High-Density Hydro with Lizzi Gold (Business Development Manager @ RheEnergise)

That the problems with pumped hydrate that we're trying to solve here, what does reenergize do to solve those problems? That means that we need much lower vertical elevation and we also don't need a supply of water. So huge step change in what you can actually do. What we actually need is lots of projects where exactly where they're needed by the grid, putting them at constraint points, co locating them with renewables projects, putting them in their population centers, or with large industrial energy users and really kind of having this more distributed model and pushing these projects through quite quickly it it's something which is kind of at the intersection of chemistry and material science and engineering.

Hello, buddy, Quentin here. And this week, we've got Lizzie Gold on from reenergize.

Now this conversation's interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we're talking about a new way of thinking about pumped hydro. And the the term for it is high density hydro. So get that in your brains. And then the second thing is Lizzie's a real chemist who really understands materials and all the stuff that goes into this new technology. So in this conversation, we talk about quite a lot of technical stuff, and I hope you enjoy it. If you like this and the rest of our podcasts, please do hit like, subscribe, and all the good buttons.

It really makes a difference to us. Alright. Let's jump in.

Reenergize or reenergize.

Reenergize, one word. All one word. People often ask us, like, where the h comes from, and it's actually rheology So looking at the science of materials and fluids and complex flows of complex fluids. So that's the reenergized And obviously, it's a bit of a play on words on reenergize energy storage.

You put energy in and you put energy out. Very nice. Yeah. What is it? Reology?

I've never heard of that. Reology I hadn't either before I joined Reenergize. And so we're just talking a lot about dents, fluids, and all sorts in this this conversation. Mhmm.

And what reality is all about materials in fluid form? Yes. So it's the flow of complex fluids.

So that might be a suspended solid in or a mixture of of lots of different things which act as a fluid.

So without kind of going duty what we do because I know we haven't we haven't even introduced the technology yet, but it we're working with a a suspension.

So it doesn't actually behave in the same way as a water or another fluid. Okay. Let's get to that. But first, so we're gonna ask I'm gonna ask you about you and why we're but today, we're gonna talk a lot about a new type of battery technology, which looks a bit like pumped hydro and a bit like a flow a bit like a other stuff.

But it all centers around this magical sounding material, and we'll come to that in a sec. But Lizzie, firstly, who are you? And how do we end up talking? So, yeah, I'm I'm Lizzie Golden.

Yeah. Thanks for inviting me on the podcast. I work for Reenergize as business development manager. So I joined the company just over two years ago now when it was just myself and the founders.

And so in the past two years, we've gone from being, you know, a few people around a table to twenty five people in two offices in London and Canada. We're just about to start building our first real life demonstration project.

Cool. And so is it, is it a battery company? Would you describe yourselves as a we would not.

We tend to not like to compare ourselves to batteries because we're not we don't think that we really compete with batteries. So we are a long duration energy storage provider.

And we define long duration as anything between four and sixteen hours. So not really the long, long duration your kind of, you know, daily or or twice daily to kind of load shifting applications.

We're based on conventional pumped hydro. So a lot of people have heard of the Electric Mountain in in Wales, which is, you know, decades old. What a lot of people actually don't know is that storage is one of the UK's, sorry, it's the world's most abundant and oldest form of energy storage. So it makes up over ninety five percent the world's energy storage, and that's just by power. If you look at it by capacity as well over ninety nine percent, and that's kind of where the idea for reenergized came from, you know, we everybody's talking about batteries, but we have this other form of energy storage, which isn't really being deployed in large volumes.

What can we do to make it better, and to make it more applicable in today's context when we know we have this huge challenge of We have all of these renewables coming onto the grid, and we need to balance them. So we're we're really taking pumped hydro and making better. So the framing of this conversation, if I've got this right, is it's starting from pumped hydro and thinking, how do I improve that? Exactly.

Rather than saying lithium ion battery cells, how do we change that? We're kind of we're going down the physical pumped hydro routes And that's our frame of reference. Yeah. Exactly.

Exactly. I think that the starting point was, you know, we've got this amazing technology that's proven.

It's it it does exactly what we want to do and what we know we need to do in the market, which is take these large chunks of energy and shift them to when we need them. So looking at kind of, you know, four, six, eight hour blocks of energy, taking those from, you know, may maybe a solar plant generating during the day, taking that in, and dispatching it at night rather than a battery, which might do kind of those quicker response services.

