Latest / The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast / Episode 244. Harnessing CO2 for Heating & Cooling with Lalit Chordia and Todd Palcic

Transcript

Episode 244. Harnessing CO2 for Heating & Cooling with Lalit Chordia and Todd Palcic · The Refrigeration Mentor Podcast

• 0:00
  Todd: Trevor, I'm Todd Pelsic and this is Lalit Chordia.
• 0:01
  Awesome. Great to meet you guys. Thanks. We've been business partners for a lot of years and Lalit is the, uh, is the inventor and founder of Thar Energy.
• 0:02
  Trevor: Well, thanks for, for joining me. I'd love to find out a little bit more about your guys, the CO2 experience. I see, uh, just looking up your profile, 1982, you started working with, uh, subcritical fluids. That's crazy. I only started learning about them 10 years ago.
• 0:03
  So it's amazing that much experience you have as well as, uh, seeing your background in, uh, CO2 ground source, heat pumps. That's back in 2009. That's, Getting an understanding of that, you know, so much experience and knowledge that, uh, I'm sure that you have the share that you help customers with. I'd love to find out about, uh, where you guys started, how you got here and where you guys are moving forward.
• 0:04
  Todd: Yeah. Just, just a little, a little bit of background from my side.
• 0:05
  There's a family of Thar, uh, companies, all of them in some one way or another working with supercritical fluids over the years.
• 0:06
  Some of them are gone now. So Thar Instruments sold off to Waters Corporation, a public company, Thar Pharma sold off to Grunenthal, a pharmaceutical company. Another company called Criticality was sold off to a large tobacco company and some other ones.
• 0:07
  Um, we've, we've kind of merged in. And put together. But right now we have our process essentially in a nutshell, um, and it's sister company, and then we have our energy and the spinoff of thought energy is clean heat technologies. And we, we decided to launch clean heat technologies as. obvious urgent need for, especially I feel like after the Ukraine, uh, the invasion of Ukraine, there's been a tremendous change in, in thinking on energy where there was a huge boom in clean tech.
• 0:08
  And then there was a, uh, there was a fall in clean tech. And then the, then the war reminded everybody, nope, we have to be a lot more efficient. And, uh, and so we were trying to, we got a little far ahead of everyone else in 2009. You know, Lalit invented the ground source CO2 heat pump and, uh, as far as for the, the first one in the U.
• 0:09
  S., 2008, and he installed it in 2009 here at our facility, providing both patio heating and, uh, indoor heating and cooling. So we're a little bit ahead of the market on, from that side. And we want to give credit to the Green Building Alliance of Pittsburgh for that. But now here we come a few years later and, and Lalit and his team have, uh, have done a number of U.
• 0:10
  S. Department of Energy Grants and moved forward and, and now won the Empire Prize in New York for Steam technology. Won one of seven winners, uh, for the up to $2 million, uh, prize. And so that's where I want to kind of, that's, that's where we are today.
• 0:11
  Trevor: That's, that's pretty amazing. Like Lalit. I'll ask you, how did you even get into, back in 1980?
• 0:12
  How, where did Supercritical Fluids come from? Why did you even, even think about that that long ago? Because there was a few pioneers at the beginning, but how, how did that even start for you?
• 0:13
  Lalit: Well, what happened is that I did a course called entrepreneurship and design and in this course, they asked me to take a, you know, do a project and I talked to my professor and said, I don't know what to do.
• 0:14
  What should I do? And he said, look, I'm from North Dakota, family of farmers. Can you figure out how to convert vegetable oil into biodiesel? And that's where it started. And that is a supercritical process to convert vegetable oil into biodiesel. And that's what got into, uh, supercritical for me. And then a friend of mine, uh, Ray Hauck, who was doing his MBA at Carnegie Mellon, came and met me and he said, Lalit, I want to start a company in chemical engineering.
• 0:15
  I said, look, I'm working on Supercritical, if you're interested, let's talk about it. So he comes out on April 14th and says, guys, SBIR due tomorrow, can we write all night? So I said, okay. So we wrote a proposal to National Science Foundation. It's called the Small Business Innovation Research Grant. And we wrote it.
• 0:16
  And because he had a car and I didn't, he took it to the airport and got it delivered to the Department of Energy. And I remember this very well, three months later, September 8th, we got funded and it was 30, 000, but in 1982, 30, 000 was a lot of money. So we were absolutely excited. And that's how we started.
• 0:17
  And that's how the company formed.
• 0:18
  Trevor: Wow. That's very, uh, very interesting story, but not, and I, I guess we give props to that professor, right? Just kind of give you an idea of where to start and then just taking off and growing from there. I was looking at both your profiles on, um, on LinkedIn and I, And I see the entrepreneurship in your background and like co2 is something that came years later but both of you are just true entrepreneurs and co2 looks like it fell in into place and you're at the right place and right time right now in the The global industry of refrigeration because co2 is starting to take off.
• 0:19
  It took off years ago, but now we're seeing inclementary increase in North America for sure.
