Episode 101: Reinventing Grid Storage with XL Batteries
September 4, 2025 at 9:29:25 PM
Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.
All right it’s time to talk a WHOLE lot more about energy kind of THE topic really since we both desperately NEED energy our demand for it is only increasing and also the transition to renewable energy is the absolute beating heart of cutting global emissions and limiting global warming.
So let’s start with the the grid likely the most complex machine humans ever made and a machine that is due for a complete rebuild. The grid we have was built for one-way power plants and load growth of 1 to 2 percent each year
The grid we NEED has to juggle rooftop solar at noon, heat waves at 6 p.m., maybe a little bidirectional charging, oh and data centers GALORE.
One bottleneck? Storage that is safe, long-lasting, and affordable at utility scale. So let’s geek out.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Tom Sisto, founder, CEO of XL Batteries. And the challenge that we're tackling is grid scale energy storage. So what we have brought to the table is a pH neutral, aqueous organic flow battery. And so that's a lot of words to describe a device that is utility scale energy storage to provide a lot of value on the grid. The simplest one being backing up solar and wind and sort of the filling in the gap of when they're not producing, the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing, but really providing a myriad of use cases. And so we have a large technical name for a device that stores energy at the grid scale.
Molly Wood
Perfect. actually, let's spend a little bit, but before we dig more into the technology, let's spend a little bit of time on why grid scale energy storage is so crucial in general, but specifically, as you just mentioned for that transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the things that people sort of take for granted is electricity. The lights work, our fridges keep our food cold, so on and so forth. And so we just kind of take it for granted. It's one of those things that was mandated to always work and it does always work for the most part. But I think what people don't realize is that the grid is really old and really complex. It's probably the most complex machine.
Molly Wood
I'm
Tom Sisto
If you want to think of it as a systems level type of thing, it's probably one of the most complex machines in the world. And so it's aging out. A lot of the gas-fired plants and a lot of the older technology is starting to age out. We think of bridges and roads as sort of crumbling and we need infrastructure investment on the physical goods that we sort of touch every day. But I think a lot of people don't realize how old the grid is as well. And so
just to overhaul it is multiple, multiple, multiple trillions of dollars. And storage plays a very big role in that and modernizing it because storage is really critical in all aspects of life, right? We store food in our pantries for use later. We store food in our fridges for use later, so on and so forth. And so being able to sync up sort of the generation profile, which is the production of energy with the use profile, which is
industrials, consumers, so on and so forth, being able to match those, if you want to think of them as waves of peak and trough and so on and so forth, matching those is where storage comes in. It allows you to time shift those two pieces to link up. so solar and wind are the classic example, right? The production line of solar and wind is not a flat line. It's a very dynamic line based on irradiance or wind power and so on and so forth. And sometimes it goes to zero.
Sometimes it goes to 25 % strength, so on and so forth. And so that needs storage in order to sort of match that generation profile with the use profile. And that's a classic example.
Molly Wood
And is, mean, is it fair to say, like in terms of grid modernization, obviously our goal is the transition to renewable energy, but it seems like it's fair to say we need storage no matter what, right? Like even for fossil fuel generation, like there's no, there's two things you're solving for here. One is modernizing the grid at all, because I think Americans are realizing we're a lot more power insecure than we used to be just speaking to the U.S. market anyway.
Tom Sisto
100 percent.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, very much so. So I mean, there have been, there's an interesting Reuters article if people kind of want to go and do some homework and some reading. Texas has had upwards of 30 near misses of blackouts from data centers sort of dropping off the grid quickly through a disconnect, some sort of issue where they unplug very quickly. And so from the use side, things are becoming sort of overloaded and destabilizing the grid.
I mean, Europe just had the blackout that cost, think it was $2 billion worth of productivity was the 18 hours or something that it was blacked out. And things are becoming much more unstable as assets are aging, as we're transitioning into newer generation of renewables, things like that. And so I think it's kind of a dovetailing of the two opportunities, right? As things get old and we need to replace them, we're faced with the decision of what do we replace them with?
Right? And the best thing to replace them with is solar. Solar and wind is a complement, but solar is the cheapest generation set. It just needs storage in order to reach its full potential and to provide sort of stability of electrons at all times. And so do we build gas plants that are 20, 30, 50 year assets and have those for the next 50 years or do we build solar and we're faced with sort of the opportunity of modernizing and transitioning at the same time?