I'd I'd like to just say I'm not a battery person, so I we're very much focused on the long duration market. But but, yeah, the the kind of the the idea is is to take those problems, which conventional pump titers suffers from. So there there's not many available sites, you know, you need these huge mountains hanging valleys, which is a term which describes when you have, a river coming through, and you need to dam it up. So you need a kind of an area which you can dam.

And then you need to be able to pump that from a lower reservoir up to an upper reservoir, and you use natural geography to create those sites. So there's very few of those in the UK. There's probably a handful. And globally, there's there's, you know, there's a few more, but in Europe, particularly, there's there's not very many available locations.

One of the other problems is that it takes a really long time to get projects through the planning process.

So that there's a project called Corrie Glass, up in Scotland at the moment, which SSE are working on getting through FID. And that's been in the pipeline for years and years. I was gonna ask you about this so that problems with pumped hydrate that we're trying to solve here. One, you need natural geography.

You need these big, big rivers areas with to a high bit and a low bit, and you have to damn it. Mhmm. There's problems with that. Secondly, the the consenting process takes years decades.

So then what does reenergized due to solve those problems. Yeah. So so our our point of difference is we we don't use water. Is called high density hydro.

So by using a high density fluid, that means that we need much lower vertical elevations.

So we and we also don't need a supply of water. So what that means is instead of needing a three hundred meter valley, which has a reservoir and a a river flowing into it and a lower reservoir that you can pump from. All we need is a hill. So we take a hill.

It can be anywhere from, you know, a hundred meters up to three hundred meters. That's our window. Okay. So there's just a frame of reference here.

Yeah. So rather looking for mountains, we're looking for hills. That's the point here. Yeah. Exactly.

So you can lower your vertical elevation needed, or alternatively you can reduce the volume of storage needed And so when I say volume of storage, that's the size of the tanks -- Okay. -- that we have in a project. We tend to talk about it in terms of the vertical elevation, because it it increases the number of sites available by an order of magnitude. So in the UK, we did a GIS study, so looking at what are our our kind of key criteria for a site and how many are there.

What does GIS stand for, by the way? Geographic information systems. Okay. Yeah. So we we did a GIS study and we looked at how many sites are available in the UK, and there's about six and a half thousand.

So compared that to a handful of pumped hydro sites and it it, you know, it's it's a huge step change in what you can actually do. So we can have pumped hydro style things everywhere. Exactly. And that's kind of the reenergized approach to energy storage. We we, you know, we don't need we don't think we need these huge mega projects, which, you know, who knows if they'll ever get through planning and funding and all of the these steps and you know, policy can change multiple times by the time you've taken a pumped hydro project from initial idea to to final kind of commissioning We think, you know, what we actually need is lots of projects where exactly where they're needed by the grid. So putting them at constraint points, collocating them with renewables projects, putting them in their population centers or with large industrial energy users and really kind of having this more distributed model and pushing these projects through quite quickly.

So we we think we can take a project through from kind of, you know, through development and construction phases in twelve to twenty four months. We actually we we recently got planning on our first large scale demo, and we got that in six months. Congrats, man. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. So So so if I've got this right, what what we're saying here is pumped hydro is a great technology, but you can only put it in a handful of places in UK because you need mountains and rivers and all that stuff. But if there was a way oh, and by the way, it takes ages to get consent anyway.

But if there's a way we could do pumped hydro, but in kind of less less height between the tanks or the reservoirs and put it in lots of different places, and a half thousand across the country and more internationally, then that would have been pumped hydro has got a different kind of future. But the secret source for reenergize is rather than using water. You used this very mysterious fluid. Mhmm.

So what is this thing? It sounds like that is key, right? Because that's the thing that means you can go from mountains to hills. But I wanna dig into how it works, how expensive it is, how it compares to other stuff, is it gonna vet the environment, all that stuff?

Mhmm. Sure. So that we always refer to it as a fluid, but it is actually a mineral, which we suspend in water. So we take a mineral we grind it up very fine.

And we add we introduce some additives to the suspension to ensure that the fluid can last the life of a project, which is you know, forty, fifty, sixty years. The mineral, whilst I can't say what it actually is, because that's our kind of secret source. It's available in pretty much every territory globally. So it's it's very abundant, which obviously is something which the lithium supply chain struggles with, and that's kind of a well known, you know, issue.

