Vanadium flow batteries with Matt Harper (CCO @ Invinity Energy Systems)

It's not just a conversation about how to get long duration storage are more renewable, so the path to net zero. It's all also a conversation around industrial Right? How do we make sure that the dollars that are being paid by ultimately ratepayers is going to support domestic industries that is, I think, what the US Ira is is is focused on for. I mean, this is a this is a long hard road.

The only reason that we have lithium ion battery sprinting serving the electric grid is because Japanese electronics manufacturers in the nineties needed a a a very high power way of getting their portable video cameras that didn't mark the two thousands. It was it was everyone's, you know, everyone started switching to laptops. Everyone, you know, decided they needed a smartphone. I mean, these were the development that led to, you know, the maturity that we currently have in the lithium ion battery industry.

It's a very, very long road to get these technologies to the point where they are ready to make a meaningful dent in the electric grid. And I think if you look at the size of the batteries that we're building today, you know, they're they're they're roughly equivalent, and we think we're treading the same path. Hello, everybody, and welcome back for another installment of transmission.

In today's episode, Matt Harper, CCO at Infinity Energy Systems, joins our guest host Tim Overton to discuss vanadium flow batteries and where they fit in the storage lineup. If you're enjoying the podcast, please hit like and give us a rating. It really helps us reach a wider audience. Let's jump in.

Hello, everybody. Today, Very exciting episode we're joined by Matt Harper, who's the co founder and CCO at Infinity. And quick disclaimer, I'm not Quentin Scrimshire.

I'm standing in for queue, and so I'm Tim Mofton. I'm the co founder and CPO at Modo Energy. So be gentle with me, and we'll see how this goes. But, Matt, why I've said kind of title and name, but maybe who are you? What makes what makes Matt?

Where any of us, Tim? I mean, let's think about it really. No, look, so yeah, and you got it right. Matt Harper, CCO, and co founder with Infinity, my background is primarily engineering and technical. I I I train as a mechanical engineer. I spent the first ten years of my career in hydrogen and fuel cells. And then in two thousand five, went to work for a little company called VRV power systems that was the original licensee of a technology called vanadium flow batteries into North America And essentially for the last, horrifying as it is to say eighteen years now, I've been pushing on, you know, advancing the technology, advancing the products and and and and commercializing those batteries and getting them out into the field.

Amazing. So, I mean, that, I might be completely wrong with this, but that seems like a a very early entry into hydrogen. Everyone, like, hydrogen is a big word. Everyone talks about now.

Fuel cells, it feels a little bit to me like they came. And maybe went a little bit, but feel like you were you were early in the game. You're absolutely right. I I I sometimes joke that I started off on the ground floor.

In hydrogen meeting. I was, you know, the intern lying on my back underneath the bus, bolting pieces of a fuel cell under the What was at the time the world's first fleet of hydrogen powered vehicles? This is the fleet of fleet of six hydrogen buses that that ballard power systems, the company that I was with had delivered into a couple of North American transit systems and, and, you know, it's, it's, it was, it was, it was, it was very interesting pioneering work. I mean, we've seen some, evidence of of of where that, has, has gone through to commercial applications today.

But I think that the, the thing that became most important and interesting to me was less the mobility side the world and more the grid and electric power side of the world, which is which is why I got interested in batteries and and and why I've been spending time there ever since. That's very cool. And vanadium flow, that it'd be great to have, like, a high level explanation of what vanadium even is. And what vanadium flow is.

And then, yeah, I mean, we can dig into the details. Love it. Yeah. That sounds great.

So, like, vanadium is a metal. It's thirteenth most common metallic element in the earth's crust. It's more common than copper, more common than nickel, stuff is pretty widely built.

What is what it is not widely done, what is not widely, part of its agreement is, it's not very widely used, right, vanadium is used primarily in strengthening steel. And that's about it. So when we look around the world to see what vanadium does, there's a ton of stuff lying around, but not a lot of it is actually processed into useful material. Is one of the reasons why there's an opportunity to go and do something very useful with it like make vanadium flow batteries.

