Catalyst with Shayle Kann - When will batteries take over the world?

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

In the 90s batteries powered your camcorder and boombox. Then your phone. Now they’re running your electric vehicle (EV), and in some cases, even your house.  At what scale will batteries meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions? We may be nearing an inflection point with electric vehicle batteries, but we’re nowhere near as close with grid storage technologies. What’s it going to take to get there?   Guest host Lara Pierpoint explores this question with battery expert – David Schroeder, chief technology officer of Volta Energy Technologies, a venture capital firm focused on storage. They talk about David’s two least favorite phrases in the battery world: “range anxiety” and “long duration.” They also survey different applications for storage and whether there’s a holy grail technology that can satisfy that variety of demands. .  Then, they zoom in on lithium-ion technology, the workhorse of EVs and storage. They cover safety, recalls, supply chains, and why lithium ion is so expensive for grid applications. But David explains why he’s optimistic that declining lithium-ion costs will fall even further. They also discuss recycling, flow batteries, thermal storage, and mechanical storage by lifting and lowering heavy blocks of concrete. Oh, and nuclear watches. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you’re a startup, investor, enterprise or innovation ecosystem that’s creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit anten​na​group​.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world — with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nex​track​er​.com/​s​u​s​t​a​i​n​a​b​ility to learn more.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Laura Pierpoint, and this is Catalyst. You have those early adopters that are paying the bill and that are getting scale up and helping manufacturers to ring cost out, and that's what has given you an EV battery. And my hypothesis is the same thing is going to give you a grid battery. Lithium ion batteries are taking over the world. In the 90s, it was your camcorder and your boombox.

Now it's your phone and your electric vehicle and even in some cases in your house. So, are we there yet? Can we scale batteries so that they meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions? It seems like we may be close with EV batteries, but we're nowhere near as close with grid storage technologies. What's it going to take to get there? When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities,

coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital,

and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lara Pierpoint, filling in for Shale Khan while he's on family leave. He'll be back next week. As amazing and effective as the electric grid is, we've always wanted and needed a way to take electric power with us anywhere. Batteries are the answer.

They've unlocked camcorders, remember those, and then cell phones, drones, and now electric vehicles. But in the energy and climate world, we still find ourselves wanting much, much more from our battery systems. Lithium ion batteries, the mainstays of EV power trains, have been in the energy. dropped dramatically in price. They went down 89% between 2010 and 2020, from pack prices above $1,100 a kilowatt hour, down to around $140 a kilowatt hour. But we still need them to get cheaper if we're going to achieve the level of mass adoption that phases out gasoline-powered vehicles. They've gotten safer in many respects, but we have a way to go there, too, given that just last August GM recalled all of the nearly 150,000 Chevy bolts they have ever made due to 13 EV battery

fires. And of course, we need to meet these cost and safety targets while improving on the range and charging speed performance across EV types. I spoke to an expert on all things batteries. Dave Schroeder, the chief technology officer of Volta Energy Technologies. VOLTA is the rare VC firm focused exclusively on storage and storage adjacent tech. Dave is optimistic about near-term technology and business model improvements that will get us to watershed levels of EV adoption. This is great news for the climate, but in order to get the relentless levels of greenhouse gas reduction we're going to need, we can't stop there. We need batteries to support full decarbonization of the electric grid, too. Here, the outlook is a little fuzzier. It's clear

that storage can be very enabling for renewables, ensuring we still have power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. The problem is that electricity is cheap and batteries are operated intermittently, so making money on storage can be tricky if you don't have a lot of renewables that produce significant price volatility. And then from a reliability perspective, you don't want to build a lot of renewables unless you know you can manage them on the grid. So we have a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Luckily here too, though, there are a lot of companies working on different kinds of technology pathways to get us inexpensive storage that can support renewables adoption. The big question is, which ones might win? Take a listen as I

discuss all things batteries with Dave Schroeder. It's great to talk to you today about batteries. Thanks, Laura. Good to be here. I have to be honest and say that for me in the clean tech space, I always kind of saw that the coolest of the cool kids and energy are the ones who work on batteries. So I'm particularly excited about this conversation. I don't know if you agree with my assessment. I'm not sure that I've heard that before. Batteries are popular a little bit now, but I don't really look at us as the cool kids. I mean, I think everyone's going to agree with me by the time we're done here. But anyway, let's jump on in.

I want to start by introducing you and introducing Volta Energy Technologies a little bit. I think some of our listeners may already have found out that if you Google the word Volta, you'll probably get about eight different organizations and companies. So give a quick overview of your Volta. What is that the Volta Energy Technologies does? So our Volta is a venture firm, essentially. We have backing from some large strategic investors as well as a more traditional committed capital fund. Our scope is energy storage and things that are related to energy storage.

So we're mostly hard tech venture. Yep, okay. That's great. And you're the CTO. Yes. And I'm going to go ahead and say that you guys are not exactly a typical VC. I think some things that I know about your, first of all, your reputation for super deep diligence. Also, I know of at least one story where in the context of diligence, you have noted that a company had a particular technical problem and also offer them a

fix for that problem before they knew they even had it. Can you confirm or deny that? I can confirm it, though I don't want to name any names. No, you don't have to name names. All I'm saying is that one of the things that I think is really unique about you and Volta in the space is that you guys are really, really deep on storage. This is what you do. It's what you look at. It's what you live and breathe. And I think that's one reason that this is going to be a really interesting conversation for folks to listen to. Great. So without further ado, let's talk batteries. Now, batteries do all kinds of. of cool things, everything from flashlights to obviously a lot of things that are really key for

the clean tech revolution. But today we're going to focus in on two pieces of this. One is kind of one of the near-term happening now investable opportunities around electric vehicles and EV batteries. And then we'll get into grid scale storage, which is one of my favorite topics. But let's start with EVs and let's start with some level setting. So where are we now with electric vehicle batteries? Well, I think we're at the point where they're good enough to be, at an inflection point for market adoption. So what I mean by that is market share globally for EVs doubled last year. It's up to around 9%, which is, you know, not huge, but it seems like it's really starting to take off.

