Latest / Clean Power Hour / Ryan Brown, Revolutionizing Battery Storage with Zinc-ion ESS | Ep 148

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Ryan Brown, Revolutionizing Battery Storage with Zinc-ion ESS | Ep 148 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Ryan Brown: Electric vehicles have dominated the conversation until now. But energy storage is in its infancy. Its growth in terms of like absolute numbers.
• 1:00
  Ryan Brown: It's on the same growth curve as EVs just shifted five years. If you do the math and assume like the fully renewable for too long, or actually will be more, and in that scenario, there's like very likely to be a lot more batteries used for energy storage than electric vehicles.
• 1:18
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our hosts, Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonisation. We do too, we're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it.
• 1:38
  intro: Together, we can speed the energy transition.
• 1:46
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by the Clean Power Consulting Group, please check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify so that others can find this content. Today on the Clean Power Hour, a safer non lithium battery. My guest today is Ryan Brown. He is the CEO and founder of salient energy. Welcome to the show, Ryan.
• 2:08
  Ryan Brown: It's my pleasure to be here.
• 2:11
  Tim Montague: I've had a slew of battery companies on the show now, and I'm thrilled to do that. It's, you know, storage is the perfect complement to solar and wind. And so we need terawatts and terawatts, or terawatt hours and terawatt hours of storage. And it's a both and right. There's lithium battery on mass now, electrifying transportation, and electrifying the grid. And now there's a handful of competing technologies and you have one of them. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get interested in storage and what is salient up to?
• 2:52
  Ryan Brown: Yeah, great. So I got interested in storage because I, I started school with the sole objective of becoming very rich. So I went to a finance programme, I got an internship at an investment bank, and it took all of about three weeks to realise I had made a terrible mistake. And so at that point, I had my quarter life crisis where I realised I would want to work on climate change. I restarted school wind engineering, and tried to think of where I thought the next biggest technological frontier was in the fight against climate change. Batteries popped up this was 2013 I said, I'm gonna get into batteries. Batteries seemed like the big thing. We got the next big thing we have to figure out for the energy transition.
• 3:42
  Ryan Brown: And then five years of working in research for looking at other batteries startups, I have the great fortune of having a lab mate, invent our new zinc ion technology that led to saline energy.
• 3:59
  Tim Montague: Cool. So what what differentiates salient from all the others? And how are you planning to go to market
• 4:09
  Ryan Brown: so zinc batteries have been around for centuries, the first battery ever made was a zinc battery. But the problem with zinc batteries in the past has typically been around rechargeability. The best zinc batteries in terms of you know how much energy they get in their performance, have always used a really high pH alkaline electrolyte. But the problem with those systems is that they don't recharge easily. So these are your disposable dura cells, there's a reason you're not supposed to recharge them, they can short circuit and have big problems. And while there's been a lot of work on making alkaline batteries more rechargeable. If you're creating a battery that needs to last 10 to 20 years and be paired with solar, you really need to get a new type of chemistry, where rechargeability is easy. And what makes the zinc ion battery different is there was a bunch of high pH sync batteries. There's a bunch of low p sync batteries. But we're the first one to have this like middle of the ground sweetspot cell that is enabled by our new type of cathode. So our new type of cathode works in neutral pH.
• 5:26
  Ryan Brown: And that neutral pH makes it easy to recharge your battery 1000s of times and that's why we're really excited about zinc ions potential to replace lithium ion in stationary energy storage.
• 5:39
  Tim Montague: Okay, so the market is stationary storage. I see that you've struck a deal with the homebuilder in the Sunbelt, Texas across the Southwest What? You know, what's the status of that project? And tell us a little bit about why you've chosen the residential storage market as a toe in the water?
• 6:04
  Ryan Brown: Great question. So the residential market is a really great first market running battery startup. Because you can get your products market quicker, they're smaller, so you don't need Giga factories before you can fulfil your first project. And what they care most about is safety. So we have a water based safety battery resident, the residential market values that above everything else, and then by finding good customers in the homebuilding segment, we know that we can quickly get products market, scale, learn quickly, and then use that knowledge to go into utility scale projects. The reason we particularly like working with sustainability focused home builders is because they have one, they love fintech. There's a reason they are, you know, building Net Zero communities. It's that, you know, it's their amazing, enthusiastic early adopters. And they're also planning on long timescales. So, the past few years, there has been major disruptions, the lithium ion supply chain, energy storage systems are experiencing six to 12 month delays. If you're planning a development three years out, and it's a big development, if your battery holds up your entire project by a year, that's a major issue. So these people are planning today for the batteries of the future.