To to touch a little bit about what that technology is and how it works. Basically, a flow battery takes the conventional battery technologies and anode and a cathode. But then it stores the energy inside the battery in a big tank of liquid rather than inside the individual package itself. What that means is that you can get to very, very large capacities in an individual individual battery cell.

And you can extend the duration of storage, so the number of hours that you get out of a single cell at full power out to, you know, a very long period of time. You know, certainly we focus a lot on four hour applications, but there's a lot of talk about what longer duration storage means and that's an area where we can at where we can get out to sort of six ten twelve twenty four hours worth of storage comparatively easily simply by increasing the amount of that vanadium liquid that's in the battery.

Okay. Makes sense. And you say there's a lot of it. I guess Is it easy to get? But sometimes there's lots of things, but actually getting it to a useful form is is not super straightforward.

Yep. Yeah. No. That's that's a good point.

It is. I think that one of the most of the Wilsmadium currently is is generated as co product from, steel and iron ore refining and manufacturing.

But, and that's less useful for us because we wanna have just the material by itself.

The thing that's most exciting from our in the vanadium space is that there are a large number of companies that are starting to refine the material from petrochemical wastes. There was a new low sulfur low sulfur standard that came in to, offshore shipping fuels, in the last decade. And that new standard has meant that, oil refineries have to scrub sulfur out of those fuels before they go into the ships that seal around the world.

Interestingly, one of the things that tends to come with sulfur out of those heavy crudes is vanadium. And so you've got these very large piles of what are otherwise waste lying around, you know, refineries all around the world.

That is a tremendous opportunity for us, not only to go and extract the material from what is ultimately a highly concentrated source of vanadium, but also you're making sure that we can get the material we need without having to go mining for new stuff and putting new holes in the earth. We're also solving a waste problem at the same time.

Okay. Sounds amazing. And then so talk to me more about the kind of manufacturing. So this is we're getting the vanadium It's a waste product. Amazing. And anode cathode, I kind of get.

But the the flow bit and the I guess we're having to pump things around, and there's a lot more moving parts. How easy is it to actually get from Yeah. I I would say that I I think that lots of moving parts is is is debatable. I, I was reading some quotes in an article from ahead of battery systems development for, an unnamed large multinational battery systems developer who said you know, quote, fill batteries are maintenance nightmare because of all the moving parts. I would argue that if you look at most Sacks of lithium ion batteries, what you see is a huge amount of complexity in cooling, in balancing and in taking those individual cells and actually turning them into something that isn't gonna burst into flame every time you try and charge and discharge it by managing heat. And log management state of charge.

Those are things that are much simpler for us to do in our battery. You know, one of the great things flow battery and especially vanadium flow battery is that it's non flammable. It's more likely to put out a fire than start one because it has that fundamental aqueous nature.

And so, you know, some of those, some of the the fact that the system itself sure it requires a pump to be able to circulate electrolyte, but, you know, we also rely on pumps for everything we do in our daily lives. And those things are pretty well. Evolved. They're pretty mature and they're pretty reliable.

So, you know, that's that's that's definitely a difference between technologies. Ultimately not something that we view as being, a bit of a, you know, any any any form of challenge when we get these things added in the field. And what does it look like? So I I think people might be kind of familiar with seeing, maybe now, lithium ion, solutions, either a big kind of forty foot container or these kind of modular systems that are around. But, yeah, what does Are we looking at the same thing from the outside, or can you tell from miles away? Yeah. No.

You can't tell. Turns out that, containers are a very efficient low cost way of moving stuff around the world. And if you can move stuff around the world in them, chances are they'll be sufficiently robust to protect whatever's inside them, on a particular operating site for many years on it.

One of the things that we do differently from, every other slow battery manufacturer in the world is that we build every one of those those modular units that go out into the field as standalone totally turnkey flow battery devices. If you see, you know, one of our twenty foot containers sitting on-site.

What you won't see is a whole bunch of extra components bolted on top of that thing. What you won't see is you know, a whole lot of of those tied together in order to do the work, of the energy storage device. If it's a totally modular, totally turnkey, product that we are shipping out. We make sure that those batteries are fully functionally tested factory before they go out the door. And that means that our customers can know that they're gonna receive something that works properly. We are gonna have a dataset that allows us to prove that the battery, was working properly on day one and benchmark, you know, the performance of those individual units before they before they leave our shop. And and altogether that significantly decreases costs in terms of how to implement these technologies and the timelines upon which we can deliver integrate and, get these batteries up and running.

Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. And in terms of, I'm, not expecting you to give exact dollars on on it, but, like, cost, are we are we talking cheaper, more expensive than, I guess, lithium ion? That's how you wanna measure it. The initial the initial capital cost is is somewhat higher.

How much higher, very much depends on what part of the market you're looking at. You know, we're actually lower cost than a lot of lithium solutions for smaller scale projects. But, you know, if you if you benchmark our prices against, you know, the you know, projects in the hundreds of megawatt hours that are being deployed, you know, the very largest battery, lithium battery projects that are being deployed around the world. Yeah. We're somewhat we're somewhat more expensive than those than those very, very large installations.

Now, with all of that said, you know, we focus a lot not on the initial capital cost, but on the total cost of ownership. Of one of these projects over its lifetime.

The fundamental benefit of the vanadium flow battery is that you get a very, very high throughput.

Through the battery over its life, meaning that we don't see any degradation of performance based on cycle life. So you can get not, you know, a few hundred to a few thousand cycles out of these batteries, but you can get tens of thousands of cycles out of them. Not only can you get a lot of cycles out of them, but again, you're getting, you know, these, remember that these are cycles that last for hours on end, you know, full depth of discharge using one hundred percent of the energy inside the battery.

And finally, the batteries, the our our batteries are designed from the ground up to be the right partners for renewable power plants. So designed as an asset that can last for decades alongside, you know, wind or solar or or other generating capacity that has that kind of durability associated.

Now what all of the what that high throughput nature means is that if you look at the total cost of delivering energy out of any out of a battery over its life and and the the metric that's usually used is is the levelized cost of storage. We are significantly lower than lithium, even at, you know, at any scale because of the ability to pump more power out of these batteries over their, over their operating line. And that, you know, I mean, that may seem self serving. Like, wow, we've just, like, tried to find a metric where it all makes sense.

But, I mean, if you look at if you look at other comparable industries as as they mature, you know, solar being a great example, you know, the the lcoe of solar projects, you know, or the total cost of ownership in some cases depending on what side of the development guides you're looking very rapidly has become sort of the the ultimate metric for figuring out what technology makes the most sense For application, there are some very, very high, high performance, solar panels out there. There are some very, very low cost. Solar panels out there. But the technologies that optimize the two to get to that ultra low of levelized cost of energy for solar are the ones that have one.

We think that that is gonna be the case with batteries as well.

Yeah. Makes sense. And the thing that's interesting to me is, so it feels to me at least that vanadium Flow is a new technology to come to market. But I guess this is something that you've been working on for, like you say, or a while now. How have we cracked it? Is vanadium flow kind of ready for the world and the world ready for it? And what have you seen over the last fifteen years, are there still big changes happening or is the technology kind of we've made it.

Yeah. Look, I I think the technology is is is largely there. It's always a question of, you know, that that that three legged stool, you know, technology, application, and markets.

You know, ten, fifteen years ago, we'd walk into a boardroom and you know, try and talk about big batteries and people would say, why? Who cares? I think that, you know, with the amount of mobile generation that's being delivered on the grid and with the amount of instability in short term markets and curtailment of over abundant renewable resources that we're seeing in a lot of jurisdictions. The the fundamental, the the the the philosophical case for storage has become very, very clear.

As we go to a larger percentage of, renewable power generation, you know, breaking into the, you know, into the single from the single into the double digits even up to the twenty to thirty percent range, like what we're seeing in a lot of jurisdictions now. The case, not just for storage, but for longer duration storage starts to make a lot more sense. You're not just trying to use batteries to solve you know, intermittency problems or power quality problems on the or or capacity problems on the order of, you know, five minutes to an hour and a half. You're starting to ask questions like, can we take an overabundance of solar generation in an entire region and move it into the even beaks where it's far more valuable.