I don't know that that means that it meets everyone's needs, but at least it meets the needs of a decent size segment. Now, that is a huge statement, because I don't think we were there even, say, like, 10 or 15 years ago. Is that right? No, primarily because of cost. But, yeah, it's there now. Okay, well, so we'll get into cost in a second, but first let's talk about battery performance a bit, because I think one of the big differences with batteries now and batteries not even that long ago is how much range they have. So this is a really important thing to customers.

Where are we in terms of getting the range that we actually need for the full variety of applications we're going to require for EVs? I guess I'm going to take the answer that's not popular for a clean tech guy and say, we're not there yet. It kind of brings up one of my least favorite phrases in the battery world, which is range anxiety. In my view, this is a term that should never ever be used. It needs to just leave the vocabulary. Just as an analogy, if you won't buy a motorcycle, because you have to move lumber on a fairly regular basis as your only vehicle, no one tells you you have lumber anxiety. So I think it really should be looked at as a product deficiency and not as a customer deficiency. I don't think that's helpful. I don't think it's helpful to

people who want EV adoption to happen. So anyway, yes, I think there's a shortfall in range. I think consumers don't buy vehicles that meet their needs most of the time or even 90% of the time. They buy a vehicle that meets nearly 100% of their needs. So if we want 100% EV adoption, then products and infrastructure have to be there to enable that. Got it. So basically, we need more range, but we shouldn't be anxious about it, or at least we shouldn't label it in anxiety. I think that's right. I mean, You know, I'm not really talking here about the gap between two or three hundred miles that a lot of EVs have now for range and, you know, like a 400 mile range that might be an internal combustion engine range. Closing that part of the gap, I think, would be helpful, especially to, you know, people with longer commutes, people in rural environments.

But I don't think that really solves it. I think you have to have, you have fast charging capability and the infrastructure for that to really enable the, you know, a longer trip to go visit family, coast to coast sort of travel. To have those things happen, you need more than just a couple hundred extra miles. Right. Well, so let's talk into exactly that question because I think there's a bit of kind of a dichotomy here, right, when you start talking about charge rates. Because theoretically, if you have batteries that can't go very far, it doesn't matter as much if you can charge them really fast and if there's a lot of charging available. So can you talk a little bit about kind of how charge rate and range play off on each other where are we with respect to charge rates in terms of battery technologies?

So there are battery technologies that already enable really high charge rates. But usually you're trading off energy density, so you're trading off the ability to make the battery small enough to fit in the vehicle. You're also trading off cycle life in many cases, maybe not all cases, and cost. So all of those things exist. You can get batteries that can charge at 10 C. or even faster. So 10C would be 10 times its full capacity in an hour.

So that would be a six-minute, zero to 100 percent state of charge. And just to calibrate, where are we with kind of traditional electric vehicle charging today? You know, closer to one. So closer to an hour and even slower, you know, maybe that rate, but between, you know, zero and 80 percent or zero and 70 percent and then slower from there. So, and, you know, if you have a hundred kilowatt-hour hour of, you know, if you have a hundred kilowatt hour battery, you know, charging that in six minutes is a big number, right? That's, you know,

megawatt charging. Right. But you would argue potentially that that's kind of where we have to go, right? Because it takes you, what, about five minutes to fill up your gas tank. And right now, it's taking a lot of people upwards of half an hour to fully charge or even, you know, 80% charge their EVs. So there's some room for us to grow on this one, right? Yeah, correct. I think that is where we have to go. We have to get to a point where we have megawatt charging capability. Okay. Maybe not for everyday use. You know, if you can charge at home, I think that's fine.

Overnight, you know, is a slow charge rate. But for longer trips, you need faster. You're still going to need fast charging for sure, at least to some degree. If not to a very large degree, to also solve the problem for folks who don't actually have access at home charging, right? Correct. So from, you know, an emerging technology standpoint, silicon anode are things. So silicon on the negative electrode instead of, I guess, maybe just talk about the classical lithium ion is graphite. versus lithium cobalt oxide.

So that's what's in your cell phone now and has been in your cell phone the whole time you've had one, probably. So that hasn't moved that much. But in the fast-charge space, silicon anodes replacing graphite have some promise for that. There are other materials.

There's a company called Niobolt. We are not an investor in Niobult today, but niobium tungsten oxide. There are other materials that enable potentially significantly faster charge rates than graphite. And how do they actually do that? Like, what is it about silicon

that enables faster charging than traditional lithium ion? So there are a couple of limiting factors for traditional lithium ion. One of them is that the potential where lithium goes into graphite is really close to the potential where lithium will plate as a metal. And lithium plating as a metal

in those chemistries is very bad. The best case scenario is you plate a little bit of lithium, it reacts with the solvent. That lithium is now gone. The solvent is now gone. So you've degraded the capacity of the battery. And anytime you do that, so if you push harder, basically, to charge faster, you will end up with some lithium plating if you push too hard. The more severe version of that is that lithium metal actually forms a dendrite that connects the negative electrode to the positive electrode, and then you have catastrophic failure in the form of fire. Okay, well, that gets us into a whole other topic here, right?

