Episode 102 : An airbag for the electrical grid

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. 

This week let’s keep talking about the grid specifically grid reliability. Because it’s one thing to build more solar and wind, but if the grid itself can’t stay stable, the lights go out. It’s not a hypothetical: earlier this year, a cascading failure in Spain and Portugal knocked tens of millions of people offline, snarled transportation and telecoms, and cost billions in lost productivity. And regulators have warned that parts of the U-S are at risk for more blackouts because of heat data center demand and a lack of storage. See last week’s episode.  

Today’s show is about using storage kind of like an airbag for the grid keeping a little power wobble from becoming a full-scale blackout. Let’s go. 

David Hebert 

Sure. David Hebert. I work for Wärtsilä, specifically in the energy storage business. We are working on mainly utility scale energy storage projects. So we have a differentiated product. we are commonly or occasionally called an integrator, occasionally called an OEM. We kind of bridge over the gap.

where we manufacture very specific products with differentiated technology, but we use other people's battery cells. And occasionally we use other people's inverters as well.

Molly Wood (01:05.009)

Tell me before we get too much deeper into the actual technology, tell me what problem it is that you're trying to solve at grid scale.

David Hebert 

You know, at grid scale, it kind of falls into two major pockets. So, you know, a battery sitting out on the grid is usually trying to solve some form of reliability issue from a technology standpoint, and it's trying to solve some form of cost issue, whether it is, you know, avoiding the cost of new transmission lines, like being able to sort of manage the balance of electricity in a part of the grid.

or it is managing the cost of renewable energy curtailment, as a good example. So in the renewable world, if the sun's shining and you could produce energy, but there's not enough load on the grid, not enough customers consuming it, you end up curtailing that energy. So that's a lot of opportunity wasted, a lot of money that is just going out into the paper. Similarly, if you have

an opportunity to do help the reliability form, right? Look at the idea of doing, how would they call it, fast frequency regulation, which is just a really fancy term to helping keep the frequency on the grid stabilized. If you can't do that with just renewable generators on the run.

You need some form of generator where you can modulate that, like a thermal resource, like an engine or a turbine or a coal plant or a nuclear plant, depending on the scale of it. But batteries fill in that gap as well.

Molly Wood 

Okay. And then it's my understanding, just to put a fine point on the climate part of this, the climate solution part of this, that the mission of the company is to move toward a 100 % renewable energy future. Is that one of the problems you're also trying to solve for?

David Hebert

Absolutely. think, you know, Wärtsilä is unique in that it does make engines, right, the other group. So I'll give that a little mod real quickly on the outside. But even in that, they're trying to move that section of the business to hydrogen or ammonia or other types of fuels that are more carbon and more green. They're also trying to help work with us on the battery side to say, how do you better balance the grid so that you can adopt more proper

like solar and wind and continue that transition. So we're in a unique position where we are helping folks get from the way things are done today to the way things would be done under a fully renewable grid. And that's going to take time and that's going to take technology and balance between the demands that we have today.

Molly Wood 

So this is one of the many, many, many steps toward modernizing the grid and also hopefully making it more conducive to renewable energy. This feels like it might be a good place for a primer on Wartzilla for people who aren't familiar.

David Hebert

Yeah, sure. I can give you a very high level background. Wärtsilä is an interesting company. They're headquartered in Finland and have a global footprint. We're a 190 year old company, so we're a very old company, but a lot like some very large scale companies, we started off as a sawmill of all things. And then gradually, then gradually they migrated into

Molly Wood

Really?

David Hebert

manufacturing reciprocating engines, as sort of the primary technology that are used in the marine sector, as well as in sort of stationary generators. And then I go, going to blank on the name and probably get it wrong. I think it was around 2018, they purchased a company called Greensmith that was doing battery energy storage projects, right, and that was to continue their efforts towards decarbonization.

And we've grown that business from a very small business to effectively a billion dollar business today.

Molly Wood

Wonderful, thank you. And then, okay, let's talk about the differentiated solution. Because it's my understanding it's software and hardware, but it's a pretty unique approach to creating grid stability.

David Hebert

Yeah, I think so two parts, right? When we look at the hardware aspect of things, we're trying to create energy storage that is going to be the most cost efficient, easiest to deploy, take up the least amount of space, really solve problems that are not necessarily connected to the prime problem, but it's trying to create a hardware solution that's just better than the other hardware solutions for all those reasons. Another great example of that is fire safety, right?

