 Well, it's it's a pleasure to be here. I always like coming back to Stanford. It's a Really a literate audience. So it's it's fun to talk to people understand I'm going to talk today about innovation in stationery energy storage and the subtext here is cost-informed discovery Why I call it that is that I started this work about a little over ten years ago and I reasoned that if the There was going to be impact in in this area The classical model of the university research wouldn't work the classical model is invent the coolest chemistry And then throw it over the transom and let the manufacturing guys figure out how to get it down to cost And the cost will come down, but this is not like developing a smartphone It gives the utility that never existed before you're up against deeply entrenched incumbents that are heavily subsidized And if you're going to unseat them, you're going to have to invent in ways that Consider cost on day one not on day one when it goes to the manufacturing. So I started with cost information right from the very beginning The other thing I want to say by introduction is I like to show this image could we get the lights down just a little bit more over here because this is a pretty image and It reminds us that Electricity is tantamount to modernity Everything that we value as 21st century world is predicated on the availability of electricity You look at this map it tells you where the modern world exists where it's dark is one of two things Either nobody lives there or the place hasn't been electrified and if it hasn't been electrified I can think of no more precious gift than reliable sustainable electricity and and electricity is special because It's it's unique in that supply equals demand everywhere at all time so you're looking at the world's largest supply chain with zero inventory and It's just it's just incredible that this thing works at all By the way, you know that this is a collage This is not this is not the NASA image of the world at night because when it's dark over here It's light over here The world never looks like this if it ever does it's a really bad day for all of us. I hope I never see it looking like this All right, so I had on the cost thing. I had one of my students put this together You can quibble about that the exact numbers, but the general trend is correct So this installed capacity is a function of capital cost and it's a semi log plot Which means all of this means nothing. This is less than point one percent So all the batteries amount to nothing there is no battery that can satisfy the needs The only thing it really works is pumped hydro, but pumped hydro is geographically constrained It's not going to work in downtown Manhattan. It's not going to work in downtown Boston You need a difference in elevation and you need abundant water and even if you had Those conditions you probably couldn't get permitted today because the public appetite is such that they don't want you messing with nature So I think the pumped hydro that we have in place now is what we're going to have But we got to get something that can perform like a battery and priced at the drop point of pumped hydro so So don't ask me about other batteries because there are no batteries that work in this market It's not battery versus battery. It's battery versus combustion. So I'm competing against diesel and natural gas So that means electrochemistry takes on thermal chemistry. It's an unfair fight So you're going to be really really resourceful if you're going to make progress So what's my idea first can find chemistry to earth abundant elements? Well, this is another semi log plot and you can see this is a Relative abundance as a function of atomic number and you can see these are very abundant elements And these are rare elements and the difference is one billion One billion that's really important to know so that If if you want something that's going to scale in energy I forbid my students to work in this part of the periodic table because it won't scale I mean look you can talk all you want about cad telluride solar cells to learn him as about his earth abundant as gold It just won't scale if I gave it to you for free. It doesn't exist the only reason I would study cad telluride is to learn about Photovoltaics as a surrogate system and then migrate over to something that is scalable You see silicon is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust so Silicon photovoltaics makes sense by the way This is why we all have phones in our pockets because the semiconductor device of choice is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust if Semiconductors are made out of rhodium. No one would have one in his pocket Platinum is down here by the way. That's why the prospect of hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles is so remote Because platinum is down here Platinum's okay for the jewelry market but not for Widespread use in automobiles Do you think if the world demand for platinum goes up by a hundred X the price of platinum is going to fall No, if the world demand for steel goes up the price of steel will fall because iron is an unconstrained resource Platinum is a constrained resource if the demand for platinum goes up the price will go up So if you're working on fuel cells, what's the number one topic? Non-noble metal catalyst So I