitive to the capital costs, the initial outlay of what is it cost to build a plant. We believe we'll comfortably be able to match the continued rapid decline of lithium ion batteries as those volumes increase yet offer these types of stationary energy storage systems the benefit of the extreme durability whether that's climate or just number of cycles, the flexibility to use them however you want to in a true install and forgets or a maintenance mode that's also safe and also designed from the beginning to be recyclable because it is so elegantly simple. And that economic benefit is manifests to 20 to 40% or more depending on the use case. So it's a very, very exciting technology. What we've done over the last six months is we've run through a number of different design iterations and we have resolved the technical risk. We had set for ourselves a spec based on modeling that we did on where we believed we needed to be relative to what customers would require in terms of battery capacity per unit volume in terms of energy efficiency, in terms of the thermal capability for example where I call it the happy temperature that our battery operates at. And what we're finding it been as we introduced these new materials we wanted to make sure we would hit that spec what we're finding is that we are already even in various small volumes far exceeding the threshold that we needed to be at be market relevant to the point where we are absolutely convinced this chemistry works. The materials that we're using they absolutely work and we have the benefit of 30 years of proof that the battery as a concept works now tuned with our materials. We thought we would see a reduction in performance with lower cost materials. What we've actually found is the material and a rate innovation gives us not only lower cost but actually significantly higher performance. So we're performing at a level we thought we would be at two years from now at far higher volumes, for example. And what that's doing is basically putting us in a launch pad where we now have a rocket ship like trajectory planned to scale up very, very quickly based on the proof that the technology works and get to very large volumes very quickly I'll say through strategic partnerships through our strategic investors. So it's very, very exciting and I think it's complementary to what we're doing is complementary to other forms of storage. The energy storage world is not a one size fits all. There's different use cases with different batteries and storage mechanisms that will meet different parts of the value chain. Ours is one that happens to be very, very flexible and very long lasting and durable and well suited for nearly any stationery application big or small around the world. Yorick, thank you very much for sharing your technology with us, very exciting. So we have time just for a few questions before we jump into the panel discussion. Can you speak about the maintenance cost of a lithium ion battery? I know that we've been seeing more and more large deployments, for example, the lithium ion battery system, 800 megawatt hour in MOS landing just in our backyard. Can you give us an idea of what that looks like right now for lithium ion batteries? Yeah, so typically for lithium ion batteries what a customer will do, a customer being someone who's building one of these power plants such as the one of MOS landing. They will model in the lifespan of the lithium ion battery let's say for sake of argument that's typically 3,000 cycles, 10 years roughly may extend over time. And then they'll model in a replacement of just the battery pack portion and they'll assume in the economics that the price is gonna continue to decline. And we've modeled in those same assumptions in our comparison. And then there's also typically an annual maintenance charge that can be between as low as 1%, generally it's more like 2% of the original purchase price which covers warranty and other stuff that might happen. So those numbers add up and they don't sound like much when you think, okay, I'm building this big plant but as it turns out that ends up being roughly one third of the levelized cost of energy of one of these plants and the same is true on the solar side. So as we look at how to be competitive and the power plant business is extraordinarily competitive every nickel matters across that value chain. So anywhere there's an economic advantage that says, okay, I can take my maintenance cost down whether I'm planning on augmenting the battery later or I've oversized or whatever, if I can get rid of that, it goes straight to the bottom line and results in lower wholesale power prices and ultimately lower retail prices for the end consumer. And Yorga, am I correct to assume that flow battery would have much higher maintenance costs than lithium-ion batteries? Yeah, I mean, a flow battery you've got a number of challenges, typically there's membranes or filters that have to be replaced, there's plumbing, there's a lot of complexity there that requires maintenance. The lithium-ion batteries, they've had a head start and they've actually done a very good job of putting the systems in place necessary to keep those batteries happy and so on. They're really sophisticated, but they do require maintenance and they are more fragile inherently just based on the chemistry. Yorga, there was a question on the energy density of your technology, are you able to comment on the cell-level energy density? Yeah, it's surprisingly good. So I came in thinking, all right, if we can hit four X to the volume, meaning that we're gonna be four times the volume per unit of energy of lithium-ion than for stationary applications where density is less important, we'd have a winning solution. Turns out the modeling we're doing based on the performance characteristics, the capacity has us closer to two X, meaning net volume after you consider not just the battery pack, but the full system. We don't need fire suppression, we don't need air conditioning, we don't need a lot of spacing between the units. It's basically just giant racks of those cylinders. It's about a two X volume, it's heavier. So you would not wanna tow this around in your car for a jam or put it in your purse to power your cell phone, but it's a very, very manageable volume from factor for stationary applications. In York, is that two X at the systems level? Correct, systems level. So that's sort of balancing between the decrease need for various overheads in the town. That's right, and there's probably opportunity in there as well, because we can pack more of