Batteries can start on fire. There have been battery fires in both small and large battery projects in the past. Not ours, fortunately. We've been very good about that. But we take that measure seriously. So when I say differentiated product, in particular on the hardware side, I'm talking about those types of features. also, we don't make the actual battery.

Molly Wood

But you're not making a battery. You said you were battery agnostic, right? Yep.

David Hebert

But we make everything that revolves around the battery to actually make it a system that can respond to commands in the grid, right? Charge and discharge very quickly.

Molly Wood

So it's the, and I think people are like not entirely familiar with the fact that, mean, maybe many of you are and my apologies listeners, but it's always good to be super specific. There is software that controls the function of the battery. So you have a hardware solution, also, so how does the hardware solution fit in there?

David Hebert

So there's that.

software solution. So from a hardware perspective, you you think about, you think about a battery, so you have a, you know, take a double A battery and hold it in your hand. It's pretty useless until you put it into some form of device, right? And that device might charge your cell phone, that device might, you know, move a hair clipper, who knows what that would be. It's very similar at the utility scale space.

Molly Wood

Right. Right.

David Hebert

A battery is a battery. We don't make those, we buy those. But we're putting those into containerized solutions with thermal cooling units, fire safety considerations, and inverter technology. So inverters are essentially the device that's converting DC energy of a battery to AC energy that operates on the grid. And those are the building of all the components around the battery are really where we put the focus on hardware and differentiate the hardware.

And then the software is really how do you get the best utilization out of all that hardware? How do you make it perform to certain aspects of the grid that are important? That's where we kind of dig into the reliability side of things. So one of the projects that we have in the UK is a good example of this. We have our hardware, and the combination of our hardware and software allows that project to

not just put energy on and off the grid, but it allows the project the ability to be able to put what they call reactive power, which helps manipulate the voltage, right, and keeps the voltage stable. If you've ever been at your house and the voltage is dipping way, way down, your lights will flicker a little bit. Anything that is voltage sensitive

like an electric razor, like if was trimming my beard and the voltage went down, I would not be very happy because the trimmer would slow down and it wouldn't act right and it would start yanking the hair out of my face and that would be really uncomfortable. So keeping that balance on the grid is an aspect of what those inverters under the command of the software are capable to do. And then the last piece for this particular project was synthetic inertia. So this is fun stuff, yeah.

Molly Wood

Right, this is the good stuff. Strap in nerds, here we go.

David Hebert

You know, Yeah, yeah. So inertia is inertia in the old school world is something you get when you have something that's spinning, like an engine, right? And there's a flywheel on the end of it. Just the fact that there's mass, right? There's physics behind it. It helps keep the generators rotating. And it gives buffer to the grid. So if you drop off

big parts of load or you have a problem on the grid. This is this kind of goes to like what just happened in Spain where you have a couple gigawatts, know, gigawatts being the power for 700 to 1000 homes or so get pulled away. Everything else has to compensate in milliseconds, right? Faster than your lights blow flicker. And if they don't, then more things start to fail.

and you have a cascade failure, which is essentially what happened in Spain. So when you have batteries that have the ability to give synthetic inertia, because there's nothing rotating, so they're manufacturing something that looks like inertia to the grid, to the way the waveforms are cooperating, it has the ability to hold things up, right? To ride through those types of events, keep the grid operating appropriately, and avoid those types of blackouts. That's really the reliability piece.

So in the UK, they made a special incentive program to be able to participate in these types of events. And that's the technology that we were able to bring to bear in our project for a company called Sanobi in Black Hillock region. Black Hillock's the project that's out in the news today. And we're seeing demand for that, more demand in the UK. We're starting to see demand.

In Australia, we've seen demand for that in Saudi Arabia, we've seen demand for that in the US, so it's becoming a bigger and bigger problem, not just because of renewables, but because the grid's getting old, right? And there are certain parts that are just, are not well situated to operate appropriately. So when you have issues like you had in Spain, which is essentially the same issue that happened in Texas, right? They had a cold snap and they had a problem where

Molly Wood

Right, right.

