 So you know that electricity is tantamount to modernity. Everything that we associate with the 21st century world is predicated on the availability of electricity. And you look at this image and where you see light you see the modern world. Where you don't see light, there's one of two situations. Either nobody lives there or the place hasn't been electrified. And if it hasn't been electrified, from my perspective, there's no greater gift than sustainable, reliable electricity. It really unlocks the future. By the way, you know this is a collage, right? This is not a NASA image of the world at night, because when it's dark here, it's light over here. If, you know, the world never looks like this. If it ever does, it's a really bad day for all of us. I never see it like that. Electricity is very unusual because, you know, the electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago. Because the way the grid operates is that supply has to be in balance with demand everywhere at all times. So you're looking at the world's largest supply chain with zero inventory. So imagine if every time you wanted to draw water from your faucet, the water had to come immediately from a spring, because there's no such thing as water storage. And then when you turn off the faucet, you have to cut back the supply from the spring. Otherwise, the water will continue to flow and build up pressure in the pipes and damage, pipes, valves. The same thing happens on the grid. If supply exceeds demand, voltage will rise, frequency will shift, both with devastating consequences. Imagine if every time you go to plug in a device, you have to ask yourself, do you feel lucky? Do you? So, you know, what's worse than no electricity is bad electricity. How do we deal with this balancing? We deal with it with overcapacity and redundancy, which leads to unparalleled inefficiency, underutilized assets in terms of generation, distribution, transmission, excessive emissions, and all at greater cost to us, the rate payers. And then add to the mix the environmental imperative, which is brought on by the climate change, which argues for a broad deployment of renewables. But the renewables are intermittent, so they themselves alone are incapable of being fully integrated into base load. And supply and demand requirement means that they're no help. Electricity at zero marginal cost that is out of balance is not a solution. It's a problem. So how do we deal with the intermentancy? Overcapacity, redundancy, all at greater cost. Storage is the key missing piece here. Batteries would do for the electricity system what refrigeration did to food supply, or water storage does to water supply. It's compelling. So what's the obstacle to the deployment of batteries? The obstacle is cost. And this is a semi logarithmic plot, so this is 1000X. And it shows various options for electricity storage. And because this is a semi log plot, all of this is meaningless. It's less than 0.1%. So none of the batteries are of any value because they're far too costly and they can't meet the long service lifetime requirements. The only thing that works really is pumped hydro. But pumped hydro is geographically constrained. You have to have a difference in elevation. You have to have access to large amounts of water. You probably couldn't get permitted to put in pumped hydro in many places today, even where there is that difference in elevation. The other thing I learned from looking at this graph, which I had one of my students construct, is that there is a wall here at about $500 per kilowatt hour. So cost is key here. And my message to you is that the classical approach in the university or in the corporate research lab doesn't work in energy. The classic approach is invent the coolest chemistry and then get it to the manufacturing people and they'll chase down the cost curve. And they will. But look at lithium-ion. It's 20 years old. It's still way too costly for this. In fact, it's even way too costly for automobiles. It's great for mobile devices. But it's not going to make it in these other markets. So if cost is the key, then cost has to be a factor in the discovery process. So I think about cost in terms of the chemistry that we're working on. It has to be chemistry that is abundant, earth abundant, and has to be simple to construct. So I refuse to allow my students to go to certain parts of the periodic table because the results will not scale. So when I started thinking about this problem, I decided I had to adopt a different approach. I disregarded everything we knew about batteries and instead looked for inspiration away from the battery field. In fact, I looked to a field that neither stores electricity nor generates electricity, but instead consumes electricity, vast quantities of it. This is an aluminum smelter. This is the cells here. It's about 30 meters across. It goes back maybe one or two kilometers. Consumes vast quantities of electricity, and yet it produces metal from dirt for less than $1 a kilogram. So I knew that if I could teach this thing to not consume electricity but to store it and then give it back at the end, I'd have something that's cheap. So I started with something that's cheap and figured out how to make it work to invent something cool and figure out how to make it cheap. This process was invented in 1886 by two people simultaneously working independently. Hall in the U.S. and he ruled in France. They were both born in the same year. They both died in the same year. 222-year-olds changed