Zinc energy storage with Balki Iyer (CCO @ e-Zinc)

I think it's important you understand that what it takes from you to hold a bucket of water for five minutes versus five hours is totally different. Now, if if my requirement is that you need to hold a bucket of water for five hours, I gotta appreciate and I gotta start making compromises. I think to me, density is a trade off that you're gonna make, clearly. Because we're not a power battery.

We're an energy battery. That means for the same power, which by the way is very critical, especially, you keep hearing about interconnection queues, power I mean, power is a very, very important access to the market as you know. So if I have a hundred megawatt power approval and I need to get twenty four hours, I'm not gonna go get six four hour systems because I don't have the power approval for that. Whereas now if I have a twenty four hour system, I can actually make it work.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back for another instalment of transmission.

In today's episode, Quentin is joined by Balki Iyer, Chief Commercial Officer at e-Zinc. Over the conversation they discuss the use of zinc as long duration grid-scale energy storage and what makes this technology so unique. As always, if you are enjoying the podcast, please hit subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode. And with that, let's jump in.

Balki, thanks for coming on the podcast. So maybe didn't get quite enough sleep. But I'm I'm feeling good.

I was just gonna say, the only thing that I'm not feeling good about is the af-ter party.

But thanks for pulling a good one, I said. Yeah. I thought you guys did a great job.

Appreciate it, man. Thank you.

Let's get into it. Let's talk about zinc batteries. We've got a lot to talk about today.

Balki, before we get started, do you just wanna give, like, the elevator pitch of eZinc. And then, we'll find out who you are. And then, we'll find find out about the the company and the technology and where you guys are headed. But yeah, Elevator Pitch, what is it?

Great. E-Zinc is a ten year old company headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

The company is a very progressive company, really looking to solve the biggest challenges in energy transformation today by using extremely commoditized materials like Zinc, extremely simple processes like electroplating, and solving the biggest challenge, which is renewable integration. So if you really look at our batteries, it's a zinc air battery with basic commodity materials, providing duration in the range of about ten to hundred hours, which gives a fair bit of flexibility for the for the battery itself. But also addressing several use cases, whether it's a renewable integration behind the meter or at the utility scale.

And being able to do all of this stuff in a very safe, no thermal runaway, fully recyclable. I mean, there's no conflict minerals because all commodity based materials. So I think to be able to do that with, good, eye for Carbon and giving Carbon a seat at the table is really what this company is about. The company is built on the backs of some amazingly good people, real good technologists, inventors, engineers, chemical engineers who kind of really care about the planet, who care about climate change, who care about really solving challenges that we are facing using technology. That's really the companies built on the backs of such great people. I'm super proud to be representing this company and and, being able to talk to you about this company.

But I think, the big thing I would say is that, the company is going through a big transformation to really transfer ourselves from being a technology company to a commercial company. That's really the journey we are in right now.

Alright. And I love the passion. We're gonna get there, in a second. Zinc batteries, no conflict, minerals, safe.

We're gonna dig into that into a second. But, Bulky, who are you and where do you come from? I know you live in Jersey, but, yeah. What have you been doing the last twenty years?

Alright. So the first time I've been blamed for being a Jersey boy, but that's okay.

Look, I'm an engineer myself. I'm a mechanical engineer, and I did a four plus one. I'm originally from India, in case you can't tell.

The chemistry and the mechanical engineering degree, and I always wondered why the hell would I choose those two degrees. And here we are, several years later, making sense of all these things in life. Right? And as Steve Jobs says, you never connect the dots looking forward. You connect the dots looking backward. That's kinda how life works. Love that.

So, yeah. So I, I grew up there.

Started my life, professional life, in the wrong side of the energy space. I started my life drilling oil. Believe it or not, I ended up in France, drilling oil. And I went to the Middle East, and then, eventually back to India.

Who is that with? Schlumberger.

So I used to work for Schlumberger, and, and then I always joke around saying that we're all allowed to sin once in our life, and that was mine. And, I think for the last fourteen years of my life, I've been working on renewable energy.

But before that, I mean, I came to the Incredible company though.

I mean, it's a clumberger. As a as a, the stuff that they do is like getting people to space. It it is incredible.

And and you know what's the calling calling out function for me about Schlumberger is that they invest in technology.

It's technology to solve problems. That's the biggest thing that I learned, being in that company. I think, that's that's kind of, the big takeaway for me from that, particular experience, and and, customers are king. Technology is is the solution.