say if you want to make something dirt cheap make it out of dirt And preferably local dirt It doesn't make sense to trade in your dependence on imported petroleum for dependence on imported neodymium Your dollars are still flying out of the country and you have an insecure supply chain and the second thing is make it easy to manufacture I'm going to grab a second point of this one is you know the cobbler's children go barefoot and I have battery problem Oh, well, they don't need it. They don't need my image All right, so the second thing is make it easy to manufacture. This is where lithium-ion falls down Lithium-ion why do they call it a giga factory five giga dollars? What it looks like a semiconductor fabrication facility and it's really really complex and that's a technology It's 25 years old, so please don't tell me that. Oh, there's so much more efficiency to squeeze out For after 25 years really all right. Good luck So you got a design holistically on day one you start thinking about what's that battery going to look like? because if it's Made out of dirt cheap elements in an elaborate design that no one can make reproducibly that's not going to work either so When I started this first thing I did is I disregarded everything I know about batteries I reasoned the battery that powers this device here is Useless when it comes to grid-level storage if you think you can take the battery out of this thing take the dimensions Multiply them all by ten thousand and install it. It's not going to work You got to look somewhere else so I look for inspiration in my other field of research which is modern electrometallurgy and I look to the aluminum smelter You import box site from one corner of the globe carbon. That's a euphemism for petroleum coke Six six and a half kilowatt hours of electricity to make a pound of metal and the plant is about $5,000 a ton capital cost So you 100,000 tons a year you can figure how much it's going to cost us to build a plant And yet we go from dirt to metal for 50 cents a pound That's why you're drinking soda and beer out of aluminum cans because it's cheap Now here's a modern aluminum smelter. This is about 60 feet and probably goes back about a mile There's a human form right there that give you a sense All right. This thing consumes vast quantities of electricity. It's probably about 500,000 amps 4 volts all right and It was invented in 1886 by two men working independently Charles Martin Hall in Oberlin, Ohio and Paulie rule in France. There they are. That's the rule. That's Hall They're both born in the same year. They both died in the same year and they met once 1911 when Hall was given the Perkins Medal by the American Chemical Society And he rule came to Philadelphia to speak in praise at the banquet. They were fierce competitors Their patents crossed at the world court. They ended up cross licensing and so on Well, I told you they were both born in the same year. So I guess in 1886. They had to be the same age 52 42 32 22 22 year olds changed the world they took aluminum from what was a precious metal costing more than silver the Washington Monument is topped by a pyramid weighing 100 ounces of aluminum because before the at the time of the American Centennial Aluminum was a precious metal and they had to have metal on the top to be part of the lightning rod and so on By the time they finished the Washington Monument the Holly rule process had been invented But don't forget aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust if they'd invented this process for rhodium It wouldn't make any difference So I looked at this and I said, you know, maybe we've got the answer right here So this is the inside you see these posts here. These are the leads on the anodes So you've got a big carbon anode here You've got a carbon floor and the the orange is the electrolyte It's cryolite sodium aluminum fluoride and you dissolve aluminum oxide by the action of electric current you make liquid aluminum here on the bottom and At the top the oxygen of aluminum oxide reacts with the carbon and makes co2 and it bubbles away So it takes a half a ton of carbon to make a ton of steel It takes a half a ton of carbon to make a ton of aluminum only the aluminum is being made by the consumption of carbon anode So I looked at this and I said, okay You can't run this in reverse because you have a fugitive emission from one of your electrodes So I said, oh, let's trap the gas well That's stupid because the gas is an insulator that won't work I kept thinking and thinking and eventually I came to the conclusion that you have to produce liquid metals at both electrodes and that was the genesis of the liquid metal battery and So how did I decide which Metals to choose while I was teaching a big freshman chemistry class and I just sat and stared at the periodic table And I knew I had to get a maximum difference in electronegativity. I did not use density functional theory No computational material science. No rapid throughput screening do da do da I sat and I looked at this thing and figured it out by raw intellect. So I knew I knew I knew One of the electrodes would have to be one of the most electropositive metals So that's going to come from the north west part of the periodic table and the other electrode has to be a poor metal But not a non-metal if it's a non-metal it'll be