• 0:20
  Lalit: That's absolutely correct. You know, when we started this 15 years ago, we were the first to do and we were going to get a couple large projects. Uh, but at the time the federal government gave tax breaks only to for profit companies.
• 0:21
  So even though we are working with two large universities, They couldn't benefit from doing the ground source heat pumps. Now that changed with the IRA. So they are allowing nonprofits to transfer these credits to for profits so that they can reduce the cost. So I think that's, it's a big deal and it's going to happen.
• 0:22
  And a lot more people are going to do ground source heat pumps. And we think CO2 is the best in the ground source heat pumps.
• 0:23
  Trevor: Yeah, I think there's, uh, I've done a lot, a few podcasts and ground source CO2, ground source heat pumps. Uh, there's still, uh, uh, ways to go with it, but I think there's going to be a game changer.
• 0:24
  I have, uh, one of my friends, uh, technicians, he's working on a system right now that, uh, Walgreens, , and they're doing a ground source heat pump at that, the full net zero store. And he says it just working amazingly. You know, for the fire refrigeration system. And so we'll see more, more of that as it evolves.
• 0:25
  And as more and more people, as it becomes a norm Todd, what was interesting when I was looking at your profile, you know, you're a real entrepreneur background, but you have a huge technical side as well. And that's what a lot of people will talk about, about your business skills, but also your technical skills.
• 0:26
  How did you get involved with CO2? With a lot of it, uh, on, on these projects.
• 0:27
  Todd: Well, we started a company when I was still an undergrad and we're trying a couple of different technical theories of his and another partner of ours, but we had a three person company, another guy, another Carnegie Mellon grad.
• 0:28
  , and, uh, we've ended up looking at, believe it or not, we were working on inline detectors for coal based power plants and trying to, trying to, trying to reduce them, make them more efficient, reduce the, you know, the environmental footprint way back then. And, and interesting thing is we ended up spinning into, he already had a super critical company and I was literally working amongst his small, super critical team.
• 0:29
  And at some point I asked him, uh, you know, Hey, can we spin off this, uh, another partner? And I said, can we spin off our instruments and just go, go to another location? No R and D we'll stay out of all of your skunk works and we'll just make instruments for the, for the, for the wealthiest people in the world, which is the pharma companies.
• 0:30
  And so we, what happened was I, I just doing a lot of market research and a lot of listening and loads of travel and going around. I realized people who could afford to pay for it were the people getting the R& D tax credits and who were spending an enormous amount of R& D and that was big pharma. So I just focused on the top 25 big pharma companies and they bit and we, we really revolutionized drug discovery purification.
• 0:31
  Most of the world now, all the big companies, they've all switched over. CO2 based purification of their, uh, of their chiro molecules, of their small molecules in, in chemistry. So it's, it's really neat to see. It's neat to see. And then I founded the green chemistry group and, uh, where we celebrate that every year at different, in a different country.
• 0:32
  Uh, we celebrate the, the, the transition to CO2 and it's recycled CO2 as well in most cases. So it's, I like to say it's upcycled, CO2, and it's even upcycled squared because we can. We can recycle the upcycled CO2.
• 0:33
  Trevor: Oh, that's amazing. So let's talk about the, that your first ground source heap on the way back 2008, you were working on it. Even components at the time. Aren't like they are today. Like we've got so many components now. How was that finding all the parts, the components globally to get the, your first ground source, , heat pump running for, for your buildings?
• 0:34
  Lalit: Uh, it was not easy, but we did get the compressors from Dorin.
• 0:35
  And, but we built everything else ourselves. And we actually did a lot of drilling. We did, uh, horizontal drilling. We did vertical drilling. We did drilling at an angle. We did everything that one could think of, just to see what works and what doesn't work. And we do like radial drilling because then we can drill six or seven holes and bring all of them to one place.
• 0:36
  So the cost becomes easier to manage than having, uh, holes being drilled every, uh, what do you call, 15 feet or so, and then connecting them. So we tried everything that we can, and the nice thing about CO2 is because we are doing phase change in the ground, my tube size that goes into the ground is only three eighths of an inch, which implies the hole that you drill is about, you know, my hole is about two, two and a half inches hole compared to somebody who's doing water.
• 0:37
  Well, they are six and a half to seven and a half inch old. So we are talking one third the size in diameter or one ninth in the area. That means you're talking about so much material that you're removing that you have to dispose of and so much material that you have to put in. This is a lot easier, a lot simpler, a lot cheaper.
• 0:38
  Now, for example, if you have a small house in an urban area and you have a driveway to go that goes to the back of your house, You cannot bring one of the traditional, uh, two million dollar drill rig to come to the back of a house to drill a hole, uh, well there. But with our system, It is the size of a SUV, you know, the typical, uh, point to direct, direct drilling system.
• 0:39
  And it just goes to the, in your backyard, backyard and drill a hole. And we can do a direct exchange right there without any problems. So it is easy, cheap, inexpensive compared to everything else that people are doing.
• 0:40
  Trevor: And that's one of the big things, one of the biggest costs right now that I've heard.