Shots fired. Yeah. I'm so sorry.

Okay. This this is a suspension of fluid and it's got this mineral in it, but you can't say what a mineral is. But it's a mineral that's abundant, got plenty of it. And I'm assuming it's not something that is particularly scary. It's not scary. So you'd find it in, you know, something like the the medical industry, it it's used and given to humans.

And I'm not gonna say anything more than that, but it it's essentially it's it's completely benign And, you know, we we've tested off fluid in labs to ensure that it's nontoxic, and it it won't do any harm if it spills into the environment because that people always say, you know, well, what if there's a spill? And it is essentially it it's just a mud. So it it it wouldn't be nice, but it's it's essentially like you've you've released a lot of mud into the environment.

Yeah. That that's it. But you can't tell us on this podcast what the mineral is? I cannot.

Okay. So it's a mineral with some additives, and it So let's compare because the pumped hydro solution with water is very easy to explain. You can do it on the back of a kind of beer mat in two seconds. You've got low reservoir, high reservoir, and you pump between them and that makes electricity.

Mhmm. So or when it when it comes down the hill. So what we replace water with your what's the fluid called? Do we got a name?

We just call it high density fluid at the moment, but sometimes well.

We we call it r nineteen, and there's quite a funny story about that because it was invented in twenty eighteen. So we wanted to call it r eighteen for re energized twenty eighteen, but r eighteen is actually a Japanese porn website. So we ended up calling it r nineteen. Nice swerve.

Very, very good swerve. That could have been the end. Yeah. I know we were like, how do you know that?

Who who who knew that it was a Japanese porn website?

Well, there's people out there. Yeah. Alright. So online team and online team is better than water because it's more dense.

So how much more dense if we have like a liter of water or a liter of r nineteen. What's the kind of difference? It's two and a half times denser. I actually brought some in my bag.

Oh, it's a little chilly.

You can the tense. Alright. So, okay. And for those who are listening, I'm holding two kind of jam jars.

One of them is obviously water, I hope, unless it's the plant. It is. Well, it's much heavier. You're right?

That's a good start. We we talk about it like, Nesquik, So does it smell? It it actually, that one won't smell. We we've we use biocide in our fluid when we have the additive in it so that we don't get bacterial growth and things like that.

But I can confirm it is definitely heavier. Yeah. And the idea is, so rather than using the water, we use this and all the normal pumped hydro stuff, and it is much more efficient with space. How much does it cost?

So that's I know how much water costs, basically zero. How much does that cost in comparison? So we don't actually have a price in kind pounds per ton, pounds per meter cubed because the it really depends on the supply chain. So the the cost of it is probably, you know, roughly third raw material, a third logistics, and a third crushing and grinding.

It's got a bit of a glimmer it though, hasn't it? It's almost like I've never looked at it under It's like, you know, that vodka with bits of gold in it that said expensive, supposedly gets you drunk quicker.

It reminds me of that a little bit. Yeah. I mean, maybe we've got it. People often think it's chocolate milk.

They go, oh, at conferences. Oh, I'm a bit is. Problem is, so these these pumped hydro projects with this in, is it o are they covered? Or is it -- Yeah.

-- they are? They're totally covered. Let's save. You looked at the landscape and a big reservoir of that, you might be a bit put off.

Exactly. So we've got a lot of really clever fluid dynamicists, which I think is such a good subtitle in our, facility in Montreal. So we have our our team is split roughly fifty fifty, between London and Montreal and all of our engineers and technology development happens there in our in our technology center. I'm gonna smell it.

Oh, it doesn't smell. No. It doesn't smell. I don't have anything. No. It doesn't oh, what a nice client.

Totally benign. Yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah. It does look like chocolate milk. Yeah. We've done a lot of work, looking at how that behaves inside a kind of mechanical system.

So we've actually just finalized the design of our first turbine. Which is our kind of hide density turbine, which will be used in the the demonstration project, which is down in Plymouth. Well, that was my next question. Right?

So moving water around pumps and turbines and things. It's all kind of pretty straightforward, and everybody knows how to deal with water. I imagine when you put something that's two and a half times the density through a turbine, you've got brittle blades and things to worry about. So you there's lots of parts of the system, pipe work and turbines and things that have to be stronger.

