Latest / Clean Power Hour / Solar, Vanadium Flow and a Flywheel: Inside G&W's Microgrid #369

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Solar, Vanadium Flow and a Flywheel: Inside G&W's Microgrid #369 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  John Pedersen: To pay those charges, okay, it's capacity and transmission, and now they pay us for those charges. So on our monthly bill, it's a credit. So it's a major swing. We made in two and a half months of frequency frequency regulation work. We made all of what we made last year,
• 1:10
  John Gounaris: and we actually hold IP. We have patents on this microgrid. So there's unique elements here that we do that no one else in the world has ever done as it relates to microgrid design.
• 1:22
  intro: The clean energy industry is moving fast. The deals are getting bigger. The technology is evolving, and the stakes have never been higher. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, the podcast for solar, storage, and microgrid professionals who want to stay ahead of it all. Each week, your host Tim Montague, industry advisor and president of Clean Power Consulting Group, brings you unfiltered conversations with the leaders actually building the energy transition. Now, here's your host, Tim Montague.
• 1:56
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, a large solar battery and flywheel microgrid in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. This is one of the interviews I have been chasing for several years, and I'm so excited to have G and W Electric on the show today. My guests are John Gounaris, VP of Global Marketing for G and W Electric, John Pederson, Principal Staff Engineer with G and W Electric.
• 2:20
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the Clean Power Hour, gentlemen.
• 2:24
  John Gounaris: Thanks, Tim.
• 2:24
  John Gounaris: Appreciate being here, and I'm sorry you had to wait three years for this interview.
• 2:30
  Tim Montague: Well, you know, I'm here. I'm happy to to be doing this, and and there are advantages to you know coming in a few years after the facility has been up and running. Now you have a retrospective. You know how it's performing. So why don't you, mr. Gounaris, set the table a little bit. What is the project, and why did G and W embark on this journey to begin with?
• 2:58
  John Gounaris: Yeah. So the timeline on this goes back a number of years, and as you mentioned, we're located in Bolingbrook, Illinois, which is a suburb southwest of of Chicago proper, and we get weather here, and you know, so the summers can be hot, and we can get some pretty decent storms. The winters are cold, and we can also get some pretty decent storms there as well. And the products that G and W Electric manufactures are, frankly, critical to the operation of the electric power grid all over the world, but particularly in the in the key markets that we serve, you would find G and W electric products operating very reliably in every just about every neighborhood in the United States and other places too, and they don't they're not flashy.
• 3:51
  John Gounaris: You you may not have noticed them in the past, but they are there, and they are keeping they're keeping the lights on.
• 3:58
  John Gounaris: And and so what we do is critical to a lot of the utility partners that we do business with, and our our owner. We're a privately held organization, and have been for the entire 121 year history of the company felt that we needed to improve the reliability of the electric power being served to our campus and also to improve its resiliency. Like I said, we have weather events, we have storms here in the Chicagoland area, and we wanted to ensure that we were able to maintain power to the facility to ensure consistency in our production.
• 4:36
  John Gounaris: Like I said, we're considered a critical supplier to many of our customers. And over the years, you know, John and I have both been with G&W Electric for multiple decades at this point, and we've grown a lot over time, but we've gotten to the point where even a small disruption of electric power to our facility has major disruptions to our production, has major disruptions in our ability to to manufacture and ship product, and and we simply just wanted to close that gap.
• 5:11
  Tim Montague: So there was a power outage that triggered a an a process of okay how do we avoid this in the future and and just for our listeners what kind of equipment are you manufacturing what just I know there's probably a large spectrum but just what are some of the nuts and bolts
• 5:31
  John Gounaris: yeah so our equipment gets installed on the electric power grid. We make electrical switches, a product called a recloser that's mounted on the power lines that that run in a lot of neighborhoods throughout America. We make cable accessory products, so huge amounts of electric. Power will flow through these devices.
• 5:52
  John Gounaris: We make current limiting devices, which can help protect the power grid, and we also manufacture power grid automation solutions. We're a very tight partner of basically every utility within the United States has certainly the possibility having a piece of G&W electric equipment on their system, and many of them actually do. The
• 6:17
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• 6:53
  Tim Montague: Designs.com. So, my recollection is you had done a lot of research, and for example, you decided on a vanadium flow battery, which is quite unusual.
