How I Built This with Guy Raz - Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc.

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Ramya Swaminathan is the CEO of Malta Inc, a company that spun out of Google’s moonshot factory in 2018 to work on an energy storage solution using the existing power grid. One thing holding the world back from a transition to clean energy: electricity generated from sources like the sun and wind has to be used right away or it disappears…but one possible answer might be—salt.This week on How I Built This Lab, Ramya recounts how she got into the renewable energy industry with two previous companies focused on hydropower. She also explains how molten salt and coolant might be better than batteries as a low-cost, long-duration and job-preserving energy storage solution.This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Alex Cheng. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] episode is brought to you in part by Canva, the easy-to-use online design platform for presentations, social posts, videos, websites, and more. Start designing today at Canva – the home for every brand.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So every time you flip on the lights or power the microwave, that energy comes from a power station nearby. Most power in the U.S. is still generated by fossil fuels. They get burnt, that heat creates steam, that steam turns a giant wheel or generator, and that produces electricity. But an increasing amount of our power, at least in the U.S., is coming from renewables like wind and solar. The problem is that you can't easily store that power. If there's wind, for example, a turbine turns and energy is generated, but a lot of that energy goes to waste unless it's used immediately. So some people are looking to solve that problem by building massive battery storage facilities. Essentially, you charge up lithium batteries and then save that power for when you need it.

But those facilities are expensive and lithium requires elements that are scarce. So enter a potentially groundbreaking solution. Salt. You can literally store heat from energy sources in molten salt. And a company called Malta is working on building that system right now. Ramia Swaminathan is Malta's CEO. And previously, she led two companies that worked with hydroelectricity, free flow power and ride development. But before Ramia got into renewable energy, she worked at the investment bank, UBS, during the financial crisis of 2008. it really felt like the world was ending. And so a few colleagues and I felt like we needed to leave the financial services industry and decided to kind of go all in on a hydrokinetic business. And so when I say hydrokinetics, the idea was to harvest power from free-flowing parts of rivers. So if you think about the lower Mississippi down from Missouri on down to the Gulf of Mexico, you know, huge amount of water power, but no dams or impoundments. So it's, you know, lots of small

turbines harnessing relatively little amounts of power at each one of them, but bundled to make sort of a distributed energy, you know, generation system through hydroconnected turbine. So that was the idea. And this was, you know, an emerging technology in the hydropower space. Hydropower, of course, is the oldest form of electricity generation, you know, well-known, well-understood. Yeah, exactly. I got it. So instead of using dams to generate hydroelectric power, you basically had this opportunity to install a bunch of small, like, turbines into the river, like, into like the Mississippi or the Ohio River.

Yes. And then you and a few colleagues ran with the idea. You launched free flow power to get it going, but it turns out. setting up those turbines was a lot more expensive and complicated than you initially thought. Yes, you have to put them under the surface of the water so that they are turning and you've got to maintain them. You've got to operate them. You've got to interconnect them, et cetera. So the economics are challenging and particularly as gas, natural gas prices in the U.S. for the gas revolution. Limiting, yeah. Yeah, drove down electricity prices. That business model became more and more challenging. But what we had really understood through the process of, you know, and advancing this hydrokinetics business plan was that there's 79,000 dams in the United States and only 3% of them have power. Only 3% of them are generating power and the rest of them aren't even being used to generate power at all.

Correct. They're not being used to generate power at all. They're there for some reason. reason, you know, it could be navigation, it could be all kind of water control, et cetera, but they're not being used to generate power. And you might stipulate for the record that a good number of them actually probably shouldn't be there and should be taken down. You know, there's certainly an environmental movement to take down several dams. And even accounting for that, there's still an enormous amount of potential in the dams that remain, the dams that for one reason or another shouldn't be taken down, can't be taken down. And so the thesis that we morphed into, we pivoted into in this in free flow power and then its successor company, uh, ride