• 0:41
  Is if you're a how, just like me, I'm in an urban area. I got my house already built from the 1960s to get someone to come in here and to do the drills. It'll make the cost of that unit versus a standard central air that I have, I have here, uh, astronomical, right? So the cost of the installation, this is what I'm understanding needs to come down, and this is one way that.
• 0:42
  Um, ground source heap units that you guys design will, uh, reduce those costs, is that correct?
• 0:43
  Lalit: Absolutely. We're talking reducing that cost by a factor of three, if not even greater.
• 0:44
  .
• 0:45
  So, at least by, so if you take a drilling cost, right, I've seen people quoting, uh, on an average 10 to 20 dollars Effort to drill and put the pipes in and grout them We can easily drop that by a factor of three if not for a factor of five And once you do that, and then you get the tax credits a combination of that those two Literally makes the drilling free
• 0:46
  Trevor: but that's the big thing is that the tax credits and I like it it if the customers or that end users is knowledgeable enough and it's easy to get We'll see this go a lot quicker.
• 0:47
  Um, what I've seen in the past though, is where there is a kind of a lot of gray area when these new technologies come in, cause I'm all for it. You know what I mean? It's how do we make it easier for the customer? And I think if there's certain tax credits that make it easier for them, I think it'll go a lot quicker.
• 0:48
  What are your thoughts on that?
• 0:49
  Lalit: I think the new tax credits are pretty easy, very simple. Uh, I don't see an issue. I, I think It comes to the business model. How do you go about doing this? And at a certain level, it's not a bad idea if somebody came and said, look, I'll do all the installation. I'll do everything.
• 0:50
  I'll take the cost. I'll, I'll charge you, uh, you know, whatever, X dollars a month. Even that kind of a business model, Makes a lot of sense.
• 0:51
  Trevor: Okay. So so back in 2008 2009 you get your first one installed It's been running 15 years now. Okay, what what kind of maintenance service? Let's talk a little bit about that over the last 15 years.
• 0:52
  How has that system been running how effective that it is versus The, the designs that you make today, because I know the advancement in your design is huge. It's like night and day, 15 years. Let's talk about that a little bit.
• 0:53
  Lalit: So, you know, from a fundamental compressor point of view, things haven't changed much.
• 0:54
  They are about, about the same. So most of, uh, the nice thing about CO2 is that you went out the refrigerant. It's no big deal. You know, you don't need a certified mechanic to come and replace the refrigerant. Uh, it is very, very inexpensive. Uh, CO2 in small quantities is 50 cents a pound, while some of the new refrigerants are, you know, 500 a pound.
• 0:55
  You know, there's no comparison. So it's easy, there's nothing complicated about it, the only thing that people are always concerned about is that the pressure that we operate is higher. Actually, when you think about it, our flow rates are substantially lower, so my tube size is actually smaller. It's thicker tubes, but smaller tubes.
• 0:56
  So it's, there's nothing to worry about from that point of view. And we think it's the best thing since sliced bread that everybody should do a ground source heat pump and you can drive down the whole energy cost of your house considerably.
• 0:57
  Todd: Switching over to the AirSource side, we're finding a lot of success and we've had commercial customers.
• 0:58
  So first, the first customer being Thar Process for, uh, the clean heat technologies, AirSource, simultaneous cooling and heating for our supercritical fluid processes, because supercritical fluid processes require a lot of cooling or pumping the CO2 as a liquid, and then heating on the, on the other side.
• 0:59
  Um, first for the extraction process itself. So, what's really interesting is how we're, we're able to use, uh, air source heat pump as well for, for industrial processes. So the, the, forget about whether it's supercritical extraction, ethanol extraction, any, many other applications where, and, or, and think about the laboratory or a manufacturing floor.
• 1:00
  So many places that you have cold storage, at the same time you have, uh, all kinds of applications that require heating, reactions, fermentation, uh, Uh, oh my gosh, there's so many, so much drying, there's drying, especially in the food industry and the ingredients industry. It's a tremendous, uh, uh, tremendous source of, of, of the energy costs, in fact, the driver of a lot of the energy costs and for example, plant based proteins, which we visited some facilities, there's a lot of expense in drying off all that and moving, uh, and, and, and solvents, of course.
• 1:01
  So we've actually now sold an instrument, commercialized this technology over the last year. Sold an instrument and deployed it in Arizona where they have very high, uh, very high costs on the cooling side. And we've been so successful that we're going to sell two more. So we will soon have three of these air source simultaneous heating and cooling, , heat pumps out there.
• 1:02
  Lalit: And the interesting thing about, uh, what Todd is talking about is in Arizona, You know, you look at the temperature, it's about 115, 117 Fahrenheit. 200 degrees every day. Right.
• 1:03
  Todd: Yeah.
• 1:04
  Lalit: And our system works under those kinds of conditions.
• 1:05
  Todd: 140 actually, I've been to the parking lot. It's a blacktop parking lot, believe it or not, in Phoenix.
• 1:06
  And it's 140 degrees in that parking lot. I'm not talking about touching the parking lot. That's the air temperature that parking lot is, is just unbelievable. And, and yeah, we've been able to solve that, that problem versus a conventional chiller.