So we've got, all right, we need to do a little bit better with respect to range. We need to do somewhere between a little and a lot better with respect to charge rates. You mentioned capacity fades. So that's something that we need to be wary of as we're solving these other problems. But now let's dive for a second into safety, because this is one of those arenas that I think people think about maybe a little bit less when it comes to batteries. but this is still a huge issue. And we're seeing some mass recalls of, you know, GM and other kinds of EVs.

We're hearing about fires happening in people's garages. There are a couple of different ways batteries can fail, but maybe walk us through that. What is it about, you know, EV batteries that can make them a safety issue? And what do we do about it? Sure. So there was also the fire, right, with 4,000 Volkswagen Audi group vehicles on a ship just a couple weeks ago. Oh, that's right. So I mentioned one, you know, lithium dendrite formation.

can cause fires. Another one that has been fairly common, I think it was the Samsung Galaxy S7 that had that problem, where they basically just had too much force on the cell. And so what separates the negative electrode from the positive electrode is a plastic separator that has little tiny pores in it.

But you can imagine if you push hard enough, you can actually make the negative electrode touch the positive electrode right through that. separator. And so that was the case there. I believe the Chevy Bolt LG recall was a folded separator. So the separators in some cases were folded and weren't completely protecting the surface and causing stresses in the cell because you had doubled up separator in some places. So, you know, that could be addressed a number of ways, I guess. There are things that I would call inherent fixes to safety, things like solid state batteries, like solid powers working on,

full disclosure that is a company that Volt is invested in, you know, that substantially reduced the risk of those kind of failures. And there are other things, just quality technologies like the ones Feasible is working on for detecting these kinds of problems. Feasible is also a Volt a portfolio company, so sorry for the shameless plugging of our portfolio. No, it's good to know. You guys are big on safety. Look, we believe in these companies, right? So there's a reason they come up. But so catching those problems before they actually get out the door, you know, would obviously help. Okay. So we've got safety and a couple of different, you know, potential failure modes and ways to approach those failure modes in addition to all these other dimensions. So what does this mean overall about the technology space? Are there particular kinds of technologies that you think uniquely can be helpful in? in kind of that multi-dimensional way to take us to the next generation of batteries, or are there kind of specific combinations of things that might wind up being useful? Where are you really looking from a technology perspective to solve this suite of challenges?

So I think the answer to that question is, yes, there are some things. I'm going to back up for just a second, just to point out that I know EV fires make the news. There is still a lot fewer of them on a per-EV basis than there are internal combustion engine vehicle fires on a per-per-e-vehires. on a per-I-CE basis. So not saying safety can't and shouldn't be improved, but it's not starting from a bad situation today. That's a really great point. But some inherent things like solid-state technologies,

I do think could substantially improve safety across the board. But there are lots of other things, right? Negative electrodes that aren't close enough to the lithium-plating potential that that is likely failure mode. Silicon is one of those. Some of these niobium oxide compounds are another one that have enough energy density to be relevant. There are other materials like lithium-titanium oxide that have been around forever, but the energy density is just not good.

So those sorts of things. But I think really quality could by itself solve it. Just careful enough inspection, right, but battery costs needs to be really. really low. So that's a high-tech proposition. So this is kind of cool because in some ways I feel like this is like the best of all worlds from like a technology and development perspective is that, you know, we're kind of at this inflection point that we're really going to start to see some serious adoption and there's some pathways to solve some of these remaining technical challenges. So it seems

like a super exciting time for the EV space. But there's one other little thing that, you know, comes up occasionally in these conversations and that is the cost. So of course, batteries are a big percentage of the cost of electric vehicles. And ultimately, if we're going to really get where we need to go from a greenhouse gas emissions perspective, everybody needs to be driving Navy. So what is it going to take to get the cost down? I mean, are these technology developments we're talking about going to be really expensive, or do you also see a way that we can simultaneously really get to cost reduction at the same time that we're improving performance? Okay, so let's talk about one performance attribute that generally also decreases cost.

So if you have high energy density materials, it usually means that you're actually making less battery, right? So your manufacturing cost tends to drop along with that. Materials like silicon are not inherently expensive ones and generally have high energy density and high rate performance. So that's a challenging field. People have been working at it for a long time, but I think we're getting close to where some of these silicon dominant anode materials will start to become prevalent. So that's one place where you could get performance and get cost. I think there are lots of other little ways that will help you improve cost. There are companies out there working on dramatically lower cost processing for cathode materials.

6K comes to mind, yes, another Volta portfolio company there. So cost reductions. The cathode is the biggest single expense in the battery, so dropping its cost is is meaningful. The ability to recycle. There are a bunch of, there's a bunch of activity in that space and, you know, being able to use recycled lithium, recycled nickel, cobalt, all of it, is also cost reduction. And some of the quality things that I said, I think, are needed to improve safety also have the potential to improve cost. If you can catch quality problems at the beginning of the line or where they happen, rather than making some 10% scrap, you save cost.

So I think there are a lot of little ways that you can drive cost out of the equation up. Things that reduce the energy associated with drying of electrodes. Reduces the footprint for emissions in the manufacturing process. It also reduces cost. Functional materials that act as both binders and conductivity additives, which are present in the electrodes of lithium ion batteries, right? Replacing two materials with one material, generally gets you a little more energy density,

also gets the cost down. So I think it's a combination of all of these different little innovations that ultimately drive it. Yeah, no, I think that's really exciting and good stuff. I think, so if we're thinking a bit, though, about this point you made that there are some materials out there that can both improve on cost and at the same time improve on performance. That sounds awesome.