• 7:29
  Ryan Brown: And what they're really want is safety and a secure supply chain. So we're working with those home builders as our first customers developing products with them, specifying pilots with them, with the goal of becoming the kind of main supplier for that segment as we build our own large factories a couple years out.
• 7:53
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Denowatts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Denowatts, digital twin benchmarking technology you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results.
• 8:11
  Tim Montague: The fourth generation Deno recently completed a technical review by DNV you can download the report at Denowatts.com, that's D E N O W A T T S .com.
• 8:25
  Tim Montague: Now back to the show.
• 8:27
  Tim Montague: So I resonate, you know, I want a battery in my garage that is as safe as the refrigerator freezer, right? You don't want to have to worry about thermal runaway and lithium ion is off to a mixed start on that front for sure. I think that the news media likes to blow that up a little more than, you know reality, so to speak, right?
• 8:52
  Tim Montague: Every Evie? Car fire is in the news. But let's face it, I sent in cars catch on fire all the time. They're just not in the news, because it's not news anymore. So I think it's about and I think Elon Musk is a very smart guy. And if he didn't think lithium ion was going to work, he would do something else. And if he thought something else was going to work, he would do that, too. So that's, that's something I always ask, you know, my guess is, well, why isn't Elon doing zinc batteries? It's such an ingenious invention. And I'm not. I mean, your point is well taken 100 year old technology, right, just next generation of rechargeable batteries. That sounds good. Sounds like there's less supply chain issues, less safety concerns, check those boxes, why isn't Elon doing it?
• 9:50
  Ryan Brown: Great question. So if you think about the company that Tesla is there, an Eevee company, and if you think about all the battery suppliers in the world right now, their main focus is the electric vehicle market where lithium batteries are our King, and they're always going to be king because their energy per weight, which is absolutely critical for anything on wheels, is unbeatable. And so for these companies, their main focus is securing quality battery supply that they can use for their EVs. And then if they're really good at making battery packs for cars, they say you know, why not also make lithium ion based battery packs for residential energy storage.
• 10:36
  Ryan Brown: And that's the obvious solution until now when there's just so much rapidly scaling batteries, and until recently, the price was always falling. So everyone was excited that UK continued Evie sector growth With a two ever cheaper ever more available ever better batteries, of course, we'll use them for both markets. What we're seeing now is that because the materials used to make lithium ion batteries are in short supply, we're seeing companies like Tesla, and others, diverting batteries that would otherwise go to their energy storage segment, to get them in their cars, and not trans growing. So batteries that used to seem too heavy, like LFP, people were like, Oh, those will never be in cars. Now that's going to become the new standard. And so the Evie markets eating up all the lithium ion batteries that can appropriately because they absolutely need that low energy per weight. The there is one major battery company that is, you know, has seen the writing on the wall CETL they're developing sodium ion, where the first market is going to be energy storage, because they know that for us to have the energy transition we want. We can't be bottlenecked by the lithium supply chain.
• 11:59
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I did notice that that CTL is expanding into other technology. So that's interesting. And I would only disagree with one thing you said and that is that. I think Tesla is a robotics company disguised as an automobile company. And we just don't see that yet. Right.
• 12:16
  Tim Montague: The the robot that they're making is, is in the shadows.
• 12:19
  Tim Montague: But anyway, point well taken.
• 12:25
  Tim Montague: And I hope you're right. I hope that zinc has the legs that that you and others are saying it has. Because I'm very concerned about the lithium supply chain.
• 12:35
  Tim Montague: More so than the than the safety features, I think that we can figure out the safety features eventually, and prevent thermal runaway and lithium batteries.
• 12:45
  Tim Montague: But But supply chain is a real problem. Lithium is super abundant, is zinc as super abundant as lithium, relatively speaking.
• 12:56
  Ryan Brown: So yeah, in America, we make pennies out of zinc. So it is orders of magnitude more abundant. It is its production that there's both domestic mining, and processing into battery grade metals. And crucially, recycling it is like dead easy, this is not something we have to figure out a new. So there's way more zinc. And when I say more, I don't mean reserves, I mean actual annual production and processing capability. So it's a higher capacity supply chain. It's a domestic supply chain. And it's more recyclable. So zinc is, is a very great candidate for batteries that can be heavy stationary energy storage, but want to use safe, local, abundant and inexpensive materials.