• 1:07
  Trevor: So, so that's good. Cause I see more and more of these, uh, CO2.
• 1:08
  Air heat pumps, cool chillers, uh, come into the market. I see around the world, lots of people investing a lot of money in developing these. What are some of the things that you learned about getting that first one out there or something? Because it is the hottest thing. There's always a learning curve when you're getting this.
• 1:09
  What are some of the things that you, did you guys learn? You're like, Oh man. Okay. This is what we need to do. And this fixed it. And now, cause you've got it running. You got, you're getting three more out there. What are those learning curves that you
• 1:10
  Todd: came across Todd? What can we share? I mean, I don't know if we want to share a lot of this.
• 1:11
  This is where the part of the secret sauce is, but it's okay. No, I would just say just in general, we're talking about stainless steel where, and we're talking about off the shelf when it comes to the air source, simultaneous heating, cooling off the shelf. The beauty is we've got off the shelf components for the most part.
• 1:12
  Awesome. Of course, we have, we already fabricate and manufacture here high pressure components. So the ones that are not off the shelf, we already have them here. We have that inventory. We have that. So, , as works, we, we were able to do a lot more when, when we, we have a toll processing facility here, GMP, you know, FDA, uh, authorized facility, certified facility.
• 1:13
  And, uh, so we're able to, to experiment and, and put on different heat loads. And see how it performs at higher and lower. So before we ever shifted out to Arizona, we'd already run it through its paces. Of course, you know, the temperature came and we had to do a couple of things, uh, to, to on how to handle.
• 1:14
  We in Pittsburgh, you know, we have a high humidity, um, but we never reach a hundred degrees how to say, the year's like 94 f. You know, and you're in, you're in, uh, you're just a few hours north of us. It's a similar situation. I think that was the, that was the main thing is trying to adjust for Arizona.
• 1:15
  When we put another one in Pennsylvania or Ontario or Illinois, it's, uh, we already figured it all out. So, so yeah, I love it. If you want to comment on Arizona at all.
• 1:16
  Lalit: No, I think the beauty of our system is a simultaneous heating and cooling, right? You have different loads on the heating side and you have different loads on the cooling side.
• 1:17
  And we designed our system such that whatever is the excess between the heating and the cooling, we went out that to the environment. So you could today be, uh, in an industrial facility where you're doing, uh, cold stories to store your product, but you have to really dry it. So, you need heating on one side and you need cooling on that side.
• 1:18
  And the net difference between the two is, is what is vented out really to the environment. And that's what we have figured out how to do that and how to do that optimally in our system.
• 1:19
  Todd: And the luck for us is. We know already in the Arizona, we built the extraction system.
• 1:20
  So we know, precisely what it requires and, and we can custom design the system with off the shelf components that do that. And the beauty there is from a maintenance point of view, if there is a problem. This is no longer some sort of theoretical science. And okay, let's try to reproduce that.
• 1:21
  No, no, it's, it's common components. We have plenty of
• 1:22
  Lalit: them. And these are the same components that we have used for the last, you know, 30 years since supercritical CO2. So we understand as a matter of fact, you know, if you use the word CO2, I don't think you'll find any other company which understands CO2 as well as we do.
• 1:23
  I'm not, I'm not talking just about. Heat pumps, I'm talking about everything put together, the thermodynamics, the chemistry, everything put together.
• 1:24
  Trevor: Three phases of CO2. Yeah, I love that. So what's your customer? So I love to hear this because now your customer has been using most, uh, let's say heat pump chillers with HFC, HFOs, whatever it is.
• 1:25
  You guys come in with, With a super critical co2. What are your customers thoughts? What kind of, uh, uh, cops we'll talk about coefficient of performance differences with co2 and those, but what kind, what are your customers saying about about this? I know they're ordering more, but what are your thoughts over the years of, um, those refrigerants, uh,
• 1:26
  Todd: our heat pumps versus the ones you're doing now?
• 1:27
  Before you even, before you even answer the COP side, I'll just say this. They're willing to pay 2x at least for a CO2 versus a conventional chiller and heater. But, but the, the heater and chiller required, so for a simultaneous They're probably willing to pay up to three X and even at three X, because we're right now, we have it, we have it priced about a little more than two X.
• 1:28
  And even so they're immediately after one month of operation, say we need two more. We need to start putting this in all over the place. This is, this is too good to be true. And, and it's not from a tax advantage side. It's strictly from an energy and these guys are probably not going to be able to get the tax break, uh, from this.
• 1:29
  So, if this worked for this particular customer, we're very, very confident, and when we get, when we start talking to people who, uh, who need the tax break, who are not in R& D lab, for example, don't have, uh, you know, where you have profits and you can, you can write it off, it's a great opportunity. Now, Lalit, you can talk maybe more about the COP side.
• 1:30
  Lalit: No, the COP for CO2, especially on the heating side is uncomparable. It's probably the best of all the things out there. So there's no comparison. And we all know CO2 on the chilling side is not as good. So when, but you do a combination of A plus B, we always come out ahead.
• 1:31
  Todd: Want to talk about the percentage saved?