But that's not, is that always true? I know that in the past, you know, I've heard about certain kinds of materials that potentially could be really low cost, but we'd really struggle with performance, like sulfur is one of those. And similarly, there are materials out there that seem to really improve performance like cobalt, but come with a lot of challenges when it comes to supply chain issues and things like that. So how should folks be thinking about the future of the battery space? Are there going to be some tough tradeoffs we're going to have to make at various points, or do you really think there's a big enough suite of materials that can really hit that sweet spot

of, you know, actually improving up? on cost and performance simultaneously. Yeah, so I don't want to gloss over the technical challenges at all, right? Silicon is very difficult. It's a great material because it has a huge capacity for lithium, and that's what drives the energy density up. It also drives huge volume expansion of the silicon when the lithium goes into it. So you end up with cracking, you end up with exposing fresh surfaces, which also react

with the solvents in the battery. It's a difficult problem. But it's a problem that people have been working on for a really long. time. And it seems to me like there are emerging solutions. Yeah. Okay. Sulfur, same thing. That has, you know, sulfur is essentially free. People pay you to take it in some cases. People will probably pay you to take it. Yes. So other than transport costs, you're looking at a zero cost cathode that, you know, there's no shortage of at the many, many gigawatt hour scale. But as you pointed out, rates are typically low. It can be very difficult to

get cycle life up. Anyway, it's another place where people have been working for a really long time. We do have one portfolio company, Conomics, that's in that field. I think they've made really, really good progress. Not quite ready for an EV cell today, but it's going in that direction. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence. those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators,

grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energyhub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy.

Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital. As I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we've been talking so far about kind of EVs as one sort of big class of things. but the truth is that there are EVs and there are EVs, right? We've got passenger EVs, and obviously we've seen a lot of change in that space and a lot of adoption recently.

And as you say, we're kind of getting to some inflection points. But there are fleet vehicles. There's long-haul trucking. There's, you know, the difference between what it means to be kind of a family owner of a passenger car versus someone who's actually, you know, working for a ride sharing service. So to what extent do you think there are going to be lots of different battery solutions to be? to provide services to all these different transport applications, and to what extent do you think we'll have just a small number of types of batteries that can actually do a huge range of things?

So I definitely am not a believer in a single holy grail of batteries that solves all problems. I think it's going to be a number of solutions to solve different application cases. And so you could certainly imagine a city EV that really doesn't do highway driving doesn't really need 400 miles of range, doesn't probably need 200 miles of range. What it needs is the ability to charge really fast and have a really long cycle life so that it can survive a lot of those charge-discharge cycles. So, you know, what we're seeing right now with companies like one, our next energy, which is yet another Volta portfolio company, is that there's a lot of traction right now for light and medium duty delivery vehicles, for example, which, you know, are in that category of, The owners and operators know how many miles that it's going to go in a particular day. That's the range you need.

You don't really need more. You're not going to take it on a family vacation. And lithium-iron phosphate-based batteries seem to be the logical choice today for those applications. And, you know, there's growing business for that. And my guess is that $5 plus per gallon gasoline is probably going to help with adoption there. Right. Although, as we've pointed out before, that coming along with a lot of increases in materials costs, we're going to have to see how this actually plays out.

But probably not iron phosphate. Fair enough. Okay. All right. Still a couple of things that we'll be able to get on the cheap. That's great to know. Okay. Well, I think this is, you know, that's interesting.

And it's helpful in some ways, I think, right, that there are a kind of range of different kinds of applications. This isn't going to be a winner-take-all kind of scenario. This is sort of one of these spaces that's going to have a lot of, you know, rich technology development across a couple of dimensions. to really optimize for the things we need to do. Tungsten niobium oxide, that's another thing that's in that same category of, I think, you know, very high rate, very long cycle life, you know, that has potential for city vehicles that don't need really long range and just need fast charge capability. So anyway, I think there will be a mix, and I think that mix is going to be around for a long time.

Let's talk about one other aspect of electric vehicles. I have, I'll say, some relatives who shall not be named, who like to bait me with, you know, cartoons on social media that say things like if you drive an EV, it's actually dirtier and worse for the environment than operating an internal combustion engine vehicle. Granted, this was like 10 years ago, so it might be a little harder to make that argument now. But let's talk for a sec about life cycle greenhouse gas emissions. Is this something people should be thinking about and really be concerned about? Are there ways in which we need to be developing batteries that are going to reduce the sort

of embedded or production greenhouse gas emissions associated with them? Yeah, so first let me start with, that's not true. Thank you. What your relatives are putting out there. You know, if you have a dirty enough grid, right, if you have a diesel gen set charging your car, it's probably quite a bit worse than, you know, just using a gasoline-powered car. But that's not our grid, right? We have a lot of already a lot of fairly green power on the grid, and so that by itself

isn't true. And it's gotten better, right? it keeps getting better. Last year wasn't a good year, but in general, the trend is in the right direction. So I don't think that people generally should worry about that. I worry about it a little bit, but the first proposition is we need to get a EV adoption up because it does actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even if you consider the energy that's embedded in production of the battery itself. As far as that goes, production of the battery itself, that's generally driven by energy use, you know, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with that production.

Energy use drives cost, and this is a really competitive business. So there's a huge incentive for squeezing the energy out of battery manufacturing because people want to squeeze the cost out. So I don't think it's a big concern. All of the big players are very, very motivated to drive their energy use down as far as they can. So some of the things that I mentioned, before, you know, with new ways to make cathodes that are less energy intensive, you know, that stuff will have positive impact on cost and the embedded CO2. It's really nice to once in a while encounter a space where incentives are actually aligned the right way that reducing cost means reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

So let's just put some cheers up for that. Great. Okay. So, you know, we've already motivated a little bit this notion that EVs are only as clean as the grid you use to charge them with, at least to some degree. So this gets us to the next big point, which is to meet any of our greenhouse gas emissions targets. We've got to decarbonize our grid. And it's technically the easiest problem to solve.