David Hebert

a bunch of generators started dropping off and then everyone else went with it. Those are the types of issues we're trying to prevent. So that you sort of increase that reliability, increase the safety for people that need that electricity and really also allow for more renewables to enter the mix in that same situation. Because the batteries are great. Think of them not like a butter knife, but more like a Swiss army knife.

Molly Wood 

Right.

David Hebert 

They can help the grid with inertia, with that type of balancing. They can shift energy from daytime to nighttime. And they can do all these things simultaneously. So they both add reliability and allow the capacity of renewables to come online at the same time.

Molly Wood

Let's take those apart one at a time. I have heard this technology, I feel like this is one of those like the more times we explain it, the better people have a chance to get it. I have heard this technology described as almost like an airbag. Like in a crash situation, you effectively trick the other parts of the grid into not panicking because there's this kind of virtual buffer that is enabled by the software plus the hardware.

David Hebert

Yep. Yeah, you need both components, right? Software on its own can't create the physics, right? The hardware has to be able to do it. But the hardware can't respond without the software to tell it what to do in an appropriate time and manner.

Molly Wood

Right. Has this, I mean, is this like totally new? Like, you know, where you're just like, hey, if we could just trick the other parts of the grid into not panicking and going down, we could solve this. So Wartzilla invented it or where did it come from?

David Hebert

It's.

No, I mean, I'd love to claim that we invented it. Interestingly, like the concept's been around for over a decade. I think at least on the hardware side, the ability for a specific device to be able to respond, right? It's been out there. I think the controls to be able to make it act appropriately and not conflict with the grid, but be more harmonious with the way that the grid operators are controlling the grid.

Those advances are relatively new and those advances, we have specific intellectual property on those.

Molly Wood

it. And it sounds like I could imagine that there are a lot of customers for this who are just looking for grid reliability. Like that all on its own and we'll get to renewable energy in a minute. But you pointed out that grid reliability is becoming more and more of a concern that needs to be addressed. Like is this a bolt on solution that, you know, utilities and grid operators can buy?

David Hebert

and

David Hebert 

It is, right? You know, another good example, in North Carolina, our customer Duke was able to section the grid and use the batteries and the renewables that were in that section of grid to be able to put the power back on for a certain number of hours during the day after the hurricanes had gone through the region.

Molly Wood

Hmm.

David Hebert 

different grid operators are looking for the ability to do those types of reliability solutions in addition to managing voltage frequency inertia, the physics of the grid. So there's a lot of emerging opportunities for that. Other.

Molly Wood

for more of like, sounds like a resilience type solution or an ability to disconnect. Cause we described the airbag where it's like a bridge.

David Hebert

Yeah, so.

David Hebert 

Think of it, there's resiliency when you lose everything, but there's also reliability. So the way that the grid operates is truly like a grid, right? Your power can come from multiple directions. It usually comes from one, it's not always bidirectional. I live in New England, and in New England, snowstorms come through and the grid will go down. Not because...

I have any problem in particular in my neighborhood, but because they can't simply separate my neighborhood from every other part and keep it up and running. So you'll see utilities are starting to use batteries for emergencies like a hurricane, but also for being able to just do a better job of managing where the power comes from and where it goes to, to sectionalize and keep it running for folks on a reliability standpoint.

David Hebert

The other thing that's coming about is that they're using batteries for what they call non-wires alternatives. That's the data expression. So that's more of a cost solution than a reliability solution. There are sections of the grid where in order to say add a data center, that's the hot topic these days.

Everyone wants to put in a data center. Data centers are huge parts of the load, but they can't serve that load to the data center where they want to build it because they just don't have big enough wires, right? Can't carry enough capacity and electricity to that place, or at least not constantly carry it to that place. So, utilities are looking at batteries as well as the data center operators are looking at batteries in order to essentially allow those interconnections because what the battery can do is change the

the profile a little bit. So instead of having peaks and valleys when the load comes and goes or the generation comes and goes, the battery can flatten it out. And then when you do that, the wires are good enough as they are. It allows them to have that interconnection, allows them to be able to move forward.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk about my favorite thing decentralization we’ll talk about how this solution could enable renewable energy in places it hasn’t been all that feasible before and I will learn one new word and one new idiom. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with David Hebert of Wartsila about synthetic inertia. Obviously. 