• 1:32
  I think we're close to 50 percent of the energy required. Uh, saved on that system.
• 1:33
  Lalit: Yeah. So what happens in a simultaneous heating and cooling that we used to sell earlier, we used to sell a chiller separately and we sell, used to sell the heating system separately. And the funny part is the heat of the chiller would end up in the room and then room is then cooled with a different chiller.
• 1:34
  So it's actually pretty bad by combining these two. Only the net difference between the two is being invented into the environment. So that makes it at least a factor of two better, if not more.
• 1:35
  Todd: Yeah. So 50 percent energy savings is a big deal to someone running equipment every single day in a lab that requires air conditioning.
• 1:36
  Lalit: I do want to talk about the, steam heating with supercritical CO2. So, uh, we just got awarded, as Todd said earlier, one of the seven people on the Empire Technology Prize.
• 1:37
  And it's very interesting, right? If you go to New York City, they have, whatever, hundreds, hundred thousand buildings, tall, multi story buildings, all being heated with steam. And the steam, it's, uh, supplied by, uh, Con Edison. And for Con Edison, this makes sense, right? They have a huge natural gas plant, which they convert that into steam.
• 1:38
  Now, the loss in New York state is that by 2030, every commercial building has to meet certain carbon footprint. And if they continue to use that steam, they cannot meet that carbon footprint. And Con Edison is not doing anything to replace the carbon source for the steam. So each building owner has to figure out what to do.
• 1:39
  So the New York State government decided, look, Con Edison is not doing much, so they created this Climate Fight, which is a non profit. And the Climate Fight group was to go out in the whole country and find people who can replace the current steam generation with a heat pump based steam generation. And, uh, ClimateFight did a fantastic job.
• 1:40
  They actually went all over and they got 70 people to apply. And they picked seven, and luckily we were one of the seven. And the reason why I think it's very important I say this is, Unlike most of the places where you get a grant from the Department of Energy, they give you the grant and you just go and then you do whatever you want.
• 1:41
  Climate Fight actually had not consultants, not academicians, but they had the users, that is the property owners, the property managers, the MEPs, and the steam boilers to go look at these 70 applications and figure out which seven they wanted to work with. So from a commercialization point of view, they are already connecting us to the actual user.
• 1:42
  And And the afternoon that we were there, they made sure we met with the users. And I asked only this question, which was very important for me is, why did you pick us? What's so great about Thar? And the answer was twofold. One is CO2, because they felt that CO2 was one of the better refrigerants, especially compared to the new refrigerants that are out there.
• 1:43
  They are the forever chemicals. In other words, you leak them. They are dead in the environment forever. You cannot destroy them. So CO2 was a great, uh, refrigerant from that point of view. That is zero global warming potential, zero ozone potential. And it's not a forever, uh, chemical. Then the other thing that there was, then this is the technical side of it.
• 1:44
  The cycle that we proposed, we gave them a COP that they loved it. And they said it's, they thought it was doable and we could do it. And it was high enough that they would be very interested. And they are looking forward for us to delivering the COP that we claim we are going to deliver. So that's where we are.
• 1:45
  And I think, uh, from a market point of view, just New York City, the market is 4 billion. And this is just the eating side, right? Now, as Todd always talks about the commu industrial side, you have the same applications in the food industry and pharmaceutical industry where they need steam.
• 1:46
  But just the, uh, U. S. market for commercial buildings for steam replacement, 40 billion. That's why these numbers are good.
• 1:47
  Trevor: That's a target that everyone should look at and it's an opportunity to because we do need to to start looking more people need to start looking at co2 and co2 heat pumps and co2 and buildings because it's it's coming that direction.
• 1:48
  , what are your thoughts on, uh, on this? Transition, because you guys have been working at this since decades, right? What are your thoughts on this transition? How long it's starting to evolve here versus other parts of the world. What are your thoughts about?
• 1:49
  Todd: First want to mention, you know, it's, it's funny because if you go back an hour, if you take a tour or you're more than welcome to drive down, it's like four hours, uh, five hours and, and take a look, what we're, what we have back there is more than just one heat pump.
• 1:50
  And we're, we're looking at, you're going to see a lot of different heating, cooling ideas. But we have a, we built now a larger scale, larger scale heat pump for industrial purposes to take the next level. I think scale is going to play a role here. And I think the future, to me, I mean, I've both go, go back and forth at it.
• 1:51
  Imagine this is like landing in, uh, in the United States, uh, Plymouth rock kind of time here, right? If this is a wide open area that everyone needs something, you know, from a residential because there's a hundred million homes to apartments with a refrigeration storage down below or, or a grocery store down below it.
• 1:52
  Imagine that application. You have all the office buildings are under siege right now from, from being big emitters. Plus, uh, the costs are going to, their costs are going. And their, and, and, and their tenants want to pay less and off in the office market. So now how does an office building reposition itself to be more competitive?
• 1:53
  It needs to be greener. It needs to be a lead, et cetera, et cetera. So this, this, this transition is going to start with cost. I think at the end of the day, you have to start with, the work with partners who understand costs and on and have to have cost conscientious customers.