an insulator. So these are the poorest metals They're right next to this staircase here. That's the staircase of the semi metals So I'm going to choose one of these opposite one of those and this was our first embodiment It's a magnesium on the top anemone on the bottom and a molten salt in between The magnesium is a density less than two anemone is greater than six and the molten salt is around three Now metal see on all this from my my electro metallurgy people look at this and they go wow It's high-temperature, you know, I'm going to burn the place down. They don't understand you cool a haul cell You don't heat a haul cell you cool it So the magnesium floats on the salt. It's insoluble. It's like salad oil and vinegar and the salt is insoluble in anemone So I don't need any separator no membrane. It's primitive and On discharge what happens is a magnesium wants to alloy with the anemone But magnesium is insoluble in the salt but magnesium smart It knows if it dumps two electrons and becomes magnesium iron it can traverse and then when it gets over here It acquires two electrons and becomes a neutral and alloy so the top layer gets thinner and the bottom layer gets thicker and Then to charge the battery so these electrons go through the external circuit to charge the battery We force current through it and electro refine the magnesium back Purify the salt and purify the anemone So when you recharge the battery you reconstitute it to its pristine condition and There's none of the fracturing that occurs in a lithium-ion battery with Decrepitation all this is no the because it's liquid and the liquid has no memory and By the action of current you generate heat which is a threat in a lithium-ion battery here We trap the heat of this just a schematic of course But we trap the heat and when it discharges generates jewel heat when it charges it generates jewel heat and with appropriate Installation it can sit for days, but this is typically designed to be working on a diurnal basis So you know you generate the heat that you need and you might say well this thing's crazy And of course lots of people agree with you, but I I've persisted so we have earth abundant elements It's self-assembly you don't think about batteries and self-assembly you think about self-assembly and you know nano stuff, right? Now this is really important people people are vicious in their criticism of me. They say this is stupid that the thermal Penalty is going to sap most of the electricity. No the round-trip efficiency of this battery Which I'll show you one chemistry that's operating at 475 degrees Celsius is 75 percent accounting for the thermal losses 75 percent pumped hydro is 70 percent Which is I'm not going to say it's better than pumped hydro just say it's good enough if it's as good as pumped hydro It's fine and at commercial scale it's self-heating our cells in the laboratory are tiny so we have external heaters We don't worry about thermal runaway. In fact, we've shock tested these where we actually Mixed the top layer with the bottom layer got a huge exotherm Temperature goes up, but below the melting point of the steel can and below the boiling point of the contents I once was approached by some DARPA people who said Do you think you could put one of these in a forward operating base in Afghanistan? I said yeah, and the other guy says yeah, well what happens if a sniper shoots at it? I said well The bullet goes in the top of the alloy with magnesium it goes in the bottom of the alloy with anamone He says yeah, but now you got metal leaking out. I said yeah, and it freezes And the guy looks at his buddy. He says battle hardened So oddly enough a high-temperature battery is safer than a room temperature battery and By the way, you know you can't ship lithium-ion batteries You can't even take the galaxy note on a plane Huh, and you can't ship lithium-ion batteries by pallets on planes So we went to the Department of Transportation and said what about this and they said so what's the voltage of your battery? At room temperature as a room temperature. It's dead. It's solid metal and solid salt. They said no problem All right, this is a this is a cutaway one of the earlier This is magnesium up here, and this is anamone here This is a steel can and this is probably about what these these are there's your centimeter So you get a sense of of what it is and you can see well, you know Metal has very high surface tension so it balls up and then if you make it big enough then it'll go flat How do I know this because all the plate glass in this room was made by pouring molten silicate on top of liquid tin and The glass in this room doesn't look like this does it so I know it can get really flat This is this is some candid shots This was Steve Chu visiting us in June of 2012 and he autographed the glove box there see proof All right, so What's the status report we've tested over a thousand cells looking at different chemistries Different combinations of alloys different combinations of salts the database is really sparse We have people people study liquid alumina they study liquid magnesium, but you start looking at Say something like lithium plus anamone or lithium plus bismuth Either no data or bad data bad data is worse than no data And we've identified a number of alloy chemistries that will get us below a hundred