AI transcript
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Pushkin.
[MUSIC]
>> Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace,
your daily download on the economy.
Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and
student loans to the future of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
Marketplace is your secret weapon for
understanding this economy, listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
America’s power grid is arguably
the largest machine ever built in the history of the world.
Thousands of power plants,
millions of miles of power lines,
all delivering exactly as much power as everybody
wants almost all of the time.
Now, in order to become more efficient and to move away from fossil fuel,
that machine has to be completely rebuilt.
The other day, I talked to one of the people who’s rebuilding it.
You’re wearing a bright yellow,
like a neon yellow work vest,
got a little American flag in the corner.
So where are you right now that you need that vest?
>> Well, I’m in the factory in Wharton, West Virginia.
It’s about 500,000 square feet under roof that we have right now.
The activity under that roof is everything from cell assembly.
So we’re operating that line to finish in construction of the building.
>> So you’re building batteries at the factory and you’re also building more factory at the factory?
>> Exactly, yes, all simultaneously.
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>> I’m Jacob Goldstein and this is What’s Your Problem,
the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
My guest today is Matteo Jaramillo.
He’s the co-founder and CEO of Form Energy.
Matteo started his company because he realized that in order to rebuild the grid,
in order to move off fossil fuels,
the world will very likely need batteries that are profoundly different
than the batteries we have now.
Specifically, Matteo’s problem is this.
How do you build batteries at scale that provide affordable backup power to the grid?
Not for two hours or four hours or six hours, but for 100 hours.
Matteo has been working on batteries for about 20 years.
He’s been doing it since before it was cool.
And back in 2009, he went to work at Tesla.
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>> So I went there specifically to put batteries on the grid,
to take that technology and the balance of system which Tesla is excellent at,
and take it out of the car and put it on the grid.
And JB Strabo, who is the CTO and my boss at Tesla while I was there,
shared that vision and in fact has always been a leader on this stuff.
And so he gave me the room to run to do that internally at Tesla.
>> And so you basically started the Tesla powerwall business there, is that right?
>> That’s right, more than just the powerwall.
So what we call the power pack, and so it’s going to be a mega pack.
But batteries on the grid, yes, exactly.
>> So what is the limit of lithium ion batteries?
I mean, your company now is not a lithium ion battery company.
Is there sort of a moment when you realize that lithium ion batteries are not
going to solve all of the problems that need to be solved to shift to all
renewable energy all the time?
>> Yeah, lithium ion batteries are a fantastic technology.
But like any battery technology, there is a compromise somewhere.
And in the case of lithium ion, it is cost.
They are phenomenally energy dense.
They cycle wonderfully.
They are produced at massive scale.
They’re very, they are in fact very safe.
But they cost a lot for the kinds of problems that we also want to solve on
the grid, not just single digit duration hours, intermittency challenges, right?
The sun’s going down and then coming back every morning.
But multiple days of duration, or even seasonal imbalances.
And that duration of challenge,
lithium ion simply is not suited purely from a cost perspective to address.
And so that was the challenge that I went after as soon as I left Tesla.
>> So let’s talk about duration cuz that’s obviously central to what you’re doing.
How long are lithium ion batteries sort of techno economically useful for?
Like presumably you could just keep adding them and you could have as much
duration as you want with lithium ion batteries, but
it would be wildly expensive and nobody’s ever gonna do it, right?
>> That’s right.
>> So for how long are they actually economically efficient for
energy storage on the grid?
>> Well, today, most of the lithium ion that’s being put on the grid is
between two and four hour rated power duration.
So at its rated power, you start using the battery and it’s empty in two or four hours.
And what’s been interesting is to see that duration evolve over time.
So when the first lithium ion batteries were put on the grid,
they were rated at 15 minutes of duration.
And then it crept up to 30 minutes, and then it’s an hour, and now it’s two to four hours.
>> And is that just a function of the batteries getting cheaper so
you can put more of them in?
>> Purely a function of cost.
And so you can take that cost and duration pairing and see where it’s gonna go.
As certain costs, there’s a duration that is directly implied as a result.
And so we know where the cost curve for lithium ion is going and
therefore we know where the duration is also going.
>> So let’s talk about that two to four hour duration that lithium ion batteries are at now.
That seems very useful in the context of those moments when it’s a hot day and
everybody gets home from work and turns up their air conditioner.
And traditionally, we’re now still in many places.
Utilities have to turn on these very inefficient gas powered peaker plants, right?
And if we can use lithium ion batteries to solve that, to prevent that from happening,
like that’s great, right?
Like that is a very useful step in the evolution away from fossil fuel.
>> Precisely.
>> But why is that insufficient?
Like what’s the next thing that we need that we don’t have?
>> Well, the next thing that we don’t have is what happens if you have one day
that’s like that and then the next day that’s like that and the next day that’s
like that, stressing the peak multiple days in a row.
And it could be a stress that comes from heat or
it could be a stress that comes from cold or
it could be a stress that comes from cloud cover, storms, right?
Because one premise of course of the four hour battery is that you can recharge it
when you need to.
And all of a sudden, if you’re in a weather event where recharging is highly
non-economic or it’s not even possible, then different solutions are needed.
And different durations are also needed.
So how do you ride through entirely these multi-day duration weather events,
which we see in every market around the world?
>> So if we’re at like four hours, there’s any number of sort of hours.
There’s any amount of duration that you could kind of try and tackle next, right?
It could be 12 or it could be 24.
But you end up going all the way to 100 or 100-ish,
which I assume you didn’t pick just because it’s a satisfying round number.
Although it is a satisfying round number.
>> Yes. >> Like, why do you decide to go all the way from four to 100?
>> It’s a great question before, in fact, we even started the company.
And the question was, well, how do you solve the seasonal challenge, right?
That sort of winter to summer challenge for entry storage.
And it’s, you can sort of have a gut sense for it.
Well, but it covers a very wide range.
Do we need 10 hours or do we need 2,000 hours?
How do we wind that down?
And, well, this is how we framed it up.
What duration energy storage do you need to solve those problems?
And then, what is implied about the cost for that?
And can you build something that actually hits that cost target?
And so the 100 hours falls out of that very deep technical exercise.
If we say, take the state, my home state of California, for example.
100% of the carbon emissions on the electric grid comes from natural gas.
There is no more coal in the state of California.
And if you look at the way that the natural gas fleet participates in that system.
If we want to be able to drive to a deeper decarbonization for
that particular grid, which California does, legislatively it’s bound to.
Then we have to functionally replace at least some of those natural gas plants, right?
And when we look at what the battery needs to do,
technically, it needs to be able to provide that at least four day duration range, right?
So just functionally, that’s what it has to do.
It’s got to cover those cloudy, three, four days in a row.
When the solar is not really contributing to the system.
>> And so in the case of California, you have the law on your side.
>> Exactly.
>> It’s like, well, these utilities are gonna have to buy something.
And so let’s figure out how to be the ones to sell it to them.