So were you working offshore?

Were you, I was working offshore.

I was working onshore. I I was I've been on some rough seas, and I've had some incredible experiences. I I always tell everybody that I started my working life like, like a James Bond, because I used to go on supply boats and helicopters and, you know, private jets.

The same line that I use. I worked offshore for a bit as well in wind and and gas. I can't believe I've come across someone else who's been peddling that same line.

Oh, independently so.

I wasn't even You were first though. Yes, sir. I don't know about that. But it's okay.

But look, if you didn't know that I said it and you still said it, it's not copying.

So it's okay.

Alright. So you, you you did some, adventures with Schlumberger. Yep. And then And then you brought renewables.

Yeah. And then I ended up in the United States, just like following my American dream. And came here to do my masters, my business school, all in New York. And then, ended up in a tiny little company called GE, and then, grew my grew my way up in that company.

Did a lot of exciting stuff, and I'd say the last thing that there was a point in time in my g career where I said, look, I got another thirty, forty years of working life left in me. I wanted to be about something that I can hang my hat on, and, decided that it's gonna be about clean energy. And this was the time, you gotta remember, Q, that this was a little bit before when being in clean energy and wind and renewables and storage wasn't very sexy at all. I mean, you can go to a party and and somebody asks you, what do you do for a living?

And you say, I work on wind turbines and solar panels. That wasn't something that they said, oh, wow. They actually said, what? You didn't get a real job?

So that's how life was at that time. And then it was the time where, frankly, a lot of lot of things were going on in the world, but, you know, clean energy wasn't really our focus. But I felt like, at that point in time, that's kind of my calling and my epiphany, and and I chased that. And Energy is an amazing company again.

Really, helped you grow irrespective of who you are and brought out the best in you, and that's what they wanted for the company. So they supported me through that journey and, put me in the right jobs. And, I spent a good deal of my time, you know, working in clean energy, doing business development for wind and solar and smart grid all around the world. And, and at that point in time, I just decided that I wanna take matters in my own hands, because, you know, you can have great technology, but what the world needs is solutions, even if it's good technology.

And I felt that there was a gap there in the last mile. And, I thought I could fill that gap as an entrepreneur. So I decided to become an entrepreneur and, started a few companies and had had a few exits, all in the renewable clean energy space, between wind and solar, IPP, and digital companies, and battery storage. And here I am.

Alright. And how long you been doing eZinc?

So I've been in the company for a little under two years now.

Okay. Okay. But the company's been going for ten ish, something like that. Yeah. Alright. And do you live in Canada?

I live in Jersey. Don't you?

I live in Jersey. So the camp company is headquartered in Canada, so I'd say that, ninety ninety five percent of our employees are all based in Toronto at this point in time. But there are few remote employees and, we're just starting to look at, US market. We just started. That was one of my mandates when I came on board, and, we've been expanding. We've hired some amazing people in the in the country.

There's a general recognition by our board and our investors and, by our management that, US is a very important market for us. And this was even before IRA. So it's just said that it happened afterwards. But I think, there's a good recognition that US is a very critical market.

It's not just a beachhead market. It's kind of the market that's gonna help us sail to where we want to. And, you know, I I can't think of a better fit in terms of the technology and where it fits in the US market. So I think if you look at where the market is going, if you look at where the technology is needed, that gap, I think it's just amazing fit.

And what do you do at EZinc?

So I wear two hats. The first one is I actually am the commercial officer. I'm the chief chief chief commercial officer of the company. In addition, I also am the executive for US Expansion. So all of our activities in terms of market expansion, government relations, projects, and also setting up our Gigafactory, eventually. All of the things that, we do in the US is, under my, preview as well.

Cool. And we're about to jump into, how this thing works. But, just to take stock of the business. So how many people are in the business?

How many sites have you got deployed or operational or tested?

What what are the numbers for the business? Where you guys at?

So we are about seventy plus employees. As I said, we are ten years old, seventy plus employees. A lot of them, you know, engineers, PhDs.

We got, you know, close to fifteen plus PhDs in the company, and, extremely bright. And then we have, obviously, have, one, pilot deployment that we've already completed.

We are about to do two more. The one that we completed is a smaller pilot up in Canada. The The ones that we are about to do is one is a megawatt hour, and then another one is gonna be a twelve megawatt hour, both in California. So we are very excited about that. But I think because that's gonna really start addressing the use cases that we wanna look at.