But it gets a little bit tougher if one of the best and cheapest ways to solve it is to put lots of renewables on the grid. Because then you need to manage the variability of those renewables. So, you know, one of the things that I've gotten on my soapbox on a couple of times in my career is that, you know, so often I hear people say, we need more storage referring to the grid. And I always kind of stop them and say, do we really need more storage? What we actually need is reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which means more renewables. We need more reliability. We need the ability to continue to serve people with power even when the grid itself isn't operating. So there are actually a huge range of applications for which we need storage.

But storage is actually kind of a means to an end, I think, in some ways. So there are a thousand things we could talk about in this dimension because there are all sorts of ways that storage can be really helpful for a wide variety of grid needs. And already, storage is getting built and is being helpful for a number of those. But let's talk specifically about the greenhouse gas reduction side of this and really get into, you know, what it's going to take to have the kind of storage on the grid

that's going to support renewables. In other words, what do you think about prospects for so-called long-duration storage? You have now used my second least favorite phrase in the battery world. I know you know that that's not my favorite. So I don't have nearly as big of a problem with long duration as I do range anxiety. I actually think that it can have a useful meaning.

So here, you know, if I have an application that requires me to charge or discharge for eight hours or 12 hours, you might say that is a long duration application. And I think that's fine. Where it kind of falls apart is that when people talk about the technology side of it and they talk about long-duration storage technologies, they seem to come at it with this idea that duration's a good thing because duration is a good thing in just about every other context that you would use it in.

But in the case of energy storage, duration is one divided by the maximum rate. So it's one divided by performance or inverse performance, right? So duration from a technology standpoint is the opposite of high performance. And so I always kind of cringe, when I hear people say things like lithium mine can't do long duration or can't do durations more than four hours. Everyone who has a cell phone knows that lithium mine can do 24 hours because we've all forgotten to plug one in for a day and found that the thing wasn't dead yet.

So clearly lithium ion can do long duration. What they really mean is they don't want to pay for lithium mine, which is totally understandable, but it certainly can do it. But before we get into the cost, though, for a second, I just want to ask you to explain this a little bit more, because in my mind, the way it works is this, right? When you say that duration is kind of the inverse of performance, you're saying, all right, you have a certain amount of energy you can store in a battery. And then it's basically like you get to choose how big your faucet is, right? Like either your faucet pours that energy out really quickly, in which case it's short duration, but you're getting a lot of it once. Or you can have a much smaller faucet, in which case you can have all the duration you want. You're just not going to get much power at any given time.

Is that the way to think about it? Correct. And so usually the way it works for the, from the technology standpoint is when people are talking about the duration, they're talking about the biggest the faucet can be for that technology. So it's limited to that rate as a maximum, right, which limits the other kind of applications that it might serve, right? It's really is stuck at, you know, C divided by eight. So its capacity over eight hours or C over 12 or whatever. There are even some technologies out there that are no faster than C over 100. So anyway, really, really low rate performance. And usually the low rate performance goes with other poor performance attributes. So it's usually low rate and low round-trip efficiency, you know, meaning that, you know, for every kilowatt hour that you generate that you want to store in this thing, you only get 0.65 kilowatt hours back.

So it's normally just kind of a broad suite of not great performance attributes. Energy density is usually not good, round-trip efficiency is not good, maximum rate's not good. But why does that have to be the case? Why can't you have a huge faucet and tons and tons of energy stored all at the same time? So I think that's the holy grail of batteries that you just described. I mean, we look for things all the time where that's not the case, right? And the way people usually go about the cost problem is to separate power from energy. Try to store energy in some really, really cheap way, and then convert back through some power device that's inherently more expensive.

But that limits your maximum rate. And generally, causes you to have some sort of crossover of cost relative to lithium ions. where lithium ion is the clear cost leader if you only needed an hour at that maximum power rating or two hours. But somewhere in the eight to 12 hour time period, it flips and becomes cheaper, usually in theory, maybe not in practice, than lithium ion. So it seems like this is a space we're kind of unlike in EVs. We're just sort of unlucky that there aren't kind of those sweet spot technologies that can manage both, a huge amount of energy and a huge amount of power all at once, at least given this other constraint, which we're introducing now, which is cost, right?

Well, right, and that's the problem. Cost is the problem in this space. There are certainly technologies, right? You could make flow batteries or some of the other technologies that are out there. You could make them perform at a much higher rate. It would just be at a much higher cost. And so you're, you know, you're making that trade-off. Right. Well, I think some of what kind of helps to motivate this a little bit is that if you think about how often you're and how much you're using any given battery, right? Like, you want to try to use it as much as possible in order to make back your money. And so the bigger you make your energy storage, you know, in some sense, yeah, sure, then the more capacity you have, but you may not use it quite as often. So there's kind of this like inherent cost tradeoff that's

built into what it is that you're creating with a battery. Correct. And if you start talking about things like seasonal storage where you're only going to use it, you know, once or twice a year, it's really hard to get your money back if you paid anything for it. Right. And so just to help everyone with the vernacular here, when we say long-duration storage, even though it's a release favorite phrase, it gets used a lot, right? So typically people mean what? More than eight hours all the way up through seasonal energy storage?

