50 - Gravity Storage Solutions with Robin Lane (Commercial Director @ Gravitricity)

It's capable of fast response. It's capable of response in less than a second

Zero to 100% power in less than a second.

I think the batteries and the energy storage technologies of the future will be required to last longer, frankly. We use an extremely dense, magnet dense material.

You either need a lot of mass or you need a lot of height.

If you go underground, then you're using the geology of the Earth, if you like, to hold up that weight. And that's the secret sauce.

Hello, everybody. Quentin here. Now in this episode, we're talking about the oldest technology known to man, gravity and gravity batteries. We've got Robin Lane on from Gravitricity, who have been one of the leading players in gravity energy storage pretty much since we all heard of it. And what's interesting about this conversation is the journey that Gravitricity have been on from moving magnet dense material up and down mine shafts to where they're going now and in the future is fascinating. So let's see what you think in the comments. I hope you like it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So, Robin. Gravity. Gravity energy storage. That's what you guys do, right?

Yes, it is. Gravity is always there. You can rely on it. It's not ever going to go anywhere.

So seem to us to be a good thing to be making energy storage, basing energy storage on. We're actually more than that. We're a company who has, legacy-wise, we believed in, I guess, the power of underground spaces and the potential of underground spaces to really make a meaningful difference and offer energy storage at grid scale, which is what we need. And gravity is, kind of, the first technology off the block, if you like, in that respect.

Gravity as a technology, love it. A lot of ups and downs in this. There's a lot of dad jokes to be said in this episode.

We'll try and get them in.

And then so Gravitricity. Where's Gravitricity based?

Gravity city is based in Edinburgh. And we've got a team of about 15 or 16 employees based in Edinburgh. And we've put together our project demonstrator up in Edinburgh. And that's where that has been. It's down now and we've disassembled it. But we did some testing on that and that was a massive learning experience for us.

OK. Cool, well we're going to come back to the technology and the company in a minute. But as ever, I'm going to ask you about you, how are you here? How long have you been doing Gravitricity? And what we're doing before that? So we've got some frames of reference about your thinking.

Sure.

So I've been at Gravitricity for about 18 months. I'm the commercial director. So I've got a broad remit across strategy, identification, and definition and delivery as well as managing the commercial side commercial relationships. So it's fairly broad role and that's one of the things I love about it.

Going back in time, so I've been in the--

I guess the nexus between the entrepreneurial journey and CSR and sustainability and the low carbon agenda for about I guess 15 or 16 years. So going back to say, 2006, very different world back then. This is pre Nick Stern, The Stern Review, pre Inconvenient Truth, when a rock was something that you picked up off the ground and nothing else. And yeah the space was just starting to gather some momentum, I guess.

And fast forward to 2010, 2012, there was much more work around working for energy retailers, food retailers, who were, kind of, early adopter to the sector as well as the Carbon Trust and government, both central and local. So there was a lot of work to be done there helping those organizations really identify and crystallize and realize the opportunities which were presented, the business opportunities which were presented by, I guess, the low carbon agenda.

So were you a consultant during that period?

Yeah, I was a consultant working with those companies. And then I worked in house for a large corporate identifying and developing businesses in a particular area of the agenda with large corporates. So I was at Arqiva for two years between 2012 and 2014. They're ostensibly a comms organization. But they saw a massive opportunity for them in smart metering. And so I was brought on board as, I guess, a flexibility and smart metering specialist to help them identify and track down what exactly that meant for them.

And then more recently, I've worked directly with technology companies. I've always had a conviction that technology companies and technology has to be a really, really big part of the overall solution to decarbonization. And so I worked directly with technology companies, spin outs from universities, Fred in a shed kind of organizations, and many other different profiles directly through government grants helping them to identify their strategy, helping them to negotiate agreements and prepare for investor raising as well.

I should say that before that, I was a corporate lawyer. So I was a corporate lawyer for about six or seven years, both in the city of London and in Brussels and in Sydney training there, doing corporate and commercial M&A type transactions. So that's how I began my career. It's been a good grounding. But I had a conviction that there must be more to life. And as it turned out, I was right.