We are very much in the journey of maturing our product and derisking our product, which is a very, very big step for all of us. But one of the things that we have one of the steps that we have taken is, the unique, in the sense that we're not just trying to mature our technology and derisk it at any cost. We wanna do it in a commercially viable cost. And that's a tough step. Because if I were to just simply sit there and say, just make a product that works, it doesn't matter what the cost is, and then we'll figure it out later.

That's a strategy that a lot of companies deploy. That's something that we decided not to deploy. We decided that the landing spot where you land first is gonna be at a within a striking distance of where you want because too often the companies fail because they have the fallacy that you land wherever and then you keep selling at a massive loss, and then you'll make up for it for scale.

You just cost engineer it. You way out of it. Yeah.

You can never you can never do that. You can't make up in scale. In fact, you've just accelerated your journey towards failure by doing that. So I think we made a very conscious decision to just say, look, let's make sure that we land, but we land well. So that, you know, we have the right cost basis and then then we'll let scale take over. Without a doubt, there is an element to play on scale. I think our COO will tell you that I mean, he always keeps telling us that design's got a very important role to play in cost.

Scale's got a secondary role, don't get me wrong, but design's got a very important role.

Hundred percent. You, yeah. If you can get your unit economics right, first or second time in hardware, you're off to one hell of a start.

Okay, so we've got an idea about the business.

What about what's so special about Zinc?

And this is a bit of a silly question, but if you can please answer it. So what is Zinc?

There's no silly questions, but I think zinc is a metal. It's a commodity metal.

And I think one of the things that I will tell you what's special about zinc is this. I mean, zinc is omnipresent, as you know. I mean, you even take zinc tablets. So you even eat those zinc.

Right? So it's it's so hopefully, that should tell you it's not toxic. It's not, harmful. It's it doesn't catch fire because you don't store your zinc tablets and you put a fire extinguisher next to that.

Right?

So, that should hopefully tell you it's safe. Right? I think the important thing about zinc, what's unique about zinc, is I think it's the third most used metal in the planet.

And even more important is the fact that a third of what's used in zinc is actually recycled zinc.

So the recycling of zinc is a very well understood process. And that's very important because you can't say that about all metals. And even more important is the fact that all the zinc that's used today, that we use in everything, including your medicine to whatever you use, is still a very small single digit percentage of all the reservoirs that we have for zinc today. So abundant source, well established recycling reprocessing method and extremely safe. That's what's unique about Zinc.

Alright. And so how does it work in a battery? And what's oh, we've got so much to cover here. Let's start with what it looks like. What does it what does one of these things look like?

So, so let me just tell you how it works in our battery, and then we'll talk a little bit about how it looks. Sure. You know? So zinc's, you know, typical gray material.

You can find it in, you know, either as a gray powder or you can find it in small little particles. But the way it works in our batteries, it's a very unique technology. What we actually do when we're charging the battery is we actually charge and create zinc. And we create this charged zinc.

So you literally have these metal pieces, which looks like a blackberry. You know, the tiny little blackberries that you eat.

Wow. So it literally looks like that. Yes.

It's like a centimeter kinda size.

It's this small little thing. And so you have these small little zinc floating around, gray zinc floating around like blackberries, but it's fully charged. So that's what we create zinc.

So the zinc is dispersed in the electrolyte and when you charge, you suddenly start creating this charged zinc that looks like I'm talking like atomic level now.

Right?

No. We're talking literally, you can see it.

You can see these blackberries.

You can see this I'm telling you blackberry size.

You see the blackberry. That's how tiny little zinc pieces that are floating around.

Floating around in what?

In the electrolyte.

So you think of this as a small Like a fluid.

Yeah. So we have an electro so a cell is almost like a window air conditioner size. That's how a cell is. Okay?

Alright.

So you have lot of, you know, anodes and cathodes. I mean, just think of these electrodes sitting inside the cell. Okay? And your sill is filled with electrolyte.

And this electrolyte has zinc dispersed in them. Poured zinc dispersed in this electrolyte.

Square?

Like, is it like shoe box box kind of size or it's it's almost like a window air conditioner.

It's about three, you know, three feet wide, one feet, you know.

Is it a rectangle?

It's a rectangle. Okay. It's a cube, you know, so.

I see. I can picture this thing. What color is it? Is it see through?

It is see through.