And in particular, what they’re going to need to buy is order of magnitude days,
not hours, not weeks of energy storage.
>> That’s right, and if you need those days, then the cost falls out of that.
And you have to be somewhere around $20 per kilowatt hour.
Again, one-tenth, maybe the future cost of lithium-ion.
That’s where we started.
And so that’s where the pairing of 100 hours and
roughly $20 per kilowatt hour comes in.
It all falls out of the modeling that is done to really understand
the electric system and how it operates as a portfolio.
>> So now you have this frame and you gotta figure out how to build
a battery that has a sufficient duration at a low enough cost.
And there’s a lot of options, right?
There’s a lot of weird, fun things people are trying to do the thing you’re trying
to do, right?
So how do you get to where you get to?
>> Well, we started doing a bake-off, essentially.
We didn’t pick that technology.
We knew that design space we had to operate inside of.
And that was that $100 hour, $20 per kilowatt hour range.
And we had a couple contending chemistries that we liked.
One was sulfur-based, the other was iron-based.
We had some other ideas as well.
But when we first founded the company and took investment, our promise for
that to those investors for the very first round of funding was,
we will identify the most promising chemistry.
Not that we were gonna solve it or that we could prove that we had a market.
>> So people are giving you money to build batteries and
you didn’t even know what the batteries were gonna be.
>> Exactly, yeah.
But to be clear, that’s because the opportunity is overwhelmingly compelling.
This is a trillion dollar market if you can get it right.
And so that’s why it was worth it to even pursue this experiment from the beginning.
And so we had a couple of different technologies that we evaluated.
And at the end of the first year, it was clear that iron air was
the one that had the greatest chance to succeed.
The entitled cost was there, the entitled embodiment of that cost as
a real device was there, and the performance was there.
And so that’s the one that we picked, and that’s the one that we said,
this is what we’re gonna really devote our company towards.
>> Tell me about iron, why do you land on iron?
>> Well, iron, besides coals, the most mined substance on earth.
A few billion tons of it every year.
>> Not scarce, one country’s not gonna lock down iron reserves for the planet.
>> Definitely not, and if you squint, it’s not too hard to envision the earth is
just a rusty ball, basically.
>> Yeah, feels about right too, like vibes wise, rusty balls.
>> Yeah, exactly, and so you’re never gonna run out of it, of course.
And humans know a lot about iron, frankly.
There was a whole age of humanity where we really played around with iron.
>> It’s like, well, stone, not great as a battery, bronze, too expensive, iron.
Wait a minute.
>> And so we like the idea that there is a substance that a lot is known about,
but had never really been brought into the modern understanding electrochemically.
And other iron batteries are out there.
So for example, Thomas Edison, the battery that he went to market with is
a nickel-iron battery using an iron anode, and that was over 100 years ago now.
And so a lot is known, relatively speaking, about iron anodes.
But it’s not an art that has been really advanced recently.
And so where we started from was the best understanding that was out there
about iron air, which actually comes from the 1970s, roughly.
There was some work that was done recently out of one academic lab, but
not too much, and we saw that the performance metrics that Westinghouse
was able to get at a study that they did at the behest of the US Department of
Energy, that if we could achieve what they had done 50 years ago,
then we had a minimum viable product.
And we thought, we think we could probably do that.
>> I mean, it’s the basic idea like iron is cheap and big and heavy and
not that energy dense.
So of course, nobody’s going to use it for a laptop or a car.
It’s the opposite of what you want for a laptop or a car.
But you don’t actually care in this instance if it’s big and heavy,
because you’re just going to put it out whatever in the desert anyways,
where there’s a ton of space.
>> Exactly, and again, the overriding consideration here for
the selection of a chemistry to pursue is cost, and specifically capex cost.
And back to your earlier question, the things that we can trade off as a result,
I’ll give you one example of cycle life.
Lithium ion batteries cycle phenomenally well, thousands of times.
>> Cycle life meaning charge and discharge and charge.
>> Charge and discharge, that’s right.
But to give you an example for the way that technically we can think about
a trade off in pursuit of very low cost.
If I am building a battery that lets us say discharges over the course of a week
to make this easy, and charges over the course of a week,
so I mean 100% rent or proficiency, then the maximum number of cycles I can get
in a year is 26, theoretical maximum.
And over the course of a 20 year project life, it’s roughly 500.
A far cry from the thousands and thousands of cycles that lithium ion is
pursuing because it needs, right?
I have to be very good at charging and discharging hundreds of times, but
that is a materially different challenge than thousands of times, right?
>> So you’re close now to having real working batteries out in the world.
We’ve been working on it for years.
Are there, is there an example of a thing that you figured out between when you
started and now?
>> Yeah, so to be clear, we have working batteries out there in the grid right now.
So we deployed our first battery connected to the grid charging and
discharging about a year ago.
So it was in summer of last year that our first one went out in the world.
And we learned a lot from that.
But as far as learning that we had along the way,
it’s about iron maybe not surprisingly, iron reacts in two different levels.
So you have different states of oxidation for iron, right?
>> So basically rust in the case of iron, right?
>> That’s right, that’s right.
And the first reaction is iron to iron hydroxide.
So you have FeOH, right, one hydroxide.
And there’s a theoretical limit to the amount of energy you can get out of
that particular reaction.
>> And just to be clear, this is relevant to you because your batteries,
when they’re charging and discharging are sort of rusting and unrusting, right?
That is a version of what is happening, yeah.
>> That’s exactly right, that’s precisely what’s happening.
And what we have found is that, in fact,
the theoretical limit is about 30% higher than what we originally thought it was.
And I can’t tell you why precisely because there’s a lot of trade secret
involved in this, but that’s one learning that we had.
>> That’s like a basic science insight?
>> This is not in the published literature anywhere.
This is a true discovery by the team at Forum Energy.
>> And tell me about deciding to go trade secret instead of patent.
You wanted to try and keep it forever?
Why not patent it and be sure you own it?
>> Well, it’s a combination of things.
Our intellectual property approach utilizes different methods depending on what it is.
>> You figure trade secret worked for Coca-Cola, probably worked for you.
>> That’s right, that’s right, yeah.
>> They patented the secret formula 100 years ago, where would they be today?
>> I don’t know what to say.
>> We’ll be back in just a minute.
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[MUSIC]
>> Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future of AI,
so that you can understand what it all means for you.
Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
[MUSIC]
>> So you’re actually talking to me today from Forms Factory in Weirton, West Virginia.
Tell me about the factory.
Tell me about Weirton.
>> So Weirton is where we’re building this plant and it’s the home of what was Weirton Steel.
And it was the dominant economic driver for this region in the northern,
what’s called the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia.
It’s a stretch of West Virginia that sits between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
And the plant was one of the most productive steel plants in the country for
a very long time, employed about 14,000 people.
And the plant shut in the early 2000s, and so that’s the site that most of the plant has gone.
There’s only one remaining structure from that plant, but we are on that same historic site.