dollars a kilowatt hour for the electrodes in the electrolyte and This is one of them that we published two years ago, and the reason I'm showing this is that you know I'm tenured right tenure means never having to say you're sorry. I don't have to publish. I don't care All right, but I do want to publish to launch the careers of the young people who work with me So this one ended up in nature, which it's arguably the number one scientific journal on the planet and What that does for these people is Red carpet treatment when they start their careers, but it also means that we must be doing something of intellectual value You know battery people, you know the hierarchy of of science. You know mathematics physics Chemistry and then electrochemistry is the bottom of chemistry and batteries is the very bottom. All right, but Sometimes Something good happens So this is what was in that this is this was the shocker that was in I'll give you just a little bit of science Because I want to get through this in in time. So this is what was in that paper So we looked at the the lithium antimony system and this is the data for solid lithium antimony and these are data that were obtained by none other than professor Robert Huggins and These data are fantastic. It's got a very very good voltage and Good performance, but it's it's a solid at you know, lithium forgive me antimony melts at 630 degrees and Lithium melts at 180. So why are we what are we doing up at 630? So if we alloy it with lead it'll the melting point will come way down, but lead is a low voltage system It's a low melter, but a low voltage Anamony is a high voltage, but high melter So I said well Let's alloy the lead with the anamony and see what happens and I figured it would be sort of rule of mixtures wrong And when you think about it in retrospect We should have predicted this if you've got an alloy of lead and anamony and lithium is coming in the lithium doesn't Distribute amongst the lead in the anamony it bonds to the anamony preferentially because it's the tighter bond so this is cafeteria material science you get the low melting point of Anamony lead and the high voltage of Anamony and that kicked open the doors for a whole bunch of other alloying things and we said wait a minute this We can start using these low melters, but we would have disregarded them. That was a surprise so this is what happens when you when you put this on a plot of Normalized for the same amount of anamony they lie on top of one another until you get to this compound Lithium-3 anamony and once you go beyond that the voltage plummets look at this is fantastic so being at Stanford, I know you want to hear about the On the commercialization side too, so let's say a few words about that So I with two of my students started a company in 2010 All the catchy names were taken So we had to register the thing so we called it in a moment of desperation the liquid metal battery corporation I can't think of a more boring name If you want a boring name for your company call me And then two years later. We decided to change it. We changed it to Ambrie. Why do we come up with Ambrie? I learned that from somebody here Cisco systems, where did that come from? San Francisco, so I looked at that and I said we invented this battery in Cambridge And so I lopped the front and back off of Cambridge and Ambrie comm was still available So that was great So series A funding came from Bill Gates Now I'm Canadian. I'm very polite. I wouldn't dare go to Bill Gates. Bill came to me Why because I was teaching this big freshman chemistry class at MIT was too big to fit in a room So they had to put it on closed circuit TV and spill it over into a second room And then as the internet got more and more bandwidth they came up with MIT open courseware and this was one of the classes that went on open courseware and Somewhere around 2005 2006 Bill started watching my lectures all of them every year and In August of 2009. I got an email from a woman who said she was his secretary He was coming to Boston at the end of September would I have 90 minutes to meet with him? Well, I disregarded the email Because I thought the students had hacked into my account and they were just going to make a fool out of me So I disregarded it and then about a week later. She wrote me again and said Perhaps you didn't see my email, but mr. Gates was really like to see you So finally he came and we sat and we chatted in my office for about 90 minutes Now we talked about computers and education because the chemistry lectures even had comments about the camera work and and Distance learning and then we started talking about energy and and I had no results This was August of 2009 nothing I sketched it on a whiteboard He said we you know if you ever decide to spin spin that out Let me know I'd be want to put some money into it a year later My students went to him and he was our first investor and was met with the Monday from Total a big French energy company This is an interesting story, you know, I don't know on this campus, but an MIT for a long time We had a really really strong movement of students to divest fossil fuels All right now who was my first funder for the liquid metal battery? It wasn't Electric Power Research Institute. It wasn't the Department of Energy it was an oil and gas company, so Think about it