Molly Wood
So what was it that made you target this technology and this opportunity?
Tom Sisto
Yeah, so it's pure dumb luck. I think the, yep. So right place, right time, I think is sort of the background for this company. So the technology is really what defined everything. I was doing my postdoctoral research at Columbia University. So my background is making molecules. I was a synthetic chemist, was my training for my PhD. Pharmaceutical background, so generally there's a...
Molly Wood
The best origin stories are pure dumb luck.
Tom Sisto
sea sponge, tree frog, bark in the Amazon. All the molecules are isolated out of the frog and molecule 3082 is the next sort of wonder drug, but we can't grind up tree frogs and make pills. So the synthetic chemist will make that same molecule from oil and gas feedstocks. I was interested in unnatural products. So those are termed natural products. They're found in the natural world. I was interested in unnatural products. So things the universe had never seen before.
Molly Wood
love, by the way, how you just gave the quickest casual overview of how we get drugs. One. You're like, yeah, well, by the way, we find a thing in a tree frog and then you don't want to grind it up. And so we make a synthetic version of that. And OK, great, awesome. When the chill background part of the origin story is the most interesting thing you ever heard, it's what just happened there, audience. OK, keep going, keep going.
Tom Sisto
Yep. Yep.
Tom Sisto
and that's pharmaceuticals.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, but I mean quite frankly as a tangent the isolation chemists have the best job in the world. They're the guys who dive into the sea and find the sponge or they trek through the Amazon and then they isolate out the thing. So if you ever want a fun job go to school and become an isolation chemist and you get to explore deep into the Amazon. So jealous of that personally.
Molly Wood
Okay, children, yep. Okay, so there's, and then you're saying there are sort of two types of creating novel molecules. There's that version where you're trying to mimic a natural thing.
Tom Sisto
And then there's the unnatural side. And so those are generally predicted by theory. And so if you have an adventure streak, you become an isolation chemist, natural products guy. If you have a God complex, then you create things that the universe has never seen before. so, yeah, exactly. And so that kind of always fascinated me just in general, that you could create something that had never existed before. And those are generally electronic materials.
Molly Wood
And that's you. Got it, okay.
Tom Sisto
There's also some hard materials, ceramics, rubbers, things like that. But electronics are sort of the biggest version in terms of application for novel molecules and materials. so that was my training, but I never made devices in my training. So I went to Columbia to learn how to make devices. And so we were making solar cells and transistors and all of the sort of next generation electronics. And what we found was a molecule, it's actually based on red paint.
So it's an old 1900s dye, red paint still used today in consumer goods, red inks, car paint, so on and so forth. And we were using it as a light harvester for solar cells. And what we saw was that it would accept the electron and it just never degraded. And so that was a really special aha moment because organics, and so this is something that obviously the audience wouldn't know, but organics have sort of been put forth by the highest levels.
as very promising materials for energy storage. the DOE, national labs, Harvard, MIT, so on and so forth for about 20 years have been looking at organics for energy storage. And the challenge is...
Molly Wood
Okay. And what does that give us some specifics about what that means? Like organics for energy storage, how?
Tom Sisto
Yeah, so an organic molecule is a carbon-based molecule. So that's what we mean when we say organic, not like the food organic pesticide-free, but.
Molly Wood
Right.
Molly Wood
yeah, yeah, totally. But I mean, like, what kind of battery would that be? Is that a sodium battery? Is that a...
Tom Sisto
So all sorts of applications of organics have sort of been put forth, but the sort of holy grail is that it is the literal charge storage material. So like instead of lithium, instead of sodium, instead of a metal, it's a carbon-based molecule. And the reason why is because the scale can be astronomical, right? The oil and gas industry is the largest physical producing good industry in the world.
Molly Wood
I see.
Tom Sisto
And it's not that oil and gas is bad, it's that the burning of oil and gas is an unsustainable thing. And so if you could take that and you could make a synthetic molecule and you could use that to store energy, it can be ultra cheap and it can be ultra scalable. And so was sort of the postulated next wave of energy storage. The challenge is they're not stable. And that is required for energy storage, right? If you're going to cycle something.
for 10,000 cycles, needs to be stable. so.
Molly Wood
not stable like sometimes when people think of batteries and they hear not stable, do they blow up or do they just degrade over time and not hold as much energy?