• 7:03
  Tim Montague: So, I want to hear a little bit about that decision. Over the years, there's a small handful of flywheel projects that have come across my desk, but very few. Flywheels are fascinating, somewhat complicated. They they they require some special safety, you know, circumstances.
• 7:23
  Tim Montague: You have to put them, I think, generally below grade because they might spin out of control.
• 7:26
  Tim Montague: I don't know, but how did you guys settle on some of those aspects of the project.
• 7:33
  John Gounaris: We can start with the battery. So one of the important considerations for us was that we wanted we wanted a battery that had sufficient duration for backup energy to be able to ride us through a multi-hour outage of power, so we were not, you know, we were thinking that you could have an outage that's one, two, maybe up to four hours long, and we wanted to be sure that we had sufficient energy to be able to hold over the the campus, which at that time was two buildings, and be able to hold it over for a significant period of time because the outages here can be blinks of an eye, but they can also be far more significant than that. The other thing that we wanted was safety was an important consideration. There's certain battery chemistries that have you know they they can be flammable. They can they can have some pretty catastrophic effects if they if they malfunction, and given that Bolingbrook is our global headquarters, where frankly the majority of our production happens, the majority of the revenue of the company happens from this facility. Yeah, we wanted to be sure that we chose a technology that was safe and posed no danger to the operations itself, and so the more traditional lithium ion type solutions that that you see common within commercial and industrial applications, I mean that was a pretty significant knock against that.
• 9:09
  Tim Montague: Okay, so a safety safety concern around lithium ion. I get that, and and then the the trade off for vanadium flow is that it has a very large physical footprint, and relatively speaking,
• 9:26
  John Gounaris: yep.
• 9:27
  Tim Montague: It is much less, you know. There there is virtually no, I don't think, thermal runaway issues with vanadium flow. It's not it's not as cost competitive as as lithium ion in my understanding either. But was were those factors the cost and because this is a this is a big project, and and I think I saw a note that this might have been one of the largest capex projects that the company had undertaken. But yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that.
• 10:01
  John Pedersen: Yeah, sure. We did an analysis of lithium versus flow battery, and our project was 20 years total cost of ownership. But we didn't want to do a project that was you know just a buy, and you you know we wanted to do 20 years, so everything in this project has a 20 or more warranty extended period, right? So all long time, so the technologies at the time for lithium indicated to us, even the most current information says lithium is going to degrade slowly over time, and there's they're degrading slower and slower.
• 10:32
  John Pedersen: That technology is getting better, costs are coming down as well. But at the time, we felt that if we were going to do 20-year total cost of ownership, we would have to buy almost three systems with lithium to get the state of capacity and everything else to be maintained, be viable. And at that calculation at that time, the flow battery came. In about half the cost over towards what you would have to do to it on an annual basis and everything else because even lithium you have to maintain the temperature range much tighter. Flow batteries you don't. It's a thermally mass device so it keeps its own temperature. So there's very little there's very little concern even if you exceed the temperature ranges you don't damage the battery. So you can come back in the temperature, use the battery. So we fell.
• 11:13
  Tim Montague: So in my in my world, we would say the there was an advantage in the opex.
• 11:16
  Tim Montague: There was a higher capex, but a more advantageous opex, right?
• 11:20
  Tim Montague: Now the the flow battery is not O and M free, though, right? You are replacing some of the the liquid. on a periodically, right? Do not
• 11:35
  John Pedersen: replace the liquid. The electrolyte is permanent. It's it's a sustainable thing. So you have to on the negative side, or I don't know the chemistry. You add something because there's an extra element you need to put back into it. I don't know how it's like a it's either glycol or some some liquid, but it's like a gallon. But we have 500,000 liters of this material, so it's nothing. It drops a bucket. It's nothing, and that would be the only thing we have besides the you have pumps and knobs and lights and if you think of that. You know, small normal things that would wear out from some installation issue or something else. That's the only thing replaced the battery's whole,
• 13:06
  Tim Montague: and I know you went with a CellCube solution.
• 13:09
  Tim Montague: How's the battery performing over the last couple of years?