Molly Wood

Okay. So it, it sounds like it solves for what we can loosely call decentralization, but also helps reduce the need to, because we keep hearing about needing, what is it? 72,000 miles of new lines, which, which we all agree will take infinity. and so it's solutions like these that reduce the need.

David Hebert

Yeah, it's a lot of lines.

Yes.

Molly Wood

for that much new interconnection.

David Hebert

they reduce the need for those interconnections and they ease the timing for those interconnections. Insofar as data centers or other consumers of electricity want to be carbon free, they can do so not with cogeneration, that's diesel fuel or natural gas even, but they can move to utilize more more renewables in those grids, in those small sections that they're looking to support.

So that's just good for the environment from that end.

Molly Wood

Right, okay, so now let's dive into that. Thank you for bringing that back, that topic background. You're like a story arc professional. So now that I think we understand the stability piece of it, put a finer point on it for me, if you would, about how this can incentivize bringing more renewable energy onto the grid.

David Hebert

Yeah.

David Hebert

Yeah, I think that goes back to a little bit about what I was mentioning on cost. Right now, there are a lot of markets where they'd love to have more renewables on the grid. And then renewables on the grid really have some dependency on whether there's a big enough connection on the grid. So it's not just a load problem like a data center, but a generation problem. So more and more, what we're seeing is battery energy storage is being combined with solar and combined with wind.

so that you can put the solar in the wind and the places where you can get the land, but you don't necessarily have to build up the infrastructure of the grid to be able to get that electricity out onto the load centers. So it enables more to be built in general because you're bypassing the limitations of the grid. And it eliminates the second problem, which is if the grid's not big enough, you just have to put in a smaller system.

Molly Wood

Right.

David Hebert

or you have to curtail that system so that you're not actually using a lot of the energy. The batteries that can take that energy, hold that energy and send it out during the night when the grid's really not being utilized, that's allowing for the size of the solar plant to be bigger, the size of the wind plant to be bigger, the totality of the energy used on the grid. So, you know, on a megawatt hour basis for the amount of money that's being spent.

more and more megawatt hours what we're consuming as electrical consumers are making their way to people.

Molly Wood

So it gets rid of the excuse that you may not want to build more renewable energy generation because there just isn't capacity to deal with it. But it also bypasses the very real, I I see you making the face, which is like that excuse, they'll probably still come up with an excuse, Whoever they, the amorphous they, exactly. There's an excuse out there somewhere, but this at least is sort of like.

David Hebert

It's whoever they are. Yeah, there's there's an excuse out there somewhere.

Molly Wood

there's the technology to get around it, but more importantly, it actually allows for it in places that have been hampered so far. Yeah.

David Hebert

Yes, yeah. I think what it really does is it changes the dialogue around all those sites and around all those plants, right? A little more on the background that I have over 20, close to 25 years in the renewable space as well. And, you know, I can remember when I wanted to put a

you know, a system, you know, the footprint of a car on a commercial building that was a refrigerator freezer and the utility said, oh, no, you can't do that. Right. If we had batteries, then they would have said, oh, okay, I get it. Now, in the end, they just needed to get used to renewables and they did, but it would have been a solution to bring to bear at the time if it had been available 25 years, but it wasn't very common 25 years ago.

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood

Right.

David Hebert

Nowadays, that argument still remains, right? The solar is intermittent, clouds go by. What happens when the cloud goes by? It's not steady power, and we consume power on a steady basis. And in what they tend to do is they say, you don't have a means of managing that yourself as a renewable. So what we need to do is we need to have spinning reserves.

And what spinning reserve means is instead of curtailing the solar, they're running an engine somewhere and they're creating a bunch of carbon. in the case, just in case, right, we're starting to sort of put batteries into the place to say, intermittency is not a problem and we can take care of it here, right? And you can avoid running all those engines and paying the money to run those engines and paying the capacity to have built that engine plant and eating the

additional carbon that's coming out of it. So I think really it starts to temper back that intermittency argument. And I think where batteries have really sort of excelled and done well with is that multi-use aspect of it. Not only is it there to solve the intermittency, it can help me with other problems I already have. So the utilities are more and more saying, I understand this now.

Molly Wood

Right?

David Hebert

Right. I'm willing to embrace this now because it solves more problems than simply the intermittency. So now my focus shifts from how do I stop the solar from coming online in my jurisdiction to how do I let more solar come online? Because when they pair it with batteries, it solves a whole bunch of other problems for them.