And it’s a huge privilege to be able to build this plant here in Weirton.
>> Is there a practical reason that you’re on the site of a steel plant?
I mean, is iron close by or the rail links good?
>> Yeah, it’s a phenomenal piece of physical infrastructure is what it comes down to.
And that’s how most of the steel sites were picked originally in the country.
Flat places near rivers with great connectivity to the economy, essentially.
And so that’s exactly what this site is.
So it’s right on the Ohio River.
There’s Barge Access, which of course connects into the Mississippi.
There’s two rail lines, one which comes directly into our site and
another which is not very far away.
And then phenomenal highway interconnectivity to the country as well.
>> So now you have a factory, you are at the factory.
You’re making batteries, you’re building more factories so you can make more batteries.
>> Make more batteries, that’s right.
>> What do you have to figure out next?
Like what is sort of the frontier for you at this point?
>> Well, at this point, the things we have to figure out are really the scaled
manufacturing processes.
There’s not a lot more that we can do in the lab.
Even building sort of production intent size scale systems, which we do all the time.
We have to build those devices off of the real volume processes.
So the equipment sets, the operations, that’s where the risk remains in the company.
And the only way to retire that risk is to take that step and to do it.
And so that’s really where the focus is as a company is on that next phase to get
into start of production to produce those batteries and to work through the challenges
that inevitably pop up when you do something for the first time at that scale.
>> So you can make a battery, the hard thing now is to make a thousand batteries or whatever.
>> Yeah, at high quality and low cost.
>> And low cost.
And so tell me when you have like a full scale deployment, what will it look like?
>> Yeah, it’ll look pretty boring is the short answer.
>> And ideally the operation will be super boring, right?
If everything goes well, yeah.
>> Yeah, paint drying in a field, that’s what it will be.
>> Literally iron rusting, it’ll literally be iron rusting in a field.
>> And unrusting, we’ll go both ways, Jake.
>> Yes, that’s the hard part.
>> Yeah, these will be can shipping containers, so 40 foot containers installed in a field.
In other words, it will look like pretty much any other battery that is installed for
utilities today and most people don’t know what that looks like.
But it is just shipping containers installed on pads in arrays in a field.
And so the size of these projects ranges from dozens of
those enclosures to hundreds or even thousands in some cases.
>> Your initial projects are dozens, I imagine?
>> That’s correct.
So the first projects that we’re doing are generally around 10 megawatts each.
So that’s what these utilities, they range from 5 to 15, but let’s just say they’re 10.
And so at 10 megawatts, 100 hours, that’s 1000 megawatt hours.
And that puts these initial batteries that we’re putting in the field,
at least from an energy perspective, as some of the largest batteries ever deployed on the grid.
>> So you talked about having to scale, right?
Having to figure out how to build thousands of batteries that are cheap and reliable.
Is there a particular piece of that that you’re trying to figure out right now?
Or a particular piece of it that seems, frankly, daunting?
>> So the category of challenges that we have in front of us are squarely in the engineering and
specifically manufacturing engineering challenge.
How it can go wrong is inevitably things pop up when you’re
doing manufacturing at scale for the first time.
And so generally these are challenges that involve sort of days to weeks of
technical challenge that you need to solve, but you can inevitably solve them with a good team who knows what it’s doing.
And so that’s what we’ve built.
I think the biggest risk for us now, frankly, is hiring to fully build out that team,
to be able to do that on time and in the way that we need to.
But I’m not worried at all about whether there’s some technical challenge that will pop up that we cannot solve.
We are through that phase of what’s needed and it truly is an execution play from here.
There’s no magic pixie dust required.
We don’t need to say any prayers over a piece of technology to hope that it works.
We know that it works and we know that it works at the scale, but we need to go do it.
And so that’s the main challenge.
>> And then in the medium term, I mean, other people are working on other kinds of batteries,
other kinds of energy storage, long duration energy storage.
I mean, tell me about that sort of competitive landscape.
Like what are the other technologies that you think are compelling in a kind of similar duration?
>> Well, that term, long duration energy storage is an interesting one because it is used very broadly today.
And that’s why we actually prefer the term multi-day duration storage,
because it puts a little bit more precision around what we’re doing specifically.
So long duration energy storage is used today to refer to six hours of lithium ion, for example.
>> And you’re like, “Fat, you call that long?”
That’s like, “I get out of bed in the morning, I do six hours.”
>> Well, you know, for lithium ion, it is long compared to what it used to be, but it’s fairly incremental.
>> Well, who else is going for multi-day?
Like tell me other compelling multi-day storage technology.
>> Well, so it’s not so much that there’s other storage technologies.
It’s that there are other technologies that could act as a substitute for what we’re doing.
So for example, nuclear power, carbon capture on thermal plants, for example.
Hydrogen is also a possibility there.
Or even if you want to, transmission.
If we had a perfectly interconnected globe for transmission,
we would never need to store energy at all, right?
>> Oh, interesting, right, because the sun is always shining somewhere.
>> That’s right, 1/8 of the world is enjoying a summer afternoon at all times, right?
So now that’s a thought experiment.
>> And do you, like, I mean, obviously that’s the sort of limit case that’s not going to happen.
But when you think about reasons you might not win in the long run, for lack of a better word,
I don’t love that word there.
You think more about universes where we don’t actually need 100 hours of storage,
universes where there is great carbon capture on natural gas plants,
or more nuclear power, a better transmission?
>> Yeah, I don’t think about it quite that way.
When we think about competition, we need to make sure it’s in the context of the market
that we’re operating in.
And this is very much right now a non-zero-sum market.
In other words, it is growing incredibly fast and large.
And, you know, the whole industry is just accelerating in a way that it has not,
essentially, since it was built.
So we’re seeing load growth, you know, four or five percent or more in some cases.
It hasn’t been like that for literally 50 or 60 years.
>> Load growth is basically demand for electric.
>> Demand going up, that’s right.
>> And that’s like electrification plus artificial intelligence.
I mean, it’s essentially those two drivers.
>> Exactly, that’s exactly correct.
Electrification of cars for, you know, residential applications and electrification of industrial
processes, you know, very large consumers, you know, transportation industry, very large
consumers of energy overall.
And now a lot of that is becoming electric energy that they’re consuming.
And so our position in the market is very strong because we have a solution that is showing
up in a relevant time frame and it can scale in a way that our customers, these utilities,
need it to scale.
They need all solutions to show up.
We’ve yet to have a conversation with any utility who says, “I’m only going with one
solution.”
Right?
They’re trying to build nuclear.
They’re trying to build more natural gas.
They’re trying to build as much renewables as they possibly can.
And they’re going to need this kind of multi-duration storage.
So it’s such a growth market for us that in some ways, if you can show up with a product
that meets the specification on time and at scale, they will buy it just about as much
of it as you possibly can supply.
>> So if things go the way you hope they will go, what will the world look like in whatever,
the medium term, whatever that is for you, five years maybe?