development was as long as you have the dams, you may as well have the power. And the opportunity set is really enormous. So I guess around 2018, um, there was another opportunity that kind of drew you in. For a couple of years, Google, their lab X had been working on a project trying to figure out, I guess, how to deal with this challenge of storing energy from renewable sources. So let's talk about the problem first, right? When you've got wind power or solar power, even hydroelectric power, it just you have to use that energy right away. It just flows into a grid and it has to be used or you lose it, essentially. That's exactly right. Wind and solar are now the cheapest. form of generation. And the problem with that is, of course, what you just said, which is electricity

has to be in balance. Essentially, supply and demand have to balance each other. And the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. And the ability to time shift, to take power when it's widely available. So in the middle of a day, for example, at the maximum irradiation, and move that to a time where it's not available, like in the middle of the night, when the sun doesn't shine, is in many ways the linchpin that is needed to unlock the renewables revolution. And that's really the idea that Google was working on from 2015 to 2018. They had in-house at X, the Moonshot Factory, what they called Project Malta, which then ultimately became the company I now lead, Malta, Inc.

And the idea, the technology, was really designed to provide low-cost, long-duration, grid-scale electricity storage. And so essentially, and we have this problem today, right, which is when a grid receives energy from solar or wind sources, it may not need it at that time. Exactly. It's a surplus. So I think there's a significant percentage of renewable energy that just goes to waste. And I guess I should add to that that, you know, coal or natural gas are essentially their energy stores, right? We burn them and we need them. But we don't need them.

But essentially, coal fire plants are constantly being burned. So it's like, you know, you live in a house. There's always energy available, right? And so you plug in and you get it and when you don't plug in, but it's still being generated by some. thing. And the problem with renewables is that right now, even today, so much of it is just kind of going to waste. Absolutely. So there are two things you should know about renewables, right? So one is what you just said, which is they're not always available. And when they are available, it may be too much availability. So the easiest way to exemplify that is in the case of solar. So think about a place that has

abundant solar energy. So the South, yeah, the Sahara Desert, the southwest. California, yeah. California, et cetera. So when you think about this abundant resource that's available, well, great, let's build more solar. Sure. But what are you doing?

You're really stacking more and more and more power in the same hours of the day because the sun is only available during daylight hours. Now, however, let's look at the demand side of the equation because in most of the grid environments, peak demand actually doesn't happen in the very middle of the day. There's a peak in the morning when people wake up and there's a demand. It's steady during the day because most people work during the day. And then there's a real peak in the evening hours as people get home and there's a lot of activity going on. And then it settles into a bit of a dip overnight. And so when you look at the solar profile relative to that demand, you'll see that it's a mismatch. Right. And as you stack more and more and more

solar during the day, you're actually not addressing the peaks that happened during the morning and the evening. And actually in that middle of the day, at 12 noon, you're producing way too much power to serve that maximum demand. So that's the problem that you can see. That's very obvious. It's evident. It's that time mismatch. There's another non-obvious problem that Malta is also trying to solve, which is that when you add what's called intermittency to the grid, so intermittency is that power sometimes available, sometimes not available. When you add more and more of this onto the grid, and at the same time, you're retiring the traditional fossil-based assets, coal-fired plants, gas-fired plants that you talked about,

well, it turns out that the original grid environment was really architected for those fossil assets. So reliability, the support of frequency, the resiliency of the grid, all of those are really supported by large moving spinning turbines on the grid. And we're taking those out because we're retiring coal plants. We're retiring gas plants. And that's all that's great from a decarbonization standpoint. But it leads to a real problem in maintaining grid reliability. Because the grids essentially are used to having that constant stream of electricity flowing in. Yes. And the spinning mass provides what's called inertia, which really supports that frequency regulation. It supports the