Molly Wood

Yeah, it handles grid stability. It deals with not having to build new peaker plants. It keeps customers happy and maybe saves them money. I mean, it is really interesting. Like, I think it's always worth it to sort of remind people that this is all a journey that's been building that there was and still in some pockets, unfortunately, is legitimate resistance to solar and this idea that like, well, this will be too cheap and power plant or, you know, utilities will go out of business. And then they sort of start realizing like.

we actually cannot generate and distribute enough electricity to meet demand. And that isn't even about EVs, but now we have EVs and data centers. And then this magical technology, I call myself a battery groupie all the time, you know, enters the mix and people are like, if we could just store that and then control how we distribute it. so then, so you have all of these sort of layers of tech.

David Hebert

Yeah.

David Hebert

Hahaha

Molly Wood

innovation and then you have a layer like Wärtsilä which says, cool, we will come and help you more efficiently store and distribute that energy so that you get that stability that you've been hoping for.

David Hebert

Yeah, no, absolutely. Like I think, you we as Wordzilla, I'd love to say we're driving the adoption of batteries. But in reality, the adoption of batteries is dragging us along down the highway faster than we can keep up sometimes. But what we are doing is we're taking any application of the battery and we're optimizing it, right? We're looking for ways to make sure that that battery is utilized to the full extent. You know, there are software aspects

Molly Wood

Yeah.

David Hebert

that are looking at state of health and balancing very, very specific issues within a battery that today are managed by just not using them. So you're an IPP, someone that puts in a battery system might under utilize that battery by 10 or 15%, something because they don't want to get into the yellow zone, right? Where they're getting close to the danger zone. And what we're doing is we're saying, no, no, no, let the software controls and the technology we have

take care of that for you, right? And give you that extra 10, 15 % or, know, no, no, no, don't fear this new program from the utility that wants synthetic inertia, embrace it, right? Because we've got the technology to help you move that forward. So that's where I think we really excel and we're not getting dragged along by the market. We're definitely leading the market in that particular lane.

Molly Wood

Can you truly be, I'm just sort of curious about this. Is it possible to truly be battery technology agnostic? Yeah. It doesn't really matter. Like it could be a flow, who did I just talk to? A flow battery using, know, saltwater and like a novel molecule. It doesn't matter.

David Hebert

It is.

David Hebert

Yep.

Yeah, I mean, we're.

Molly Wood

As long as that battery can plug into your thingy. Yep, yep, okay.

David Hebert

Sure. Yeah. There's so much going on just with lithium ion that it hasn't been a big focus for our company, but it is. We've done it before. And it's not just batteries. It's managing the other aspects of the grid. So we have a very interesting project that's in Bonaire. And we have another one in Graciosa that the software we use manages the grid.

You know, they might be called micro grids only in that they're small because they're islands, right? They have no other choice but to be an island. But in reality, they're just proper grids that aren't as big as Urquhart. And we're managing engines, not our engines, other people's engines. We're managing wind, solar, and batteries to be able to sort of balance and dispatch and control how the entire grid moves. So having a different type of battery

That's not the biggest problem on the technology side. It just has to be profiled, have to hook up the controls, got to be able to get it going. So there's some engineering to be done, but it's very easy to do. And then the last note I'll leave on that is we ourselves are looking at other technology. So today, almost everything is lithium ion because of the price curve, but we're constantly looking at solid state, at sodium ion.

at anything that falls into that scheme to say what's going to be the right technology in the future.

Molly Wood

Right. OK. What do you think the future holds? mean, there's so many conversations about energy. mean, it's like there are people saying pretty soon consumers will know the cost of a kilowatt hour the way they know the price of a gallon of gas. There's conversations about decentralization and resilience and microgrids. It sounds like you're willing and prepared to have a finger in everything.

but you're also in an interesting place to see this evolution happening.

David Hebert

Yeah, I think, you know, one of the best markets for us is Australia, right? And they arguably have come a very long way. They built up their solar portfolios really, really high. They built up the battery portfolios quite well to be able to manage the solar and offer all the services into that market.

your point about consumers knowing kilowatt hours, I think that's where their structure, they call them gen tailors, right? So the utilities don't move the electricity, they generate it and they sell it. Retailers of generation. Yeah. So they're very tuned into what you just stated, which is how are all of my consumers consuming electricity and how is that electricity compliant with the carbon reduction needs that they want?

