Category: Renewable Energy

Great to chat with Matt Campbell, CEO and Founder at Terabase Energy! Terabase accelerates the deployment of solar power plants! We discussed the advantages of rapid characterizing the site for solar power plants, the use of GIS, the exciting technologies that cheap solar energy enables, the relationship between local developers and big players in the energy sector and more!

https://carbotnic.com/terabase

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James

Excellent conversation with Nick Kitchin, CEO of Cumulus Energy Storage, developers of scalable, low cost batteries for the electrical grid. We discussed the pros and cons of copper/zinc batteries and why they are the best solution for long term grid energy storage, the importance of supply chain considerations when scaling energy products, why microgrids are such a massive opportunity, why Sheffield is an amazing place to build a company focused on advanced manufacturing and more!

Here is the audio. The excerpts below are lightly edited:

MCWALTER: Could you tell us a little bit about Cumulus.

KITCHIN: Cumulus is designed to help electricity get to where it needs to get to at the right time. It means developing grid scale energy storage, basically big batteries. We are based in Sheffield in the north of England, and my two co founders, Darren and Mike, are based over in the Bay Area.

MCWALTER: In terms of the founding team, did the technology and idea come first, or did you have an existing relationship with your co founders, and this was an idea that you cooked up together?

KITCHIN: The Cumulus story really starts in March 2012 at a wind energy conference. Us founders had some Friday night discussions about how we could work together and if so, what would we do? And we very quickly honed in on energy storage as the key disruptive technology that we could put into the offshore wind industry. And so we started a conversation about big batteries in particular using rechargeable copper/zinc as the best chemistry. It wasn’t really about the battery chemistries specifically, it was more about the opportunity that we saw seven years or so ago and what could we do that was different from everybody else? And where were the openings in the marketplace?

MCWALTER: What did the early users look like? 

KITCHIN: We initially looked at two industrious, one is the water industry and the other is mining. We realised that if we could put a membrane in between the copper and the zinc discs in the copper zinc battery, we could then make rechargeable batteries at the right kind of scale. And because copper/zinc is a 200 year old battery technology there is a certain amount of de-risking by using tried and tested chemistries which sped up our development program.

From an industry like mining’s perspective they’ve currently have high carbon solutions powering their equipment on site. If you can then replace that with a low carbon solution, for example solar plus our long duration storage batteries you can change power sources and decarbonize.

MCWALTER: What are the advantages and disadvantages of copper/zinc versus lithium ion batteries?

KITCHIN: Overall, lithium is really good at the high power, short duration, high energy density applications like in your mobile phone. Copper/zinc is really, really good at the high energy, long duration applications where the energy density is less important.  There are several large scale lithium ion long duration implementations, particularly in South Australia. But the number of cells involved in creating a product like that is absolutely huge. Whereas our solution is working towards the point where we’ve got containerized production and our own gigafactories and that is a much lower cost and much greener solution compared to lithium. There will always be a range of technologies. Each technology has its own benefits and specific place in the overall energy storage market.

MCWALTER: What does the supply chain look like for copper/zinc batteries? 

KITCHIN: For copper/zinc, we have a really simple supply chain. The world produces a lot of copper and zinc and so we don’t have the same supply chain issues that the rare earths have like cobalt or lithium. Not that I’m saying lithium is constrained. But cobalt certainly has its own issues, and the rare earths associated with some of the applications as well. So copper/zinc, is very green in the sense that it’s 99.5% recyclable; literally everything we use can be recycled apart from the membrane. And so we will have an end of life value, unlike lithium. In other words, we’ll be paid to do the recycling rather than having to pay to do recycling. Together there are a whole series of different things that we thought about and designed into our system to make it a very low cost, great application.

MCWALTER: What are the pros and cons of funding from private sources versus government grants?