You know, that's a, that's an ideal application for batteries like ours that not only can deliver four to six hours worth of full power all day, you know, every day of the year, but do that in a way that they can that they can do that work for the life of the generating assets that are that are that is generating that access energy in the first place.

Yeah. Okay. And are we saying like it feels like there's been a big push for energy storage in in general, and, like, in the States with the inflation reduction act, the RA, Have have you seen a step change in appetite for this kind of thing, or do you feel like it's been a gradual thing? And, yeah, do you think more needs to be done to open up the space?

Yeah. Look, the I mean, to to get back to that, the the sort of the the three parts of the stool that are ultimately gonna support, you know, the the the the work that technologies like this can do on the path to net zero. It's that it's that regulatory piece that is still, I think evolving, right? You know, I often state of people that, you know, people say, well, you know, why why how have you not sold, you know, eight gigawatts of this thing so far? And There's an easy answer. The easy answer is that, sorry, markets don't lead technologies, right, markets for appropriate solutions tend to be developed after those solutions become apparent.

With vanadium flow batteries and with, you know, high throughput longer duration batteries in general, I think we are just at the stage of proving to the, you know, the the people who are designing markets who are, you know, implementing policy, who are, you know, crafting the interaction that these batteries will have in an economic manner with our energy system are just finally realizing that the other two legs of the stool are already there, right, that there is a need there's a technology that can fill that need, and what is yet to be done is the work to figure out how that capability can be most appropriately compensated. Are you are you seeing the kind of the same thing happening globally, or do you think the states and kind of GB bits of Europe that are looking at storage Australia. I mean, I've said a lot of places, but The I mean, is is this a trend everywhere?

Yeah. Yeah. Look, it's happening in in in in in fits and starts all over the world. I mean, we the UK There are some very mature and I think well advanced, markets for shorter duration storage, which is which is fantastic. It's not a perfect fit for us because it's focused on, you know, comparatively short duration capabilities.

Certainly in Australia, what we've seen is, you know, a very significant, recognition that it is that longer duration capability that's gonna be needed. You look at states like, South Australia where they have negative prices for electricity on their on their on their on their on their spot markets.

Hundreds of days a year. I mean, this is this is a real challenge, for getting to, more getting more and more of renewable generation on the grid and they see that that long duration storage is something that could help make that happen. Certainly, I mean, the markets for electricity are one way that these, this kind of work can be compensated.

The flip side of that are sort of direct incentives for the construction and operation and manufacturing of these, these, this this this class of product, this class of technology, and that's certainly where the inflation reduction act in the US, the Ira, has has focused.

I I think it's important to to note that, I mean, this is not in this is not just this is not just a conversation about how to get vulmonary storage are more renewable, so the path to net zero. It's also conversation around industrial policy. Right. How do we make sure that the dollars that are being paid by ultimately ratepayers to get low cost reliable electricity is going to support the, you know, the the the the end is the domestic industries that that that have to go and basically deliver those goods.

That is, I think, what the US Ira is is is focused on. And I and I think that we've already seen other countries around the world start to adopt similar pieces of industrial policy. And I and I think that that, you know, it has it has proven to be a good model for how we can advance, you know, the sort of the decarbonization and, you know, electrification goals of the future while at the same time making sure that the the the the work to make that happen is being done in a way that benefits the the domestic economy.

That makes sense. The this maybe sounds like a a like, I'm a a bit of a slight, but it's really not. I'm genuinely interested. Do you feel like people take vanadium flows seriously enough.

I think I see some there's some kind of technology that comes into the space that I feel like whether it that it should be or not, there's it's grouped with, like, well, you know, that will never really work. It's nobody really understands it or like, who's really gonna build a, I don't know, yeah, that technology.

We hear kind of a lot of talk about hydrogen right now. There seems to be a lot of push for these kind of more generalized technologies.

I don't think in general people hear about vanadium flow much. Do you think do you think it's a problem? Or I mean, to find problem. I mean, look, I would love for my company and its products to have greater visibility.

I I also fundamentally believe that the products that we are building are solving one of the biggest problems on the roots in that zero. So you know, even my own my own narrow self interest aside, I would like to see more people adopting the kind of work that to, and and and products that we're doing.