Mhmm. How are you guys solving that problem.

Well, it's not necessarily a case of it being stronger. It's it's more a case of you actually have two and a half times less volume volume going through for the same power so that the pressure is comparable when you have a denser fluid because you actually just need to use less of it. And that's kind of our key value proposition is that we're not taking pumped hydro and making it bigger and better. We're just making it more scalable.

So instead of having, you know, we we could do a kind of one hundred megawatt hour project on a site which which has a two and a half times smaller footprint and smaller hill. Mhmm. So so the turbine is is very similar to what you see in a conventional pumped hydro project. It's the same architecture.

It's actually based on a Francis turbine, which doesn't mean any to anyone who doesn't work in hydro, but if you work in hydro, it's, you know, it's it's the one they use in conventional pump hydro projects. And what we've done is taken the same architecture and made it two and a half times smaller volumetrically, and then there's things like, you know, using special coatings on the so that they're more resistant to abrasion. The fluid is actually it is obviously more abrasive than water because it's got solid particles in it, but it's actually a lot less abrasive than you'd think because the mineral is very soft.

And actually what a lot of people don't realize is that in conventional pumped hydro project, you get a lot of quartz and other debris, which is washed through in spring, when all of the water, the the kind of ice water comes down from the mountains. And that's really unpredictable, whereas what we're doing is highly predictable. And so we have these, you know, predictable maintenance periods over the period of the project. Similar as you would to any other kind of storage technology.

And so that the costs actually almost balance out in that way. Does it does it set do you have to kind of mix it round? It it if you left it for a really long time and it didn't have additives in it, it would set.

The additives essentially, you know, we we we use a polymer and it essentially adheres to the surface of the particles and stops them from sticking together. So it's not just the mineral that's in there. We do have some things. So we're kind of developing a lot of different areas of IP and one of those is a fluid management system.

And basically, at the moment, that that means we have a lot of pumps inside the tank. So that even when we're not cycling it, we can ensure that we're agitating the fluid and maintaining the stability and maintaining the suspension. I was gonna talk about that. We've there's lots of benefits to using a high dense fluid -- Mhmm.

-- R19. But what other challenges are there. So some that we talked about some of the equipment that you have to use is a little bit differently. You need to agitate it.

It's something else that we need to think about when we're trying to use these kind of fluids. Yeah. So we we have a kind of number of different, elements of the system, which we're creating IP around there's the turbine, which we've spoken about, there's the flue management system. And then there's things like the valves, the tanks themselves, And all of those are, you know, that they're based on things which have been around for decades.

So our technology is it's new, but it's also very familiar. It's pumping, it's it's turbines, it's tanks, it's not we're not, you know, doing anything particularly groundbreaking, any one field, but when you put them all together, it it's something which is kind of at the intersection of chemistry and material science and engineering. So we we've brought together quite a lot of people within our team who may not have worked in that way before, or I've seen the chemists to, you know, we'll look look at the density and and run it through a turbine, and that's something that they've never really had to think about before.

So it's quite interesting inter section of skills, and I think that's where the real kind of innovation is coming from. I've got to ask it because there are so many competing technologies for this space, right? And so we have traditional. We have a traditional.

We've got flow batteries, which are pretty pretty advanced, but still, you know, there's many there's many pilot projects not really big ones that are being built just yet. We've got things like rust batteries.

We've got some folks are peddling hydrogen storage, There's loads of, competing technologies looking to access this long duration storage space. Oh, and then, of course, then there's a lit lithium ion people who say, you know, what, batteries can do it? The battery cells can do it. So where does, reenergize an r nineteen as a solution sits against the rest of the competition.

It's a bit of a naughty question really because the the world of long duration is still figuring itself out. Mhmm. But How are you framing the thinking around that? Yeah.

I mean, I actually quite like the questions. I think, you know, a lot of people think you've got short duration, which is, you know, really dominated by batteries, and then you have long duration, which and a lot of people think that's hydrogen. It's the styrene batteries. So kind of multi day, we're even seasonal storage, whereas we're saying, well, no, we're really kind of medium medium to long depending on who you ask.

And we sit in the four to sixteen hour window. So looking at kind of daily load shifting activities, Our cost profile is quite similar to that of, like, vanadium flow batteries and conventional pump hydro, but we're a lot more scalable than conventional current hydro, and we have much better round trip efficiencies than vanadium flow batteries.