KITCHIN: When you are taking government grants the positive is that the government is showing private investors that there is a real market here as they are willing to put taxpayer money into it. The downside, of course is it takes a long time to prepare the applications and then it takes an even longer time to actually get that through approval and finally get the grant awarded. So first, the dust the ground bit on the finance side of things. business angels, family offices, VCs, and then moving on to funds and all the rest of it. It’s relatively simple to get the first few rounds of finance, but when you’re approaching commercialization, you’re looking for between 2-10m GBP, and you’ve got to get to the point where you’ve got you to move from pre-revenue to post revenue. That’s the difficult part of the overall fundraise but once you’ve done that, then you’re in a really good territory. 

MCWALTER: Thinking back over the last few years would you have done anything differently? 

KITCHIN: Essentially, something like this does take time to develop, you can’t get away from it. It’s not like doing a software app. You do have to build it up into a design, build, test structure and go around that cycle on a regular basis. It just literally takes time. So I don’t think there’s a significant shortcut that we could have gone through to get to where we are today. The technology development has been pretty good, to be honest, and having a foot in both the UK and the US, particularly in California has helped a lot. With the R&D facility over there we have been able to get hold of the right people very, very quickly and have a very flexible team.

MCWALTER: How do you think about recruiting talented people?

KITCHIN: Well, the first thing I would say is it is literally about getting the right people to do the right right job. We’re looking for team players, obviously, and we’re looking for people that can push the founders and challenge the founders and help us move along a bit. The majority of people that we’ve recruited are to date have been people with degrees or masters and a few PhDs. That’s the kind of level of people that we’ve needed for our development team. And when we get to full production, we’ll be extending that out significantly creating a lot of employment across the spectrum. We’d really like to re-employ a lot of people from the automotive industry which is currently going through huge changes. We can re employ those people and employ them in the energy storage assembly plants. That’s a key part of our strategic outlook. 

MCWALTER: What are your views on the decarbonization pledges of large enterprises? 

KITCHIN: I think if you break it down into the departmental case one big example is data centers. In the data center market you have the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and with the total electricity consumption of the data centers themselves, those firms are in a position to actually drive that to be more efficient. The flexibility that comes with the right kinds of energy storage, from a site management point of view means there’s a really good fit.

MCWALTER: What are the biggest cleantech opportunities for entrepreneurs? 

KITCHIN: If you look at where we’ve got significant numbers of people, in excess of a billion people right now with no electricity, for example Africa with 600 million people and India with 300 million people. There is the chance to say, just like with the telephone system where these countries skipped landlines and went straight to mobile. So the same thing can happen with energy in these countries via microgrids that do not need great long transmission systems. Rather there can be a series of micro grids with locally produced and delivered energy from a combination of renewable generation, probably solar plus storage. There’s a huge opportunity.  Similarly in India, where you’ve got remote regions dependent on diesel generators, you can replace those with solar plus storage and create micro grids. It’s amazing. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t believe anybody has yet really fully clocked just how big this energy storage market is going to be as these areas open up to clean energy.

MCWALTER: What are the advantages of working in Sheffield, UK? 

KITCHIN: We have Sheffield University, that is a really big one. We’ve got the advanced manufacturing research center (AMRC). You have Boeing and Rolls Royce and a wide range of cleantech businesses. Because we are colocated and all working on advanced manufacturing, you’ve got this support network, and synergistic conversations you can have with all sorts of different people at different times. It’s a really, really good network and you can get apprentices, you can get design work done, you can get manufacturing done, it’s just all there. It’s great. 

MCWALTER: A Lot of regions or cities are trying to recreate Silicon Valley, should they rather select specific industries to focus on where they can really shine? 

KITCHIN: Absolutely. AMRC has the advanced manufacturing focus itself as it was built on a former coal mining area. So we’ve got disused coal mines, we’ve got heat, and distributed networks which make it easy to focus on advanced manufacturing rather than consumer software apps. So yeah, I agree with you. California has got its own characteristics, different towns have other advantages for example Leicester and textiles. They’re all different. So let each place build to their own strengths. 