>> Yeah.
So, in five years in the industry that we’re in, form could be a spectacular commercial
success of an amazing business and still have relatively small impact just because of the
size and scale of the industry overall.
And I’ll give you one point of reference.
The US today has about 1200 gigawatts of installed capacity, generation of capacity in it.
And over the next five years, if we absolutely blow it out of the water, we may make 10 gigawatts
worth of projects.
>> Which is a lot to be clear.
>> Which is a tremendous amount, right?
For one company to produce.
>> Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s a lot of shipping containers of iron batteries.
>> That’s right.
And so it will take probably another 10 years past that to see the kind of multi-day storage
that we’re bringing into the market have a real material effect in the industry.
And I think that we can get there for sure.
But it requires scaling very quickly in multiple markets, Europe, Asia, Africa, to be able
to drive the possibilities for what this kind of new type of asset in the electric system
can do.
>> So, should that make me worry about the pace of decarbonization?
I mean, even if you succeed wildly, you will be very small relative to the whatever, to
global demand for energy.
Like I get that that’s good for you and in the long term it’s good for the world.
But is it worrying in the kind of short to medium term?
Is it a reminder of how hard decarbonization is at various margins?
>> Well, it certainly is a reminder of just how hard it is and how large the challenges,
the scale of the challenge.
Another way of thinking about it is to achieve the goals that have been laid out by governments
across the globe, roughly $150 trillion of investment required through 2050.
>> Yeah.
Also good for you but worrying for the world.
>> Also good, worrying.
And the question is how quickly can we go from making the plans and having the technologies
that are nascent and scaling up to actually implementing them at scale.
So what is not so concerned to me is between 2030 and 2040, I see a huge amount of opportunity
to scale exactly what we’re talking about.
And again, it’s an all of the above scenario.
So I see a lot of effort that’s going into just the acceleration broadly speaking and
I do think that what form is bringing to the table can play a meaningful role in that and
it will take 15 years to scale it up and it’s very possible.
And we need a huge diversity of resources to meet the demand.
Our existence in many ways is based on electricity these days and we need all the different kinds
of solutions to show up.
And multi-daterition storage and specifically iron-air batteries can play a meaningful role
in that entire system and not only drive reliability up and cost down but also meet the goals of
load growth, which was a really big challenge and meet the decarbonization goals of the
electric system overall.
And having this kind of asset just makes solving those challenges a lot easier.
We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future
of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
That’s the end of the ads.
Now, of course, it’s time for the lightning round.
So tell me about vocational discernment.
Well, I think you’re referring to the fact that I went to Divinity School at one point.
This was, in fact, right before I joined the battery industry.
I went to the Yale Divinity School and Yale is a great place.
I did consider going into the ministry.
And one of the reasons why Yale Divinity School is a great place is because they put you through
the vocational discernment process, a very intentional process to discern if indeed the
ordained ministry is right for you.
And I realized very early on that I was not cut out at all to be an ordained minister,
which is fortunate.
You discerned that it was not your vocation.
That’s right.
And it’s a great thing to learn early on in the process.
And so I quickly realized, if not that, then what?
And so taking those same skills, because they are skills you can apply to a lot of mindsets,
really tried to figure out what did I want to work on.
I do want to work on, have always wanted to work on something that I felt was meaningful
and impactful.
And so for me, I just kept coming back to energy for a lot of reasons as a way to really
make lives better in a lot of ways.
One of the other elements of vocational discernment is you identify key features of yourself,
your personality, if you will.
And one thing that I have come to learn about myself, not just them, but over a lot of time,
is I’m a pretty patient person for the things that I think are worthwhile.
So I was prepared to pursue something that I thought might take a decade or two.
And that’s what has happened.
But I’ve stuck with it since then.
And I’m glad I did.
It’s been a great ride.
Why did you think you might want to be a priest?
Well, why do I think I want to be a priest is because I am attracted to a lot of the
intellectual elements of religion.
And that is not the vocation.
It turns out I’m much more attracted to problem solving than problem listening, which is a
large part of being a minister.
So that’s what I thought.
But I have a huge fascination intellectually with religion and with the notion of God.
And it was something that I wanted to spend time really thinking carefully about.
What’s something you learned in divinity school that’s helpful in running a company?
So many different things.
The study of theology, in many ways, is the study of human nature.
And one thing about batteries that I love, why it continues, as a category, continue
to fascinate me now and have since I started, is that batteries are in some ways like humans.
They’re all flawed in some way.
There is no perfect battery.
And they can always be improved.
That’s the other thing I like about them.
That seems like a particularly Christian reading of batteries, if I might say so.
We don’t know the limits of how batteries can be.
And if you’re curious enough, then the rewards can be fantastic.
And the other thing is, if you find the right fit for the battery, then the flaws don’t
matter so much.
And that’s also sort of the way humans are, right?
So you and John Steinbeck share a hometown, Salinas, California.
What’s one Steinbeck book?
If somebody’s going to read one John Steinbeck book, what should they read?
Well, East of Eden.
But that’s a long one.
So there are shorter ones.
It sounds strange, but endubius battle is one that really stuck with me.
That one, I don’t know.
But it’s about labor relations.
Which was like the family business for you growing up, right?
Yeah.
My father was a lawyer for farm workers, and my mom was a teacher in public schools for
basically kids and farm workers.
What’s one thing that you wish more people understood about energy or power?
Well, back to some of our earlier comments.
Just the scale of the industry and the size of things that happen.
It really boggles the mind to try and appreciate how big of an industry it is and how much
change is happening to such a large industry.
I think it was, maybe lots of people have said it, but I heard Jigar Shah describe the
grid as like the biggest machine ever built in the history of the world.
Which is a kind of rad way to think of it, like it’s this one giant machine, and not
only is it giant, it has to work all the time, right?
That’s the other wild.
You can never, ever turn it off.
That’s right.
Yeah.
And not only that, we’re matching supply and demand instantaneously at all times.
That’s how the machine operates.
So the way it operates is also just phenomenally complex.
And it’s amazing that we’re able to have as much reliability as we do today.
And so, you know, the grid will be reinvented, it will be rebuilt, essentially, and rebuilt
again over the next 30 or 40 years.
And so the scale, which is, again, hard to approximate, but appreciating that is key
to understanding the direction that it will take and what will be involved to affect this
change.
It’s like, is it the ship of Theseus?
Is that the one?
It’s like the giant, like national scale ship of Theseus where it’s like the whole grid
will be different.
And you won’t even notice.
You just flip the switch and the lights will go on.
That is what we’re aiming for, for sure.
Matteo Jaramillo is the co-founder and CEO of Form Energy.
Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sarah Bouguere.
You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
Hey, everybody.
I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future
of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
(upbeat music)
Pushkin.
[MUSIC]
>> Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace,
your daily download on the economy.
Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and
student loans to the future of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
Marketplace is your secret weapon for
understanding this economy, listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
America’s power grid is arguably
the largest machine ever built in the history of the world.