• 1:54
  And typically my, my belief Trevor, and that's how I took the, our instruments market, I took it on with by going after the lowest hanging fruit, the really top 25 farm. I mean, sure there were another thousand labs that were interested in super critical, but you have to focus. And, and our focus, I, you know, when I look at New York city, I look at Rockefeller center and say, let's start there.
• 1:55
  You've got an ice rink, you've got an eight story building, let's do a simultaneous heating and cooling. And once you've done it at a place like Rockefeller center. Everybody is going to come in and you need a big PR event. We need people like you out there. Um, I, I think that a lot of industries, we see electric cars, plant proteins, they, they spike up and then they, they come down.
• 1:56
  And it takes a long time for that second wave after the, you know, the fast movers, the, you know, your, your pioneers and first movers after they're done, there's a lull before the mass market comes on with every type of technology curve, you know, the standard technology curve. And if we just go after the really, really big players, uh, and make a good, good PR out of it.
• 1:57
  And I said this to, and recently on a panel and plant proteins. You know, we have to do a better job of working with the media. We shouldn't blame, uh, the media or blame the government, blame anyone. Um, ultimately we have to provide something that saves the consumer money. In this case, those are the building owners.
• 1:58
  It also makes the, uh, the engineering and architectural firms look good. You make them look good. They're gonna, they're gonna introduce you to the next project, the next project, the next,
• 1:59
  Trevor: and then, and on top of that, you know, bringing value to the customers, making more cost effective. 'cause it is, it is a bigger expense than what we were doing before, but we had 50 years of working on those products.
• 2:00
  So it can evolve. CO2 equipment is brand. It's still brand new. You know, to the, to the, to the grand scheme versus since, you know, the last 40, 50 years working on heat pumps, you know what I mean? Developing those. So I know the price and the costs are going to continue to come down. It's bringing that huge amount of value to the customers, bringing a huge amount of value to the.
• 2:01
  The different organizations from the manufacturers to anyone involved. And this is what's going to happen with CO2. I know, I know it as more people start to understand it and realize it, it is going to become more mainstream, which is, it's still not me to me. It's mainstream. Cause I talk about it day in and day out.
• 2:02
  But in the grand scale of things, we're still a small CO2, still a small part of our refrigeration and HVAC industry, but it will continue to grow. And I think bringing value just like you are to your customers, to the people around you is just going to make it a fast track in our industry.
• 2:03
  Lalit: And, you know, I, I was just coming back from Dubai and it's amazing to see how large refrigeration systems are there.
• 2:04
  Uh, one of the malls that was there, it was not the largest one, medium scale. 50, 000 tons of chili. Now, if you, if we can make a dent over there, that's huge.
• 2:05
  Trevor: That is huge. 50, 000 tons. 50, 000 tons. You know, I'm usually, I do a lot of CO2 training, you know, but it's like a couple hundred tons, you know what I mean?
• 2:06
  Now that's a 50, 000, that's amazing. But that's the thing. There are so many different opportunities globally that we're going to start to see pockets of CO2 starting, which, which it started, you know what I mean? 20, 30 years ago, it started just like when you started it, but now it's evolving. And now more and more people are taking on more and more people are believing in it, you know what I mean?
• 2:07
  Because they start to see COPs of four, five, six, seven, eight, you know what I mean? Versus what they seen before.
• 2:08
  Todd: But remember, I think it's also important to note that it doesn't need to be the one solution in a building. Yeah. This is an existing steam system. And you have some cooling requirements. Like I mentioned, whether you have a grocery store in the bottom or chilling, you know, some sort of refrigeration or what have you.
• 2:09
  , if we, or if we can even provide, uh, air conditioning, for example, a tall building like at Miami or something like that, imagine the, or your places where you need heating and cooling, but let's, let's, let's, we're not saying that you have to cut off your steam supply, you're already connected to the steam network.
• 2:10
  And in a city, for example, like Pittsburgh, um, or on a camp, the college campus that has, uh, It has a, you know, already a steam generation system and you don't have to cut off. We can be, it can be a hybrid approach and we can be supplemental or above a certain range you switch over to switch over if necessary.
• 2:11
  So sort of like I look at it, like the peaking plants we see all around here in the States, we see these little natural gas peaking plants, you know, when it, whenever, um, you know, you have a 90 degree F day. Uh, you know, it's time to turn on some of the peaking, uh, plans, especially if there's maintenance on a local power plant and it's shut down.
• 2:12
  Lalit: So Todd talked about peaking plants, right? So what we are also trying to do is integrate small sizes of thermal energy storage. I'm not talking huge, but small. The objective of that is to be able to move, uh, your energy, uh, cooling energy. And store it in the thermal energy storage and use it during the peak hours so that you're producing it off peak and storing it.
• 2:13
  Or you look at the weather that's happening, uh, let's say tomorrow is much hotter than today, then generate the cooling today instead of tomorrow and store it. So there's a lot of things that we are integrating to make our system more efficient, drive down the energy cost, and it's a good return for the buyer.