Okay. Right. Cool. Even more exciting.

So it's exciting because actually when we have a lot of our customers and our partners and investors come in, we actually show them because you can see through zinc getting metallized and then falling down like tiny little pieces of zinc. Wow. So it's that's exactly the reaction we always get. It's like kid in a candy store. Everybody gets excited about it. And funny enough, it's actually, the reason we created this, transparent, enclosure, we call it the fish tank. It's almost like a fish tank.

It was for other reasons because it was a cheap material, it was easy, whatever. But it turned out that it had some very good unintended positive consequences, that you can actually see these things happen.

But anyway, coming back So it's full of fluid.

It's electrolyte.

It's full of electrolyte and then there's zinc How does that out of interest?

It's it's transparent. It's pretty done. It's transparent color. So there's zinc dispersed in it. Like, say, imagine zinc is mixed into it. Yep. When you charge these batteries, zinc starts metalizing and then it starts getting dropped to the bottom.

Like, electrolysis. Yeah. Like like like a gold plate.

Plating. Yeah. It's like a plating. Yeah. It's just in plating. So it just starts getting charged and formed.

And then these things fall to the ground, fall to the bottom of this particular fish tank for lack of better word.

And then that's the fully charged state. You can sit there like that for however long you want. There's no self discharge or anything like that. So it just sits there. Whenever you decide to discharge, you pass air through the bottom and that actually disperses the zinc back into the electrolyte and that's what the discharge is.

What's the air doing? Is it is it is it making it float or is it oxidizing Or what what's the air doing?

It's that's exactly what it is. It's almost like it works like a fuel cell.

So this air is sent Alright. And then it's, you know, dispersing it and that's what's discharging all the And this metal, does it float naturally then?

It's basically dispersed in the electrolyte.

Okay.

So it's naturally dispersed in the electrolyte. That's how it's formed. But when you charge it, you actually start creating the metal.

And it all pulls together in these clumps.

Exactly right. Not one clump. There's multiple of these clumps. So there's a tiny little multiple blackberry sitting there and they all fall down.

This is very cool. It all feels very mechanical almost. It's it's electromechanical.

That's exactly you said the right word. And that's why I was I telling you it was kind of almost a serendipity that I did a mechanical engineering and chemistry. If you think about it, this is exactly what mechanical and chemistry comes together. It's a beautiful mixture. I mean, if you really enjoy these things, that's the beauty of, that's what excites all of us, that you're actually working on some pretty cool technology that is actually solving an important problem.

So do you guys have IP around? Do you have a a patent or do you, like, what what's this all sounds great. What's the trade off? Because why why isn't everyone doing this already? What's what's the trade off?

No. It's a it's a first and foremost, we have IPs and protections and all of that stuff around this. And, look, there's zinc batteries, iron batteries, sodium batteries, all these batteries exist. So it's not like, they're the only ones who's making non lithium batteries. So this Every battery has an electrolyte. Every battery has a cathode, an anode, charging, discharging.

Electrolyte. They chooses their own method. They choose their own cathode, anode. So, I don't think that's the unique part of it.

What we do, metallizing zinc and actually charging that is actually pretty unique. I don't think anybody else is doing that. And, it all, again, started with the inventor, who, you know, fortunately had the opportunity to not create an idea and build a business around that idea, which is what typically happens. You have a brilliant idea and you create a business around it. Instead, it actually worked a little bit other way and that worked out very well for us as a company, is that this is actually a resource company who was looking at end users for zinc.

And they dispatched this amazingly bright individual to say, look, go figure out how else can we use zinc. And he had the whole, you know, kind of smorgasbord of, like, saying what are all the different opportunities that I can use this for? And then, he looked at energy as a very important, use case and looked at the energy use case, looked at the trends of renewable coming in, the importance of having a stable grid, energy transformation, and saw the need for long duration energy storage and figured out that actually Zinc, if you did it the right way, could hold energy for a long period of time. So effectively, if you think about the way this company was created, as I said, it was not created because somebody had a brilliant idea. It was created because there's a resource that's available, and there's a market need that's used for it. How do you match the two? And I sit there and say, actually that's the best way to create a business.

In fact, I've never heard of that before. So who was backing him? Was it like the the international global zinc council resource people? Like, who who whose vested interest is getting zinc everywhere?

Do you know what I mean? Why start with the material?

Go back to the people who own the zinc mines.

Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what it is. Alright. And so, I wanna come back to the the how you deploy this thing.

So I understand that the the battery is the cell. Do you call it a cell? Yeah. Yeah.

So you got a fish tank, and you got the the little blackberry zinc thing is floating around and doing all of that. That all sounds great.

And then, how much how much power or energy can you store in one of these, one of these window air conditioners? That's quite a nice thing to describe as one of these fish tanks. What what's the density, power density like? And how does that compare to other energy storage types? Yeah.

So it's it's, you know, one of the one of the important things is that, and we often tend to do a mistake of comparing a cell to cell.

I'll give you the answer to the question, but it's important to understand that the density is a broader question at a system level versus at a cell level. A cell typically stores about a watt. So at a twenty four hours, you're looking at about a two point four kilowatt hours. That's really what a cell does, but, of course, we're doing a lot of things to see how we can, you know, increase that significantly.

But when you look at a density, you ought to look at it from the perspective of how does a system hold? Like, if you were to set up, for example, a twenty four hour a megawatt system. Right? That's about a twenty four megawatt hour.

How does it compare to the incumbent or something like that? I think typically what we say is, look, the fact of the matter is when you have to store things for much longer versus shorter. Right? When someone I give you something and I just tell you to, you know, I ask you to hold a bucket of water.

Right? And I just tell you to hold it for five minutes. It's a whole another ball game versus when I ask you to hold it for five hours.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. I think you know where I'm going with this thing. But I think Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's fine.

I think it's important you understand that what takes what it takes from you to hold a bucket of water for five minutes versus five hours is totally different.

Mhmm. Now if if my requirement is that you need to hold a bucket of water for five hours, I gotta appreciate and I gotta start making compromises.

Trade offs, as you called it. Right? That that's the trade offs that you need to make. So I think to me, density is a trade off that you're gonna make.

Clearly. Because we're not a power battery. We're an energy battery. That means for the same power, which by the way is very critical, especially you keep hearing about interconnection queues, power I mean, power is a very very important access to the market as you know. So if I have a, you know, hundred megawatt power approval, and I need to get twenty four hours, I'm not gonna go get six four hour systems because I don't have the power approval for that.

Mhmm.

Whereas now if I have a twenty four hour system, I can actually make it work.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that doesn't get talked about enough is these longer duration ten, twenty hour systems. As I say, twelve hour systems is probably the right number, for the maths, which someone can correct me on. You can make more of a grid connection if you're running these assets more continually on, off, on, off, at full power. You're doing more cycling or you can store more power.

It's just something that doesn't get talked about very much, which is that we have these batteries connected to using grid connect like, ten megawatt grid connection, and they're only using it, I don't know, ten, fifteen, twenty percent of the time Yep. For its full power. You're from a from a just a copper perspective, that we're not using all of that copper a lot of the time. Mhmm.

Alright. So then are you guys focused on do you have a focus? Is it behind the meter assets or is it in front of the meter? You said you got you can do, you're focused on the longer duration up to a hundred hours.

Yeah. I imagine imagine that's fairly arbitrary, but you you have to kind of, position it somehow.

I'm sure you you go to a hundred or whatever.

What's your target market? Where where does this make the most sense?

That's a great question.

Look, we've we've been studying the market very, very closely for quite a quite a long period of time. I think there's there's a lot of market that's getting made in the multi day segment, which is, like you said, three days, four days. And there's a definite use case for that. I mean, look at, you know, picker plans.

Lot of the peaker plants run quite a bit of time. Right? They are there for multiple days.

You look at a lot of the fossil fuel. If you were to replace fossil fuel with renewables, which is what we wanna do as a energy transformation, your expectation sometimes that, you know, the wind could go down, sun could I mean, if if you had three days of rain, there goes your solar power. What are you gonna do about that? And it's not uncommon to expect three days of rain.

So I think the multi day has a definite role to play and I think the market's getting made. But when we look at our market where we wanna enter this, space, it's gonna be first in the behind the meter market, more on the twenty four hour space. Now, if you ask a question saying, hey, is there a very ready made twenty four hour market? I think I think it's it's happening today.

I'll tell you why it's happening today.

Think about, any R. A. Market today. R. A. Market today in California is already about four hours.

You look at any sort of PSPS event. Right? That's, you know, because of forest fires, whatever. PSPS event.

What's that? Public safety power shut off. That's, that's a term that's used for specifically shutdowns, blackouts happening in California related to forest fires.