OK. Cool. And then so we're going to go into detail about the technology in a minute. But so Gravitricity, this is a company based in Scotland. And you guys well, what's the belief? Because we're lithium people really.

Most of our customers and the industry is all about lithium ion batteries. And then there's a few bits on the periphery, like flow batteries and flywheels and gravity batteries and all these things. So what's the gravity play? What do you guys believe about the market or about the technology that means that this business makes sense?

Yeah.

It's a really good question. And I think I think the foundation belief is that the landscape of energy storage, which we've seen develop over the last five or seven years because it's grown up extraordinarily quickly, really come from nowhere since 2014 and '15. And that is fantastic story and we in the UK should be proud of, I guess, being at the leading edge of that internationally. And lithium ion has played a obviously an important role, and it will continue to play an important role.

But I think the future of energy storage is somewhat different. And I think the reason why lithium ion has played that role is that it was an off-the-shelf, mature, ready-to-go technology, which was, as I say, ready to go, to scale up, and able to deliver on those needs as and when they were there. I don't think that that's necessarily going to be the case. I think the use case and the demand requirement from the market has been relatively homogeneous over the last five, seven years. And I don't see that continuing into the future.

What does that mean, homogeneous?

It means that it's the same.

It means that the single use case for grid scale energy storage over that time period has been fast duration--

sorry, a short duration, high power kind of services. And that's the kind of use case that lithium ion has fitted well into. And that will continue.

But I think that the energy storage landscape will kind of fan out and diversify. And I think there are a number of different dimensions on which the markets will be requiring more and different capabilities of energy storage technologies than they have in the past.

So what's the play for the gravity? Did you call it the gravity battery or the gravity technology or--

Gravity-based energy storage, is what we normally--

we can call it a gravity battery. But most people regard a battery as a chemical battery. And that can kind of confuse matters.

OK. So what's the play here? So if lithium ion batteries are doing their bit on the grid and there's billions of pounds of CapEx being deployed into that sector right now. But there are some things that lithium ion--

there are some shortcomings especially with longer duration and number of cycles, although both of those lithium ion folks pretty much think they've solved to a certain degree.

What's the gravity play here? What's the secret sauce about the gravity--

I'll call it the gravity battery because of the next bit. Yeah, what's all that about?

Yeah. So just elaborate on what I said before, I think there are at least three ways in which the capability requirements of the future market will fan out and diversify.

And the first of those is in terms of longevity. I think the batteries and the energy storage technologies of the future will be required to last longer frankly, than that. And the reason for that is they're going to be seen as a grid infrastructure asset. And they will therefore have to, I guess, perform the role and have a lifetime to match other grid infrastructure assets. So that I see is a really important part of the future.

So you mean decades and decades rather than a single decade?

Exactly right. Exactly right. And I think the second way is that they will need to be capable of being more aggressively cycled. So we're talking about not just solely one cycle every day, but potentially charging and discharging and charging again and then discharging again, a little bit and then all the way, and then all the way up to the top, potentially multiple times every day. And again, if you expose a lithium ion battery to that, it's not going to last particularly long.

And the third way is long duration, longer duration systems. And so those are the three ways I think that the capability requirements of the future are not necessarily going to match up to the ones of the past. And so to get back to our system and why we think it plays a part, well, on the longevity front we have got a system which we believe can last for many, many decades.

There's no system or component part which can't be switched out and changed and obviously, we've got operation and maintenance costs, but they're not huge.

And they will go down over time as well. So it's a system that can last for many decades. It's got that high power, short duration type capabilities. It's capable of fast response. It's capable of response in less than a second. So it can compete in those markets.

Is that full power in less than the second or it starts moving--

Yeah, no. It's full power in less than a second.

Zero to 100% power in less than a second.

And that's something which we've validated through our concept demonstrator.

OK.

Yeah. So there's that and so there's the longevity of the system. There's the low OpEx cost. There's no depth of discharge limits.

It's the safety requirements. And those are the things that we think we can bring to the party which are fundamentally very different to--

I guess there is a depth--

there's a depth of shaft.

limit. Right, which is the depth of this discharge limit. So there is a lower and upper bounds on the energy that can go into these things and be stored in these things mechanically in the same way that there's a chemical low and upper bounds within a lithium ion cell.