stability of the grid. So Malta helps not only time shift that power as we were talking about moving solar that's available during the day to being available at night, but we're also replacing the inertia, which helps maintain the reliability of the grid. A good example, a good mental image to think of is, you know, if you have a generator in your home, you're adding appliance after appliance, and you can actually sometimes hear the generator stall. If you think about that and zoom out to a grid environment, right? If you add too many appliances or too many loads on the grid and you don't have that large spinning mass on the grid to support the inertia, you can stall out the whole grid. And so that's a problem from grid operators. Now, it's not visible. It's not obvious. It's not something

that you can see. But it is measurable. And it is something that grid operators worldwide are really dealing with as they go through this energy transition. When we come back in just a moment more from Ramia about how Malta is supporting the transition to renewable energy and how the answer to storing electricity could be as simple as salt. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. This is a huge deal. For the first time ever, investors of all sizes can invest in some of the top private pre-IPO companies in the world, including those leading the AI revolution. Fundrise, already America's largest direct access alternative asset manager, just like launched a first of its kind venture capital product that's available for all investors.

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please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2018 and Ramiya Swamanathan is working with the Google X spinout company, Malta, to address the challenges of renewable energy storage. So, all right, so at Google X, they're developing technology to figure out how can we store this energy for use, you know, for example, at night or when there isn't wind. And there are many different organizations and companies working on this, mainly with lithium-ion battery storage. So let's just talk about one example, right? If you drive a Tesla electric car and you drive up to a Tesla supercharger, I believe that now all of them, around the U.S., at least, are powered by renewables.

So you go in, you plug your car in, and your car is a battery, and it stores that energy, and then you drive for, 200 or 300 miles or however long it goes, and then you go back and you fill it up again. So that's one possible solution, which is essentially get this wind power and solar power and just charge up a bunch of batteries, which is what a lot of people are working on. This was not the model that the Google team,

and when you essentially were brought on when it became an independent company in 2018, this is not the model you guys are working on. You're not focusing on lithium ion batteries and storing them in batteries. Correct. The technical insight that formed the foundation of what Malta's working on today

in terms of our technology was actually the brainchild of a professor at Stanford. He's a Nobel Prize winner. His name is Robert Laughlin. And he had the insight that you could take what's called a heat pump and a heat engine and put thermal energy storage in the middle

in the form of molten salt on the hot side. And molten salt is just like what it sounds like. Really hot salt. Okay. Yeah. So it turns out. out that salt is a terrific store of heat. And when you heat salt above a certain temperature in the 200 degree C range, it actually becomes a liquid. And it holds the heat very well. And because it's a

liquid, you can pump it and it's easy to work with. And so not to trivialize this, but, but you can, this is why you can cook a whole chicken or fish and a salt bake because it is a great insulator. Exactly. Same properties. And, and so, you. And so, you. You know, Essentially, what you're doing is you're taking electricity, electric energy from any source, and you're converting it into thermal energy. And then you're moving it out again when it's needed back on the grid or for some purpose. You're reconverting that to electric energy. Essentially, you could generate energy, heat up salt, and the salt would kind of act as like a storehouse. Exactly.

And the whole idea was really to use components and subsystems that already exist at scale. in power plants all over the world and just haven't been integrated into this exact system. So there's a salt loop and a coolant loop. The salt loop is exactly what it sounds like. It's sort of where the hot salt, you know, circulates. And actually, that's the youngest part of the system.

And when I say that, what I mean is the salt loop has been in continuous operation for now more than a decade. Whereas the other parts of the system, the coolant loop, the general air loop, turbo machinery, heat exchangers, all those parts and pieces. have been demonstrated at scale in many cases for decades.

So this system, right, and I'm going to oversimplify this, but essentially, instead of like, right now, if you had wind power, right, let's say like a lithium ion battery, you'd have wind power. And the wind power would just power up those lithium ion batteries. And then when the grid needed the power, it would take it from the lithium ion batteries. The system you're talking about works differently. it essentially is constantly generating, you know, energy or as, you know, as often as possible, from solar and wind, sending it to the grid. If the grid doesn't need it, it can send it back to the system you're talking about.