Tom Sisto
So time is a funny thing in battery world. Time is really kind of a key point. most organics and what I mean by most organics, like 99.999 % of organic molecules, if you were to charge them, would last for 10 to the minus six seconds. So, gone. No. Put six zeros after the decimal or before the decimal point. I mean, literally people spend.
Molly Wood
That doesn't sound like very long, yeah. OK. Right.
Tom Sisto
careers in academia, creating crazy situations with lasers and freezing and so on to capture a brief femtosecond of a radical and observe it and then write papers and so on. That's how unstable they generally are. They're termed, in the industry of chemistry, they're termed reactive intermediates because they're transient on the way to something else. And so there's a few that have been found over the past hundred years.
Molly Wood
Wow.
Molly Wood
Okay.
Tom Sisto
Like if you're a graduate student in chem 501 or 602 or whatever it may be There's a book chapter called persistent radicals where you learn and they're named after the scientists. They were that Sort of groundbreaking. It was a radical that could be seen sort of on the bench Maybe in a bottle for two weeks or three weeks or something like that. It was that famous So for us to have found a radical
a charged species that we didn't see degrade at all under normal ambient conditions was that aha moment. And so that was sort of what led one day both myself and also all the collaborators that were involved in sort of the project. And so we had this aha moment and we looked at it and we said, okay, that's a battery molecule. That's the thing. But then when you think about batteries and the applications,
Molly Wood
Right. So you're saying you're getting a chapter. You're getting a chapter. Okay. Amazing.
Tom Sisto
Mobility is lithium ion. You could argue sodium. Hydrogen is a really fun one, but it's the top left of the periodic table. So if you Google a periodic table, all of that is the literal top left, and that's energy density. That's size and weight. Every battery you've ever touched is made to move around. Right, from a AA to a nine volt, even a lead acid in your car, so on and so forth, we built batteries to unplug from the wall and move. And stationary storage is just totally different paradigm.
And organics have a place there. It's not size and weight, it's cost, longevity, which in this case, we fit the need, but it's cost, longevity, safety, so on and so forth. And so it's just a different engineering paradigm. So we looked at it and we said, this is stationary storage. So flow battery is the best type of battery for stationary storage. And that's a whole nother sort of topic which we can dive into.
That necessitated us putting the molecule into liquid. So we did, we put it into pH neutral salt water, and then we put it into a flow battery architecture and we saw that stability hold, and then we spun the company out.
Molly Wood
So what is, I mean, it's pretty awesome when you talk to somebody who's like so casual about something that really, it's probably gonna turn out to be a super huge deal. Explain Flow Battery for let's, know, we'll just keep going on the technical construction here.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, absolutely. So a flow battery is a type of battery that I'll sort of start with the two things that are true that people may not realize, which is that they are very old type of battery. NASA invented them in the mid 80s and they're very, very scale. They're already among the world's largest batteries. So China has built, I think it's an 800 megawatt hour vanadium flow battery. I just saw a headline, I think it's a European.
one that's gonna be 1.6 gigawatt hours, it just got permitting approval. They are literally scaled to the largest scale in the world already. So they're mature and they're scaled. We just don't know about them because they're too expensive. And so they're too expensive because of two things. The vanadium metal, that's the charge storage material, is too expensive. And then the sulfuric acid that it dissolves in is too corrosive. And so it drives a lot of materials costs. So we'll start there.
Those are facts where they're mature and they're big. They're just unknown because of cost. So what a flow battery is, is it's analogous to a car. We'll sort of start with analogy and paint the picture. It's analogous to a car in that there's an engine, which is the cells, and then there's a gas tank. And in a car, the engine is the horsepower and the torque, and the gas tank is how far you can drive the car for, right?
And you can independently lever those. You can work on the engine and you can get more horsepower and torque. You can swap your 10 gallon gas tank for a 20 gallon gas tank and you can drive for twice as far. And they're totally independent of each other. That is then analogous of a fuel cell for anybody who has ever heard of a fuel cell. Same thing. There's a cell, which is the engine, and then there's a tank of hydrogen, which is the fuel. It's consumed in this case, right? And they're independently leverable. A flow battery is the same thing as a fuel cell.