Thousands of power plants,
millions of miles of power lines,
all delivering exactly as much power as everybody
wants almost all of the time.
Now, in order to become more efficient and to move away from fossil fuel,
that machine has to be completely rebuilt.
The other day, I talked to one of the people who’s rebuilding it.
You’re wearing a bright yellow,
like a neon yellow work vest,
got a little American flag in the corner.
So where are you right now that you need that vest?
>> Well, I’m in the factory in Wharton, West Virginia.
It’s about 500,000 square feet under roof that we have right now.
The activity under that roof is everything from cell assembly.
So we’re operating that line to finish in construction of the building.
>> So you’re building batteries at the factory and you’re also building more factory at the factory?
>> Exactly, yes, all simultaneously.
[MUSIC]
>> I’m Jacob Goldstein and this is What’s Your Problem,
the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress.
My guest today is Matteo Jaramillo.
He’s the co-founder and CEO of Form Energy.
Matteo started his company because he realized that in order to rebuild the grid,
in order to move off fossil fuels,
the world will very likely need batteries that are profoundly different
than the batteries we have now.
Specifically, Matteo’s problem is this.
How do you build batteries at scale that provide affordable backup power to the grid?
Not for two hours or four hours or six hours, but for 100 hours.
Matteo has been working on batteries for about 20 years.
He’s been doing it since before it was cool.
And back in 2009, he went to work at Tesla.
[MUSIC]
>> So I went there specifically to put batteries on the grid,
to take that technology and the balance of system which Tesla is excellent at,
and take it out of the car and put it on the grid.
And JB Strabo, who is the CTO and my boss at Tesla while I was there,
shared that vision and in fact has always been a leader on this stuff.
And so he gave me the room to run to do that internally at Tesla.
>> And so you basically started the Tesla powerwall business there, is that right?
>> That’s right, more than just the powerwall.
So what we call the power pack, and so it’s going to be a mega pack.
But batteries on the grid, yes, exactly.
>> So what is the limit of lithium ion batteries?
I mean, your company now is not a lithium ion battery company.
Is there sort of a moment when you realize that lithium ion batteries are not
going to solve all of the problems that need to be solved to shift to all
renewable energy all the time?
>> Yeah, lithium ion batteries are a fantastic technology.
But like any battery technology, there is a compromise somewhere.
And in the case of lithium ion, it is cost.
They are phenomenally energy dense.
They cycle wonderfully.
They are produced at massive scale.
They’re very, they are in fact very safe.
But they cost a lot for the kinds of problems that we also want to solve on
the grid, not just single digit duration hours, intermittency challenges, right?
The sun’s going down and then coming back every morning.
But multiple days of duration, or even seasonal imbalances.
And that duration of challenge,
lithium ion simply is not suited purely from a cost perspective to address.
And so that was the challenge that I went after as soon as I left Tesla.
>> So let’s talk about duration cuz that’s obviously central to what you’re doing.
How long are lithium ion batteries sort of techno economically useful for?
Like presumably you could just keep adding them and you could have as much
duration as you want with lithium ion batteries, but
it would be wildly expensive and nobody’s ever gonna do it, right?
>> That’s right.
>> So for how long are they actually economically efficient for
energy storage on the grid?
>> Well, today, most of the lithium ion that’s being put on the grid is
between two and four hour rated power duration.
So at its rated power, you start using the battery and it’s empty in two or four hours.
And what’s been interesting is to see that duration evolve over time.
So when the first lithium ion batteries were put on the grid,
they were rated at 15 minutes of duration.
And then it crept up to 30 minutes, and then it’s an hour, and now it’s two to four hours.
>> And is that just a function of the batteries getting cheaper so
you can put more of them in?
>> Purely a function of cost.
And so you can take that cost and duration pairing and see where it’s gonna go.
As certain costs, there’s a duration that is directly implied as a result.
And so we know where the cost curve for lithium ion is going and
therefore we know where the duration is also going.
>> So let’s talk about that two to four hour duration that lithium ion batteries are at now.
That seems very useful in the context of those moments when it’s a hot day and
everybody gets home from work and turns up their air conditioner.
And traditionally, we’re now still in many places.
Utilities have to turn on these very inefficient gas powered peaker plants, right?
And if we can use lithium ion batteries to solve that, to prevent that from happening,
like that’s great, right?
Like that is a very useful step in the evolution away from fossil fuel.
>> Precisely.
>> But why is that insufficient?
Like what’s the next thing that we need that we don’t have?
>> Well, the next thing that we don’t have is what happens if you have one day
that’s like that and then the next day that’s like that and the next day that’s
like that, stressing the peak multiple days in a row.
And it could be a stress that comes from heat or
it could be a stress that comes from cold or
it could be a stress that comes from cloud cover, storms, right?
Because one premise of course of the four hour battery is that you can recharge it
when you need to.
And all of a sudden, if you’re in a weather event where recharging is highly
non-economic or it’s not even possible, then different solutions are needed.
And different durations are also needed.
So how do you ride through entirely these multi-day duration weather events,
which we see in every market around the world?
>> So if we’re at like four hours, there’s any number of sort of hours.
There’s any amount of duration that you could kind of try and tackle next, right?
It could be 12 or it could be 24.
But you end up going all the way to 100 or 100-ish,
which I assume you didn’t pick just because it’s a satisfying round number.
Although it is a satisfying round number.
>> Yes. >> Like, why do you decide to go all the way from four to 100?
>> It’s a great question before, in fact, we even started the company.
And the question was, well, how do you solve the seasonal challenge, right?
That sort of winter to summer challenge for entry storage.
And it’s, you can sort of have a gut sense for it.
Well, but it covers a very wide range.
Do we need 10 hours or do we need 2,000 hours?
How do we wind that down?
And, well, this is how we framed it up.
What duration energy storage do you need to solve those problems?
And then, what is implied about the cost for that?
And can you build something that actually hits that cost target?
And so the 100 hours falls out of that very deep technical exercise.
If we say, take the state, my home state of California, for example.
100% of the carbon emissions on the electric grid comes from natural gas.
There is no more coal in the state of California.
And if you look at the way that the natural gas fleet participates in that system.
If we want to be able to drive to a deeper decarbonization for
that particular grid, which California does, legislatively it’s bound to.
Then we have to functionally replace at least some of those natural gas plants, right?
And when we look at what the battery needs to do,
technically, it needs to be able to provide that at least four day duration range, right?
So just functionally, that’s what it has to do.
It’s got to cover those cloudy, three, four days in a row.
When the solar is not really contributing to the system.
>> And so in the case of California, you have the law on your side.
>> Exactly.
>> It’s like, well, these utilities are gonna have to buy something.
And so let’s figure out how to be the ones to sell it to them.
And in particular, what they’re going to need to buy is order of magnitude days,
not hours, not weeks of energy storage.
>> That’s right, and if you need those days, then the cost falls out of that.