And these sort of salt heat exchangers can store it and then re-release it when it's needed. Essentially, yes. So it works very much like a store of excess electricity. Now, one of the critical differences between us and lithium ion, In addition to just, well, we use different components than they do is what is called the duration of the system, meaning how long can the system generate for once it's been charged? So if you think about that in any mobile application, it's sort of in your case of the Tesla. How long can you drive? How many miles can you drive for? You can probably drive for a few hours.

Your iPhone can last for a couple of hours. Yeah, exactly. That's duration. So if you had a plant, if you had basically a bunch of lithium ion batteries in a desert, you know, you know, holding energy and there was a blackout, maybe it could power us a town for 10 hours. 10 hours would be long for lithium ion. So lithium ion actually started really in the one hour space. They've extended to now four hours.

And you do see some six, maybe even eight hour applications in the world today for lithium ion. Beyond that, it's not that lithium ion couldn't do it. It's just that you've got to add more batteries to essentially to have more. electrical storage, you just have more batteries, just stacks instead. I mean, you can imagine like, you know, like a tanker carrying cargo, just stacks more containers on. Exactly. And that's, that's the only way you could extend essentially that storage facility. Exactly. Whereas in our system, what you can do is just to add more salt and more coolant and you extend duration while keeping the power portion of it, that is the machinery, the turbo machinery, the heat exchangers. You keep those all

constant. But let's say you wanted 10 hours or 20 hours or 30 hours. Well, you just add some more salt and some more coolant and build bigger tanks or add more tanks and you can extend that duration. So from a cost and performance standpoint, you're going to really look for a technology where you can extend duration very cheaply. And Malta's technology fits that bill very well. All right. So just, I mean, it's totally amazing because I've never heard of this technology before. You're essentially talking about literally about salt. I mean, the same salt that is extracted from dry lake beds and oceans. I mean, first of all, that's what we're talking about? Right. So we're talking about potassium nitrate and sodium nitrate, what is called solar salt. But yeah, it's a commodity.

Sure. This is the same salt, I think, used to soften water, for example. Fair. Yeah, solar salt, right? Right. And so it really is, the whole idea was to build a system. with commodity materials that had a very robust supply chain. There's a lot of it available. A lot of it available. Yes. And I think after the experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sense that energy is not only now an issue of decarbonization, but in Europe, for example, is now a

core issue of energy security, energy independence, and that a hostile power could hold a country, a set of countries, a continent hostage over supplies of things used to make energy, I think has really brought into focus the importance of robust supply chains and commodity materials. So, you know, no one's going to hold anyone hostage over salt. Yeah. So essentially, given that there's, you know, plenty of salt and antifreeze available, right? And I would imagine that long term, this is going to be much cheaper than lithium ion, for example. That's certainly the hope. That's certainly the hope. All that being said, I would say that the need for storage generally, electricity storage generally, long duration and short duration, is an enormous need if we are going to rise to the challenge of combating climate change. So we do really pay attention to the competitive profile on a cost basis for lithium ion, but fundamentally, we're offering a different solution for a different segment of the market.

All right. Let's talk for a moment about just the U.S. Our electric grid system, and I'm not an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure it's regional. Like Texas basically has its own and the western U.S. has its own, the upper Midwest, the south. But they're all these sort of semi-autonomous but interconnected systems. And so, and we often hear about how our grid system in the U.S. is just in bad shape. It has to be upgraded, et cetera. So right now, you know, you've got, let's say, here where I live in the Bay Area, there's power generators and, you know, the East Bay and other places and they're generating power through coal or natural gas or whatever it might be. And all that power is sent to the grid that I, you know, get my power off in California. how does this system you're talking about integrate with existing generators? Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, we don't have a single grid.