Q, you won't even guess. Let me ask you a quiz question.

Hold on. I answered I asked a question. Alright. Alright. Fine. Fine. Fair enough. Let's do a quiz question.

Fair enough. Okay. Alright. Well, you know, I I I thought that maybe just we could have a fun, doing this quiz now.

Answer the question. Let's do it.

What do you think was the median hours of a PS four, you know, shut off that's happened, blackout that's happened, median, mind you, in California last year?

Oh, this is gonna be terrifying. Isn't it?

Mhmm. Remember, you just talked about two hour batteries, four hour batteries, and all of that stuff. Right?

I wanna say a couple of days. So like fifty hours. And you're gonna tell me it's way more than that, aren't you?

No. No. No. You're you're good. You're good. I think you're striking in the right direction.

But the last year was sixteen hours and it's projected to get worse. So think about it this way. How do you solve that at a four hour battery? If a power is gone for sixteen hours, how do you solve that?

I'll tell you how you solve it.

You fire up the diesel gensets.

Yeah. Right? Unfortunately. Unfortunately. Yeah.

Is that what we're all fighting for?

Not really. Right? I mean, I think if you again go back to saying you make decisions with, give carbon a seat at the table.

Would you do that decision? Not really. Right? So that's the question that we have to answer ourselves. And I sit there and and California is not the only state where resilience and these type of power shutdowns happening. I mean, you could look around the country. Texas had its own share.

Even states like Connecticut has its own share. New York City metrics are going down. I mean, this The reliability is is an issue. And you don't solve the reliability by putting billions of dollars of rate payers money and putting more metal on the ground, when you know that there are technologies that like these that can solve the thing. So, when you look at that sixteen hours and then you say, look, four hours of RA market and then I can get about couple hours of energy arbitrage because I can peak power. I can store a little bit more sunshine, and then, you know, discharge it in the evening when it's peak power. You get two, three hours more and then you solve the sixteen hours.

Very quickly, it adds up to more than twenty four hours as a behind the meter solution. And then don't forget that peak bill management is a very important use case for a lot of our customers.

Thirty to forty percent of the bill is actually for peak power.

It's not even the energy. You don't you don't pay for the units you use. You use for the you pay for the fact that you're using it at peak power. That's a good chunk of every one of the behind the meter c and I customers bill.

So that's a very important use case that we try to solve. So I think we look at all of these stuff and we try to triangulate that with where our product is, where our tech is, what sort of use cases our tech can solve, where can we actually give money back to the customers in terms of ROI, ROE mainly, and LCOS in comparison to the other Technologies. When we look at all of that stuff, we said look, that's the entry place that we wanna go. So we're looking at the behind the meter market very seriously because we think that that's more ready than the bigger front of the meter grid connected market, which is a bigger market but that we would be ready for.

But I think, in order to just keep keep things moving and keep, the right kind of use cases addressed, I think that's really where we wanna land first.

How how much space do you need for one of these things? I assume that you need you've got, like, you got the fish tanks and you add them up and you put them together. But then I imagine you need an inverter system, and a transformer, and whatnot. So, do they come in a container? Do they come how do these things come?

Yeah. That's exactly right. Look, it comes in a twenty foot container. Standard twenty foot container gives you about a megawatt hour, give or take.

Alright. Okay. So Yeah. Equivalent to lithium ion in space there.

Exactly. But I think the only difference that I would say is that because we don't have thermal runaway issues, fire safety and other stuff, you don't have to have a lot of the fire safety equipment that you need to build on top of it.

And the second part, which is very critical, that's why I said when you look at density, don't look at it cell level or even a container level. You have to look at it at a at a project level because the type of inter container spacing that you need to give, for example, of the lithium ion, you don't need to give it our batteries. You can actually pack them a little bit more closer as long as you're able to do the o n m and other stuff. And those things gives you a lot of optimization. You can even stack them if you want to. Because there's no fire regulations around not being able to stack them. So there's a lot of good advantages that you have because these are, you know, thermally safe batteries basically.

Cool. Very cool. Last question on the technology. What where does it sit on valve trip efficiency?

So we are in the forties, something that's being worked on and to see how high we can go.

But I think we are still in the forties And, So for for every megawatt hour you put in, you get about forty percent of that back on the on the That's right.

That's right. Yeah. So and and like I said, typically, you know, every engineering problem is an optimization problem at the end of the day. Right?