• 13:13
  John Pedersen: Very admirably. I would say that 100% of the time we are able to do what we want to do with the battery. There are some, you know, PM activities that you know takes a piece of it off, but it's a planned activity. It's a very highly reliable system, so we're able to participate in frequency regulation at the at the highest reference marks of performance with our system. We routinely outperform in our response times on all the other batteries in the fleet.
• 13:42
  Tim Montague: Yeah, yeah. I know this is an intelligent generation project, right? And and their framework is earn, save, protect. So you earn by providing grid services. That's the frequency regulation mr.
• 13:53
  Tim Montague: Peterson was just referring to.
• 13:58
  Tim Montague: You save by reducing capacity charges, and then you protect with resiliency, which was one of the primary goals of the project to begin with. I get it, battery and solar, and that's you know relatively commonplace.
• 14:13
  Tim Montague: the The odd duck here
• 14:19
  John Gounaris: is the flywheel.
• 14:21
  Tim Montague: The flywheel. I'm so stoked that you guys installed a flywheel. This is the first flywheel project I've gotten to talk about on the show. So, totally keen on that.
• 14:31
  Tim Montague: Like, why was why was that on the table?
• 14:35
  John Gounaris: If you consider our campus as two buildings, one of the buildings is primarily like assembly operations for the equipment, and our our second building is molding operations for components that go into the final assembly assembled product, and that and those molding processes include machinery that are extremely sensitive to the electric power coming into the building. So even very very minor blinks or interruptions of power. I mean, we're talking five cycles, or you know, in the in the area of you know less than a cycle of electric power can disrupt the entire can disrupt machinery within that building, and we can suffer you know certain bits of equipment going down, having issues with the operation of the equipment, so it's very very sensitive what goes on in that building, and we felt to make sure that we were providing just the most robust, clean energy into that building. The flywheel was the way to go, and it's in series with the feed coming into the building. So if we do lose power from the grid, the flywheel will maintain will maintain full load on that building for up to 62 seconds, and which is plenty of time for the rest of the microgrid to be able to operate and be able to run that facility off of multiple sources of energy, so that's that's the reason why the flywheel is there. It's basically a ride through, but it's a near instant. It is an instantaneous ride through because of where it's positioned in the circuit to be able to power that building in the case of an outage.
• 16:17
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and so here I'll just I'll try to explain my understanding of how this works, but for the for the listener, and then you guys can correct me. The flywheel is is spinning constantly, right? It's there.
• 16:29
  Tim Montague: It's just spinning in the background.
• 16:33
  Unknown: Yep. And then if
• 16:34
  Tim Montague: there if the grid flickers, there's a brownout or any you know irregularity. It is there. And provides power to the grid to the local facility, and then, as you said, ride through.
• 16:50
  Tim Montague: Right, it only lasts because then there's then there's resistance, and and it is starting to slow down, and it it can't just run forever, right?
• 16:58
  Tim Montague: It's going to slow down and and run out of gas if the grid goes away, right? But then there's other sources like solar and battery, and then do you also have a a generator?
• 17:10
  John Gounaris: Yeah, we do. So that building specifically has a two megawatt diesel generator that can essentially operate that building indefinitely. So, like I said, there's multiple sources of energy which we can use to back up that building, and yeah, so far power's been perfect since we turned on the microgrid. Yeah,
• 17:31
  Tim Montague: and so the the team that architected this project, you know, it it is sizable capex, and I don't know if you're willing to talk about what the capex was, but we're talking several million dollars, and and but there's a return on that investment because of the the earn save and then the protect. Has first of all have you had to rely on the resiliency aspect of the project at all?
• 18:02
  John Gounaris: Yeah, absolutely.
• 18:02
  John Gounaris: We we just had a pretty significant outage here in the Chicagoland area. We had some pretty significant storms in June and July, and we had one that that knocked out power to the. So our facility is in a it's in a business park, but there's a residential neighborhood that's tucked up against us here. There were parts of that neighborhood that had power out for over 24 hours, so it was a pretty significant outage. And the microgrid performed absolutely brilliantly as designed during that outage.
• 18:36
  John Gounaris: So you know we we were able to operate our assembly plant from the batteries until the batteries were were depleted.