But I, I don't despair. I mean, this is a, this is a long hard road, right? The only reason that we have lithium ion batteries currently serving the electric grid is because you know, Japanese electronics manufacturers in the nineties needed something needed a very high power way of getting their portable video cameras that are in the market, you know, these these these these early development of portable devices. And then, you know, into the two thousands, it was it was everyone's, you know, everyone started switching to laptops.

Everyone, you know, decided they needed a smartphone. I mean, these were the developments that led to, you know, charity that we currently have in the lithium ion battery industry. I mean, that's a that's an industry that has essentially been, you know, very mature for decade and a half, maybe two decades, it's a very, very long road to get these technologies to the point where they are ready to make a meaningful dent in the electric grid. And I think if you look at the size of the batteries that we're building today with seventy five megawatt hours out in the field versus the size of projects that were being delivered using lithium ion batteries five or seven years ago.

You know, they're they're they're roughly equivalent, and we think we're treading the same path.

Alright. That's really cool. Did that seventy five megawatts, that's Inviniti's asset Are there Yep. Is there a large kind of number of other vanadium flow or, similar assets? Yeah. There's a there Yeah. There's a there's a number of companies around the world who are who are working to, deploy the data and flow technology.

Probably by the numbers, the biggest, the biggest projects, being delivered by others are being done by a number of players in China. There are, there there are a couple of projects that are pushing very close towards the gigawatt hour scale in China. And and and those are those are certainly the the the largest examples of Canadian flow being built today or being operated today.

But, yeah, I mean, look, we we we not we don't wanna be the only company in this space. Right? You start to look like the loan limited when you're the only one who's who's actually chasing after this. But but, you know, we've got, we've got, we've got, you know, competitors and colleagues in Europe and in North America and Australia and and all over Asia who are, who see the promise in this technology fundamentally and are working to get it deployed, and we're very happy to have them along for that ride.

That makes sense. And for Infinity and and you, I guess, is vanadium flow the That's where that's what you're in, and that's what you're staying in, or is there kind of a next step on the journey? Is there an upgrade, I don't know, a different metal or something kind of crazy. It's on on the roadmap.

No. There certainly could be. And if you look at I mean, there's so there's if if you look at, across the low battery space in general, There are a number of different chemistries out there. You know, there are iron flow batteries.

There are organic flow batteries. There are Zink bromine batteries, which is more of a hybrid battery than a than a pure flow like what we build. But, and they've all got they've all got different characteristics. Right?

You know, if you want something that is provides lower cycles, but a lower overall cost, you can go one direction. If you want something that is good for cycling, you know, not on the order of sort of hours to days, but in the orders of days to weeks, there are other electrolytes that are fundamentally lower cost that you can that you can look to to use to store that energy. I would say that when we there's a big conversation in the industry around what does longer duration storage mean. And you know, some people say, well, it's four to eight hours.

Some people say, well, it's you know, it's eight to twenty four hours. Some people say it's, you know, twenty four hours out to months on end.

Because we're we're focused in that middle group. Right? How do you take, how do you, you know, how do you deliver, say, you know, six to twelve hours worth of energy on demand. And the reason we focus there is not only it's a good fit for the for our particular class of flow technology, but also if you look at sort of the the jobs to be done by longer duration storage or by storage in general on their electric grid, really it's about firming renewables.

And a lot of renewable power operates on a daily cycle, you know, solar is obvious. But even wind, especially in coastal areas, you get you know, you get you get a lot of fluctuations in window at point that happens to that that that happens on a general daily basis.

So being able to take, for example, eight to fourteen hours worth of good solar power generation and turn that into base load. That's an application that is that where where where our batteries work very, very well. And where we see that solving that problem could just be an absolute massive leap forward for decarbonizing the grid?

Yeah. That makes sense. Do you see it's it's most of your interest from like from private, yeah, kind of funds, organizations looking to deploy and make a profit off these systems, or do you see a lot of interest from the kind of grids themselves? I guess they can also be private, but Yep.