Brilliant chat with Colin Gounden, CEO of VIA, a company that uses machine learning to enable encrypted analysis of confidential data at large energy companies. We discussed the comparative advantage of the VIA founding team,  the way VIA solves for the data siloing issue which so many machine learning projects suffer from, how they solved for slow enterprise sales cycle with the “30 minute pilot”, how growing up in multiple countries affects your perspective, why energy efficiency of everyday appliances is a massive opportunity for cleantech founders, how they hire for their company value of “love in:love out” and more!

Here is the audio. The excerpts below are lightly edited:

MCWALTER: What would you say was the comparative advantage of the initial founding team?

GOUNDEN: I think familiarity plays a big part. Some of us have known each other for 10-20 years so there’s some advantages just in terms of direct communication. You can have very direct conversations,  there’s no beating around the bush, there’s no kind of like mincing words, and you get a lot of stuff done a lot faster that way. Also, we tend to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and have been able to say, Hey, this is my weakness, this is not my area of strength, and I could really use some help here. And sometimes, in other founders, some groups find it hard to admit weakness.

MCWALTER: Thinking back to those early days, what were the first 3-6 months like?

GOUNDEN: Lots has changed since that period. In the early days, we were really focused in the area of machine learning and AI to solve problems in the energy space. We actually started by working with regulators. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was one of our first customers. And I would say in total transparency, it was less about the software and more about solving the problem. It looked a little bit more like a consulting company with software, figuring out what software was the right software to solve these kinds of problems. And certainly, I think even today still, but in 2016 certainly, AI was very much in a custom mode and it needed a lot of hand holding. So the first three to six months in addition to working with some customers like regulators, there was also a lot of client conversations. We had a good CRM tracking system. Jackie Finn runs our marketing group and she was very insistent about us having a really good tracking system. So I think we did over 400 customer interviews in the first year. So a lot of it was just customer discovery, just understanding what the market needs and doing some paid work along the way.

MCWALTER: And what is an example of how VIA solves problems for utilities? 

GOUNDEN: For example, we have a large European utility, who have petabytes of data. And they want good in-house data science people, but it’s actually really hard to attract certain skill sets to the utility industry and you see this a lot; they have six open positions and only one filled. And because they cannot often get the people in-house, they would like to make a choice of packaging the data in order to work with academics or consulting firms or maybe even general data scientists. In an ideal world, that would be great. But of course, there’s lots of confidentiality issues and so they cannot just send that data out. Instead of getting access to the data directly VIA enables third party data scientists to write up queries in Python and basically send that to wherever the data is, it runs there and results get returned. And we have a bunch of checks and balances to make sure the code you’re writing isn’t going to steal something,and the results that are getting sent back aren’t revealing too much. There’s also an audit element to make sure the utility knows who’s doing what when, and with what data. This solves for the privacy concern while giving utilities access to amazing data science talent. 

MCWALTER: One of the big common problems with machine learning and those kinds of ventures is data siloing. What are your thoughts on that?

GOUNDEN: We have one customer who said they have two divisions, one in mainland Europe, and one in that In the United Kingdom, and they said it takes nine months to transfer the data from one unit to another. Mary, Queen of Scots did not take so long. It’s all these regulatory concerns that’s actually blocking that transfer of data. Our goal is that they could learn from each other without having to physically send their data. That is one of the problems VIA is solving. 

MCWALTER: When a client shows an interest what is the typical kind of timeline to get a client up to the point where they’re getting real value? I imagine these jobs in general are just moving pretty slowly?

GOUNDEN: So we launched something in 2018, called the 30 minute pilot. And we thought this is kind of an industry first because so many pilots, prototypes and demos take too long. And so literally we said, well, what would it take? Let’s think about this differently. What would it take to get real data, real results in 30 minutes? So we created an environment to do that. And actually,it only takes three or four minutes to load and the other 27 minutes, is getting people comfortable with the idea that they have to go collect a little tiny piece of data on their own by digging around their files. So that’s why it totals 30. Also, we have a pilot we offer where for transformers for example, if the client is interested in benchmarking their transformer performance against the hundreds or thousands of transformer readings we have in our database without having to actually physically combine your data. So we can do that in a 30 minute process. 