• 18:44
  John Gounaris: But our molding facility was actually able to operate indefinitely. We and so it operated exactly as designed. So yeah, absolutely. And what's interesting is that what we've noticed as a result of the flywheel, in particular, is that the quality of power that's in the area around us does cause a fair number of what I will call micro interruptions, and there may be a technical term for this, but I'm using this term rather loosely. These are interruptions that you don't see. These are not impacting anything in daily life, but they're significant enough where they would have caused problems in that in in our facility, and because of the flywheel and because of the design of the overall microgrid, you know, absolutely zero impact. We we can see the impacts because of the power quality meters and the sensing that we have built into the solution, so we can literally see the oscillographs and see what the impacts are, but the plant itself is totally isolated from this as a result of the flywheel. The
• 19:51
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• 20:02
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• 20:30
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• 20:46
  Tim Montague: And what ballpark figure, though? What is this saving G and W on an annual basis? Do you estimate in dollars and cents?
• 20:56
  Tim Montague: Not not to mention the the uptime, but but just the just the the grid savings. But a capacity capacity charges could be 30% of industrial users' bill. They're significant, and so what you're doing is you're you're charging the battery before this two-hour window that's happening, you know, five times a year, where the grid is just cranking on a hot summer day, right? And then you're discharging the battery and attacking that capacity and bringing down your your energy bill over the course of the year. It's it's not rocket science, but it you do need a software as a service partner like Intelligent Generation. So shout out to them. They've been on the show several times, and and they are the. You know the preeminent software service in PJM.
• 21:46
  John Pedersen: I've been telling people when this comes up because I give a lot of tours of the system is that we used to pay those charges. Okay, it's capacity and transmission, and now they pay us for those charges. So on our monthly bill, it's a credit. So it's a major swing. It is a large component of the bill, and now it's a large contributor of the benefit. Now our rates, when we joined this whole system here, we had a five-year contract at an extremely low kilowatt-hour rate, and that's not possible anymore. So now it's up almost four times what it was, you know, those years ago, or some rough number like that right now. So the bill did go up, but not due to those charges. Those are literally credits on our bill each month now. So we do these events with an excellent partner, Intelligent Generation, who gives us the predictive analytics. We follow their commands. The system has worked out very well for us, and I would say that the credits we're now receiving that even the difference from charge to credit on those two capacity expenses is a favorable exchange for us.
• 22:52
  John Pedersen: But frequency regulation has become much more lucrative for us. You know, we we made financially, which I don't know if private company, so I'm going to say, but we made in two and a half months of frequency frequency regulation work, we made all of what we made last year. So I'm not sure what the end of this year is going to be, and I don't know if this is going to stay in that direction.
• 23:12
  John Pedersen: But with the storms coming through, with the loads increasing, with the you know we're not going to bring generation online as fast as we you know most people would like to see because data centers are growing faster than all those things. I think the demands for FR and those transmission and those capacity charges, you know. So if we haven't, if you haven't thought about putting in a microgrid or system to do things like this, you could do this for resiliency power, but then do so by participating grid tide and earn the return on that investment through commercial terms. So I mean it's very lucrative for us. I can't speak highly enough about.
• 23:53
  Tim Montague: So the payback here isn't hypothetical. It's real dollars, real storms, and real frequency regulation revenue. Let's get into the hardware, the solar, the battery, and that flywheel.
• 24:05
  John Gounaris: I'll take it from here. So the the core of this is going to be solar panels. So roughly 6000 bifacial solar panels that are on our main assembly building, and they're bifacial. It probably gives us another 20% absorption of solar energy as a result of them being bifacial, the roof had to be especially prepared to allow us to take advantage of that.
• 24:31
  Tim Montague: And what's the kW of the solar?
• 24:33
  John Gounaris: It's two megawatts.
• 24:34
  Tim Montague: Two megawatts, yeah.
• 24:35
  John Gounaris: So that's our interconnection agreement, and the panels can do a little bit more than that, but that's what our interconnection agreement is. Backing that up is is the vanadium redox flow battery system that we just talked about earlier on. That's two megawatt output and it's an eight megawatt hour battery. And John, I forget it has kind of like a an accelerated output for a shorter duration. Can you remind me what the battery
• 24:59
  John Pedersen: is capable of exporting 150% power on demand?