No. We, we we we've seen a lot of interest from from private operators, private developers. We've also seen a lot of interest from slippy operators, we bill our batteries for behind the meter applications as well for electricity consumers who are looking to, you know, make them make, you lower their electricity bills often make better use of their own self generated electricity if they've got solar panels on the roof, for example. But we announced about a month ago, that we have been awarded, eighty four megawatt hours worth of business with the USDAE.

And that those projects are led by, a number of utilities, regional utilities. So, you know, it is absolutely the the the the utilities themselves are waking up to this problem of how do we make sure that we appropriately integrate, renewable power and and they're making moves to make sure that they're gonna be able to do so technologies like ours.

Yeah. Okay. That's really cool. But it'd be interesting maybe to chat about one project in particular, maybe a recent project that you've worked on, and just, give a picture maybe of how long it takes to build these projects, how big individual app, like, sites are, and, yeah, kind of how how they're scaling and how they're operating, whether you're happy with them.

Sure. Well, let let me let me keep it close to home on this one. We just, about three months ago, brought online a project that we've built out, in Alberta here in here in Canada. It's, developed by, a partner of ours, a company called Elemental Energy, who are a sort of mid market developer and an owner operator of both wind primarily wind and and and solar assets.

This, so what this what this project, how this project came to be is that elemental had a site, that they had control of where they were able to interconnect on the electric grid, but the the the interconnection itself had a limited size, and they weren't sure that they were gonna be able to get the right kind of returns out of it given, you know, a, the limitations to how much throughput that get through the interconnection of the solar only, and b, the degree to which the peaks in market pricing on the electric grid in Alberta, are at times when, the sun the sun isn't shining, frankly. You know, Alberta is cold. It is it's a winter peaking grid. Unlike, you know, a lot of jurisdictions where we've got a summer peaking grid people in Alberta need power to heat their homes, not cool their homes, like we see in an Australia, California.

And so it's, so so so there was a there was a hole in the ability of that project to, to to be deployed profitably. Now that was a they had a fifteen megawatt interconnection. What they ended up deciding to do was to take one of our batteries that has a peak capacity of about three megawatts. And then and then add, you know, over basically, oversized the solar So they've they've got twenty two megawatts with the PV generation capability now on that site, and a significant chunk of it is going to charge the battery. That combination of being able to, to to to generate more energy on, off of of that site while at the same time not changing the size of the interconnection was, was was was the thing that that changed the economics from their perspective and allowed them to green light the project and see it go forward. How long did that project take from, like, I guess, greenfield or brownfield to an asset being operational.

The vanadium flow bit, I guess. If Put a year and a half. A year and a half. We had, you know, Alberta is a tricky environment to build in. You know, the ground is frozen for about four months of the year. So so you've sort of got a a no go zone on on on construction from December through March.

But, but, yeah, it was ultimately it was about eighteen months from the point at which we, we contracted with elemental for the project and alongside us, they finalized contracting for all the other components that we're gonna go into place. And when, and when we and we will when we went live and consistent.

That's cool. That's not that's not typical. We see Certainly, the the the fact that there was a grid interconnection already available and already on hand was was helpful. You know, we see around the world that those interconnections are becoming the bottleneck in getting these projects built in online.

But, but but but but otherwise, you know, that that that eighteen month, eighteen month development, development timeline from green light to operation is, I think fairly fairly fairly standard.

Yeah. Are they noisy vanadium flow batteries?

Like, can you hear hear them running? In fact, they're a little quieter.

You can't hear them running.

You can't hear them running. Most of the most of the noise that comes from them is, related to, cooling. We, you know, we air cool the systems. We We we have little fans in there that blow air through the battery to to keep it cool. But what we don't have are the sort of big refrigerant based chiller systems that you typically see bolted on to the end of the lithium ion container. So, you know, we are we are comparatively quiet all things considered.

That makes sense. And I'm assuming they're kind of downstream of the vanadium flow bit.

The kind of system works and integrates in very similar way to how you'd see conventional, I say conventional, how you'd see, yeah, like, lithium ion systems plugging in, Yeah. The, the the one the one difference that we, that that we do on a significant majority of our projects, and certainly the product with elemental is like this. The project that we are just putting the finishing touches on now in South Australia with Spencer Energy is the same way. We actually, DC couple the batteries to the solar PD generation.