We don't have an electricity system. We have a combination of very many interconnected, and in some cases, not interconnected. So Texas, in particular, Urquat is not interconnected with the rest of the United States. Problems, unfortunately, yeah. Yes. And so the question for all of us, as we kind of navigate this energy transition, because it's a fact that we're adding renewables faster than any other kind of new form of generation. But you and I expect that every single time we turn on any appliance in our house, the light switches, that the power is going to be on. It's going to be safe. And it's going to be available as long as you need it. And so we demand that. It's a very regulated space, rightly so. And folks in the space don't necessarily want to be the first to try some newfangled technology. That's traditionally been the stance of utilities because they want to provide resilient, reliable, affordable power that is also safe at all times to their customers. So the question I think for innovation in general, not just for Malta, but for all emerging technologies, is, you know, what is the balance and what is the pathway forward to enact an energy transition that is quick,

enough to combat climate change, but also, you know, meets all these requirements of safety, reliability, resiliency, and affordability. Malta's plant integrates really well into the existing legacy grid system because our system is comprised of parts and pieces, systems and subsystems, that are used in power plants all over the world, including the United States. So for grid operators and utilities, we're a one-for-one like-like replacement of that gas. plant of that coal plant. And then super important in the context of the energy transition is delivering jobs to people who otherwise would be displaced by the transition, right? So when you shut down a coal plant, you're displacing those workers. And because Malta's plant looks, feels, acts, and is

operated and maintained just like a traditional thermal asset, you can actually incorporate all those incumbent workers into the plant. When we come back in just a moment, we learn why other companies that tried to use salt to store energy have failed and how that failure might actually mean success for Malta. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz.

So here's more for my conversation with Ramia Swamanaathan, CEO of Malta. Ramia, there was a company, and it probably did something somewhat different, but called Crescent Dunes. and they try to use molten salt to store energy. They shut down in 2019. What mistakes do they make that you're trying to avoid? Yeah. So Crescent Dunes, their technology was something called concentrated solar. And concentrated solar essentially is a technology that concentrates the rays of the sun.

So when you look at a concentrated solar plant, there's lots of little mirrors, and they're kind of stretched out over a huge field. And they take the rays of the sun, concentrate them, and send them together. to a receiver that becomes very, very hot. And then it takes molten salt. It takes salt, just like I described, and stores the heat. So it's really concentrated thermal energy. So that's why it's called thermal solar power.

Now, concentrated solar, the most difficult part of the cost profile was kind of everything except the salt loop. So the land area is difficult because you need a lot of land. the mirrors, you've got to position them just so. They've got to move with the sun. The receiver is extremely complicated technology because it needs to receive the concentrated solar rays from all these mirrors. And then you've got the salt loop that is kind of the passive recipient of all this heat energy. So what we've done is to take the simplest, the cheapest, and in many ways the least complicated part of the system, and adapt that to the Malta system.

And that's basically the salt, which is the cheap. That's the salt loop. That's the cheap, the simple part. Now, you know, I'm also being a little simplistic by saying, oh, well, salt is really simple. I mean, salt is corrosive. You know, it is definitely a difficult medium to work with. But at this point, there are very large concentrated solar plants operating worldwide. And the largest such plant actually is, I think, still under construction or recently commissioned. It's in Dubai. It's called the Dewa plant. And it's 700 megawatts with 12 hours of storage. So salt storage is known, understood, and used in other parts of the world. And given how hot the salt storage becomes, salt becomes, I mean, are we talking about, like, volcanic temperatures? Like, I mean, are they stored in, like, similar structures as, like, a, you know, a nuclear power plant? Yeah, that is a great question. And the reality is much, much less dramatic. So the highest temperature in our system is 565 degrees C. And so that is hot. I mean, for sure it's hot. The salt is molten. It needs to be stored in steel tanks. And, you know,

certainly there's an art to ensuring that there isn't corrosion or corrosion strength cracking. It's like a pizza oven, right? It means like a thousand degrees. Well, I guess not really a pizza oven, but it's not crazy hot. It's not crazy hot. And actually, do you know, gas plants like traditional gas plants that we have right now where we combust gas, get. to be much, much, much, much hotter than that. So for a power plant, it's not that hot. So, all right, let's talk about where you are now. You've got, you know that, like, you know this technology in theory and maybe even in practice works. It's, I mean, the costs to produce this, I know you guys have raised quite a bit of money to make this, this is a cash intensive proposition,

certainly at the outset. Tell me about where you are. in the process of actually building a facility. Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of where Malta is, we have spent the last couple of years developing technical partnerships and validating the system. We are now ready to deploy at commercial scale.