So I think, as I said, if something is going in and out every fifteen minutes, you better not be losing too much on the round trip. Right? If something's going in and out every twenty four hours, it's a whole another man bargain. Right?

Because there's also enough time in the twenty four hours. Where you can actually time it in such a way that you're not charging so much for the for the charging part of it either.

And you just do it during periods of surplus renewals. Exactly. So alright. I think I'm I'm actually fascinated by the amount of, storage technologies that are coming around coming out that are in the sort of forty to sixty range or actually thirty to sixty range.

Still, in my opinion, still a damn sight more sensible than long term hydrogen storage.

That's a different different story. So now on to our last two questions.

Firstly, is there anything you wanna plug on this podcast? So you've got the all of our listeners are listening in now. Anything you'd like to talk about? Projects, announcements, anything like that?

No. I I think from our, company perspective, there's there's a lot of exciting stuff that's going on. We have very good partnerships that we have, built with National Labs, here in the US, universities, and and also the Department of Energy. I think we've had some extremely good, good dialogues going on.

I think there's there's a lot of willingness to listen. There's a lot of willingness to listen to a company that's built a fair bit of good technology outside in a, what's called as a friendly country. Right? In Canada.

And then trying to see how we can bring that and make US part of our home. I think there's been a incredible amount of support there. We've been in discussions with several states, to see where we wanna set up our Gigafactory.

There's been, we've been welcomed with, quite open arms, if I can be honest. And and I think that we appreciate that. I think that, we'd like to continue this dialogue to see where's the right place that we wanna do.

We have made some, quick investments in the state of Arizona to start our first plant there, which makes our air cathode, which has been a great acquisition for us. And I think that's already working in pretty full steam right now. So, I think that, US market continues to be very, very exciting. I think IRA and BIL, these are all things that are extremely good short on the arm.

What's the second one you said there?

A bipartisan infrastructure law. So I think that's that's, also an equally important legislation that this country has had, in order to be able to stimulate, our industry, and jobs, and and, and infrastructure in this country. So I think these these two have been extremely important and extremely good. And I think, as a as a startup company in a space that's really solving a big climate crisis problem.

I mean, look, we all are doing this because there's an existential crisis. We all have to believe in that. Right? I think, profits and other stuff come secondary.

I think to me the purpose is first, people are second, profits are third. And I think it's important that we think about these three piece in that order. And I think, that that kinda makes us feel good. And, even the tough days, you get through the tough days when you think about those three priorities.

And I think that's that's really what I would say about the way we are.

Alright. And now, for the last question. What's your contrarian view? So what do you believe that, a lot of the world doesn't?

Well, I'd say that, I don't know if it's necessarily a contrarian view.

I think that, I've had a change of view on my own, and my own self on this one over time as I've grown.

I think, there's a lot of belief among a lot of us that a single person cannot make a big difference.

I think we all get very comfortable with that thought process.

And it's it's also a little bit of a we love the collective responsibility, especially when it comes to making things happen. When it comes to taking credit, we all like the individual responsibility. I think that's just the way the society is. So I've kind of grown up and thinking about that a lot too, that there's there's, collectiveness, the collective bargaining, and there's an element of single person cannot change the world type of a thing.

And I'd say that my contrarian view right now is that, actually, that's not true at all. I think, actually, I I'm starting to believe that a single person can actually change the world.

There's some real examples out there.

Real people who are just normal human beings like the rest of us. They wake up in the morning, put their pants on one leg at a time, and here they are making massive changes in this planet.

That's that's kind of impacting for generations to come. And I think there's enough good examples, whether it's the field of politics, whether it's the field of, you know, sciences, whether it's in the field of business, whether it's in field of sports. I think that, I've kind of I believe I certainly starting to believe that a single person can make that big change.

Wow. Mic drop. So I wanna say a massive thank you for coming on the podcast. It's been awesome.

We really wish you all the best. Good luck in, in your next projects, and we'd love to have you on again in the future to talk about, how they went. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you, Q. It's a pleasure. And, look, I've gotten to know you and your company in the last, few days, and I think it's been a more than a more than just a pleasure.

And I wanna wish you the very best. I think you guys are onto something big and, important, and that's gonna make a massive glacial shift in the industry too. And I think, we welcome that at open arms, and we also, you know, rooting for you from the sidelines to be successful, and, we look forward to working with you guys together sometime.

Thank you. Thank you.