And you have to be somewhere around $20 per kilowatt hour.
Again, one-tenth, maybe the future cost of lithium-ion.
That’s where we started.
And so that’s where the pairing of 100 hours and
roughly $20 per kilowatt hour comes in.
It all falls out of the modeling that is done to really understand
the electric system and how it operates as a portfolio.
>> So now you have this frame and you gotta figure out how to build
a battery that has a sufficient duration at a low enough cost.
And there’s a lot of options, right?
There’s a lot of weird, fun things people are trying to do the thing you’re trying
to do, right?
So how do you get to where you get to?
>> Well, we started doing a bake-off, essentially.
We didn’t pick that technology.
We knew that design space we had to operate inside of.
And that was that $100 hour, $20 per kilowatt hour range.
And we had a couple contending chemistries that we liked.
One was sulfur-based, the other was iron-based.
We had some other ideas as well.
But when we first founded the company and took investment, our promise for
that to those investors for the very first round of funding was,
we will identify the most promising chemistry.
Not that we were gonna solve it or that we could prove that we had a market.
>> So people are giving you money to build batteries and
you didn’t even know what the batteries were gonna be.
>> Exactly, yeah.
But to be clear, that’s because the opportunity is overwhelmingly compelling.
This is a trillion dollar market if you can get it right.
And so that’s why it was worth it to even pursue this experiment from the beginning.
And so we had a couple of different technologies that we evaluated.
And at the end of the first year, it was clear that iron air was
the one that had the greatest chance to succeed.
The entitled cost was there, the entitled embodiment of that cost as
a real device was there, and the performance was there.
And so that’s the one that we picked, and that’s the one that we said,
this is what we’re gonna really devote our company towards.
>> Tell me about iron, why do you land on iron?
>> Well, iron, besides coals, the most mined substance on earth.
A few billion tons of it every year.
>> Not scarce, one country’s not gonna lock down iron reserves for the planet.
>> Definitely not, and if you squint, it’s not too hard to envision the earth is
just a rusty ball, basically.
>> Yeah, feels about right too, like vibes wise, rusty balls.
>> Yeah, exactly, and so you’re never gonna run out of it, of course.
And humans know a lot about iron, frankly.
There was a whole age of humanity where we really played around with iron.
>> It’s like, well, stone, not great as a battery, bronze, too expensive, iron.
Wait a minute.
>> And so we like the idea that there is a substance that a lot is known about,
but had never really been brought into the modern understanding electrochemically.
And other iron batteries are out there.
So for example, Thomas Edison, the battery that he went to market with is
a nickel-iron battery using an iron anode, and that was over 100 years ago now.
And so a lot is known, relatively speaking, about iron anodes.
But it’s not an art that has been really advanced recently.
And so where we started from was the best understanding that was out there
about iron air, which actually comes from the 1970s, roughly.
There was some work that was done recently out of one academic lab, but
not too much, and we saw that the performance metrics that Westinghouse
was able to get at a study that they did at the behest of the US Department of
Energy, that if we could achieve what they had done 50 years ago,
then we had a minimum viable product.
And we thought, we think we could probably do that.
>> I mean, it’s the basic idea like iron is cheap and big and heavy and
not that energy dense.
So of course, nobody’s going to use it for a laptop or a car.
It’s the opposite of what you want for a laptop or a car.
But you don’t actually care in this instance if it’s big and heavy,
because you’re just going to put it out whatever in the desert anyways,
where there’s a ton of space.
>> Exactly, and again, the overriding consideration here for
the selection of a chemistry to pursue is cost, and specifically capex cost.
And back to your earlier question, the things that we can trade off as a result,
I’ll give you one example of cycle life.
Lithium ion batteries cycle phenomenally well, thousands of times.
>> Cycle life meaning charge and discharge and charge.
>> Charge and discharge, that’s right.
But to give you an example for the way that technically we can think about
a trade off in pursuit of very low cost.
If I am building a battery that lets us say discharges over the course of a week
to make this easy, and charges over the course of a week,
so I mean 100% rent or proficiency, then the maximum number of cycles I can get
in a year is 26, theoretical maximum.
And over the course of a 20 year project life, it’s roughly 500.
A far cry from the thousands and thousands of cycles that lithium ion is
pursuing because it needs, right?
I have to be very good at charging and discharging hundreds of times, but
that is a materially different challenge than thousands of times, right?
>> So you’re close now to having real working batteries out in the world.
We’ve been working on it for years.
Are there, is there an example of a thing that you figured out between when you
started and now?
>> Yeah, so to be clear, we have working batteries out there in the grid right now.
So we deployed our first battery connected to the grid charging and
discharging about a year ago.
So it was in summer of last year that our first one went out in the world.
And we learned a lot from that.
But as far as learning that we had along the way,
it’s about iron maybe not surprisingly, iron reacts in two different levels.
So you have different states of oxidation for iron, right?
>> So basically rust in the case of iron, right?
>> That’s right, that’s right.
And the first reaction is iron to iron hydroxide.
So you have FeOH, right, one hydroxide.
And there’s a theoretical limit to the amount of energy you can get out of
that particular reaction.
>> And just to be clear, this is relevant to you because your batteries,
when they’re charging and discharging are sort of rusting and unrusting, right?
That is a version of what is happening, yeah.
>> That’s exactly right, that’s precisely what’s happening.
And what we have found is that, in fact,
the theoretical limit is about 30% higher than what we originally thought it was.
And I can’t tell you why precisely because there’s a lot of trade secret
involved in this, but that’s one learning that we had.
>> That’s like a basic science insight?
>> This is not in the published literature anywhere.
This is a true discovery by the team at Forum Energy.
>> And tell me about deciding to go trade secret instead of patent.
You wanted to try and keep it forever?
Why not patent it and be sure you own it?
>> Well, it’s a combination of things.
Our intellectual property approach utilizes different methods depending on what it is.
>> You figure trade secret worked for Coca-Cola, probably worked for you.
>> That’s right, that’s right, yeah.
>> They patented the secret formula 100 years ago, where would they be today?
>> I don’t know what to say.
>> We’ll be back in just a minute.
[MUSIC]
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[MUSIC]
>> Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future of AI,
so that you can understand what it all means for you.
Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
[MUSIC]
>> So you’re actually talking to me today from Forms Factory in Weirton, West Virginia.
Tell me about the factory.
Tell me about Weirton.
>> So Weirton is where we’re building this plant and it’s the home of what was Weirton Steel.
And it was the dominant economic driver for this region in the northern,
what’s called the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia.
It’s a stretch of West Virginia that sits between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
And the plant was one of the most productive steel plants in the country for
a very long time, employed about 14,000 people.
And the plant shut in the early 2000s, and so that’s the site that most of the plant has gone.
There’s only one remaining structure from that plant, but we are on that same historic site.
And it’s a huge privilege to be able to build this plant here in Weirton.
>> Is there a practical reason that you’re on the site of a steel plant?
I mean, is iron close by or the rail links good?