So we kind of sit somewhere in the middle. What what does that mean that, better round trip efficiencies? So is it in the seventy seventies percentages.

We think that we can hit eighty percent. Eighty percent. Yep. And that's comparable to what you see in, you know, mature pumped hydro. So we're using the same turbine based on the testing that we've done. We it indicates that we can achieve those kind of efficiencies.

I think vanadium flows and we're like sixty five percent. We obviously are we're slightly sight limited, but a hundred meters isn't is a hill that you can find pretty much anywhere. So if you think You don't get evaporation?

No. Like you're doing traditional pumped hydro. Yeah. You should if if if everything else is the same, you should the route of proficiency should be slightly higher than -- Yeah.

-- compared with. Exactly. It it's interesting because it just kind of go back to what you said about the how how do we fit into the, you know, long duration storage landscape. There was a really interesting study done earlier this year, which looked to the duration of stories that you need in a energy system dominated by wind and then looking at an energy system dominated by solar.

So wind being very similar to the UK and somewhere dominated by solar, being somewhere like Spain or Australia or, you know, Chile, which are coincidentally all markets that we're looking at. And it says, you know, in in the UK, where you have a lot of wind, sixty percent of your storage, will probably be under twenty four hours in terms of the duration. If you look at somewhere like Spain, ninety percent of your storage would be under twenty four hours. So when you're looking at those kind of daily load shifting activities and trying to, you know, take solar energy from when it's produced in the middle of the day and shift the evening when people are using it.

That's really where we think our technology fits really well. And actually, in the UK, you know, replacing things like gas peaking plants, which have typically done those type of blocks and moving those kind of blocks around. And we've actually just signed a commercial MOU with a kind of gas speaker operator in the UK, which we're really excited about. Can you say who?

I can't say who? Yes. We're we're just working on the press release. But we keep your eyes peeled on our website.

They run gas speakers. They own gas speakers. They own gas speakers. They own gas speakers. They own lots of gas speakers.

How how how many how many is lots? They earn more than ten. Yes. Okay.

We'll be releasing our our press release will be out very soon. We can do all of the different options now, and then we can cut in the one that Alright. Cool.

Well, yeah. We're very excited about that. And so what you're gonna do, a deal with a gas speaker owner -- Mhmm. -- and they're gonna build as in they're gonna buy your technology and build us, a system somewhere.

The idea is that, we would license our technology. So we're we're a license, so we would want to work with developers or utilities to build out our systems. And the idea is that the kind of gaspeaker owner would work with a developer or development themselves, build out our projects and slowly phase out the kind of fossil fuel assets, but use them and operate them in the same way. Two more questions to go.

The first one is if you've got anything you want to plug, now it's the chance whether you got project or a big announcement?

Well, we are currently fundraising. So we're fundraising for our series a. So if there's any investors listening and you want to invest in a, you know, up and coming new long duration storage technology, then please do get in touch. We are always looking for sites.

So whether if you're a developer and you want to develop a long duration storage project, if you have a hill in your garden and you want to get some additional revenue, a hundred to three hundred meters, we would like to check it out. So It's an heck of a garden. Not in London, not in London, but we've we've we've had the pleasure of speaking to lots of lovely Scottish estate owners and visited their beautiful estates, and they have very big hills. So if you if you're a Scottish state owner, then please send me an email.

Alright. And then now, my favorite question, what is your contrarian belief? What do you believe that the rest of the world, or most of the rest of the world don't. So I think kind of touched on it earlier, but in within the energy storage context, you know, we we really strongly think that we have to do the energy storage build out so quickly in looking at long duration origin, we won't be able to do that if we focus on these mega projects.

You know, pot there's so much policy change that's needed to get those big projects through to the commissioning stage. And I think, you know, the the the barriers are so high and you're putting so much at stake and it's it's like putting all your eggs in one basket. So we'd really like to say just, why don't we build out lots of small projects on a distributed model?

And do it really quickly and actually make an impact. And that's kind of what we've built the company around. Alright. Okay.

Liz, you wanna say a thanks for having me on the podcast. We're gonna put all the links in the footnotes. If you wanna check out some of the stuff that Lizzie was talking about, head down there. And if you're listening to this, please do hit like, subscribe, and any of the buttons that pop up at you, it means to work to us.

Until next time, thank you very much.