• 13:51
  Tim Montague: Yeah. So let's talk about the residential storage market. You know, I like to say that today, only a fraction of a percent of people have a battery in their garage, but in 10 years, everyone's going to have a battery in their garage, it's going to become an appliance, a standard appliance in all homes and commercial buildings, frankly, it just a great device for reducing your energy load, and saving money.
• 14:16
  Tim Montague: And you can of course, store extra solar, if you have extra solar, you can store extra grid energy for when the grid goes down. You can have that resiliency, you can you do a lot of things, the value stack of storage is impressive in it and it's complicated because it's different in every jurisdiction, meaning every every locality every utility, every state every region has a different a different value stack or a slightly different value stack.
• 14:45
  Tim Montague: And and so it's it's non trivial. Here in Illinois, we have fantastic incentives, we have a $250 per kWh incentive for batteries. And that means the battery is cash positive in year one or two and and the rest is gravy. Right. So what is your take on the residential storage market? You know, that that story in PV magazine, which we will link to in the show notes says that that Horton world solutions plans to build 200,000 homes and they are quoted as being a sustainable home builder. So I don't know like what part of their portfolio is quote unquote sustainable homes but anyway, they're they're certainly planning to put batteries in a large number of homes. It sounds like so how do you how do you meet that demand?
• 15:38
  Tim Montague: And and what do you think consumers are looking for just in terms of some of the basic specs is that is it a 10 kilowatt hour battery, or a 15 or a 20? Um, you know, there's there's various flavours of residential batteries in that 10 to 20k range. And then some of them are modular and scalable in chunks of 10 kWh, which I think is cool. Because truly you need 30 Plus kWh to have a home that could operate off grid and a big solar array. Right. So, but what is your take on resi? On the resi storage market?
• 16:17
  Ryan Brown: Great question. So, consumers, individual consumers have driven residential demand up until now. And it's primarily been like a luxury purchase, or a peace of mind purchase to have protection against backups. The key thing to realise about residential energy storage is that it can do as you said, so much more. And so if you think about what sustainably built homes, and by that I mean, low emissions homes will have to look like really quickly. That's replacing everything that's powered by natural gas will be powered by electricity, charging an Eevee in the garage. And so the electricity consumption of these new homes is going to look very different, it's going to have way higher peaks. And that creates a big problem for rapid transition away from fossil fuel use in the home, where now we're going to have a drastically changed electricity load profile on legacy infrastructure. And so the new value instead of being a luxury or peace of mind purchase by individual homeowner is that there's increasing recognition that having a battery in the home is actually a key way to get our existing wires on our existing grid infrastructure to be able to take on more more electricity demand from clean appliances, clean heating, and also an energy supply from distributed solar. The key value for residential in my mind coming forward is by creating flexibility that will allow existing grid infrastructure to go further in the energy transition. And that's what homebuilders like Horton world solutions and others have found is that when they're designing for all electric, having the batteries in the home, is the difference between a regular utility substation being hooked up to their community versus something completely different.
• 18:29
  Ryan Brown: That's way more hard to integrate. So that's new build.
• 18:32
  Ryan Brown: And then what we're also seeing in California and Texas, is that because there's so much money to be made from providing resiliency, there's new bot business models emerging of companies putting batteries in people's homes, saying Don't worry, I'll be there in a blackout, otherwise leave the operation to us, and then owning a fleet of batteries that they operate as effectively a power plant to add resiliency in the grid. And that becomes a very financially attractive business model. And so, in short, residential market is really in its infancy and really starting to prove the case of how it can make energy infrastructure ready for the clean energy transition quickly.
• 19:26
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• 19:59
  Tim Montague: Yeah it's only a question of how fast we can make the energy transition. We're gonna make it we have all the technology we need. We just need the ability to deploy, deploy, deploy and afford afford afford and and you know that's why industrial policy like the IRA legislation that we got in 2022 is so important. It does soften the blow of electrifying your home and you know truly we can do away with gas furnaces and and some communities have started to outlaw gas appliances. So we see the writing on the wall but this is this is happening in his end is the future. It just a question of how fast and can we do it fast enough to do Yeah, to prevent the worst, so to speak of, of runaway climate change and and, you know, depends on who you talk to you what that means the worst. You know, if you're living in the less developed world on the coast, you're already experiencing some of that worst. And it is causing mass migration and starvation.