Yeah. So I guess what I meant there is that you can drop the weight all the way down to the bottom of the shaft. The shaft is always going to have a bottom. And if it doesn't have a bottom which we're using the limitation will be the length of the cables you use.

And so--

The shaft at the bottom of the bottom is--

there's my mind blown.

[LAUGHING]

Every shaft will have a bottom. But it's a question of whether we want to go all the way to the bottom. And it may be that we don't or we are--

some shafts aren't exactly straight. They, sort of, curve in as they get deeper. And so they'll come a time when you drop the weight in, it will get stuck halfway down. So you don't want to do that.

So let's be clear here. There's a few different gravity technologies out there or ideas. So if I got this right, you guys are doing stuff vertically up and down, a bit like a lift, but with a big weight in it, rather than something on wheels going down a mine shaft or going down going down a hill, if you like, underground. You guys are going up and down, up and down, that way.

If you're--

we're getting into technology now. But if you've got a--

how deep do these things have to go and how much weight do you have to move to get an equivalent amount of energy?

So that's an interesting question. So very, very simple formula that governs the amount of electricity that we can store in a particular shaft. And the formula is mgh. And energy is given by--

GSE physics.

Exactly. So it's really, really basic stuff.

Exactly, it's those three things. Going back to the beginning, gravity is your constant. Obviously, there's no way in which you can change that.

10-ish.

Yeah, 10-ish, just below 10.

And so therefore, you've got mass and height as you're two variables you've got to play with. And what that means is that you need heavy, heavy weights and you need long drops in order to make gravity energy storage work. And when I say heavy weights, I don't mean a few tens of tons. You need to be talking about weights in the hundreds of tons to really--

Hundreds of tons.

Yeah. To make this really, really work. And that's perfectly doable.

We're going to be lifting up weights of say 500 tons or more at a time and dropping them through a drop of say multiple hundreds of meters, so 500 meters or plus. And if you do that, you can generate and store very interesting amounts of electricity.

So what does that look like? So say you've got 500 tons, I don't even know what 500 tons. 500.

What does a mini weigh? Mini is like half a ton, right? That's not the right one. What does a car weigh?

I mean, a car. I mean a big car, a big SUV might weigh two or three tons, I guess.

OK so we're talking 250 cars. We're going to lift them all up at once or pull them down. And then we put them--

how big is this thing? How much space does it take up?

Yeah. So the diameter of the shaft is likely to be six or seven meters, standard. I mean if we're deploying in shafts that already exist, we obviously take on the diameters that are already there.

Like a mine shaft.

Exactly, like a mine shaft. If you're dealing with shafts that don't exist and we're digging them from scratch, we can obviously customize that and choose what diameter we want.

So the parameters, the weights are obviously governed by the parameters of the shaft. And you've got six meters. And it'll be quite multiple meters deep in order to get to that 500 meters.

We use an extremely dense MagnaDense kind of material. We hold it in a bucket and we fill it to the top.

MagnaDense, that's a new word.

Yes, it's what I'm saying. Yeah.

It's a fairly commonly used ballast in heavy industrial applications.

Sources all around the world. You don't want to be moving 500 ton weights around the place.

So what about numbers? So I'm like megawatt hour terms, let's get a frame of reference here. So let's say a ton going up and down in a shaft that goes 100 meters, I don't know, we can do the maths live on air. You might have some of these. So what are some examples?

A ton isn't going to get you much. So if we go to 500 tons which is kind of the metric we tend to use, if you drop 500 tons through a distance of roughly about 600 meters, you get a megawatt hour of electricity. So going back to what I said, you do need heavy weights and you do need long drops, which is why incidentally we believe that the only way to do gravity energy storage is below ground.

And we've got competitor technologies who are looking to do things above ground.

We don't believe at Gravitricity that that is the right way to be going about it because if you're talking amount weights in the 500 ton sort of realm, you can't pick those weights up and lift them above ground unless you've got an incredibly strong structure, which would prove prohibitively expensive. If you go underground, then you're using the geology of the Earth, if you like, to hold up that weight. And that's sort of the secret sauce.