All right, so this this is a this a cartoon that one of the students put together This is what we're doing at Ambrie. These are individual cells and I'll show you an image of them in a second So we're putting them together in pallets each one of these cells is 80 amp hours one cell 80 amp hours They're at a four inch square and this gives you two kilowatt hours and we had to invent all the manufacturing capabilities power electronics so the thing that I Find curious is that it's much easier to do this in Animation than to do it in reality Actually, it would be very hard for me to do this. I would much rather do it in reality but anyway, so you said this would be a 53-foot trailer on a 18-wheeler and that would give you two megawatt hours plus the power electronics and We've had to invent all of that. I talked to GE Schneider Electric ABB Seamans all these guys I said look I'm an electric chemist. I need to I need all this power electronics help me And they just said wow that's pretty risky. Let's keep in touch You know the big incumbents they don't they're not taking any they're not taking any chances All right, so this is a two or three years ago November this is Phil Judici our CEO. This is Deval Patrick who is the governor of Massachusetts at the time And what we have in the background is the? Robotics that help us build these cells so we hired a man from the automobile industry Not a man who builds cars, but a man who designs robots that build cars and then we figured out how to Automate as much as we can in this in this thing. This is what the cells look like. This is a 10 centimeter 4 inch square and The can is positive. It's just a steel can. This is a TIG weld is really primitive and then there's a feed through here to make connection to the upper electrode and and Right here has a dielectric seal. It's got to be hermetic Dielectric and it has to stand up to the most vicious metals from the northwest part of the periodic table magnesium Lithium and so on and that's taken us several years to solve and we've solved it This is 80 amp hours, and we've now built them Eight inches by eight inches one cell and that's 380 amp hours because you get rid of all this wall so you get more than four times the thing 380 amp hours for one cell. It's roughly one volt says about 380 watt hours Now for reference, this is a 1865 olithium ion 18 millimeters by 65 millimeters on The same scale. Why does that mean something? Well, if you were to build this They put one megawatt hour on 50 square meters. You need 93,000 of those one 865 o's Now I'll give them to you for free, but someone's got to wire them You see this is where the economy of scale flips more is not better than fewer We need 2600 of the 8 inch squares, but this is the thing that really makes me excited This cell has been operating. This is this is early data. It's it's way out here now But this is this is essentially full discharge full charge the full depth of discharge And a 300 milliamps per square centimeter if you know lithium ion, I mean the you've got to put two decimals move over here 300 milliamps per square centimeter and the fade rate is this number here. What does it mean? It means that if you deep discharge this battery every day once a day for ten years That's three thousand six hundred and fifty cycles you retain ninety nine point four percent nameplate capacity We have some cells at Ambrie that have been running for two years Discharging and charging twice a day and they have nameplate capacity zero fade The capacity here is with an experimental error of capacity here And there's you know, there's a little bit of jiggle in the data, but there's no trend So the the electro refining thesis is demonstrated So this is this would be silent. It's not like a gas fired turbine zero emissions no moving parts Remotely controlled so this thing can act as a load, you know, sometimes to balance the grid Let's say all of a sudden there's a whole bunch of solar comes in and we don't have the demand So you've got a dump electricity. So you call a coal fired plant say Back off by five percent is going to take in 15 minutes to do it and meanwhile the the frequency is going to migrate And the voltage is going to go up, you know every time you plug in your device Can you imagine if you had to think do I feel lucky? Because it's not 110 volts and it's not 60 Hertz and maybe 140 volts and you'll blow your device irretrievably so this thing can on a millisecond turn from a source into a load and Then it can it can take electricity at huge quantities But the only question is what's it's a thing so the first one's obviously going to be way over here But our cost models indicate that at scale we're going to be below five hundred dollars per kilowatt hour So that looks good But there's more we've continued to do research and now I'm looking at I call it zebra unchained because zebra Has the liquid sodium with the beta-aluminum membrane, which is very fragile We've got a molten-solu electrolyte and this is crazy solid nickel Converts to solid nickel chloride because of the nickel chloride dissolves in here It'll attack the beta-alumina most people don't realize beta-alumina is really refractory But not in the presence of transition metal chlorides transition metal chlorides will eat right through this So look at the lunacy of this you have a solid