I think that's right. I mean, I've actually even heard it anything above four hours because that's where historically the cutoff is for lithium mines cost working out, though I noticed just this week California installed its first large eight-hour lithium ions So apparently it isn't limited to four hours. It's actually one bids for eight. And I think, you know, so as an investor in the space, we always try to disprove this hypothesis. But I think the null hypothesis has to be lithium ion wins. And, you know, then you have to see if you can come up with ways that that's not the case. But you have to start there. Okay. Well, so we'll get into lithium on a second. But first, let's talk about. just for a second about this cost issue, right? Because I think, you know, we talked about how performance are sort of these tradeoffs, but I think, as you said, the biggest issue in this

space really is cost when it comes to batteries. So fundamentally, we're talking about electricity and electricity for the grid. So electricity is not that expensive relative to the cost of a lot of these technologies. So how does this play out with lithium ion? People talk about lithium ion a lot of the time as being too expensive for the needs that we actually have. But what does that actually mean. Why is lithium ions so expensive in this context? So I guess I fundamentally disagree with that statement. I think lithium ions cheap, but for a reason, right, you mentioned, well, it's too bad that there's no technology that really fits this grid application well, and there is one that fits EVs, but I would say, well, there's not one that fits EVs. There was one that fit camcorders and

cell phones and laptop computers really great. So you had these early adopters, essentially, of that technology that we're willing to really pay for that performance, right? You had well over a thousand dollar a kilowatt hour cost and people still paid it. You know, by the way, power tool batteries are still at retail about $1,000 a kilowatt hour, right? And people are happy to pay it. Maybe not happy, but they do pay it. And so you have those early adopters that are paying the bill and that are getting scale up and helping manufacturers to ring cost out. And that's what has given you an EV battery. And my hypothesis is the same thing is going to give you a grid battery because those not early adopters, but earlier than the grid, EV manufacturers are going to

ring the cost out of it and utility industry will be the beneficiary there. Sure. So that makes sense that EVs can kind of help bring down the cost of lithium ion and they could be competitive for the grid. But what's the rub with that? Like why isn't lithium ion already cost competitive on the grid? Why is it so expensive to build lithium ion to serve needs longer than four hours? So lithium mine's cost doesn't really change with the amount of energy that you're storing, right? If I buy a kilowatt hour of lithium ion or I buy 10 kilowatt hours of lithium ion, it costs the same per kilowatt hour. So you're stuck with whatever that cost is. There are some other things that are not great attributes of lithium mine that also increase cost.

One is existing lithium mine usually also has to go along with some HVAC. So temperature has to be controlled. There are technologies that are emerging. I'll mention solid power again just because they have demonstrated the ability to operate at elevated temperature for very extended periods of time without degradation. So, you know, things like that that are really being done for EVs might ultimately benefit the grid as far as, you know, part of the cost of lithium ion. Got it. So, okay. So we've got, so again, I think it's also a piece of this puzzle, right, that lithium ion, if you want to have a lot of long-duration storage, you kind of got to stack these lithium ion installations next to each other. And so you may not be using your

last one as often as your first one. And it's really not that they cost so much, right? It's that you don't get value out of the 23rd hour of storage that you have installed if you don't use it every day. Right. So, okay. So this is a tricky issue. And given the kind of, you know, structure of lithium ion, that's going to be something that we'll have to grapple with, even though there are some reasons that it could come down in cost related, certainly to, you know, EVs being a place to kind of help be a cost reduction mechanism. But there are a lot of other technologies out there that people are looking at that could potentially address this sort of, you know, set of grid. grid challenges. So let's talk about some of those flow batteries are one that come to mind, you know, pretty immediately. So explain what a flow battery is and why it's different and potentially solve some problems associated with lithium ion, but not necessarily all of them when it comes to cost. Sure. So this is one where you would get some sort of scaling, where your cost for more energy or more time, if you want to think about it that way, for a long duration application,

isn't linear. And the reason it's not is because the idea of a flow battery is that you have tanks where you are storing the energy in some chemicals, and those chemicals should be very low cost, so that the cost of the energy you're storing is low. So you can think of that like a gas tank for a gasoline-powered car, right? The bigger the gas tank is, the more energy you're storing, and the bigger the engine is, the more power you could get out of it.

And really doubling the size of your gas tank wouldn't be very expensive, right? Doubling the power output of your engine is expensive. So if you really don't need anything more than C over 12 performance, you can have a very small power stack and you have big tanks, and it takes 12 hours to convert that energy back into electricity. So that's the basic idea of flow batteries. There's approximately one flow battery technology for every element in the periodic table. More than that for carbon.

There's lots of carbon-based technologies that are out there. Generally, they have round-trip AC-to-AC efficiency in the 65% range, which I don't know if that sounds good or bad to you. Lithium ions probably in the low 80s because of the HVAC load and other things. And usually you get something that looks like lithium-ion costs when you're getting around 8 to 10 hours. Okay. So potentially kind of cost competitive, but as you say, it sounds like flow batteries will have a harder time finding other applications outside of the grid where they can really come down the cost curve. They sort of need to scale within grid applications. Is that right? Correct. And that's really the problem. What you're looking for for these grid applications, you're not looking for some great performance that there is an early adopter who would want to pay for that performance. The differentiated thing you're looking for is cost. Sure. Okay. Although I will say, Dave, I'm going to hold you to this. I'm going to start looking for a uranium flow battery, because we'll hit the singularity once we get one of those. I'm pretty sure. Okay. I'm pretty sure there are some nuclear watch batteries. I've seen that pitched. So I wouldn't be surprised if you can find it. And look, if I sound really negative on flow batteries, I'm just reflecting what we've seen to this point. But the reason we've seen so much of it is that we keep looking.