• 2:14
  Todd: There's a big concern about, and you've seen this in Texas and some other places, but The overall load, this is the, the load's gonna come down. We have an increased demand for electricity because of, you know, uh, data storage, uh, crypto, yeah. Uh, you know, ai, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right? And, um, and then of course, globally, it's 'cause of a increasingly large middle class and expectations of a middle, middle class lifestyle.
• 2:15
  You know, we're, we, believe it or not, you'd think it would be saving energy over, over time here. But you, you, you have electrification of car of cars, and we're gonna have electrification of. Industry boats, aviation, you're going to have aviation, electrification of everything. And so reduction of demand, especially peak demand.
• 2:16
  It should be welcomed by everyone in the power industry.
• 2:17
  Trevor: And I think so too. So what's the next, so what's the next step you just spun off? Uh, is it clean heat technologies? I believe now this is more of a heating and cooling systems. Is that correct? CO2 heating and
• 2:18
  Lalit: clean heat technologies. The main focus of it is to provide steam for buildings to heat them.
• 2:19
  Okay. That's the main thing. Then we have a separate company that's going to do simultaneous heating and cooling that Todd talked about for chemical industries.
• 2:20
  Todd: So that's Thar Energy, which does a lot of other things. And Thar Energy right now is builder and Thar process is now selling along with a partner, uh, selling the simultaneous air heating, cooling, air source, heat pumps.
• 2:21
  Lalit: And the third one that we're going to have is a separate company that does ground source heat pumps with CO2. Lots of stuff going on there, but you know, just to give you a little bit of why I think ground source heat pumps are fantastic. I'm sure everybody knows it, but if you think about it this way, right?
• 2:22
  If you have a house and you're outside temperature, which is what standard, 25 degrees C or 77 Fahrenheit, let's say you need 3 tons. When the temperature gets to 105, 110, for the same house, you need, because you're producing less liquid for your chilling, , you need a 6 ton system, literally double. So you have to run a bigger system.
• 2:23
  Just on those few days in a year when it's, uh, really hot. So what happens with geothermal is because you're using ground source, you really need, you're going back to your three tons, or really maybe even smaller than three tons, maybe it's two and a half tons. And the motor size, instead of being, if you assume one kilowatt is one tenth, instead of six kilowatts, it comes down to two and a half kilowatts.
• 2:24
  And that has a huge effect everywhere. The wires, the connections, you know, if you just roll out from the transformer to the motor, everything that's in between, it drives that cost out.
• 2:25
  Todd: Combine that with microgrids and the, and the change of getting off of the big, big power plants and long transmission and all the losses.
• 2:26
  You, you know, you build a new community and you have ground source heat pumps in this community, or either one for the apartment building or condo building, then individual houses. And especially the way we have built the really large houses here in the States. I mean, think about now the, the microgrid can be smaller.
• 2:27
  I mean, it's the, the infrastructure impacts are, are extensive.
• 2:28
  Lalit: And if you add AI into this and you include what's going to happen in the next 24 hours and run your systems based on that. That will drive down your cost even further down, and that's where we are all heading, in that direction.
• 2:29
  Trevor: And I think that's where a lot of the power usage is being, it's just wasted.
• 2:30
  Like, you drive by buildings, I've seen it many times in cities, even here in Toronto, every light's on in the building, you know what I mean? air conditioning running down to 65. You know what I mean? And that doesn't really need to be. It's just, that's the way it's always been done. And I think with AA technology is really going to help, , the power grids as well as help the planet itself.
• 2:31
  And, uh, like Todd said, micro grids, I think that we're going to see more and more of that as well. I've had lots of people talking to me about more and more of these new subdivisions. Um, all integrated into one. Um, have you seen much of that globally, you guys?
• 2:32
  Lalit: Microgrids? Not yet. Not yet. I think it's going to happen, but it's, you know, a, in, with the, when you go, go globally, the problems are very different.
• 2:33
  Our problems in the U. S. are very different. Their problems are very different.
• 2:34
  Todd: Yeah, exactly. And I think, look, I think you're going to have, you're going to see it more and more in places like Texas, where it's deregulated and you're having these problems. Uh, you're, you're going to see it a lot of people who want to be, uh, off grid, but they really don't want to be off grid.
• 2:35
  So rural communities, obviously it's a no brainer for them, but, but think about the campuses of the future. Why wouldn't they produce their own energy, whether it's a Google's campus or it's, uh, Carnegie Mellon's campus or, you know, these kinds of, these kinds of places. And, but ultimately the developing world benefit the most, because think about it, you're trying to build a new resort in Mexico, think about how difficult it is with the bureaucracy and such.
• 2:36
  Get on to the grid there and we all know from, from, you know, Lelit has experience in India and even, even my, in the early days, I had some experience in India and very, very difficult with bureaucracy and, uh, other issues, you know, uh, to, you know, get it, get in line, get onto the grid there. So it's, it's, it's a challenge.
• 2:37
  So there's a lot of hope in I'd say the developing world, especially at places where there's now people have expectations for air conditioning.
• 2:38
  Trevor: It is a really interesting conversation on C2 is it's love.