electrode that on discharge covers itself with a solid insulating layer So I said well the problem here is we got to get rid of this beta-alumina and not replace it with another brittle ceramic So we've been working on that and we have some success But I can't tell you about it not because of IP because when I went to first publish the liquid metal battery It kept was held by nature for 11 months and ultimately rejected and one of the reviewers Scoured the internet and he found an image like this and he says he's already talked about it So I'm not going to talk about this so if I but if I took that new zebra chemistry with the The non-ceramic membrane I don't have an aluminum separator and means I don't have to just have sodium because sodium is the only metal That will work with beta-alumina So now I can have a liquid metal molten salt on the positive electrode side very fast reactions And we've got some systems that are less than $25 a kilowatt hour because you're looking at things like lead lead chloride With sodium on the other side or magnesium. I mean it's really really cheap So that would mean that this cell would then have 240 amp hours and the 8-inch cell would have over 1,000 amp hours for a single cell that gets really exciting and The zero capacity fade So I'm going to wrap this up with some general comments about what I've learned from all this experience First, you know, I it's the power of a free thinking and counter a counter intuition Most people would say the battery should be at low temperature for high thermal Efficiency, but I reason to go to high temperature because I get all liquid and liquid liquid Electro, forgive me liquid liquid electrode electrolyte interface is fast. We have Current The I zero the rest current density is 600 amps 600 amps per square centimeter There's almost no polarization Scaling I've already told you everybody says make many I say make fewer but make them bigger and Lastly human resources the people that worked on this were graduate students undergraduate students and postdocs who had no Experience in electrochemistry and no familiarity with batteries. I wouldn't have them otherwise they came with Britain are like you bright young minds undjaded and Don't know what's impossible and they made miracles happen the first year with our ARPA E grant When Dave Danielson came after the third quarterly visit. He said I Give this Project of all in my portfolio the lowest chance of success because they were all struggling But after two years we were getting results and after three years they worked miracles so I say go with the novices and you got to have the right culture if you put good people In a bad culture you don't get good results either so remember this one If this looks like your workplace Get out So I'm going to end by reminding people How it all began it all began here with a professor Volta at the University of Padua. This is his first battery. It's a stack of coins silver and zinc Separated by cardboard soaked in brine and this gave birth to a new field of science Electrochemistry it actually gave birth to electricity. There was no electricity before this The dynamo was invented 60 years later, but this was the birth of electricity So all the guys that did electromagnetism in the 1830s and 1840s. They were working with this This Volta gave us the new field and immediately within 10 years there was new technology Electroplating electroforming and then formed the basis for electrolytic production of metals The second thing that volt is discovery did is that for the first time it demonstrated the utility of a professor Until Volta no one believed a professor could be of any use But Volta showed that if you give a professor Resources and good people leave alone. He's liable to do something of societal value and Everybody who does sponsored research is following in Volta's Footstep before Volta all advances in the science came Not from the science it came from the artisan People knew how to color glass with glazes before a professor could give a mediocre lecture on Bandgaps in yeah, and people knew how to make a a tempered sword long before a professor could give a mediocre lecture on phase transformations in metal But Volta changed that Volta invented it at the university and then it's spread and that's what we do here. Thank you Okay, we have time for some questions and in keeping with the Custom I'd like to begin by encouraging and actually requiring Questions from students in the audience, please. Yes I've like been following you on Twitter for a while. I'm curious to talk a little bit about Electricity electricity storage and spreading electricity because with electricity comes education and ability to spread all the good things about modern modern life I remember one time you mentioned something about hydro like hydro power through waves I was wondering if you ever had any thoughts towards how do you take wave power and use it to both provide Electricity and possibly a clean water to places that don't necessarily have it. Have you ever thought about that way? Well, you know, I think that if you start with water that needs to be purified to make it potable then you know, I start thinking electrochemically because It's 540 calories per gram to evaporate it and then condense it and so on you can do it But I would I would like to see