the world. With this invention, aluminum changed from a precious metal costing more than silver to a common structural material, thanks to a change in the process. But let's not forget one other important fact. Aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust. If they'd invented this process for iridium, it wouldn't have made any difference. So that was my point of departure. And this was the invention. It's called a liquid metal battery. It's got three layers, all liquid. So I have liquid magnesium on top and I'll show you some other metals. And liquid antimony on bottom, and a molten salt electrolyte in between. And the metal is insoluble in the salt and the salt is insoluble in the metal. So they phase separate and sit one on top of the other like salad oil and vinegar, only in this case we have three layers. Magnesium has a density of less than two, antimony greater than six, and the molten salt is somewhere in between. So there's no need for membrane separators and so on. And this operates at elevated temperature. This is crazy. It can't work. Because it's elevated temperature and everybody knows you have to make a battery at room temperature. Why? Because you want to put it to your face. You don't have to put this to your face. So don't pay for attributes you don't need. And then people don't know much electromedalergy. That's my other field. And it turns out that when the current passes from top to bottom and magnesium alloys with antimony, you generate jewel heat and you trap that heat and it self-sustains. And then when you charge the battery, you bring magnesium back to the top and it generates heat and you trap that heat. And people said that heat will just consume all of the energy of the battery. It turns out the round-trip efficiency of this accounting for the heat loss is 75%, which is greater than the round-trip efficiency of pumped hydro. And I say that and people still say, it's crazy, it won't work. I love it. There's nobody else trying to do this. And now this was my team. There's one student. He was a physics graduate from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Actually, David and I were both born in Toronto in different years. And he's staring at this thing. He's looking at it. He's wondering if it's going to work. Actually, I'm not sure it's going to work, but I don't tell him that, because that's how mentoring works. I tell him, no, no, you'll figure out how to make it work. But he had no prior background in batteries. So he was bright, he was young, but undjaded. And I kept that going all the way through. And then I got funding from Total and from ARPA-E. And this was my team in the summer of 2010. Twenty people. And again, this is the only one that had some background in batteries. The rest of them were all novices. So I don't hire experts. I hire the anti-expert, especially in an area like this. And multinationals. She's from Spain, Korea, China, France, Trinidad, French Polynesia. She's from Poland, David and I were both from Toronto. And I hired a few token Americans as well. And that was the team. And I have to tell you that 20 times 3 is far greater than 3 times 20. So if I had the same amount of money spread over 20 years with three people, I wouldn't be standing here right now. And by the way, the first year, their results were terrible. And in fact, when the Department of Energy monitored David Danielson, who is now the Undersecretary of Energy, when he came to review us after the third quarter, he stood up and he announced that of all of the projects in his portfolio, he gave this one the lowest chance of success. And you can feel the mood sink in the room. But I was patient and they learned from each other and after two years, good things happen. After three years, they worked miracles because they didn't know what was impossible. They were novices and they were at the university. And electrochemistry began at the university. It began with Professor Alessandro Volta. And there's his first battery, a stack of coins, silver and zinc separated by cardboard soaked in brine. And with this invention, it immediately turned into not just a new field of electrochemistry, but new technology, electroplating, electroforming, and it served the basis for electrowinning of aluminum. The other thing that Volta's discovery did was for the first time it demonstrated the utility of a professor. Until Volta, nobody imagined a professor could be of any use. Volta showed that if you give a professor money and good students leave him alone, he's allowed to produce something of value. So sponsored research at universities today is in the tradition of Volta. So how did I get to the next invention? I just sat here with the periodic table. I didn't use density functional theory, no high speed computational material science. I was teaching freshman chemistry. I taught freshman chemistry at MIT for 20 years. Most of my colleagues would kill to avoid that assignment, but I went for it because it was high impact and I was not schooled as a chemist. I was a metallurgist from Toronto. And so as an error of East, I had to teach myself electronic structure and bonding and I can tell you my invention comes from that trajectory, that odyssey. And by the way, the periodic table was given to us by another professor, Mendeleev. The metals on the top had to be most electropositive and the metals on the bottom had to be the worst metals but still metals, so they would be the most electronegative of metals. And mercifully, nature was kind