MCWALTER: With COVID a lot of companies moved from an office, or multi office kind of model to something fully remote, what did that transition look like for VIA?

GOUNDEN: Our VP of product the other day, he mentioned we seem to be more productive than, in a way and I said, that’s probably because, One, no one’s on vacation, Two, thankfully no one’s sick  and Three, no one has any distractions or other things to do. So that trifecta means you will likely get a big bump in productivity over the few months while people have been working remote. I do think it takes work to get that to be efficient. So I’d say we learned a lot of tactical things for example, all meetings start on time. And you see people actually show up one minute early because that’s important and video is essential. And, in our Slack channel, everybody logs into the morning and says welcome and everybody says goodnight at the end of the day and that’s an important part. So there are little things that help the culture stays cohesive and I think that that takes a little bit of work. There’s also the little things like virtual pub night and trivia night.

MCWALTER: What are your thoughts on the opportunities for founders in a world that targets 100% electrification?

GOUNDEN: Because I come from the world of data analytics I have a bias which is in a world of complete electrification it means a world where we can optimize power consumption. We can learn from each other about how power consumption varies in the world. In Japan everything consumes gigantic amounts of power, the televisions, the rice cookers, the refrigerators. And if you go somewhere else, like Kenya or parts of India it turns out because power is expensive the exact same 27 inch television does not use the same amount of power in Kenya or India as it does in Japan. And so what are the opportunities for an entrepreneur? It’s saying, “Well, how do I take everyday items and make them low power? Because that helps everybody. So pick your favorite object that you know well and that can be air conditioning or rice cookers or refrigerators or dishwashers or  cell phone chargers or whatever it is and ask how do I make that charge faster, smarter and with low power consumption? There’s hundreds of opportunities like that. 

MCWALTER: What are your thoughts on like the increased risk from cyberattacks in a more and more connected kind of power grid?

GOUNDEN: Unfortunately, that’s increasing as an issue. You once had a house with a door and a lock, and now you’ve got thousands of windows, and it’s easier to break in.  One infamous example of a retailer who had a big breach of credit cards happen by someone hacking in through an air conditioner unit. So I think that’s a real concern.The thing to do is not just depend on cybersecurity to keep up with hackers, but I think edge processing will be a great way to deal with it, in other words don’t move the data. Don’t let the data have access to a window, and do as much processing on the edge as possible, and you minimize some of those risks. Keeping it fragmented and distributed is one way of kind of making sure we are dealing with some of those threats.

MCWALTER: What are your views on things like blockchain applied to cleantech?

GOUNDEN: We actually have a small blockchain component we use to basically audit logs with an immutable ledger; it’s basically a smart contracting function that controls who can access to what data when and for what purpose and then tracking, the usage and and what data was used at what point in time. We never saw really the big crypto coin opportunity. A lot of others did, but the idea of this kind of decentralized database infrastructure and auditable ledger that makes a lot of sense, especially in a world where you need technologies that are beyond trust, or you don’t know all the parties. So, in a power grid, where I have a manufacturer of a electric vehicle, and I have a charging station from somebody else, and I have electricity powered by some distributed generation site by a third party and then a grid that connects them; all of those things may not know each other so they need trust to be able to kind of know what’s happening when and be able to have some auditable trail makes sense. So we see a good use for blockchain in those instances. 

MCWALTER: Where did you grow up?

GOUNDEN: I grew up a little bit everywhere. I was born in Canada, but grew up in Scotland and I went to 12 different schools around the world. Some time in California and in Australia and I think that influenced me in a lot of different ways. You become more open to lots of things and you realize the world is filled with very different people and you have to adapt quickly to stay alive and be respectful of others? Because there’s huge diversity and what you think is normal may not be normal to anybody else. I remember going to school in Scotland and on the first day of school meeting somebody and saying “hi” to them. And “hi” was just not said in Scotland in those days. It was a very North American thing .And I remember thinking, well, that’s what you learn, you learn to adapt. So being respectful and open is probably the number one lesson that comes from growing up in so many places.