these together, there's less of a setback requirement. You don't have a fire safety issue and some other things, but it's very competitive. Four X would have, I think the math would have worked just fine. We're closer to two X, that's a very happy zone. Excellent, there's one specific question from our audience. What is the discount rate used in your financial simulations? I think we used 8% in this, and it's same same. So there's also a declining assumption for the price of lithium ion battery packs for the augmentation that's assumed in. You can model this however you want, you end up with basically the same that effect. Reduce that maintenance cost and it's a massive influencer on the overall economics of the plant. Excellent, your thanks again. And let me now invite everyone to return to the stage. Excellent, Yi, do you want to start? Yeah, absolutely. So I want to ask, well, first of all, thank you, three of you, about the scaling issue. If I look at the electricity consumption just now, we're talking about 2.5, close to three, terawatt power, and if I do a simple conversion, I say this is worldwide consumption. I do a simple conversion as I want to stop for four hours. That already translate into, by 2050, we probably need 10 terawatt hour, might be even more, long duration would even more. So we're talking about 10, 20 terawatt hour over storage, or more. I want you to comment on the scaling issues. How do we get there, can we get there? I mean, this is very exciting opportunity, of course, for storage, you can see the market is big, but the challenging is their scalability. I don't know, Andrew, do you want to start? Yeah, yes, thank you. Yeah, this is very interesting question because exactly as Marco pointed out, we need to start now, because you cannot just show up with the terawatt hour capacity in one year. I mean, it takes long time. For our technologies, we leverage a trillion business already established, construction companies, steel manufacturing, and motor generating manufacturing, but still, it will take a long time to reach that amount of capacity. I mean, many, many years, many decades, actually, because it's in any case a big, big process. If you compute the numbers behind that and the cost, even take very competitive numbers, I don't know, even taking $30 per kilowatt hour, even very low number, you end up with trillions. And therefore, you cannot just pop it up in one night. So this is very important. I think people should be aware of that and we need to begin with it. Yeah, well, one of the things that we look at and what it takes to scale up, and I think the world has demonstrated, it's very good at scaling up quickly when there's economic benefit. We look at the manufacturing tooling costs. So how much tooling capex will we need per gigawatt hour of capacity? And we believe we're at roughly 20% of the tooling cost relative to the equivalent lithium ion battery plant capability, just based on the simplicity of it's easier. You don't need clean rooms. There's a whole lot less complexity involved in the manufacturing process, or just more a simple assembly. So there's less capex in that increases the ability to put volume on very, very quickly. Yeah. I totally agree with Andrea and Yorg. It's the material cost needs to be extremely low, materials very abundant. The tooling cost to scale needs to be very low. And so leveraging well-established manufacturing techniques and approaches that are already a scale and essentially must boil down to a supply chain, honestly a supply chain and execution cost. So establishing supply chains with suppliers that already exist, logistics, execution cost, and that allows you to essentially incrementally scale like Andrea was saying over time and initially of course support and incentives to really kind of really see that process. But intrinsically you need to have economies of scale built in from the onset. Yeah. I mean, also speaking of scaling and this coupled together with really favorable with the long lifetime batteries, right? Also other storage mechanism, like gravity. Otherwise you build out something, every seven, eight years you need to change it. I mean, this doesn't help your scaling unless you figure out very simple process of recycling, circular economy. Certainly this point, if anybody wants to make a comment, please do, yeah, about this long lifetime. Is this important? Yeah, I agree. The long lifetime I think was one of our key aspect. I mean, leveraging existing industries, leveraging these existing technologies, leveraging existing infrastructure. We don't need much tooling, you know? Because it's just that construction process. We need the just what we call the break machine, the price. I mean, this is a little bit custom, but it seems significant compare to battery technology, but I believe you might have acknowledged that they require Gigafactory, they require really sophisticated equipment that they need to scale. So, and therefore I think this is, therefore, Pompidro, for example, was very, very successful in the past because this technology lasts for 60 years, so you don't need to replace anything. You just run and improve, improve incrementally, incrementally. Will, back to you. Thanks, yeah, I thought I would maybe build off that question a little bit and talk about the sustainability issues. And Andrea, I appreciate you covering this in your talk. So I thought I would maybe present the question in the following way. You know, many of our listeners are working in the lithium-ion battery field. And when you compare, say, long-duration storage of any kind, typically you think of it as lower energy density in some cases, in many cases. And also over the lifetime of the technology, perhaps also slightly lower energy throughputs, which both of these, I think, puts more pressure on the sustainability aspect. Maybe you can talk about how sustainability has formed your thinking, right? I think all of you touch upon this a little bit, but maybe, Andrea, you can expand upon a little bit more how you are mitigating these challenges. Please. Yeah, the sustainability is very key, especially we have two main focus there. One is carbon footprint, actually. This is also important because when you speak about cement, you immediately think of carbon intensity. So we are trying to really reduce the amount of cement in our rigs. So we are less than one-third of regular concrete rigs, regular concrete construction. And we're trying to further reuse with the new generation products to offset this CO2 environment. We are approaching also different