• 25:02
  John Pedersen: And roughly speaking, that probably cuts it in half, so about two hours, maybe a little less. And you can also charge the battery in a hurry. So this particular battery is about three three years past the latest generations from CellCube. So we can charge our battery at 1.9 megawatt. It's 2212. So I could charge that battery at 3.8 megawatts, and do it in a hurry. If I think, hey, we better charge this thing up.
• 25:27
  John Pedersen: Storm's coming. I need backup power. We can just turn that on and charge this thing up. No degradation occurs on this. Then we can hold it and be ready for the outage. If that's what the plan is, you can discharge at 150. So the system will charge faster and discharge faster, and it doesn't degrade the battery.
• 25:43
  Tim Montague: But at the end of the day, it's it's an eight megawatt hour battery. That's what you're, yeah. But that's that's a it's a it's a big battery. I mean, big.
• 25:55
  John Gounaris: It's in our parking lot. I mean, we happen to have the land space available to be able to to mount this thing. So your point about energy density is well taken.
• 26:02
  John Gounaris: But I mean, for us, it's it's not an issue at all.
• 26:07
  Tim Montague: Yeah, if I recall, there's 16 containers. Is that right?
• 26:10
  John Pedersen: No, 20 containers. There's there's 12 on the bottom, eight on top.
• 26:16
  Tim Montague: Okay, 20 containers, and they're 20 foot containers, or yeah, that's a lot of real estate. Although they do stack them, right?
• 26:25
  John Gounaris: Yeah.
• 26:28
  Tim Montague: All right. So eight megawatt hour battery, and then the flywheel.
• 26:31
  John Gounaris: Yeah, flywheel is 1.3 megawatts, and it's positioned within the building itself, and it's only in the molding plant, right? So that's it's that's the only entity that. It's backing up outside.
• 26:42
  John Gounaris: Just outside of that molding plate is the two megawatt diesel generator, and then connecting all of these components together is actually a medium voltage loop. So we're connecting to the Commonwealth Edison grid using a point of common coupling switch that is a G and W switch that we manufacture at the very same facility that it's operating on, and so it's taking power in from the utility and distributing it to the loop that we have on the campus. We have a total of three medium voltage pad mount switches that are distributing and sectionalizing and protecting electric power on our campus. All of the switches were built there in Bolingbrook, and each of them includes relays and protection schemes, which were designed and set by G and W engineers, and and we are able to operate our own electrical switches from our microgrid control room, and that is how we're able to essentially coordinate the operations of the microgrid using this medium voltage loop on the backs of our own switchgear. What's interesting, it's not technically part of the microgrid itself, but it is part of the resiliency story of the plant. Is that the there are two feeds coming into the plant from Commonwealth Edison, and each one of those feeds is controlled by a G and W Viper recloser that's operating like in a preferred alternate type scheme.
• 28:19
  John Gounaris: So, in addition to the microgrid, we have the ability to automatically throw over to an alternate feed should we lose one of the feeds due to a storm or some other outage. So there's actually multiple levels of of redundancy to the campus to improve its overall reliability and resiliency. But all those components are acting together to keep the lights on on our campus.
• 28:47
  Tim Montague: I'm curious how this has changed the business, because obviously you're you're in the in the electrical gear business, and having a robust microgrid on your campus has that made an impact on the business in some other ways or some unexpected ways?
• 29:10
  John Gounaris: Yeah, it absolutely has. So there's a few that I can talk about. Like the even though we've been around for a long time and we are well known to our customer base, we're not a company that generally gets a lot of attention just in the general public, and I've really been surprised by you know the number of requests for tours, not necessarily related to people in our industry, like people wanting to know about the microgrid, people wanting to know about the company, requests for tours, requests to know more information, interview requests.
• 29:46
  John Gounaris: Actually, on the on the strength of the of the microgrid itself, I had an opportunity to do an interview as part of the precursor to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Like, I mean that's how far-reaching this got, right? I mean, so, so our our humble little switchgear company here in the Chicagoland area was getting national and in some cases global exposure due to a lot of the cool things that we're doing, and the story that we told was you know one of just why we got the microgrid, but really it was, you know, it's our own people that did a lot of the choosing of the components and the validation of the vendors and the design of the scheme, and we actually hold IP.