MCWALTER: I actually had not a dissimilar background, growing up in different countries. And one of things I found was you definitely started to notice, and ask the question, “Why are things like this?” And often people do not notice certain things because it is the water they are swimming in. 

GOUNDEN: Right. I think this is an age old question. I think Voltaire wrote about the foreigner who comes to the court and asks all questions like, “why do you have all of these odd, behaviors and rules and standards?” The outsider often has an interesting perspective about why we do things.

MCWALTER: When building company culture is the primary lever used at the hiring stage or rather the building of certain values within the company over time?

GOUNDEN: The screening process is super, super important. And one thing we do is give little case studies,whether you’re an office admin, a developer or DevOps person, you have different kinds of case study assignments that everybody gets. It’s easy to be charming on a 45 minute call, right or in a meeting, but you need to actually see, are they interested in the work? Can they pay attention to detail? Are they committed to it? We have a value, which is “love in:love out”. If you love what you do, it’ll show in the output that you have. We have a 3-4 month probationary period and some people are like, “yeah, I take that bet. I bet I’m going to be great.” You know, that’s not much of a leap. Generally the best people are the ones who are willing to take that bet on themselves. There are probably 50 other little things that we do along the way to keep people motivated and which attracts the best people.

Very enjoyable chat with John Jung,  former CEO and Co-founder of Greensmith energy a long term energy storage company, and currently an operating partner at Cota Capital.. We discussed the investment picture for cleantech and green energy, Greensmith Energy’s acquisition by  Wärtsilä, the massive opportunity of energy storage, why India and China are the countries to watch for the future of cleantech, how fresh eyes on an industry can bring about the most radical innovation and more!

Here is the audio. The excerpts below are lightly edited:

MCWALTER: What is your perspective on raising money for renewable energy, green technology, clean tech companies from VC? 

JUNG: I can speak to that as an entrepreneur that’s gone out and raised money for different ventures, where the goal was actually to raise the least amount of money. Not the most. Sometimes you hear about Silicon Valley CEOs and how they  go out and raise as much as they can. The problem with that mindset is that, although you may need a certain amount of money, you have to really be deliberate about the trade offs that you create, which basically means you have to say no to a lot of ideas that engineers and developers develop. It also really kind of forces you to make strategic choices of what it is you want to be when you grow up? 

But from my experience of the venture capital community with, with energy and clean energy in particular, I gotta be honest with you over the last 20-30 years, it hasn’t been very good. Having said that, I think very much like the railroad where, maybe 1.0 doesn’t quite kind of get there in terms of all the people that invest their infrastructure. it usually takes a 2.0 or 3.0 infrastructure, it requires critical mass which we are now getting to. 

MCWALTER: Your views on the state of the battery market?

JUNG: It’s really good to be agnostic as much as possible. A good example of what I mean strategically about that is if you are a battery company, let’s say your battery is the best battery. But batteries are very much like car engines. In that you’ve got a reason for a Ferrari engine, you’ve got a different reason for a Volkswagen engine. And it’s not to say one is good or one is bad, you just have different horses for courses needs for. And batteries are no different, not just in terms of duration, and density, but all the different cycling. 

MCWALTER: I’d like to understand the business model a little bit better? Was it like a subscription pricing model or more milestone based? What was the actual kind of monetization strategy of Greensmith?

JUNG: Yeah, I think that’s that’s another excellent question. Because I think this is where a lot of entrepreneurs get wrong, quite frankly. I think it is good to start with something, right. It could be an idea. It could be a model, it could be a material. It could be data, it could be anything. But ultimately, when you’re building a company it’s essential to get an understanding of who’s gonna pay for something that you provide…

MCWALTER: One of the things that I’ve noticed is, the US has resisted a carbon tax so far, while we’ve seen other countries move forward with them including some states in the US having carbon regulations of various types. On the other hand, you have corporations like Microsoft, and even McDonald’s making very strong decarbonization commitments, which ends up having a lot of downward pressure on their supply chains to decarbonize. In your view, which will have the larger impact in the US specifically on decarbonization, government regulation from the top or these kinds of sustainability commitments moving through corporate supply chains?