What that means is that, you know, it's sort of a a typical a typical plant layout would be to combine both the batteries and the PV generation together on an AC bus really at the, you know, call it at the at the, at the fence at the at the plant fence at the boundary, of that project.

And by by having those two, the generation source and the batteries coupled together on the DC side, it avoids having to do the conversion that, you know, that which which which in price losses, you know, you lose energy when you convert, say, the p v power over to AC and then back into DC to charge the battery.

But the other thing that that DC power configuration does, which is very helpful for a regulatory perspective is it means that from the grid's perspective, you're only looking at a single inverter.

And you can look at the rating on that inverter to set the interconnection capacity that's going on to a particular site. And then behind that inverter, you've got all sorts of additional ability to push and pull power as you see fit, you've got, you know, for example, at that elemental, you've got, you can have a fifteen megawatt inverter with twenty two megawatts of solar and three megawatts of of battery standing behind it, but never risk going over that fifteen megawatt threshold. So in terms of the permitting an an application process for some of these connections. That ability to DC couple is very, very helpful.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

And how many how many megawatts are gonna be built over the next few years? Like, are we gonna see gigawatt hours other than I mean, you mentioned we've already got gigawatt hours in, I guess, China, but maybe kind of, yeah, more locally for you in the in the kind of states and your pipeline, how how much vanadium flow are we getting?

Well, you know, I I can't, of course, provide forward looking statements as a publicly traded company, but what I would say is that, you know, we We have we have said publicly that we, you know, we've got, we've got many gigawatt hours with the capacity in our pipeline right now. I think the two forces that we see are the projects that we are that we are building are becoming significantly larger. The number of projects where people are looking at the advantages of the technology that we're building and thinking, oh, I could probably make some good use of that. Is going way up.

Certainly, factors like the Ira and the US and and some of the some of the regulatory movements that we see in in Australia and here in Canada are promoting people to look at this kind of technology a lot more, a lot more comprehensively. So we do, you know, we we're we're very encouraged that, you know, that seventy five megawatts that is currently contracted is is gonna start to look like a like a dropping on dropping the ocean sooner rather than later. The the one thing that I would add to that is Our current product is was really, you know, designed for projects up to the sort of tens of megawatt hours.

We have been working for the last few years with, the team at, at Siemenska Mesa, the Wintervine company.

It's interesting to note that solar and storage together has been sort of one of the biggest stories of the last three or four or five years in renewables in general. But you've heard very little about wind and storage together. And there's two real reasons for that. One is that, the scale of wind projects are so big that the batteries to support them would be far and away the largest batteries being built on the electric grid, even to take a dent in that wind turbine with our wind farm output.

And second of all, the duty cycle that you would need a battery to execute to be able to not only manage the intermittency that get that, that is injected on the grid from a lot of wind sites, but also to manage the time of generation of the, that, the bulk of that electricity, making sure that, you know, wind that's blowing overnight is turning into electricity that people can use during the day. Is is is there's the that's a that's a big that's a big shift over the course of the twenty five hour period that you need to make for wind energy to be more useful.

That combination of those two things together, means that regulating the output from wind turbines with lithium batteries is gonna be very, very difficult because they were out. And you know, you would not have an asset that could stand alongside wind for the twenty to thirty years that wind turbines are intended to be in service. So the team at Siemens Mesa reached out to us and said, look, we really like your technology. We think it is tremendously capable not only in solving hours worth of energy shifting problems, but solving milliseconds worth of power quality problems. You guys can do both. And so we'd love to work with you to develop a product suitable for our fleet.

The problem being that, again, it gets that scale problem. Right? We were building a product that was that was that was applicable in the tens of megawatt hours and they needed product, you know, they needed a product that was suitable for the hundreds of megawatt hours, gigawatt hours and above. So we've been working with them on a joint development program for our next generation product.

And, you know, we've we've already announced a few, pioneering deals to to deploy that product. The the the the deal that I mentioned a few minutes ago to a handful of US utilities will be some of the first examples of that next generation product delivered into North America. But because the the the that that product's fundamentals are designed for projects, you know, like I say, in the hundreds of megawatt hours or above, We think that once that product is fully released and available to the market, we're gonna see a very, very large uptick in the size of our install base. Yeah.