It seems like a lot of weight to move, a long, long way for one megawatt hour, right? Considering a one, I'm just thinking about comparison, one megawatt hour of, I know it's different cycling and things than a lithium ion battery, that's about half a shipping container, so a 20-foot shipping container. And that will probably cost CapEx wise, let's say installed 400 grams. So 400,000 pounds installed, maybe a little bit more. In fact, it's changing on a daily basis.

And then what does the CapEx cost of one of these? I guess you have to amortize it over a longer period because it's a longer--

it lasts for longer. What do you spend on a 600-meter shaft with a 500 ton magnet weight in it?

Yeah.

So if you're asking it if we're competitive today with lithium ion, the answer is no. But I also think that's the wrong question to ask because you're comparing a mature technology which has gone down that cost curve with a technology, which is still traveling down that cost journey. And frankly quite near the beginning of it. And if you look at other industries, I mean, I was looking at this recently the offshore wind industry between 2010 and 2020 came down, the levelized cost of energy of offshore wind came down 70%.

Now that's an achievement that no one could possibly have predicted in the noughties and leading up to 2010.

And there are all sorts of naysayers who are saying that it's going to stay really, really expensive and uncompetitive. And how have we achieved that, we've achieved it through efficient supply chains, better technology, and frankly, also well economies of scale. But also very, very strong policy commitment from government through rocks, through CFDs more recently. And that's what's been achieved and those costs continue to come down.

So I would say that, as I say, we're at the start of that journey and we believe that we've got an enormous cost reduction. So our analysis shows that we can reduce our costs by well over 50% over time. And we believe that we can become cost competitive with lithium ion in time.

OK. Interesting. So that's the core thesis here. Otherwise, no one would be doing the work because so the argument is the cost of gravity storage will become competitive with lithium ion at some point in the future, if we keep working on it.

What about--

there's a few different gravity companies out there--

gravity companies, selling gravity--

developing gravity energy storage solutions. And they're all very, very different. Where do you guys fit in to the overall realm of this new technology?

Yeah. We talk about our gravity systems, being able to offer, so we've got a single weight system. So that's what it says it is. It's dropping a single weight up and down a shaft. And that is very much aligned with the current lithium market and where the current lithium batteries offer themselves into the market. So short duration, high power type applications, frequency regulation, ancillary services, that's where they play, and that's where the single weight system will in time play.

We've also got a multi-weight system which does what it says on the tin. It picks up a weight it. It drops it down to the ground. And as that's that weight is decelerating towards the bottom of the shaft, the mechanism at the top is picking up a different weight and repeating that process. And you potentially, you can do that multiple times, thereby offering multiple hours of duration capability.

So you go kind of up, down, up, down, with two arms to this thing, if you like. Or is it all on one continuous cable?

So the weights get stacked on top of each other.

So you've got a--

in time, you've got a quite a few weights stacked on top of each other.

And obviously, the second weight can't travel the same distance as the first weight because the second weight goes on top of the first weight and so on. But if you've got a deep enough shaft, you can actually do that quite a few times before the limitation of the shaft depth becomes an issue.

OK. So you guys have got--

you've got single weight and multi-weight and you go up and down in the shafts. And are you aiming for existing shafts or new shafts? We had someone from Fichtner Consulting Engineers recently talking about energy from waste, fascinating thing in itself.

And one of the things he said on the podcast, which really made me think was that going into the ground cost 10 times more than going up. That was his rule of thumb, because he was going, you don't know what's in the ground and there's different rock formations. And it's just expensive going into the ground. So do you guys--

is that driving you guys to look at existing mineshafts around the place or are you going to be digging new holes or shafts?

What did he mean by going up? Do you mean going above ground?

Structurally going up. I guess you're talking about different weights, though.

I'd like to speak to this guy. I don't know who he is, but please put me in touch because we don't believe it's credible to go above ground, basically for the reasons we've already talked about. So you need to be talking about weights in multiple hundreds of tons. And you need to be dropping those weights through significant distances. And once you realize those two things, once you have those two insights to hand, you do the maths on lifting up 500 tons above ground.

You can't do it unless you're spending multiple millions of pounds on an incredibly strong structure. And that's going to blow your business case out of the water. Whereas if you're going below ground, in multiple cases, you've actually got the hole already and you're utilizing, I guess, the infrastructure of the old energy system to enable the new. And there's a really good story there about how we're re utilizing repurposing old coal mines.