>> Yeah, it’s a phenomenal piece of physical infrastructure is what it comes down to.
And that’s how most of the steel sites were picked originally in the country.
Flat places near rivers with great connectivity to the economy, essentially.
And so that’s exactly what this site is.
So it’s right on the Ohio River.
There’s Barge Access, which of course connects into the Mississippi.
There’s two rail lines, one which comes directly into our site and
another which is not very far away.
And then phenomenal highway interconnectivity to the country as well.
>> So now you have a factory, you are at the factory.
You’re making batteries, you’re building more factories so you can make more batteries.
>> Make more batteries, that’s right.
>> What do you have to figure out next?
Like what is sort of the frontier for you at this point?
>> Well, at this point, the things we have to figure out are really the scaled
manufacturing processes.
There’s not a lot more that we can do in the lab.
Even building sort of production intent size scale systems, which we do all the time.
We have to build those devices off of the real volume processes.
So the equipment sets, the operations, that’s where the risk remains in the company.
And the only way to retire that risk is to take that step and to do it.
And so that’s really where the focus is as a company is on that next phase to get
into start of production to produce those batteries and to work through the challenges
that inevitably pop up when you do something for the first time at that scale.
>> So you can make a battery, the hard thing now is to make a thousand batteries or whatever.
>> Yeah, at high quality and low cost.
>> And low cost.
And so tell me when you have like a full scale deployment, what will it look like?
>> Yeah, it’ll look pretty boring is the short answer.
>> And ideally the operation will be super boring, right?
If everything goes well, yeah.
>> Yeah, paint drying in a field, that’s what it will be.
>> Literally iron rusting, it’ll literally be iron rusting in a field.
>> And unrusting, we’ll go both ways, Jake.
>> Yes, that’s the hard part.
>> Yeah, these will be can shipping containers, so 40 foot containers installed in a field.
In other words, it will look like pretty much any other battery that is installed for
utilities today and most people don’t know what that looks like.
But it is just shipping containers installed on pads in arrays in a field.
And so the size of these projects ranges from dozens of
those enclosures to hundreds or even thousands in some cases.
>> Your initial projects are dozens, I imagine?
>> That’s correct.
So the first projects that we’re doing are generally around 10 megawatts each.
So that’s what these utilities, they range from 5 to 15, but let’s just say they’re 10.
And so at 10 megawatts, 100 hours, that’s 1000 megawatt hours.
And that puts these initial batteries that we’re putting in the field,
at least from an energy perspective, as some of the largest batteries ever deployed on the grid.
>> So you talked about having to scale, right?
Having to figure out how to build thousands of batteries that are cheap and reliable.
Is there a particular piece of that that you’re trying to figure out right now?
Or a particular piece of it that seems, frankly, daunting?
>> So the category of challenges that we have in front of us are squarely in the engineering and
specifically manufacturing engineering challenge.
How it can go wrong is inevitably things pop up when you’re
doing manufacturing at scale for the first time.
And so generally these are challenges that involve sort of days to weeks of
technical challenge that you need to solve, but you can inevitably solve them with a good team who knows what it’s doing.
And so that’s what we’ve built.
I think the biggest risk for us now, frankly, is hiring to fully build out that team,
to be able to do that on time and in the way that we need to.
But I’m not worried at all about whether there’s some technical challenge that will pop up that we cannot solve.
We are through that phase of what’s needed and it truly is an execution play from here.
There’s no magic pixie dust required.
We don’t need to say any prayers over a piece of technology to hope that it works.
We know that it works and we know that it works at the scale, but we need to go do it.
And so that’s the main challenge.
>> And then in the medium term, I mean, other people are working on other kinds of batteries,
other kinds of energy storage, long duration energy storage.
I mean, tell me about that sort of competitive landscape.
Like what are the other technologies that you think are compelling in a kind of similar duration?
>> Well, that term, long duration energy storage is an interesting one because it is used very broadly today.
And that’s why we actually prefer the term multi-day duration storage,
because it puts a little bit more precision around what we’re doing specifically.
So long duration energy storage is used today to refer to six hours of lithium ion, for example.
>> And you’re like, “Fat, you call that long?”
That’s like, “I get out of bed in the morning, I do six hours.”
>> Well, you know, for lithium ion, it is long compared to what it used to be, but it’s fairly incremental.
>> Well, who else is going for multi-day?
Like tell me other compelling multi-day storage technology.
>> Well, so it’s not so much that there’s other storage technologies.
It’s that there are other technologies that could act as a substitute for what we’re doing.
So for example, nuclear power, carbon capture on thermal plants, for example.
Hydrogen is also a possibility there.
Or even if you want to, transmission.
If we had a perfectly interconnected globe for transmission,
we would never need to store energy at all, right?
>> Oh, interesting, right, because the sun is always shining somewhere.
>> That’s right, 1/8 of the world is enjoying a summer afternoon at all times, right?
So now that’s a thought experiment.
>> And do you, like, I mean, obviously that’s the sort of limit case that’s not going to happen.
But when you think about reasons you might not win in the long run, for lack of a better word,
I don’t love that word there.
You think more about universes where we don’t actually need 100 hours of storage,
universes where there is great carbon capture on natural gas plants,
or more nuclear power, a better transmission?
>> Yeah, I don’t think about it quite that way.
When we think about competition, we need to make sure it’s in the context of the market
that we’re operating in.
And this is very much right now a non-zero-sum market.
In other words, it is growing incredibly fast and large.
And, you know, the whole industry is just accelerating in a way that it has not,
essentially, since it was built.
So we’re seeing load growth, you know, four or five percent or more in some cases.
It hasn’t been like that for literally 50 or 60 years.
>> Load growth is basically demand for electric.
>> Demand going up, that’s right.
>> And that’s like electrification plus artificial intelligence.
I mean, it’s essentially those two drivers.
>> Exactly, that’s exactly correct.
Electrification of cars for, you know, residential applications and electrification of industrial
processes, you know, very large consumers, you know, transportation industry, very large
consumers of energy overall.
And now a lot of that is becoming electric energy that they’re consuming.
And so our position in the market is very strong because we have a solution that is showing
up in a relevant time frame and it can scale in a way that our customers, these utilities,
need it to scale.
They need all solutions to show up.
We’ve yet to have a conversation with any utility who says, “I’m only going with one
solution.”
Right?
They’re trying to build nuclear.
They’re trying to build more natural gas.
They’re trying to build as much renewables as they possibly can.
And they’re going to need this kind of multi-duration storage.
So it’s such a growth market for us that in some ways, if you can show up with a product
that meets the specification on time and at scale, they will buy it just about as much
of it as you possibly can supply.
>> So if things go the way you hope they will go, what will the world look like in whatever,
the medium term, whatever that is for you, five years maybe?
>> Yeah.
So, in five years in the industry that we’re in, form could be a spectacular commercial
success of an amazing business and still have relatively small impact just because of the
size and scale of the industry overall.