Sure. Right. I have not accepted the null hypothesis that lithium ion wins. It is the null hypothesis, but we worked very hard to try this. Well, sure. And what you said, I think really should carry some weight with folks, right? That, like, this is the unique situation where you get to choose the size of your bathtub independently from the size of your faucet, which is actually a pretty cool thing, particularly

for grid storage. So there may be, there may be, you know, interesting things here yet. There are other features of flow batteries that are particular, that might be attractive to utilities or others, in general, they will not burn. That's a big plus. It's a big plus, right? So unlike a lithium-mine facility, they don't really need HVAC for the most part. So there are some advantages.

Awesome. Okay, well, let's talk about thermal energy storage, because this is another sort of way that you could get at the storage challenge. And again, sounds really exciting, right? You have some really cheap materials that can store heat. One of the things that always fascinated me about thermal storage applications is then you can pick, right? You can either take this heat and use it directly and maybe help decarbonize an industrial process, or you can use the heat to generate electricity.

So what's going on in the thermal storage world? And what do you think it might take for thermal storage to get competitive with lithium ion for some of these grid applications? So if we're talking about lithium ion, really we're talking about, you know, thermal to electric storage, right? More than heat stored to be used as heat. Fair enough. So we've looked at some of those. So not really a battery, but definitely competes for the same application space that lithium ion and flow batteries would. So there you're using electricity to run a heat pump and you're creating a hot and cold reservoir.

That could be molten salt. It could be hot rocks and ice or a glycol slush, basically. Or it could be hot rocks in ambient conditions. then you run the heat pump in the other direction to get the electricity back, and in a lot of ways, very analogous to the flow battery. If I want more hot rocks, I can store more energy, and hot rocks are cheap, or at least they're cheap before they're hot. And the size of power that I have is driven by that heat pump, that engine, basically. I can't quite let you get away with that. Dave, what do you mean by they're cheap before they're hot? Well, you know, you're...

Oh, I see what you mean. But you need them to have the kind of performance that they can get hot and cool, and that's a little bit more than just buying a cold rock. Correct. But still, you know, the storage part of it is cheap. It's the conversion part of it that's expensive. So in that way, it's the same as a flow battery. And unfortunately, at least from what I've seen, round-trip efficiency kind of looks

like flow battery, round-trip efficiency, and, you know, where the crossover with lithium-mine costs, you know, in that eight-to-10-hour range kind of looks similar to. obviously some advantages, you know, the same as flow batteries. You know, you don't really have to worry about risk of fire. You don't have the same material set that you do in lithium ion, right? So you're not worried about the same nickel-cobalt lithium sort of supply chain. So there are some advantages there. Similar also to flow batteries, you know, I said there's one of those for every element in the periodic table.

There's a flow, there's a thermal storage for every thermodynamic. or maybe more than one for every thermodynamic cycle. And actually, from an investment standpoint, this creates a pretty significant problem. How do you pick, even if you want to pursue a portfolio strategy, how do you pick two or three technologies out of this sea of technologies? They might have intellectual property that prevents someone from directly copying what they're doing, but they can't stop all of these other people who could generate nominally the same performance from pursuing what they're pursuing.

Interesting. So yeah, more of the... It's tough to make an investment decision in that case. Right, or their particular chemistry or their particular thermodynamic cycle. Sure. But one thing about this, I mean, you know, I did mention, well, so obviously, you know, being competitive with lithium ion for thermal energy storage, there's some things that you're going to have to do.

But do you think it is interesting that there is kind of this flexibility associated with this kind of storage that you could with some added complexity, but also potentially with some financial benefits, you know, you know. even toggle between electricity production and heat production for specific applications. Do you think that makes this space more interesting, or is that not something that really factors with you guys when you're looking at it? With the right partners, potentially yes. Okay. Fair enough. All right, let's talk about...

And actually, as long as we're on that topic, you know, there are also flow batteries where, you know, one side is hydrogen. Hmm. Interesting. And so if you have, you know, use for that hydrogen or that hydrogen is, you know, that side of the flow batteries connected to some other hydrogen. infrastructure, you might squeeze more cost out that way. Interesting. I mean, as flexible energy carriers go, hydrogen is a pretty interesting one.

But that's a whole topic for another time. Coming back to batteries really quickly, we used to joke when I was in graduate school that we just needed to find a better way to get rocks up a hill and then get them back down again. And I am, therefore, surprised to see there are some companies that are legitimately doing this and potentially doing it well. So tell us how excited you are or aren't. about basically energy storage companies that lift really heavy bricks or rocks off the ground

and then set them back down again. Right. It's like pumped hydro except for places that don't have mountains. Exactly. So look, pumped hydro, it's hard to argue with pumped hydro, right? It works really well in places where it works. And so, you know, it could work here too. So Volt is invested in Energy Vault, and, you know, I believe that they have a reasonable shot.

And the reason that, you know, I think this is at least a case where potentially you disprove the hypothesis that lithium ion wins is it looks to me like they have a real shot at four-hour applications, at least in cases where, you know, the size of the overall installation is very large, right? Many megawatts. I think they have a play there. But you can get good round-trip efficiency. You're basically just using electric elevators to raise in lower cement blocks. And so, you know, that's a well-known technology, and it can be pretty efficient. And they also have some ability to incorporate things into the concrete block that they might be able to get paid to take, you know, waste piles from coal plants, ground up blades of windmill turbines, you know, other waste products. They don't need actually really high-quality concrete for this application, right? They're very big blocks. The stresses aren't that large. I feel that that's really next level that they're already thinking about supporting the life cycle of repowered wind farms. And they are, and they have a good pipeline.