in this case. These are all high density metals and these are all low density metals. And so we've looked at over a thousand combinations of alloys and salts and so on. This is one of the papers that came out recently. I don't care if I publish or not, but I do publish in order to launch the careers of young people. And so this was an image that Felice Frankel made for us. This is an analog. This is liquid mercury. The electrolyte is sodium chloride in water and this is a nickel mesh that would represent the current collector for the lithium. So this is a discharged battery. All the liquid metal on the top is now on the bottom. It's a beautiful image. You know, there's actually an artistic side to all of this as well. And then we had to think about manufacturing because product to market is a long way and so we founded a company, David and I, and another person and we called it Ambri because Ambri is Cambridge. We invented this in the heart of Cambridge and it's a five letter pronounceable name and Ambri.com was still available. And here's the governor of Massachusetts at the time. This is Phil Judis. He was our CEO. And we invented all of the manufacturing capabilities for this. Let me tell you, it's a long road from the laboratory bench to the market when you're talking about energy. In fact, it's such a long road and it takes so much money that it's incompatible with venture capital. So all the talk about massive innovation, it might be fine for little devices and apps for the phone but when you want to take on combustibles, it's a very tough road. So in the background, I want to show you what we... These are the cells that we're building now. These are 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter. Each of these cells is 100 amperes and we aggregate these in order to make platters that can aggregate into modules. And then you'll see, I mean, this is the trajectory that we're on and we invented the robotics that will actually automate this. So this is 25 kilowatt hours. This is about the size of a large refrigerator. It's more than adequate for a single family home. And then we aggregate these. One of my students put this together and I marveled at how much easier it is to do something virtually than it is to do something in reality. So people who work in virtual reality are kind of easy. And by the way, power electronics, you know, battery management system, all of this, zero help from the industry. Siemens, General Electric, ABB, Schneider, no help, no help. So we hired our own people. We had to program all of this stuff ourselves. And this will give you a sense of what it's like. So these are the cells here. And I'll show you, this is the inside, one of the operations. So we invented all the robots and this is TIG welding and so on and so forth. It's primitive. But there's a chance it might succeed. So this would be the footprint of a 53-foot trailer. It's about 16 meters by about two and a half meters. This would be one megawatt hour. So it's silent, no emissions. And by the way, this can act as a load as well as a source. And you know, sometimes to balance the grid, the remedy is not more current. The remedy is to get rid of current. That's when they go to negative price and they call you up and say, please turn on all of your machinery. Well, this thing in one millisecond can turn from a source into a load. And we've abused these things at very, very high currents and they take it. The only question here is, where does this thing go? Because if this thing is on the right side of $500 a kilowatt hour, it doesn't make any difference. And our cost models indicate that we're going to be somewhere shy of $500 a kilowatt hour. So there's hope. We're on the trajectory. I wish I had the battery. I'd put it in front of you here, but it's a long way. So that brings me full circle to, you know, what have we learned from all of this? So high temperature battery, oddly enough, is safer than a room temperature battery. And then, of course, the whole business about mentoring and so on, I did not go to experts. I did not bring in consultants from the battery industry. Instead, I brought in young people, bright young people. And the other piece of it is that if, let's say, we want to bring electricity to places that don't have it, the vision of this is that batteries in Africa should be built by Africans using African resources. That way they become authors of their own future. Batteries are not built in one plant in China and shipped all over the world. So that unifies everything. And actually, there's this grand unification that I see because the other half of my research is in electrolytic production of metals. Imagine if you have a sustainable source of electricity that electrolytically produces the metal that goes in the battery that then stores the sustainable form of electricity. Because ultimately, it's all about electricity. And 50 years from now, we will be off of carbon. We will have renewable, sustainable electricity which means all industrial chemistry will be industrial, electrochemistry. And chemicals will be used as sources of synthesis for fabrics and materials, but not for sources of electrons. I hope I've given you some hope. This is a fantastic space to be active in. And with storage, we'll see the widespread deployment of renewables. And the last thing is the mentoring piece. This is what I tell my students, be realistic, ask for the impossible, and sometimes with enough ingenuity, the impossible becomes the inevitable. Thank you.