And I’ll give you one point of reference.
The US today has about 1200 gigawatts of installed capacity, generation of capacity in it.
And over the next five years, if we absolutely blow it out of the water, we may make 10 gigawatts
worth of projects.
>> Which is a lot to be clear.
>> Which is a tremendous amount, right?
For one company to produce.
>> Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s a lot of shipping containers of iron batteries.
>> That’s right.
And so it will take probably another 10 years past that to see the kind of multi-day storage
that we’re bringing into the market have a real material effect in the industry.
And I think that we can get there for sure.
But it requires scaling very quickly in multiple markets, Europe, Asia, Africa, to be able
to drive the possibilities for what this kind of new type of asset in the electric system
can do.
>> So, should that make me worry about the pace of decarbonization?
I mean, even if you succeed wildly, you will be very small relative to the whatever, to
global demand for energy.
Like I get that that’s good for you and in the long term it’s good for the world.
But is it worrying in the kind of short to medium term?
Is it a reminder of how hard decarbonization is at various margins?
>> Well, it certainly is a reminder of just how hard it is and how large the challenges,
the scale of the challenge.
Another way of thinking about it is to achieve the goals that have been laid out by governments
across the globe, roughly $150 trillion of investment required through 2050.
>> Yeah.
Also good for you but worrying for the world.
>> Also good, worrying.
And the question is how quickly can we go from making the plans and having the technologies
that are nascent and scaling up to actually implementing them at scale.
So what is not so concerned to me is between 2030 and 2040, I see a huge amount of opportunity
to scale exactly what we’re talking about.
And again, it’s an all of the above scenario.
So I see a lot of effort that’s going into just the acceleration broadly speaking and
I do think that what form is bringing to the table can play a meaningful role in that and
it will take 15 years to scale it up and it’s very possible.
And we need a huge diversity of resources to meet the demand.
Our existence in many ways is based on electricity these days and we need all the different kinds
of solutions to show up.
And multi-daterition storage and specifically iron-air batteries can play a meaningful role
in that entire system and not only drive reliability up and cost down but also meet the goals of
load growth, which was a really big challenge and meet the decarbonization goals of the
electric system overall.
And having this kind of asset just makes solving those challenges a lot easier.
We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
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Now, of course, it’s time for the lightning round.
So tell me about vocational discernment.
Well, I think you’re referring to the fact that I went to Divinity School at one point.
This was, in fact, right before I joined the battery industry.
I went to the Yale Divinity School and Yale is a great place.
I did consider going into the ministry.
And one of the reasons why Yale Divinity School is a great place is because they put you through
the vocational discernment process, a very intentional process to discern if indeed the
ordained ministry is right for you.
And I realized very early on that I was not cut out at all to be an ordained minister,
which is fortunate.
You discerned that it was not your vocation.
That’s right.
And it’s a great thing to learn early on in the process.
And so I quickly realized, if not that, then what?
And so taking those same skills, because they are skills you can apply to a lot of mindsets,
really tried to figure out what did I want to work on.
I do want to work on, have always wanted to work on something that I felt was meaningful
and impactful.
And so for me, I just kept coming back to energy for a lot of reasons as a way to really
make lives better in a lot of ways.
One of the other elements of vocational discernment is you identify key features of yourself,
your personality, if you will.
And one thing that I have come to learn about myself, not just them, but over a lot of time,
is I’m a pretty patient person for the things that I think are worthwhile.
So I was prepared to pursue something that I thought might take a decade or two.
And that’s what has happened.
But I’ve stuck with it since then.
And I’m glad I did.
It’s been a great ride.
Why did you think you might want to be a priest?
Well, why do I think I want to be a priest is because I am attracted to a lot of the
intellectual elements of religion.
And that is not the vocation.
It turns out I’m much more attracted to problem solving than problem listening, which is a
large part of being a minister.
So that’s what I thought.
But I have a huge fascination intellectually with religion and with the notion of God.
And it was something that I wanted to spend time really thinking carefully about.
What’s something you learned in divinity school that’s helpful in running a company?
So many different things.
The study of theology, in many ways, is the study of human nature.
And one thing about batteries that I love, why it continues, as a category, continue
to fascinate me now and have since I started, is that batteries are in some ways like humans.
They’re all flawed in some way.
There is no perfect battery.
And they can always be improved.
That’s the other thing I like about them.
That seems like a particularly Christian reading of batteries, if I might say so.
We don’t know the limits of how batteries can be.
And if you’re curious enough, then the rewards can be fantastic.
And the other thing is, if you find the right fit for the battery, then the flaws don’t
matter so much.
And that’s also sort of the way humans are, right?
So you and John Steinbeck share a hometown, Salinas, California.
What’s one Steinbeck book?
If somebody’s going to read one John Steinbeck book, what should they read?
Well, East of Eden.
But that’s a long one.
So there are shorter ones.
It sounds strange, but endubius battle is one that really stuck with me.
That one, I don’t know.
But it’s about labor relations.
Which was like the family business for you growing up, right?
Yeah.
My father was a lawyer for farm workers, and my mom was a teacher in public schools for
basically kids and farm workers.
What’s one thing that you wish more people understood about energy or power?
Well, back to some of our earlier comments.
Just the scale of the industry and the size of things that happen.
It really boggles the mind to try and appreciate how big of an industry it is and how much
change is happening to such a large industry.
I think it was, maybe lots of people have said it, but I heard Jigar Shah describe the
grid as like the biggest machine ever built in the history of the world.
Which is a kind of rad way to think of it, like it’s this one giant machine, and not
only is it giant, it has to work all the time, right?
That’s the other wild.
You can never, ever turn it off.
That’s right.
Yeah.
And not only that, we’re matching supply and demand instantaneously at all times.
That’s how the machine operates.
So the way it operates is also just phenomenally complex.
And it’s amazing that we’re able to have as much reliability as we do today.
And so, you know, the grid will be reinvented, it will be rebuilt, essentially, and rebuilt
again over the next 30 or 40 years.
And so the scale, which is, again, hard to approximate, but appreciating that is key
to understanding the direction that it will take and what will be involved to affect this
change.
It’s like, is it the ship of Theseus?
Is that the one?
It’s like the giant, like national scale ship of Theseus where it’s like the whole grid
will be different.
And you won’t even notice.
You just flip the switch and the lights will go on.
That is what we’re aiming for, for sure.
Matteo Jaramillo is the co-founder and CEO of Form Energy.
Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter-Chang.
It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sarah Bouguere.
You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
Hey, everybody.
I’m Kai Rizdal, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy.
Money influences so much of what we do and how we live.
That’s why it’s essential to understand how this economy works.
At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future
of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you.
Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
(upbeat music)
Mateo Jaramillo is the co-founder and CEO of Form Energy. Mateo’s problem is this: How do you build batteries that can provide affordable backup power to the grid for days at a time? As it turns out, the basic technology was developed – and then mostly ignored – over 50 years ago.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