technology to use carbon negative aggregates, like the aggregates developed by Blue Planet, or other methodologies to reduce the carbon footprint. For the environmental aspect, actually, as I mentioned in my presentation, we are trying to help, I mean, try to solve an old problem in energy generation. So the coal combustor is either of disposal. And I think there we are fairly unbeatable in this topic because I think we are the only one energy solution that could use such a material and try to integrate. On the recyclability, as mentioned, we are using construction material. So at the end of life, power system, you can refurbish it and you can extend life. It's done by a commercial power plant. Or you can dispose it. Dispose means you can recycle all the steel, all the metals, all the copper. You have some plastic things that cables, such things that you cannot recycle, maybe yes, in the future. And the bricks, the bricks are a big quantity of material that are actually soiled. And you can use it again for landscaping. For example, roads or landscaping purposes. And we're working now with architects to really focus on a very, very long future and how to accommodate such end of life design already in the project phase, ready now for the next 30 years, how we can vision and view the future landscape of the site and try to reuse as much as possible from our bricks. If I could add to that, the power industry, the electric power industry tends to be heavily economic driven. And so the people who are investing in solar power plants today are the same ones who built gas plants and coal plants before that. They're doing it 99% out of economic motivation to make money. So the key to sustainability is making it profitable to put in place the most sustainable solution. And I think we're at a point where that's working nicely in that generally the lower cost materials, the simpler solutions, they have a lower overall cost and they happen to be sustainable. And then there's actually a component of these plants where the decommissioning that Andrea mentioned. So when it's required for most power plants in most parts of the world to include in the economics of the plant, the takedown of that plant at the end of its useful life. So you can actually quantify what that costs. And then I think in addition to that, we're gonna see government doing its job and actually requiring recyclability and cradle to cradle thinking and so forth. But really that has to be introduced from the outside. That's not a natural thing. That's something that a power plant owner will react to when forced, but it's gonna happen. So it's gonna push us all towards more sustainable solutions. So for maybe for the time consideration, let me just ask one last question. Well, we have a lot of students in the audience right here. You three of you have been certainly, through the clean energy, this area for a long time. Do you have advice for the students? Yeah, just about maybe one minute of advice that will end today's conversation to the students. What to do, how to think about, how to explore the next step, yeah. Yeah, actually if I can also broaden the question, I think we also have a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience as well. So since we have serial entrepreneurs here, maybe also advice to them will be very useful. The, I'll give you two. First is, I do believe we are at the beginning of the single biggest transformation we're gonna see in our lifetime as big or bigger than the internet. Just the change that's gonna happen, turning the electric grid and the power industry as we know it upside down, there is opportunity all up and down that value chain. So it's worth a close look. Very specifically, we are hiring, we're hiring a lot. entervenue.com, come check us out. Yeah, I mean, there is no one technology, isn't the power industry in the past, you don't have one generation system. You are from nuclear to hydro, cold, gas, to whatever you want. So I think there is no one technology and either in the store there will be no one technology and especially for a mobile application for a station application, long duration, short duration. At the end of the day, there will be a mix of technologies and opportunities. So I think there is plenty of opportunity to further explore different technologies to try to overcome the current limitation of existing technology. So for example, for vehicle, you need to increase the energy density or flying vehicle, you need to increase further more the energy density. So this is one very interesting research topic. And on the other side for the stationary storage where the weight test, the correct point about York is not not so relevant, you need to cut the cost because it's economic dreams. Again, other technology, other industries, I think there's plenty of space and we were just seeing the beginning of this evolution. This is great. Thank you, Andrea, you're very inspiring. This is my third venture in clean tech. The first one was a disaster. The second one was a bit better and this one we'll see. I can tell you it's tough, right? The energy space is tough because the challenges are huge and really consequential. So if you're the kind of person that lost big challenges and trust really transformational work, clean energy is your thing. Join us or start your company, but whatever, don't lose faith. And this is a long-term game as well. So I'll take several years to build one of these three transformational companies, but it'll be worth it. Marco, thank you very much. On that note, I think we are witnessing the energy transitions as it happens and it's so delightful for us to hear from three pioneers who are doing this on the very front line of this. So thank you very much for your efforts and we hope to follow the progress of your companies in the coming years. So this closes today's session and Justin, if I can have the slide. So two weeks from now, we're going to have another very interesting discussion. Again, with two industry leaders, Simon Morse and Adam Panai who are running two really successful analysis company looking at energy storage supply chains across the board. So we're going to get a very high level overview of how the market is doing and specifically how we are addressing the need of scaling up from a supply chain perspective. So I welcome everyone to return two weeks from now, same time. And again, I'd like to thank everyone for listening in. Andrea, Marco and Yorick, thank you for your contribution today and we'll see everyone later. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.