But instead of a hydrogen gas, you have a positive tank of liquid, a negative tank of liquid, and the compounds are dissolved in that liquid. And then they flow, they're pumped, and they flow through the cell. And as they flow over the electrodes, they do the charging or the discharging, and then they circulate back into the tanks. And so it's a closed-loop system that can be charged and discharged. And so basically what you have is a hollow cell with the electrodes that the liquid can flow over. And that hollow cell, the liquid is
Tom Sisto
pumped through it and as it's pumped through it's charged or discharged. And so what's important about that is you can change the power, which is say if you're at town and you need 50 megawatts, you can size that and then you can change the duration to be whatever you want it be. Six hours, eight hours, 20 hours, 50 hours, so on and so forth. And they're two totally independent levers that you can pull.
Molly Wood
And so then in your case, you're taking this known architecture, but you're replacing the vanadium metal with your red paint molecule, which I suspect has a name. And you're replacing the sulfuric acid with saltwater.
Tom Sisto
Yep, exactly. And so the paint molecules are the negative one. We also have a positive molecule as well. It's an iron-based sort of plastic-wrapped, if you will, iron molecule. So still organic in that sense. But we've got a positive and a negative in pH-neutral saltwater that fits into the flow battery architecture. So we're not reinventing the car. We just have a better fuel is the easiest way to think about it.
Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about where flow batteries have been deployed, what the timeline looks like, how to prevent planned blackouts with more reliable, safe grid storage, decentralization, data centers ugh so many interesting things.
MW VO: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Tom Sisto of XL Batteries back to it.
Molly Wood
Right. What stage of creation are you at in terms of these batteries? Like, have you made them? Have you deployed them? Do they exist?
Tom Sisto
Yeah, yeah, they do. So we put a unit into the field. It's a fully integrated unit. So it's a little shipping container unit that's got everything. It's got the chemistry, the hardware, the sensors, the controls, the software, everything necessary for a standalone unit. And that's sort of our platform through which we prove value to the customer.
We qualified, there were some unique sort of qualification tests that we wanted to do with them because we can retrofit their tag gas sets that they already have. And so that's kind of an interesting thing. So they're a big oil and gas storage and shipping company. And so they have big oil and gas tanks and obviously you cannot use, yeah. And so we obviously cannot use lithium ion in a petrochemical site.
Molly Wood
You're a customer, you're saying. Okay.
Tom Sisto
And so there's an interesting avenue of retrofitting those tanks to be flow batteries. So we proved that out, same materials as their tanks, so on and so forth. And then we showed all of the use cases are what we're running through now. So there's a sort of industry standard testing manual put forth by EPRI. And so we're sort of running those industry standard tests to show that the battery can do sort of every use case that the grid demands, which makes it sort of a Swiss Army knife as an energy storage technology.
So they're in the field, being proven out, and then that's our platform to go to commercial scale. So our next step is true commercial product because we have all the data from this unit to inform the commercial design. Because again, these things do exist at commercial scale. And so it's the slight little modifications for our chemistry that we need to make on a mature platform. And so now we've got the test unit to make those slight modifications from a database position.
Molly Wood
And then is your ultimate goal to make and deploy new batteries or to do this retrofit? Because that does feel pretty promising if you could work with an existing infrastructure where it exists.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, yeah, so.
Yeah, yeah, I think there's an immense amount of tank infrastructure out there. So for instance, they have, I believe it's 400 tanks on their site. And two of the largest ones would be multiple hundreds of megawatt hours. So we're talking terawatt hours of tank capacity just at that one customer sort of across their global sites. So mean, massive opportunity to retrofit existing tank architecture. We can also greenfield. We could do both.
Molly Wood
Yeah.
Tom Sisto
And so I think that's wide open. The power unit is a piece and then the tank is a piece. And so we can drop the power units with existing tank structure or we can build a tank as well.
Molly Wood
I hear you not telling us who your customer is. Who are your potential customers? Like give us a sense of who might buy this. it is. okay.
Tom Sisto
the customer is public, so I can say their name. Yeah, no problem. It's Stolt Haven Terminals.
Molly Wood
What is that and what do they do? Yeah, like this is, I'm so glad you could tell us because this gives us an example of like what, who needs what kinds of batteries and why.
Tom Sisto
Yep, so they are a chemical shipping and storage company. So Stolt-Nielsen is the larger sort of mothership, if you will. I believe they're the largest tanker company in the world for oil and gas. But then the terminal is a subsidiary, that's the storage. And so they have terminals across, I believe it's 14 ports across the globe. They store chemicals for customers, essentially. They lease the tanks and then they store and distribute.