So when I say commercial scale, that's quite large scale. That's the 100 megawatt 10-hour system. We have built a small pilot in Texas at the Southwest Research Institute. We spent quite a while going through, I would say third party independent validations of the system and its configuration, et cetera. And at the moment, we are placing our first contracts for a full commercial plant.

And so I hope to begin construction on our first plants towards the end of next year. And I think one of them will be in Florida. That's certainly something that's been announced. So we have a collaboration with the Orlando Utilities Commission in Florida. And do you have a sense of where the first fully operational facility will be built? A really good analogy that one of my colleagues uses all the time when you're developing projects is to think of a horse race. And you never really know which horse is going to win the race until it actually pulls across the finish line. So we do have a number of projects that are neck and neck for that status of being first across the finish line.

And what I can tell you is that there are sort of in our home markets here in North America and in Western Europe. We're focused a lot in Iberia, in Spain and Portugal. And so it'll be in one of those markets, but we've got a number of irons in the fire that are running pretty much neck and neck in terms of their schedules to get to operational status. And what about the cost per kilowatt or however you measure it? I mean, you know, initially, will it be, will it be higher? I mean, you mentioned that the cost of solar of renewables is now, you know, lower or at least even. Yes, absolutely, much lower. And actually in places like Spain, for example, there is so much solar being produced that they are curtailing solar production during the day.

So actually, it is possible to charge for some hours of the day at zero cost or perhaps in some places even at negative pricing, which means someone's paying you to take the power. So that part, I'm very pleased to say kind of across the board, we're seeing that the cost of charge electricity is trending decidedly downwards. And that's a major advantage for storage. This is, again, a bit of a crude sort of comparison. But essentially, you're talking about a salt battery. If you're talking about a lithium iron battery. It's sort of like a salt battery. Sure.

Fair. Totally fair. A salt battery. Do you think that, I mean, now, especially as power outages are becoming more common around the world, certainly in the U.S. even with weather catastrophes, more and more people are putting lithium ion batteries in their homes. Yes. For backup.

And diesel generators. And diesel generators, yeah. Is there a world where this technology is either safe or even practical for homes or for vehicles or probably not? No. No, I don't see it ever really at the scale of a single home. But I do see it at the scale of you could you could have, for example, a large town or a small city being able to essentially have a microgrid. that is disconnectable from the overall electricity grid and supportable internally

with the resiliency of a multi-salt battery, as you called it. So I do see it getting lower in scale than where we're starting, but never really at the level of either a house or a mobile application like a car. I have to imagine that there are competitors, right? They're people working on similar technology in similar solutions.

Absolutely. And that's a great story, which is that it is a really fertile time for emerging technologies in storage. And those technologies are of all kinds. I mean, they're thermal storage, gravity storage, mechanical storage. And I really think that's a terrific fact for the world at large.

And when do you think you'll be able to say, yep, it's up and running. It's online. Yeah. So I hope to start construction on our first plant towards the end of next year with the first fully in service by 2027. Wow. Yeah. Cool. Which in utility terms, I know that sounds like it's a long way away.

but in utility terms, at the scale we're talking about, that's tomorrow. And the only thing I'll add is it has to be tomorrow for the scale of the problem that we're facing together. Ramiya, thank you so much. You're welcome. It's been a pleasure. That's Ramiya Swamanathan, CEO of Malta. Hey, thanks for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's totally free.

This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music. composed by Rumtin Arablewey. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Alex Chung. Our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Our production team at How I Built This includes Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, Kerry Thompson, Rommel Wood, and Sam Paulson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.