Yeah, it allows us to do that for free. And it allows us to be talking about weights of a different order of magnitude.

Interesting. So let's go back to those. These shafts that are already existing out there, these coal mines or these other types of mines?

Yeah, they're most obviously coal mines. And one of the reasons they're coal mines is because I mean, obviously, it plays to the good story about the decarbonization agenda and how we're using the old system. But also there are a lot of coal mines which are going out of commission right now, all the way around the world. I mean, there are tens of thousands of mines.

Good.

Yes, absolutely. Good riddance.

Very good.

And so I was reading report saying that 50,000 coal mines, sorry, mines, in Australia alone, which are just waiting to have something done with them. Eastern Europe is a hot spot for these mines. A lot of people are wondering how to wean themselves off coal in Eastern Europe, Poland, and the Czech Republic, those kind of countries. The move away from coal is very much an active agenda. The UK has kind of traveled that journey already. And so a lot of our old coal mines are legacy coal mines have been filled in or otherwise decommissioned.

So that's less of an option, I think, on the coal mining front, although it doesn't need to be a coal mine. It can be a tin mine. It can be a platinum mine. There are plenty of them in South Africa. And we see South Africa is an interesting market.

Interesting. Let's come back to the technology itself. So if I got this right, it's a bit like a crane a generator on, is that true?

Yeah. It is.

so you're using heavy lift equipment, which is actually on the ground.

And that heavy lift equipment doubles as a generator as well. So in one direction, it's heavy lift equipment winching the system up to the top, the weight up to the top, exactly. And then once the weight is going down, plying down towards the bottom, it's doubling as a generator. And it's pulling the cable through making that electricity. There's lots of clever gearing in the generator to make sure that actually although we're dropping the weight quite slowly, the generator is going fast and generating all we can.

There's something about this, which is very--

it feels, it's simple. It's mechanical. It's almost primitive in thinking about storing.

I'm sure the Aztecs or someone in history has done this kind of thing before, storing stuff up a hill or up at the top of a shaft.

And it's very simple to explain and think about.

What's the vision here? If gravity energy storage takes off, what does success look like?

So to go back to your first point, I mean, it is. Gravity energy storage was the first form of energy storage. We've had pumped hydro, pumped hydro energy storage for multiple decades. And then even before that, we've got grandfather clock. So I don't know what the legacy of grandfather clocks and how far we go back in time for them. But many hundreds of years.

You're not going to give me the Aztecs, though, are you?

Look, I don't know about the Aztecs, I wouldn't like to say for sure. I'm sure somebody watching this will know about the Aztecs.

The only thing I know about the Aztecs is they ate a lot of flax seeds. My wife tells me that's what, for some reason, made them way healthier than we are. But, OK.

Yeah, so it's an old system.

An old, old system.

And we're just sort of--

we're doing things in a slightly different way, but the technologies we're using are fairly tried and tested and the clever stuff we're doing is in the integration, the way we're bringing those technologies together is genuinely innovative and novel and different. To get back to your point about what does success look like? What does good look like?

So we see a world of distributed energy storage. We're not going to get--

the distributed or the energy storage of the future is going to be in multiple locations.

And so we've got a system, we've got to have a system which is capable of being distributed around different points of the grid, serving those different applications. Some behind the meter applications offering those grid services in energy access kind of roles in the developing world, in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the subcontinent of Asia. So we see gravity energy storage playing a really, really important part in delivering energy and enabling the low carbon transition around the world.

But alongside other storage technologies or is it going to--

Yeah, I think so. I think so.

The way I see it energy storage will diversify. It will inevitably diversify. So you've got lithium at the moment. You've got pumped hydro. I think the technologies of the future will include gravity. I think they will also include thermal energy storage technologies.

And I think there'll be others as well. There are great many ways in which you can store heat for the production of energy.

To me, the only thing that matters is cost, right?

Above all else, the thing that matters is cost because it's going to be--

economics will win in the end. And I look at something like Denorwig, which is the battery of the West, Wales battery and the UK's battery.