• 21:12
  Tim Montague: Already. Not so much for you and I yet but so I guess I'm curious, you know, in when you look into your crystal ball, where is where is the residential storage market taking off? Now. And, you know, of course, California is the is the most mature market for storage, California and Hawaii, and they have very special rules now in Hawaii. And you know about non injection where your solar can't feed back onto the grid. So batteries are, you know, essential, really, for anyone with solar. And then now in California, we have NEM, 3.0.
• 21:55
  Tim Montague: The new net metering rules in California are not very consumer friendly, and will continue to drive consumers to residential storage as a play to make solar plus storage more economical. I look forward to talking with Julia Piper and others about that particular phenomenon. But what do you see and your crystal ball? And and then let's talk a little bit about scaling, because that seems to be a, you know, a pretty big deal in in this world. Right. And, and you have, you have taken a somewhat unique stance on this, I think, but what do you what do you see, you know, what states should people pay attention to in your mind? And how do you get into hundreds of 1000s of homes? From hundreds, I would imagine you're still at a, you know, at a very early stage. So let's talk about that.
• 23:48
  Ryan Brown: Yeah, critic, disclaimer, I'm a communist. So the complexity of government regulation is above my credit.
• 23:57
  Ryan Brown: But hey, paygrade, I'll take a stab. But there's, there's a lot of interesting stuff happen, you have like, you're very forward thinking utilities like Rocky Mountain Power, who has taken the proactive step of encouraged of creating their own virtual power plant programme and encouraging behind the metre storage, and seeing a lot of uptake there. Texas is a really interesting market, not because of progressive policy, but just because of the huge windfalls that providing energy during times of grid stress have created, it's just creating great business models for large scale integrated distributed energy storage projects. And then as you mentioned, California, the thing that I'll add on to what you said, is actually part of the new California Building Code mandates, batteries in multifamily and commercial buildings, it requires new build residential, to be ready for batteries. And so if all new buildings by decree have that solar, if a lot of them need batteries, and then the rest has to be battery ready, then I think California can very quickly became a become a state where energy storage is widely distributed. And so it's an overall look for utilities that have these programmes. These are people that have seen the value of using batteries to delay infrastructure investment, look for states like California that are very progressive and mandating adoption, and then look for. Look for states like Texas, with the just the existing economics without government regulation, create an incentive for energy storage to provide power during the stress events. For scaling from our perspective. We always started with scale in mind, and that means we source abundant materials that are using domestics mature supply chains, so that's specialty high grade commodities ink. And then our cathode material is manganese dioxide, which is used in disposable batteries. We do some, you know, special stuff to it to make it good for our batteries. But this is stuff that's produced at scale. So step one, source commercially available abundant materials.
• 26:27
  Ryan Brown: And then step two, is we actually use the same fundamental production processes as lithium ion batteries. So we're not changing the model of how this battery our battery factories work. We're using the same equipment reusing the same know how. So that's We're confident in our ability to scale rapidly. We're using a scaled supply chain, and we're using mature production. And so the barrier for us is just how cheaply can we get the money to build a big factory? And how quickly can we get the orders to fill it? I think it's still a, you know, it's not. This isn't a software business where you can go from zero to a billion users and two months. But I'm excited that we can be a major supplier of this industry in the latter half of this decade.
• 27:16
  Tim Montague: And do you have to build your own factory or can you contract manufacture these, the cells and, and modules,
• 27:27
  Ryan Brown: we can contract manufacturer. The issue is just like everything in the battery industry right now is demand is outstripping supply. So everyone's you know, part of the installation Reduction Act, we need to stand off of battery industry that can be separate from China, basically, overnight. There's a lot of companies building Evie batteries, all those companies are using contractors to qualify designs. So the best way to own the quality and rate of scaling, is to do it yourself. Of course, we were using contractors, until then, but our goal is to own our own manufacturing, own our quality, own how quickly we can scale.
• 28:14
  Tim Montague: And, you know, you mentioned the latter half of this decade, give us a get paint us a picture for, you know, how how, what are you producing today? And then how is that changing over time? Are you still waiting for some breakthrough on the technology side? Or is it strictly a matter of amassing the resources to to build the Gigafactory.