So and so forth. they're specifically in the Port of Houston. So if you've ever been to the Port of Houston, it's like two to three square miles of every petrochemical company in the world. It's Shell, Dow, Ineos, DuPont, so on and so forth. And so you cannot have lithium ion in that area. So there is huge power demand. So Stolt has some power demand, pumping tankers, filling tanks, circulating tanks, heating tanks. There's real industrial power demand. But then really that
area, all the refineries, all the chemical plants, all of that. It's massive power demand and there's no ability to site lithium ion there. So there's opportunities there. And then we're also working with a data center developer that is looking to build out a gigawatt data center campus. And so that's a really interesting application as well.
Molly Wood
So are you, can I ask then, are you storing and distributing renewable energy for the purpose primarily of like storing and pumping oil and gas and petrochemicals?
Tom Sisto
So we're agnostic to the energy source in terms of like renewables versus tradition. We're agnostic to that. We're just a battery. And for the industrial use case, they have a number of industrial use cases, Stolt specifically. So yeah, it would be for pumping, like emptying tankers, filling tanks. Just industrial pumping requires significant energy, heating tanks. They're also critical infrastructure.
Molly Wood
Got it.
Tom Sisto
So like they cannot go down. It would be unsafe for them to lose energy type of backup need. so hurricane season is always a thing on their mind and sort of resiliency. And so we could be a backup generator in some sense as well, so on and so forth, which is very different from sort of the data center application that we're looking towards.
Molly Wood
So it seems like there's sort of multiple levels of sustainability that either exist or are possible. Like it sounds like your battery architecture itself is more sustainable because of how you're, because you don't have to process bad chemicals or get rare metals out of the earth or things like that, right? Is that a fair assessment? Okay. And then in ideal scenarios, you're storing and distributing renewable energy, which it sounds like is one of your goals. Okay.
Tom Sisto
Yeah. Yep.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, exactly. think our goal is to help enable that.
Molly Wood
but also you could just be like, and also you can just be reliable power for anybody who needs it.
Tom Sisto
Yep. And I think that's the key. As we transition, it's not going to be binary black-white. It's how do we provide a toolset that is reliable and bankable as we transition into this. And so ultimately, our goal is to store renewables. But we're agnostic as a company.
Molly Wood
Got it, okay.
Molly Wood
Yep, okay. And then how do your costs compare? Like what is the cost of one of your batteries? Like you said, the existing Flow batteries are incredibly expensive, which is why they're not everywhere. How do yours compare and also how will they compare? Like with the acknowledgement that you're early.
Tom Sisto
Yep. So we.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, so we're not at scale yet. So the economics are not market ready at today's sort of like small batch production, hand-built sort of one-off units. We're projecting very, very low costs. So when we reach scale, we believe we're going to be significantly under lithium's cost on an installed basis, which is really kind of the driving force, right? Like nobody will pay a green premium, but when the economics make sense and it's sustainable.
then you have a sort of winner from both angles, right? It's why not, as opposed to, well, can we? And so that's the way that we're looking at it. It makes economic sense. It makes longevity sense, right? From a utilities perspective, lithium ion doesn't last long enough. You don't build a bridge, you don't build a road, and then rip it out seven to 10 years later, right? These things need to last. And then from a...
Industrial perspective having an asset that lasts for a long time is also valuable, right? It's like they don't want to be ripping things out capex Quickly either
Molly Wood
I wonder how you think about, mean, I know you're agnostic and at this moment there is this massive need and opportunity around grid architecture, but I wonder how you think about a solution like yours enabling a more decentralized energy future, which just happens to be my current obsession.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, decentralized energy is a very, very interesting thing. Yeah, mean, transmission is, whew, I could talk about transmission for a very long time.
Molly Wood
I bet. I mean, is that a barrier to rolling out your solution?
Tom Sisto
I think we assist in the transition, or I'm sorry, the transmission problem. that's a whole other thing. So storage as transmission is an interesting topic. for the audience, I'm not sure how aware your audience would be on how big of a problem transmission really is. but we need, if you really kind of want to stay up at night because you can't sleep because you see how, how problematic this is going to be.
Molly Wood
Like if.
Tom Sisto
I saw, I believe it was Congress released a report that we need 78,000 miles of transmission lines, the high voltage ones, the big ones, right? The ones that hum and are kind of next to the highway or that type of thing. We need 78,000 miles of them by, I think it was 2035. And we had built, this was maybe two years ago. I had looked at this a year ago. I think we had built like 400 miles that year and we needed 75,000 miles.