That's pretty amazing. Okay, so we've got a pretty cool collection of technologies in the space of kind of grid-supportive storage that really helps us get a lot more renewables on the grid. So just to kind of conclude with talking about what it's going to take to get us where we're going. And we've really already kind of discussed this, that one of the reasons lithium-ion is, is actually exciting, is that even though it's got some technology limitations, fundamentally, you've got this whole other application space with EVs to help it come down a cost curve. So for a lot of these other technologies, there really may not be that same thing, you know, to some degree the extent to which you can scale them and invest in them,

which of course are sort of chicken or egg applications of the same challenge here, you know, it's going to depend on how many applications there are. Like, where is it that the grid actually needs that kind of storage? Where can you make money on it? How often is that happening? That's going to require there to be high renewables penetration, but you aren't going to get high renewables penetration unless you're convinced you can solve some of these problems. So we've got a bit of a chicken or egg in the grid space here.

So other than kind of betting heavy on lithium ion where they've got this other technology space to come down the cost curve, what can we do to kind of maybe change the game a little bit and enable some of these other kinds of technologies? Are there things specific to kind of grid and or renewables adoption policies or storage policies that you think could really be meaningful? Are there other application spaces we haven't really thought about besides the grid that might be relevant for some of these thermal or flow or, you know, other kinds of technologies? What do you think we can do about this, if anything? Well, I think I know what you're going to say about this, but I'll start with, you know,

one of the things that's happening as transportation electrifies is the grid and transportation are becoming much more connected than they were, right? And so we are inherently going to be putting huge amounts of lithium ion on the grid in the form of, you know, EVs. And so I think at least for demand response, there's something there, right? There's some offset that, you know, to other storage that would be needed, that won't be needed because EVs are going to be all grid connected. I don't think that solves long periods of no wind, no solar, but it certainly has to help for lots of things.

as far as, you know, how do you incentivize the development of the other technologies, I guess I think it will happen or it won't, meaning maybe lithium ion wins. And that's not necessarily the worst possible outcome. Or maybe things like Energy Vault that, okay, seem like weird ideas, we're going to pick up concrete blocks and we're going to set the blocks down again. You know, if that stuff takes off, then maybe those are the right solutions. Okay. So you're taking a wait and see. Let's see how these things compute and what happened. I am, but I do think there's a lot that we could do to sort of facilitate EV adoption, right?

I mean, the amount of infrastructure that's needed to support fast charge is huge. I think there are actually battery applications for supporting the grid to support fast charge. If we're talking about a gas station of the future where every charger has to be able to deliver a megastroids. megawatt, you know, that's a big grid interconnection if it's all going to be served in real time by the utility. Right. No, and that's a great point is that I think the same is true on the grid side, right? That if we can send much clearer signals about how far and how fast we're going to push

renewables integration, then hopefully that can really be a big help to these companies, that it'll start to become clearer, you know, how much more this space is going to require the kind of storage they can offer. Okay. I want to conclude by turning you loose and just saying, in general, like taking a big statement, step back, what excites you the most about this space? What technology, what business model, what are the things that you're really intrigued at? What are you looking at these days? What are you most excited about? Well, I'm excited about the fact that we have actually reached that market

inflection point, right? That's huge. I don't know exactly how far it'll get us in terms of overall EV penetration. It's hard to know right now. But in the battery space, I think there's a bunch of things. Some of them I've already mentioned. I think that solid state technologies and batteries could be really disruptive. High power, high charge rate technologies, extreme low-cost materials like sulfur cathodes. If that problem can be solved, it's a game changer, right? It's not lithium-mine at $39. It's $20 or something. So those things could all be huge. I think the others are more incremental, but still very important, things that drive manufacturing costs upstream in the process itself. I think all of that will,

you know, cost will drive EV adoption. So I think that's all a big deal. But it's not just batteries, I guess, I would say also, I think, or even energy storage itself. As all of those costs come down, there are other things that become really important. So we're spending more time looking at power electronics. I think there will be more opportunities there. There are already a lot of opportunities there. Technologies that avoid rare earths and still give you good efficiencies for EV and other motors. It's not like those things are not important for other motors. Wireless charging and wireless fast charging are coming, and I think those will help drive adoption. It's not just about convenience for consumers, but I don't think you should undervalue convenience for consumers. I do

think it's a big deal. And recycling of lithium mine batteries and all of those materials, you know, it's another thing that's going to drive cost and close the loop. That's awesome. Well, so this is a great list, and I think this is going to be really fun to revisit this conversation in one year and then again five years from now to see how much of Dave's magical list of exciting things manages to take over the world. I'm going to ask you to put your stake in the ground on one more question, which is, within the next five years, will I get to walk around buildings with my cell phone in my pocket and have it wirelessly charge off of solar windows in such a way that I never have to stick my phone in a charger

ever again? No. Dang it. All right. Feel free to call and laugh at me if you are actually doing that at some point in the next five years. All right. All right. All right.

Sounds good. All right, well, folks know what they need to go work on then so that you can help me prove Dave wrong here. But Dave, this has been really great talking to you. I really appreciate the conversation and we'll stay in touch on all these topics, I'm sure. Thanks, Laura. David Schroeder is the chief technology officer of Volta Energy Technologies. Catalyst is normally hosted by Shale Khan. He'll be back after he returns from family leave next week.

The show is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. PostScript Media is supported by Prelude Ventures, a venture capital, firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across a range of sectors, including advanced energy, food and agriculture, transportation and logistics, advanced materials and manufacturing, and advanced computing. Find Canary and PostScript on Twitter. You can find me on LinkedIn. Tag us if you want to provide feedback or want to suggest future topics.

And if you like today's episode, make sure to rate our show on Spotify or leave us a review and rating on Apple Podcasts. You can find links for this episode's topic and guest in the show notes. or go to canarymedia.com. Our producers are Daniel Waldorf and Stephen Lacey, theme song and mixing by Sean Marquand. I'm Lara Pierpoint, and this is Catalyst.