Electricity generated sustainably and then use that to purify water Because if you got energy if you got energy, you know, you can read after dark That means you can educate yourself and if you can drink the water and not not be ill-disposed That's that's the ingredients to a good start Yes Very exciting talk. So my question would be more about the packaging material and the sealing material that you choose to make a better pack that can be capable to manage the heat and also of lower cost and also to maintain the safety requirement So the first thing the packaging it's in a it's in a steel can. It's all steel and then the the dielectric at the top is is a combination of of oxide ceramic and There's some titanium nitride in there. That is especially corrosion resistant to the vapor in the headspace and and it's a design that you know You have to design it in such a way because it's going to undergo a thermal excursion and Ceramics are okay in compression. They're no good intention So when this thing is going to expand as it rises in temperature You have to design it in such a way that the ceramic is inside a collar so that the that the two metals Expand and then compress the ceramic. So there's all these Tricks and so on and then as far as safety goes As we keep the thing sealed of course, but you know as I said in my remarks the the high temperature It's oh, I remember you asked me about insulation. So insulation We've calculated what we need and we don't use solid insulation like bricks, but we use a powdered flowable ceramic and Put that around but even things like the interconnects the interconnects at 475 degrees Celsius can't be copper copper at 475 will oxidize So what are we going to use well early prototypes? We were using nickel nickel works, but it's frightfully expensive So I said well, let's use something that's a lot cheaper So I said well copper will put about 10% aluminum in it We made an aluminum bronze Aluminum oxide forms on the surface of the copper and it works But what we're doing next is research on lower melting metals and lower melting salts if we get down It's it's it's an erroneous plot right to in terms of corrosion Activity, but there are click stops on there if you get down below 280 all of a sudden you use copper And if you get down below 250 you don't use steel you can use polymer Can you imagine using injection molded molded polymer for the can and the seal is going to be a compression fitting? I mean just goes lower and lower and the limit is not the metals There are plenty of low melting metals But there aren't very many low melting salts and don't talk to me about ionic liquids because they're frightfully expensive and their Electrical conductivities are abysmally low. So they they're not going to help you here. We got to get a low melting salts And that's what we're working on Right back there. Yes As you look forward to the commercialization of this technology You see major policy or regulatory structures in electricity markets that might prevent the full value of these batteries from being realized Yes Yes, so the the original grid did not anticipate the need for storage and you know if you and I started a an oil company That company could explore drill pump refine make product and sell to the Consumer in electricity the people who generate electricity don't transmit it the people who transmit it don't distribute it People to distribute it don't sell a little rate pair. So the the it's all fractionated like this So I come along with storage and where would it do the most good? Well, let's say I'm a generator and The the guy who's transmitting wants to install storage. So he doesn't have to put in a new transmission line When the battery is discharging it's tantamount to a generator So I'll protest and say you don't have the right to to have a battery. So There's there's a lot of policy Changes and regulatory changes that are going to have to take place. But it's you know, if I asked you in 1985 could you Could you construct for me just the roughly how would you price? um Wireless transmission of digital data you go what I don't know what you're talking about So we're at the same point with this people people have never anticipated this so But you've touched on a key point that This is not a free market if you and I come up with a new toothpaste They put it on the shelves if people want it they buy it Right, but if you come out with something in the energy, it's so it's so Complex and regulated and so on you show up with the superior technology. They don't Greet you with flowers This is what are you doing here? You're gonna you're gonna obsolete all this stuff But you know the other thing about the grid you're mandated to meet peak demand peak demand is 40% higher than normal And it's reached less than 2% of time So if I told you you have to build your highway that way all of these highways would be 25 lanes wide So that no one would ever have to hit the brakes because you have to meet peak demand We say that's stupid, but that's the way the grid is So it's it's if you can have batteries that'll shave those peaks off It's huge. So it's not just about firming renewables, you know intermittent renewables are a headache. They're not a blessing marginal Power at zero marginal cost in excess of demand It's useless because you can't catch it. It's not like extra