Fascinating, multi-decade long structure that essentially has been supporting keeping the lights on for a long, long time, longer than I've been around. And I look at that and the scale of it. And some tell me I'm wrong here, but it's a couple of gigawatts, something like like that across a few units, maybe even bigger.

And the amount of water that thing needs to hold and move between those two reservoirs is just--

if you go and you see it, it just blows your mind. It's incredible. And so now then I think about other energy storage technologies and as you say, for moving mass around, you either need a lot of mass or you need a lot of height.

And so the question to me, is can we get those two things to the scale we need with gravity energy storage without moving, pumping material around like water? With it being physical on a cable, I assume it is. That's a big challenge.

Look, pumped hydro has done a great job and Dinorwig and Ben Cruachan and the others play a really, really important part of the energy grid or deliver really, really important services to the energy grid in this country at the moment. And as you say, they have done for many years. But I don't see them playing a really important part or technologies like them in enabling future renewable penetration because they're there already. And frankly, we're site limited.

There not many places in the UK where they're sufficient level of drop mountains, water receptacles, and what have you, to install a great many more of these things.

Whereas gravity, the kind of gravity energy storage that we're talking about doesn't have that location or I guess limitation.

It can be located anywhere and that's one of the key advantages. But fundamentally, the physics is the same.

And so how many of these mineshafts are there around the UK? Say we wanted to put a gravity energy storage system in all the sort of megawatt hour size mineshafts in the UK. So 500 tons going down 600 meters. How many of those are there for us to tap into?

So look, in the UK, as I said, the UK's not a great market for coal mines because they're there, most of them have been filled in and sort of repurposed in other ways at the moment. That could change in the future. And we're not limited to the coal mines and the mines that already exist, we absolutely see a future where you would be digging your own mines as well, creating your own shafts, and deploying these systems in those shafts.

And then you've got, obviously, you've got a challenge around the business case because sinking those kind of shafts in the ground isn't exactly cheap. And that's where our other deployments and other technologies come in because we've already always had a conviction at Gravitricity that we see gravity as a way in which you can utilize underground spaces for energy storage, but it's not the only one. And so you can store fuel gases in these spaces, you can use it for compressed air, and you can generate, you can store inter seasonal heat potentially down there as well.

Just before we come on to the other use cases. So something's just occurred to me and I might be wrong, but you said digging new shafts is expensive. Or it's not cheap. Interested to know what not cheap means.

I've got no idea what it costs to dig a shaft. Actually, from a technology perspective, digging shafts is not a new technology, right? So you'd think that the cost curve has already come down on the shaft digging. Shaft--

is digging the right term. I don't know. Shaft--

Sinking.

Sinking. Yeah. And so what does it cost to create a new shaft?

Well, look. It depends.

It's a frustrating answer, but it does so much depend on the kind of geological formations you're digging into, you're sinking into.

And so it's hard to give a direct answer to that. But we're at the forefront of that. We're at the forefront of bringing those costs down. To your point about whether that journey has been traveled when it comes to sinking shafts, I don't actually think it has because mining has historically been an extremely profitable industry.

And not one where they've necessarily had to focus relentlessly on cost and cost down. And how can we squeeze out the cost and how can we do better.

Because they've known that once you get there, plus the fact that energy has always already been an imperative. So if we need coal, and we've always needed coal historically, you need to do the digging. So it doesn't really matter what it costs. So there's that.

And so I think it very much depends. Very much depends on. But there's also the fact that the mine is a place of work.

And so there are all sorts of costs, which relate to the fact that people, human beings, are working there which of course wouldn't apply to this particular use case. So there are absolutely opportunities to take cost out of if you were to ask a miner or a shaft sinking company, how much does it cost to sink a mine for the purposes of coal digging, that wouldn't necessarily be a good guide to what we're looking at.

OK. Just to move our way up and down.

And then what about these other use cases? Actually, before we get there, I'm jumping around. Let's go back to the company. So who founded the company and how long has it been going and how is it funded? Who are the backers and what next?

Yeah. OK. So the company was founded in I think 2012 or so. And it was founded by Martin Wright and Peter Frankel originally. And they have a long history of working with each other on energy storage technologies and renewable low carbon energy storage or energy generating technologies as well.