Molly Wood
my gosh. Right.
Tom Sisto
And it was like, if everything in the queue got built over the next couple of years, it'd be like 4,000 total. So it was like, it couldn't happen. And then the other piece is with transmission, every next mile is harder because the easy ones get built first, right? And so then it's like, okay, we're going through, we have to buy people's homes and knock them down and we need eminent domain. It becomes a nightmare. And so one of the applications.
Molly Wood
Right. And this is, by the way, state by state, city by city, every individual regulation, not to mention geography, not to mention exactly, like buildings and yeah, it's a mess.
Tom Sisto
Yeah.
Yeah, it is a mess. so storage as transmission is a really interesting thing. So forgetting decentralized for a moment, which we can talk decentralized because it's a really interesting topic, but forgetting decentralized for a moment storage as transmission is a really interesting use case for batteries. it's basically, and I'll try to keep this simple. If a transmission line is like a pipe for water.
Right, there's only so much you can flow through it. Right, you fall on the tap and the pipe is completely full and I'll make a number up, it's five gallons per hour type of thing. That's just the flow. Transmission is the same way, right? Like you max out how much can pass through a transmission line and that's the problem. And so what you can do is you can put two batteries, one on the upside of the choke point and one on the downside. And you can think of them as buckets for water if you want to think of it that way. When the transmission line is completely full.
and flowing the five gallons per hour type of transmission, you can fill the upstream bucket with extra, right? And then you're not choked out as much. And then you can be releasing energy from a downstream battery to add on top of the electricity that's coming through the transmission line, right? And then later at night, let's say, so that's noon on a hot day when everybody's air conditioning is on, then midnight, the transmission line is only half used, right?
you can run it full blast and you can charge the downstream battery so that it's charged for noon the next day and you can release the upstream battery and just kind of shuffle. And so you can use two batteries as a way of catching the energy that can't go through the pipe on the upstream side and adding energy to a maxed out pipe on the downstream side. And you can basically double the amount of electricity or triple, whatever it may be.
Tom Sisto
through the transmission line by using batteries.
Molly Wood
And that even just to simplify further solves the problem that people keep hearing about, which is like, California has too much solar. We have too much. We have excess energy that we can't deal with. So this would stabilize grid operations, but also handle the problem that can be created by excess solar installation, or what we think of as excess but shouldn't be.
Tom Sisto
And yeah, and so you can alleviate and basically enhance the capability of transmission lines with two batteries, one on the upstream, one on the downstream. And then when you get into distributed energy, that's like a whole other beast. you can put, so distributed energy for the audience that may be unaware. So high voltage transmission is the really big ones. Distributed is the line and pole that you see outside. So like you're driving down your...
regular road and you see the telephone pole types of wires around. That's medium-ish voltage or distribution level voltage. And so what happens is the big transmission line comes into a substation. You may or may not have noticed them as you're driving around, but the big lines come into a physical plant that's generally fenced off and then that's where it feeds out the line and pole that's in the area. And so you can site batteries at the distribution level.
they can be charged up and that can actually provide a lot of benefit to the community in times of instability. So I'll give a classic example, which would be California sort of areas that are a little bit more remote, right? So last mile kinds of problems. So a lot of the wildfires are because wind will take down a high voltage transmission line that's kind of out in the wilderness of a national forest. It's going.
over mountains, it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere and a line goes down and then a fire happens. And so what's happening now is they're blacking out towns that are in the more remote areas by shutting down those transmission lines during high wind events. And so the town just has to deal with that.
Molly Wood
I'm gonna correct you slightly and say they're blacking out Oakland and San Francisco and Berkeley. like this is not, it's happening maybe more often in rural towns, but no, we are all used to the PSPS. It's like a public safety power shutoff alert that is literally happening in urban areas. Yeah, yeah, totally. I'm like, no, no, we have that. Yeah, no, this is why, believe me, the reasons that that,
Tom Sisto
Okay, so not even rural towns anymore.
Tom Sisto
interesting. Wow, I'm an East Coast guy, so we don't, yeah, wow. I learned something today.
Molly Wood
energy security and reliability and decentralized energy solutions are of interest are deeply self-interested in my case.
Tom Sisto
Yeah, for sure. I didn't realize it was even making it into kind of the metro areas now. That's wild.
Molly Wood
Yep. No, all know. PSPS, we're like, God. And then you got to try to come up with, yeah, it's a thing. Yep.