• 28:45
  Ryan Brown: So today, we build large pouch cells that are going to be fine for our first residential product. We're getting that residential product ready for certification and infield pilots this year. And then our focus next year, is getting the ball rolling on sales so that we can have, let's call it 1000s of homes that were supplying in 2025. And if you actually compare that to that's like megawatt hours 10s to hundreds of megawatt hours of battery, so that's a pretty like modest battery factory that are focused there is get a product out to market be able to do it quickly, and use that success in the residential market to then build the Gigafactory. And, you know, I'm, I would like to have incident money to build an infinitely big giga factory. But that's our roadmap. There's been very good funding for proven battery technologies with good commercial prospects. So our kind of key defining moment will be how successful are we in 2025? And how enthusiastic is the market for funding the scale up of the battery industry, then,
• 30:06
  Tim Montague: the Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Denowatts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Denowatts, digital twin benchmarking technology, you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results.
• 30:22
  Tim Montague: The fourth generation Deno recently completed a technical review by DNV. You can download the report at Denowatts.com.
• 30:29
  Tim Montague: That's D E N O W A T T S .com.
• 30:36
  Tim Montague: Now back to the show.
• 30:38
  Tim Montague: Cool. Well, I don't really have any other questions for you.
• 30:42
  Tim Montague: What else should our listeners know about Salient? And the you know, the residential storage market?
• 30:51
  Ryan Brown: Good question. Yeah, I think the first thing to appreciate is electric vehicles have dominated the conversation until now. But energy storage is in its infancy. Its growth in terms of like absolute numbers.
• 31:07
  Ryan Brown: It's on the same growth curve as EVs just shifted five years. And if you do the math and assume like the fully renewable world we want, there actually will be more and in that scenario, there's very likely to be a lot more batteries used for energy storage than electric vehicles.
• 31:24
  Ryan Brown: So even though energy storage has until now, and appropriately been the less important market, if that's going to change quickly. And once that changes were, we are gonna get away we're gonna see a deviation In between Evie batteries and energy storage batteries, and energy storage batteries are to be safe, cheap, recyclable, won't worry about weight.
• 31:55
  Ryan Brown: Otherwise look a lot like lithium ion batteries. And so when thinking about this market and all the different technologies, and looking at those, think about what which of those new technologies can slot in as the lithium ion replacement, which of them have the long term supply and costs and recyclability. Prospects needed to supply this will be a massive industry. And do your research because there's, there's lots going on, there's lots of exciting stuff. It's not going to be winner take all the energy storage segments, not a monolith, most of it is like the most of it will be like the products we see today, which is two to six hours of energy storage and modular systems that size from residential to utility scale. But there's also going to be big segments of long duration storage and stuff that is serving other applications. So market in its infancy, lots of growing left to do lots of nuance to emerge, and just generally an exciting time.
• 33:07
  Tim Montague: Totally agree. One I did I did think of another question. I don't know if you can answer this. But I went to a solar edge training recently and they have a they have their own 10 kWh modular battery. It's about 24 inches wide, 36 inches tall, 10 or 12 inches deep. And for the residential market, it weighs 275 pounds. Now this is an NMC battery, nickel, manganese cobalt, which is the fanciest type of lithium battery made their partner is the company that made the batteries in that solar aeroplane that flew around the world on solar power. Cool. Yeah. But do you know what a comparable saline battery would weigh? I'm just curious to get a sense of the Delta. You know, if NMC weighs 275 pounds, I met I imagined, the zinc has to weigh more. Is it 300? Is it 320?
• 34:11
  Ryan Brown: Yeah, I'd say. So not knowing all the components that go in the energy storage system and what weight they add for that system? I'll just say rule of thumb, assume it's twice as heavy. Okay, which is why these batteries won't move. All you have to, all you have to do is make sure that your modules are the right way for your installer to slot them in there and wire them up. And then yeah, don't don't expect to be wheeling it out for a picnic.
• 34:42
  Tim Montague: Nice. Well, please check out all of our content at clean power hour.com Give us a rating and a review so others can find this content. And please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Just hit the YouTube icon at clean power hour.com and get all of our videos. Every week. We're producing two videos, one on one interviews like this and a news roundup with my co host, John Weaver or an occasional guest co host. So, Ryan, how can our listeners reach you and salient?
• 35:11
  Ryan Brown: You can find me on LinkedIn, Ryan Brown, the website is salient. energy.ca Or find us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• 35:19
  Ryan Brown: I love getting messages, especially if it's about nerdy battery topics. So yeah, feel free to reach out.
• 35:26
  Tim Montague: Excellent. Well, I'm Tim Montague. Thank you so much Ryan Brown. Let's grow solar and storage.
• 35:31
  Ryan Brown: Absolutely. Thank you so much.