Peter is more--

he's the mad scientist. He's the engineer who thinks outside the box. And Martin is more of the businessman type and they work extremely well together.

So a few patents were filed and we've got those patents now in the bag. The company really started to gather pace when we got Charlie Blair on board and he joined I think in 2017.

And he's really pushed the company forward, recruited all the people we've got now, and sort of been the driving charge of the company.

And so that's where it goes back to but really in the last, I would say two to three years, is we've really, really sort of gathered momentum and gathered pace. We've raised about 8 million pounds in funding through a combination of founder's equity, high net worths, crowd raises, and R&D funding.

Cool. Well and what does it cost--

you've already done some--

I saw you at trial one in Edinburgh and it was at 250 kilowatts?

Yeah, that's right. So fairly humble in terms of the output and the duration. But that wasn't really the point. It wasn't about making money or even demonstrating that it could make money it was more about validating the technical performance of the technology. So there are a few really important things that came out of that. Firstly, that we could respond in less than a second, which is really, really important for eligibility for those high power, short duration type services.

That we had a really competitive round trip efficiency. So it's sort of nudging up towards 80%.

And we think we can improve on that in a full scale system, but it's up to 80% is where we got to on the concept demo.

And then our standstill losses were pretty negligible. So in other words that waits can sit there at the top of the drop for as long as you want it to pending the right market signals for it to be let go.

OK. Cool. And then you've raised 8 million pounds. Did you spend a lot of that on the--

because these are capital intensive things. Did you have to spend a lot of that on getting your first project off the ground or was that funded by R&D?

Yes. So the concept demo that I've just been talking about was funded through Innovate UK.

And to the tune of 60 or so percent. We had to provide the match funding and that's par for the course in these kind of instances.

And so yes. So absolutely, that's part of that 8 pounds million that we just talked about. And other than that, it's in operational expenses, taking the technology forward, developing the feed, frontend engineering design kind of work, the detailed design delivering projects on a consultancy basis. So these are the kind of things that we've worked a lot on.

And so you guys had a big announcement recently. Do you want to talk about that for a moment?

Yeah. So we're pushing to the forefront the second way in which we believe underground spaces can be used for the purposes of energy storage. And that's to store fuel gases. And in particular, to store hydrogen.

We see hydrogen as a massive part of the energy transition and a really important part of that agenda. I know you've talked a lot to different people and different episodes of this podcast about hydrogen.

So I won't talk about it so much. But obviously our take on it is on the storage side and other people will have their own view on different parts. But on the energy storage side, we see hydrogen storage as being a really important part of the hydrogen economy because with your generating green hydrogen, you need somewhere to put it because the production is intermittent. And so you need somewhere to put it.

Isn't a thing about hydrogen--

apologies, very basic thinking on this. Isn't the thing--

one of the things about hydrogen is it takes up a lot of space.

And so it takes up a lot more space than methane for the same amount of energy. And generally, volumetrically, it is a big thing.

And so for a shaft, I'm thinking like a 600-meter shaft with--

and these may be bigger shafts because a 600 meter shaft with a nine-meter diameter, how much hydrogen can you store in one of those? You need a bloody big shaft.

Yeah. So we wouldn't actually be using those kind of shafts. We'll be using purpose-built shafts.

But we can store about 100 tons worth of hydrogen in the shafts that we're talking about. And we believe, and this is I guess crucial to our proposition in the market, we believe that actually is the right level of hydrogen to store for the kind of use cases that are going to really start gathering pace. We don't see hydrogen necessarily being used in all these different applications, very controversial topic where hydrogen will be used, where it is and--

Which ones are you guys focused on?

So we are focused on the industrial applications. We see hydrogen being used in those kind of applications where electrification is either challenging or fairly impossible. So those industrial uses where you need very, very high grade heat and frankly, hydrogen is the only game in town in terms of a low carbon option. So steelmaking, oil refining, to some extent, ceramics, glass, potentially large scale transportation, as well as long duration energy storage. So inter seasonal storage of hydrogen for filling in those still cold, but not very sunny winter days as well.