Tom Sisto
Okay. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Okay. So basically if you're storage at the distributed level, you can kill the high voltage transmission lines and then you can run off of the storage at the distributed level. It becomes an economic challenge of kind of like how often is that used? How long do you need to back up for it? Like how long is a wind event? And so on and so forth. And so that's a whole nother sort of topic in debate. But I think it...
When you can use these assets all the time, because we're sort of a Swiss army knife type of battery, it makes them more economically viable than just the backup generator, right? The backup generator you buy for your home. I'm an East Coast guy, so we get snow storms, right? That's our blackouts. So it's like you buy a generator, you spend $15,000, every three years you may use it for two days during a big snowstorm kind of thing. That's the most expensive electricity you've ever purchased in your entire life.
And so utilities kind of want to avoid that. The key is to use the assets all the time for a lot of grid stability applications or just energy movement like we talked about, opening up transmission choke points, so on and so forth. But then you're also there as a backup when.
Molly Wood
Yeah. Do you have the sense as you move toward commercial deployment that this is a solution that utilities are? mean, like you always want to assume that of course they know this and they want it, but the assumptions get us killed. Yeah.
Tom Sisto
I think they very much do. I think we're starting to see some impactful driving forces. mean, California fires were an absolute tragedy. And I think you're starting to see the ramifications of things like the transmission lines, I guess to your point, and even in more metro areas. And you're starting to see blackouts and instability.
mean, obviously just had a major, major one. Texas has had the near misses that I sort of spoke about. It's coming. I think the way that utilities are, there's regulated and unregulated utilities and that's a whole other podcast or series of, yeah. And so, so there's a lot of driving forces state by state, region by region, so on and so forth. We are seeing movement in the utility industry to really kind of understand and try to get ahead of the curve.
Molly Wood
Believe me, that's multiple hours, folks, yeah.
Tom Sisto
on these things, but utilities are reflexive, I guess is what I would say. They're not proactive, they're reflexive just because of the way that they're structured and built. And so we're seeing enough problems to have them start to be reflexive in that way. But I do think they will, as a company, we are looking towards heavy industry first to provide that bankability that utilities really require. So utilities have a saying, first to test, last to buy.
is kind of an inside joke that utilities will say. And so we think industry that has a real need and the capability to move more quickly will provide the inroads to ultimately what we are as a utility product. Heavy industry and utility, both utilities and big sector. It really comes on the back of bankability, which we think heavy industry provides us.
Molly Wood
And then of course, I feel like that road leads inevitably and pretty directly to data centers, right? Like you mentioned that earlier as a future solution, but as we build more and more and more of those, or the goal is to build more of those and frankly, we, know, like be real Sam Alman, you don't have the energy secured to build anywhere near the amount of data centers that you say you want to build. It sounds like a solution like this could be crucial to enabling those to exist at all.
Tom Sisto
Yep.
Tom Sisto
Yep.
Molly Wood
Like is AI your best friend? I guess is what I keep coming back to.
Tom Sisto
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, whether we like it or not, I think it's all of our best friends. We're going to be good buddies with all of our imaginary AI friends. But I would say, yeah, it's what that landscape looks like is obviously kind of the hot debate at cocktail parties, dinner parties, and it's a really interesting conversation. It needs energy and it's going to be big, regardless of the shape and form and format.
Molly Wood
Yep.
Tom Sisto
And so, yeah, we see that as a big load. Load growth is the term, which is the consumption of energy. We see that increasing through data centers for sure. We've been flat for a while. We've used more energy, but we've gotten more efficient, which has led to kind of a flat line for a long time, I think about a decade. And then AI just changed that and boom, we're going up in terms of energy use. so, yeah, we believe that we are a necessary piece to that.
Molly Wood
All right, last question. What is your timeline looking like?
Tom Sisto
Yeah, so we are looking towards commercial product in the next two years and then beginning deployments. So we'll see sort of how time shakes out.
Molly Wood
Amazing.
Molly Wood
Tom Sisto is the founder and CEO of XL batteries. Keep your eyes peeled. Keep an eye out for that textbook chapter. Thanks, Tom.
Tom Sisto
I am.
Tom Sisto
Thank you, Molly. I really appreciate it.
Molly Wood Voice-Over:
That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.
NEXT week on the show we’re continuing the theme of reliability and preventing blackouts with a technology that’s kind of like an airbag for the electrical grid.
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