JUNG: I think there is a lot of traction and with some of those household names people and people pay attention, right? When Apple does this with their new building or, Google and Microsoft does that, it gets a lot of attention. Having said that, I think the big shifts that are happening are regulatory. But it’s being caused by other bigger shifts that are also very positive in the market. And that is associated with this phenomenon that people called the Henderson curve. What I’m basically saying is, it’s not just that solar energy generation, power generation is hitting the parity line. And  the numbers just speak for themselves in terms of new assets, new generation assets that are being deployed around the world, but they’re not stopping there. They’re gonna continue getting cheap. And there’s two reasons behind that. One is the sun and the wind is free, approximately free. The second reason is that I think the heat rate or the efficiency of an internal combustion engine is around 40% maybe. But solar and wind just gets cheaper, the more you produce it. So the last time I read any kind of academic research on the new curve for solar, it was like every time you double the production of a module, whether it’s thin, or crystalline, or what have you, it improves in unit cost by a not insignificant amount and we’re still only scratching the surface on solar penetration around the world. 

MCWALTER: What is your view of the Canadian tech scene? 

JUNG: One of the things that I think is kind of nice about starting companies in Canada, is that in Canada, in particular, is that I think the values are very similar to the US when it comes to entrepreneurs and business. And number two, I believe, for a while Waterloo graduated more software engineers that Microsoft hired than any other school in the world, so the talent is there, right? The economy is super stable, startups usually are created or sometimes created in places where you feel free, you don’t have to worry about this and that you can kind of focus on, how this cloud computing platform is going to disrupt, medical services or whatever you’re thinking about. And then the final thing is, I think it’s got enough critical mass of stuff going on in multiple sectors, because one of the things that startups really benefit from is stakeholders that are along for the ride in some way. 

MCWALTER: You’ve seen kind of clean tech applied in a lot of different countries, which country is most on track to overachieve in terms of their decarbonization?

JUNG: They tend to be  some of the biggest economies in the world, one is India, and one is China. China’s pretty simple.  for all the good and the bad of any country in the world, when they decide to put their mind to something they do it and they do it for a really long time. And they do it with basically half the supply chain of the world. So when you look at the statistics on solar deployment, or when deployment or  storage or  manufacturing capacity, you can kind of take that number, cut it in half, and basically argue that half of that is China. That’s how massive it moves needles, right? Many, many different needles. So, and I think people who are operating in the renewable industry have to be thankful for that, regardless of how they feel about different governments. 

The other one is India.There are some very aggressive business people, developers that are operating in that country and unlike Western Europe and the United States, they are bringing clean energy to some of the poorest people in the world, and I just love that. If you take a look at the electricity prices that a poor farmer pays for, in Southeast Asia, they are as high if not higher than Western European, and the United States and North America. And part of the reason is inefficiency, and all these things that I think are a great opportunity to improve on. But ultimately the eye on the prize there is bringing clean, affordable electricity to people. 

MCWALTER: Is there anything I should have asked you about but did not?

JUNG:The only thing that I would like to add about the energy industry is that sometimes it kind of feels impenetrable.That’s why entrepreneurs like to do B2C type startups where they are working on a thermostat or something that they can relate to like an electric bicycle. I would not shy away from getting into stuff that you don’t know. And seeing if there’s an opportunity to apply the things that you do know, to those and energy is a very good example. When I was hired, I was a hired gun type CEO, brought in by the VCs. I’m not an engineer, but you don’t have to be an engineer to have ideas. So I wouldn’t let the confusion, the noise, the complexity associated with the energy industry and how it’s run and managed, prevent you from finding out more. And we also live in a golden age of not only computers but information and data. So anything you want to know you can basically look up and you can educate yourself, It is really a renaissance for learning as well. So the only thing I would encourage listeners to do is do something very, very different. I kind of wonder if some of the ideas that I had and some of my colleagues who also did not come from the power industry had, were because we were willing to ask stupid questions in an industry where you don’t want to sound stupid, right? So don’t be afraid to sound stupid.