rain You know imagine imagine the food supply chain without refrigeration Food supply chain without refrigeration means you eat what is locally available You don't have Stuff coming from halfway around the world. There's what there's one other way out of this by the way I showed you that image of the world all over the place and I said, well, it's sunny here, but it's dark over there Well, what's the other remedy? Lossless transmission of electricity So if you're looking for a project, I challenge you room temperature superconductivity With room temperature superconductivity I could ship electricity from where the sun shines to where it's dark and I could balance the grid really well That's a long shot, but it's worth trying for Okay, we'll take one more quick student question and then what's a vapor pressure change of the battery during the charging discharge of the vapor pressure The vapor pressure change is going to be in the head space But we don't fully deplete the the metal out of the the head space so the the vapor pressure actually doesn't change in the head space and Then the salt is covered over the the metal on the bottom metal on the bottom is the low volatile one It's it's not it. We're not talking about High pressure or anything like that. These are all subatmospheric pressures please so I'm thinking about Power wall or something like that just say in order of magnitude or more more expensive than what you have What is the right scale? If you have a community Should and people have solar Roof sort of it should should every home have one of these batteries or should there be one for a Block or went through a whole city Yeah, that's a that's a good question. It's going to come down to how the economics shake out I mean, you know people have this idea that it'd be great to have a solar panel on a roof and and storage in their own basement and essentially be off-grid I think the economy of scale works better for a neighborhood and Because you know the grid is not going to go away So if you had neighborhood level storage, then you could have Electrical devices see right now the reason that they will not allow you to take the Electricity off your roof and take it into your house They have they they force you to send it through the grid because the grid has to know in order to balance supply and demand So they can't have all this stuff going on without their knowledge That's true up to a point, but you could have electronic devices that Let's say you want to sell electricity to the grid. It sends a note and it says requesting permission to sell What's the price and then it sends you back a note saying? Okay, we can accept it. I know it's coming And but but they don't they don't they choose that this goes back to the point of the young lady over there about regulatory issues, you know After Superstorm Sandy, they had all these luxury homes along the Jersey Shore with Panels on the roof and it's sunny day two days after the storm and the electricity goes to the grid But the grid is down So let's fix that though. Those are man-made rules. They can be changed All right Follow up question on the heat the the video or the packaging Yeah left the impression that I could walk right up and just touch the edge of that box No problem. Is that the case? Yes, you don't need a special in the machinery room, right? That's but well You saw the One with the white the white outer panel So we've got those are built and there's insulation between the aggregation of the metal cells and the outside the outside is I don't know what the spec is it has to be below 50 degrees C or something like that So that's fine because because and by the way people ask well, what happens if they they start to freeze They freeze from the outside in they don't freeze uniformly So they start freezing slowly slowly slowly as long as the ones in the center are still molten You start passing current and it melts back See a question back there Can you talk a little bit about the effect of Vanadium flow batteries because those are the ones that are commercially available today And I haven't seen that mentioned in any of the charts Well, there was a point on the the chart of the flow batteries They've been around for about 40 years people are struggling to to make them Practical and I I'm happy to see it's not battery versus battery I mean, you know if the power wall can can contribute good if the somebody can get flow batteries to work fine I'm not going to get tribal here personally I Don't work in aqueous solutions water is For drinking I I I don't Me for me aqueous electrochemistry is boring But you know, I don't so I don't know I don't know how close the flow batteries are But my mom my one question about flow batteries is how is the flow induced? Pumps those pumps are moving parts So, you know, you got a you got a factor that in the cost of ownership I asked people how long is the flow battery? Oh 30 years. I said, how about the pumps? Do you have to do anything? Oh, yeah We have to replace some of the veins and the pumps and so on how often do you have to do that? Well, you know, so Maybe that's the reason that they're not out there. I don't know Okay, I think that's it for the general question period There may be some opportunity to ask some questions to Don afterward, but in any case, let's thank him for an excellent