• 30:34
  John Gounaris: We have patents on this microgrid, so there's unique elements here that we do that no one else in the world has ever done as it relates to microgrid design, and and that has given us a lot of attention of the engineering capability of this company that I I don't think we well we haven't been able to generate that type of attention just by selling our own products so that to me was was pretty surprising just to hear just the general interest in this, and I think the reason is because concepts like clean energy and climate change, and you know microgrids being kind of a term that's used in the in the public vernacular, are things that the public can kind of relate to, and having something like this at the scale that we have, kind of in your backyard, if you live in the Chicagoland area, was interesting to people. I mean, just to give you another example, we actually had the governor of the state of Illinois on our campus, and like a couple years ago, no one ever would have thought that the governor would be interested in what's happening at G and W Electric, but you know. There he was shaking hands and and giving a speech on our campus. So yeah, the publicity and the attention that we've got it gotten not only within but also outside of the industry has been really surprising.
• 31:56
  Tim Montague: Well, what else should our listeners know about this project? I will also say that just to be clear, Continental Electrical Energy Solutions slash Continental Electrical that did the installation. They're a very, I think, probably like-minded company, fourth-generation family business, and I'm proud to say my son is now a project manager there with with Lenny and company, but what else should our listeners know? And are there are there thing are there any regrets whatsoever?
• 32:32
  John Gounaris: I mean, regrets from our perspective is I don't think we have any regrets on it.
• 32:36
  John Gounaris: I mean, for for our employees, this is a really cool project.
• 32:40
  John Gounaris: Like we're I think we're unique amongst companies that we participate in this industry, but we've also got this microgrid, which is kind of a well, it's quite literally a living grid on our on our own campus, and we talk about it a lot. It's it's a common topic of conversation around the company about what the microgrid is doing and and how it responded to this event or that event, so it has a lot of publicity around our organization. The way that we're able to participate in the resiliency of this campus, and the way that you know we're able to, you know, even brief outages of power can really impact certain manufacturing operations on our campus, like that, no longer being a concern for us, is really a game changer for a manufacturing firm. And I think what people need to understand is electric power and the grid in general is is under stress.
• 33:36
  John Gounaris: Like we're having significant amounts of load growth in this country for the first time in multiple decades. It's happening at a time where there's significant environmental impacts to the grid. Reliability overall is maybe in some areas it's improving, but overall we're seeing utilities really struggle with their reliability numbers, and it was necessary for a company like G and W Electric to take matters into our own hands and provide the level of resiliency that we felt our operations needed. And I think that that's going to be a story that is going to become more true over time for more industrial customers. This is a technology that we think has a lot of legs to it. We think it's important for the future of critical industries to get comfortable with this technology because if you want to have reliable power, there's some aspects of it that you're going to have to take into your own hands.
• 34:40
  Tim Montague: Last word goes to John Peterson, the project manager who lived this build from day one.
• 34:46
  John Pedersen: It was a it was a an awesome experience to to be the project manager for this project because the leadership, former employee, vice president of Power Grid Automation at the time, Pat Avery, had set the vision with the owner John Mueller, the president, you know, just very visionary guys.
• 35:04
  John Pedersen: Those guys, best in class, world class. Do something, it has to be done the best we can. And we use we use little phrases like, if I was climbing Everest, and somebody and I'm standing on the top peak, and somebody throws a snowball that's a half inch higher than the peak, I'm going to jump on the snowball because I want to be on the. We want the best of the best, so we did spend time searching for the best in class components. I circumnavigated the globe at least twice, and then we did all kinds of visits, not just to the showrooms, but always to the R&D centers of the places we were buying because we wanted to know where their technology was going, so we did our engineering. It's not just electrical. There's mechanical.
• 35:49
  John Pedersen: There's structural everywhere, and there's civil on some places and everywhere we went. And you mentioned the flywheel has got to be below grade. Ours is not below grade. It's on a structured lab, but it's from a company in Germany called Piller, and it's not going to puncture the walls. It's this technology in the flywheel itself is like 60 or 80 years old. The front end, the control system, all that stuff is modern. You know, because it's got you know communications and stuff like that. But, but the technology of that, you know, it's there's really no nuts and bolts holding it together. The whole thing is a press fit. It's it's just with zero tolerance.