What what are the challenges of going big? Because I I mean, I'd imagined so you've got loads of little tubes.

What are the tubes made of? Are they are they metal and welded? Or are they, I guess, plastic and also welded? Or how How what is the challenge in in going big? And, I guess, also, what is the challenge in making them in general? I hadn't really thought about what the thing flows through.

Well, it's it's, so what you what I mean, the the tanks that hold the electrolyte are, they're big plastic tanks. They're like the sort of things that if you've got a you know, a farm somewhere, you might store a thousand gallons of water in there. It's exactly the same kind of stuff. Okay.

Okay. The conversion, the conversion of you know, that stored electrical energy or sort of stored chemical energy into electrical energy happens in a device called a cell stack, which is where more of the intellectual property is that's where we spend a lot of our R and D dollars optimizing. And that's a it's called a flow through cell. It's it's basically an electrochemical cell where you've got a positive and a negative liquid flowing through it.

Yep. Ions pass across a membrane that separates two, and that's where you get your electrical power. Those, you know, the the the the one of the things that we did when we founded the company that became Infinity about ten years ago, as as as I mentioned earlier, I'd been in the space for about eight years at that point. And we'd seen that there were a lot of very specialized materials that were being applied to make these full batteries work.

And and we took the view that specialized materials that are manufactured at low volume were never going to be, the right way to build an ultra low cost highly product. And so we went and looked at, you know, what other industries were using for those materials.

And for example, we found a carbon electrode that was being manufactured as blast furnace insulation.

We found a membrane that was being, you know, manufactured not by the thousands of square meters for, you know, niche fuel cell applications, but by the tens of millions of square meters for water treatment. And So the, you know, the that that that approach of using readily available stuff to manufacture the core component of the battery with some of our intellectual property wrapped around it to make sure it actually does want was, was what we thought was a good approach and we think that's, we think that's borne out in the in the the success that we've had in getting the cost of our product down to the point where it is competitive.

Yeah. Okay. And I guess it makes it easier to scale, yeah, when you need to be doing these hundred megawatt hour projects.

Very exciting. That's very cool. The, I think that Quentin normally does a plug, in the podcast. But if there is anything that you want to plug, now's your chance?

Look, if I had to plug the product, what I would say is this is a technology that has been proven in the field. It is available now, and it is solving the next generation of problems in terms of how you integrate renewables onto the grid. You lithium ion batteries have done a great job of proving that batteries in general. It can be a profitable and and and capable, addition to, the electric grid. But what we're building is the technologies and the solutions that are going to get to give us that next step, towards a Netzero Future while we're really using, you know, a hundred percent renewable resources to serve not only the current needs on the electric grid, but also the incremental needs as we move towards, decarbonization and electrification of home heating of transportation of all of those, all of those electrification steps that, that that we all know we're gonna need. So, and I think the final thing is, what's your contrarian view? Like, what's your different view of the market?

Sure. Well, look, what I would say is that as much as I'm an engineer, the technologist, I think we have the technology we need to get to, to get most of the way at least towards Netzero. What we don't have is the right investments, the right market structures, the right, you know, legal agreements, the right contract forms that are gonna get us there. And I think that the challenge is that, you know, we're at a point where the technologies are fundamentally proven. But technologists don't necessarily understand finance and law, and the financiers and lawyers don't necessarily understand the technology.

The work to be done is in pulling together those kind of multidimensional conversations. You know, how can we take technologies that have been proven to do the work that needs to be done and deploy them in massive, massive, massive quantities. And and and and that's why, you know, that's why I, you know, as an engineer sit on the commercial side of my company, and and that's the work that I'm excited to do with, sorts of players in the market over the coming years and decades.

Amazing.

Well, Matt, yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been an absolute pleasure learning about you and vanadium flow. Really cool. Thanks, Tim. It's great to be here.

It was great to be able to speak with you. And I would just say for anyone who wants to learn more, you can find me either on LinkedIn or through our company website, that's deanvinity dot com.