• 2:39
  I love chatting with people who look at, see CO2 differently than me, because my background C2 comes from just straight up refrigeration, you know, supermarket refrigeration, industrial refrigeration, and over the last five, six years, I'm working with more people just like yourselves who think differently about CO2, use it in a different way.
• 2:40
  using it for heating, using it as a full system. You know what I mean? You're doing all your medium, low, high temp, you're heating for buildings. And I think that is going to continue to evolve with CO2 as a refrigerant, uh, in, in, in the world. Globally.
• 2:41
  Lalit: Where I see things happening is that we'll integrate our, uh, ground source heat pump with a solar panel and a dedicated solar panel, and here's the reason why.
• 2:42
  Now, if you go to California, which was the leader in solar panels, They're generating so much electricity during the day that it's excess and the grids and the utility companies are really hurting because there's too much electricity. So the government just passed which said if you're pushing electricity to the grid, you're not getting much.
• 2:43
  It's not net metering anymore. It's now you don't get much for how much energy that you can put in. Now our objective is to use that excess energy on the ground source heat pump to produce whatever heating or chilling that they need and store that and use that at night so that you don't have to get electricity from the grid.
• 2:44
  So I think this combination with, , uh, storage of, uh, energy So, combining, uh, PV with ground source heat pump and CO2 and thermal energy storage is going to become standard as we go along.
• 2:45
  Todd: It makes sense because even in Spain recently, this summer, the price of energy went negative as electricity. I mean, they just showed all the solar installed in, in Spain and, you know, Hawaii has had similar, uh, crisis where, uh, and, and even in Nevada, you think there's a big story like Warren Buffett's company.
• 2:46
  People argue that they, they, they thought they had a 20 or 30 year net metering, uh, contract. And then boom, they, it's just too, honestly, doesn't take a whole lot of houses to put, you know, solar. And all of a sudden you've got too much energy in a place like Nevada where it's sunny 350 days a year.
• 2:47
  Trevor: And it's crazy that we have this much extra energy where there's places in the world that don't have any.
• 2:48
  And we have, so how do we, how do we transfer that? That's a whole nother story altogether. But I love, I love the. I love the idea of CO2 ground heat pump and, and getting it to the mass market, you know, because I, I believe they're more environmentally friendly. They're not difficult to work on. You know, we might think of it as people think of it, they're difficult to work on, but what I've seen out there already, they're not difficult to work on, um, and they will become plug and play for people.
• 2:49
  Lalit: And lower maintenance costs, right? That's the other thing. You know, Todd was telling me, he had, uh, his, uh, HVAC guy said, Oh, you have to replace your, uh, refrigerant on your HVAC. And it's a 2, 000 bill. That's not the case with CO2. CO2's inexpensive. So, we are trying to drive down all the costing in all directions.
• 2:50
  So that it becomes part and parcel of our life.
• 2:51
  I
• 2:52
  Trevor: love it. So any final thoughts for customers out there, people thinking to get into, you know, super critical ground source, heat pumps, like customers out there are people that are on the fence about CO2, any final thoughts?
• 2:53
  Lalit: All I would tell them is, look, uh, you are concerned, we understand that, but really, long term, there's little or nothing for you to worry about.
• 2:54
  It's just a matter of time before everybody starts using it.
• 2:55
  Todd: I would say look to Japan and look to Europe. It's, it's all over the place. I was just recently at the Akema, the largest chemical engineering conference in Europe, it's, it's every four years.
• 2:56
  And the big difference this year was, wow, I just noticed energy efficiency was absolutely on the top of mind, every booth, you know, everyone was exhibiting a video or a mantra that we have energy efficiency. And I noticed how some companies. For example, Laboratory Chillers company, Ulabo, was advertising their new green chiller.
• 2:57
  And they had a huge screen and they had, they had various posters, come and see our new green chiller. And if you stick around and read it, they would say, using supercritical CO2 as a refrigerant, we're able to lower the cost of your laboratory energy needs.
• 2:58
  Trevor: That's
• 2:59
  Todd: awesome. So, so those are the, so it's, it's, it's coming, it's coming to all facets of our life.
• 3:00
  And, uh, we're, we're honestly lucky to have the opportunity to get going now in the U. S. again.
• 3:01
  Lalit: And I have a one line teaser for you. Uh, we are working on an invention. Assuming that it works well, we'll be reducing the compression cost for all refrigerants, not just CO2. It could be R 410A, it could be R 22, whatever you're using.
• 3:02
  In the range of 20 to 25%. In other words, the COP will go up by 33%. So wish us luck and we'll have that ready for people to use. Well,
• 3:03
  Trevor: I do wish you luck. Cause that's a huge, a huge help to, to the refrigeration world, right? That's how do we, we are the highest impact on energy refrigeration globally. Uh, and, but we take care of the world.
• 3:04
  Medicines, food, quality, all that stuff is because of refrigeration. And it's nice to see a CO2 is in there. Want to thank you guys for taking the time to chat with me. Uh, I learned a lot about what you guys are doing. It is cool to hear other people's outlook on CO2 and what they're doing. So I want to thank you for taking the time to do that.
• 3:05
  Lalit: And we thank you for hosting us.