• 36:30
  John Pedersen: It's the guys have just engineered this thing to the right spot, and it's it's it's it's just a beautiful piece of work. It's a it's a artistic engineered design when you look on the. But it's just I've been it's been operation for a number of years, and I'll tell you I keep my eyes and ears open to similar technologies, and I don't think there's a better battery. You know, you have there's some key points about the battery. I probably like you know can't catch fire, doesn't degrade. You got all those things here, but the vanadium came from a unique source. It's the United States. It's an Australian battery. Austrian battery. But the vanadium came from the United States, which is an important thing because domestic content and so forth to make the to make the financials.
• 37:18
  John Pedersen: But the vast majority of the vanadium came from the cleanup of a coal-fired or oil-fired plant that was decommissioned, and the landfill is between 30 and 60 percent vanadium, and they can't use that for anything else other than landfill. So when they're when somebody is forced to decommission a plant, that site's got to go someplace.
• 37:37
  John Pedersen: Well, it goes to these refining sites, and therefore, you to make my battery, we left a park and a and a housing division behind. If you get a lithium battery, you have to scar the earth. You have to destroy parts of the earth to get it, and it's much rarer to get than vanadium.
• 37:56
  John Pedersen: It's like 30 times more available than the earth, or something like that. So it's a nice little story, and you know I get a I get a green battery, and I left the green field behind. You know that's what we did. So it's just a it's just an amazing project. I'm sure John would agree. If you're interested in this system, you should talk to us, and then we should set up a tour for you.
• 38:18
  John Pedersen: And you know I've done it numerous times for various peoples, we just had one go through for some other people.
• 38:25
  John Pedersen: We met more politicians and people that have various interests, very in-depth interest in this technology.
• 38:31
  John Pedersen: It's not just industrial; it could be defense, it could be environmental, it could be whatever your whatever your direction of your life is. It's all good, and so therefore, this program here is aligned with my
• 38:46
  interest: is to get the word out and have people talk about this because there are places for lithium, there's places for vanadium, and and we have some pretty good solutions.
• 38:57
  interest: And we could talk about all the other things that G and W does that maybe you don't know about that would make your grid better, and there's a lot of them. So come to Bolingbrook and make contact with us and and Tim's Tim's podcast and learn more about this and talk to Lenny. And I'd be happy to show you around what we've got going on here and bring your walking shoes because it's a big campus and you can walk all over the place, so
• 39:24
  John Gounaris: you'll get your 10,000 steps in for sure.
• 39:26
  Tim Montague: Well, that's that's great that you are opening the facility for tours.
• 39:29
  Tim Montague: That helps a lot. A lot of people are skeptical until they can see and touch something. The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by SDE Sinclair Designs and Engineering, fixed tilt and carport racking design, engineering, permitting, and manufacturing all under one roof in Michigan. No outside vendors, no waiting in someone else's queue. Just fast turn around and steal that ships when you need it. Ask Ag Energy Co. in Illinois or Sunrise Solar in the Mid-Atlantic, they'll tell you what it's like to work with the Sinclair team. SDE, everything in-house. Visit Sinclair-Designs.com. Check out all of our content at CleanPowerHour.com. Tell a friend about the show. That is the best thing you can do to help others find this content.
• 40:21
  Tim Montague: It's very easy. Send a text, make a phone call. Remember to talk to them next time you see them. But tell a friend and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with my listeners on LinkedIn and visit with me at a trade show like Re+ Midwest or Re Vegas, the big one. I go to a lot of trade shows and I love meeting my listeners. So, with that, how can our listeners reach you, John Gounaris and John Pederson?
• 40:50
  John Gounaris: Yeah, probably the best way to do that is LinkedIn. So you can find me John J O H N Gounaris G O U N A R I S. Also, check us out at gwelectric.com, where you can learn a lot more about our products. There's also quite a bit about our microgrid on our website too. So, even if you're not necessarily interested in improving your electric power, you can find out about our microgrid there as well.
• 41:19
  John Pedersen: And the GW microgrid, G&W Electric website is GW Electric, all one word.
• 41:26
  Tim Montague: All right, I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage. Take care, everybody.