So we see most of the hydrogen, which is going to be produced in the hydrogen economy, it's going to be produced and stored and then used in fairly close proximity to each other, which places an emphasis less on the transportation of it and more on the storage of it. And so we see the storage element as a really, really critical part. Again, you've got these two incumbent solutions.

At the moment, you've got salt caverns, which are very geographically constrained. I think in the UK, there are only two areas where there the geological conditions are right for salt caverns. And they're sort of Cheshire and East Yorkshire. So they're not really the answer, I think, for the kind of hydrogen storage that we need.

And then on the other side, you've got the you've got the above ground systems, which can store hydrogen but they're extremely expensive. They take up space above ground and they're quite questionable health and safety. So status.

Is the play here that by storing hydrogen a shaft, it's cheaper than ground?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it'll be, in time, it'll be both cheaper and more attractive in other ways because it's not taking up valuable space and it's safer.

OK, interesting. I want to ask you the two final questions. So firstly, is there anything you want to plug? I mean, you've just talked about your press release. I gave you that one, but anything else that you guys want to plug. And then the second more interesting one in my view, of course, is what do you believe or what does the company believe that's contrarian that perhaps not a lot of other people believe?

And when you're growing a company, especially a startup, you have to have some beliefs that other people will think of wacky. So let's do the first one, anything you want to plug? And then that one.

Yeah, so on the plugin side, so we're currently involved in a fairly significant fundraise for the company. So we're going out to raise roughly 40 million pounds, an institutional raise, so its a significant amounts of money.

And that fund raise will support and develop or enable rather, our next three R&D projects, which are on the roadmap. So two on the gravity side, one on the hydrogen side. And we see that as a really, really critical part of our development process.

And so yes. So we're involved in that at the moment. We're sort of in the early stages of talking to potential investors. We're looking for strategic corporates.

And impact investors and any investors who really, really see that not only that they get the play of gravity energy storage, but also think that they can work with us and help us pull the technology into the market. That's what we're really, really looking for.

OK. Plenty of investors listening, so get in touch. And then the second one, what do you believe that a lot of people will think you're crazy for believing?

Yeah. So I think on that, I would say that the energy industry, I think it looks at the future and it and it regards the future as probably being more of the past. And so they look at how are we going to carry on decarbonizing the electricity supply and particularly respond to the decarbonization of heat and transport, which we all know is sort of happening already. And think, oh, we were going to need more solar, and we're going to need more wind, and we're going to need more lithium ion batteries.

I'm certainly in that camp. Yeah.

Well, OK, well let me slightly push back on that. So we definitely need more wind and more solar. And to a certain extent, we'll need more lithium as well. But I think the future isn't always or the past isn't necessarily a good guide to the future. And what I would say is I think the next stage, the next little phase of that decarbonization journey will involve other things as well.

So I think there'll be a much more realization in the UK of the incredible potential of smart meters.

And the way in which they offer engagement at a customer level and the time of use tariffs that they potentially offer. I don't think 10 years, 15 years ago, I think we would have been a bit disappointed to know that we really haven't got going on that yet. and I think there's a lot more we can do on that to really get engaged consumers.

But I'd say on the energy storage side, I think there will be a plethora of different technologies coming to market. I don't see lithium ion delivering on all the capabilities that the market will require for some of the reasons we've talked about. And so I think the energy storage landscape of the future, it will be, of course, it will be lithium. But it will also be mechanical and gravity and compressed air and it will also be thermal energy storage.

So we don't think we can deliver on all those different market requirements. But we certainly think we can deliver on some of them. So that's how we see ourselves fitting in.

This is the wonderful thing about this industry, which is it's so early and nobody knows.

And there's going to be some winners and some losers and yeah, the things that will win in the end, in my view, are cost. What was it?

I can't remember who said it. I think it was on this podcast. There's only three that three things that matter, cost, cost, and cost.

And it's true. So fingers crossed, we can get the cost down on gravity energy storage.

Also on digging very deep holes, I still can't imagine how long it takes to drop a penny from, we can do the maths. Drop a penny from the top of a 600-meter shaft and it gets to the bottom. That's a little brainteaser.

We'll do the calculation and put it in the show notes.

Put it in the show notes. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And thanks, Robin, for coming on. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you, Quentin. It's good to be here.

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