Molly Wood

Gentailers as in retailers of generation.

David Hebert

Right, so they're starting to tie all those components together and figure out like how that's going to work in the marketplace. I think that's a big change in the way that things are moving forward. The other changes are really around, I think, policy. So we're seeing more and more regulators and or utilities, depending on how the markets are structured, looking at how do I actually value

these things batteries can do, but I don't ask them to like that inertia type response. How do I change the value of how quickly they can respond or how deeply they can respond and make that market a little bit more dynamic? So what we see on our side, in particular on the software side, are AI tools that are gonna be able to predict what the price of energy is gonna be in the future.

on a minute or a second basis, depending on how granular the utilities make it and optimize against that, right? That gives opportunities for batteries and renewables to make energy, make money on the energy that they're providing, but also lets the consumers defer some of those exploding costs that can happen. Texas is a great example, right? When the grid went down and everything went up, there were people that were on real-time rates that were paying $700 a kilowatt hour.

not seven cents. This is the type of thing you're trying to avoid by one, not letting it happen in the first place, but also by having dynamic rate structures and participating structures that I think will become the norm and actually unlock a lot of the potential for renewables and for batteries to participate.

Molly Wood

Fascinating. All right, I'm going backwards a little bit, but I don't want to let you go without asking about implementing the actual solution. how do your customers buy and implement this? What is the kind of sales pitch to them? Obviously, there's all of the good reasons to do it, but we know that getting companies and utilities to part with money, there's still got to be pitch.

How much does it cost them roughly and why do they do it?

David Hebert

Yeah, I think, you know, in for our company, our customers are either going to be mostly utilities or what they call independent power producers, right? These are companies that might have built giant solar fields and put those types of things in. Really for us, we're coming at it from a perspective where if you're if you just want to buy a dumb battery and go figure it out on your own, we're probably not the company for you.

Right. But we have lots of customers that come to us and say, gee, I understand that you are a much more of a high touch delivery organization. we have the right program managers, project managers that are working on things, putting contracts through. have the service organization so that we're sort of seeing through that delivery and construction process and much more high touch, much more.

responsibility on delivering it without issue, which is important because you get project delays, have cost of capital going in, all that goes up.

Molly Wood

So would they contract with you at the same time that they're putting in a new battery system? Ideally.

David Hebert

So they would buy the battery and the delivery and the commissioning and the software all from us as one package. Right. So it's sort of that one throat to choke approach in bringing it out, making sure it actually gets done.

Molly Wood

Got it. Okay.

Got it. That is a new phrase for me, which is delightfully violent. I'm into that. Yep.

David Hebert

It's a delightfully violent, yes, you can imagine if you're trying to put all this thing together in pieces and you've got 10 companies to chase down, it can be a heavy task, really hard to get done. But then on the technology side, like I said, delivering more kilowatt hours out of the same units installed and that economic advantage go into the way they look at it. All of our customers at the end look at internal rate of return, right? They're ultimately in the business

Molly Wood

Yeah.

David Hebert

of both serving electricity, but also getting return on capital when they serve electricity. So we represent a good value when you look at it in its entirety. What does it cost to put it in? Can you get more out of it? Is it going to operate appropriately? Those types of questions that come back. That's usually the pitch, right? We've never let a customer down. We get every project done. We've never walked away.

And said, dad, you know, even if it came at our cost, at our expense, and we make sure projects are complete and they operate appropriately and those warranties are preserved for long periods of time. Right. That's the benefit you get out of a company that's been around for 190 years and actually cares about how well these things are deployed and how safe they are.

Molly Wood 

Great, so it's not, so then just to clarify, your solution is something that is part of a larger grid modernization effort on the part of the customer. It's not like they come and buy the container for the battery and the software separately. They're doing all of this at once. And you are managing it all at once, Perfect, okay. And then what is the future hold? What are the next three to five? What's the longer term vision for the solutions that you're working on now?

David Hebert

They're doing it all at once. Yes.

David Hebert

I think for us, you know, we're going to continue to push cost down, right? The lower these things, the less these things cost, the more applications there are, the heavier they're going to be used. We are putting actually a fair amount of focus into longer duration. So you mentioned we're not looking at flow batteries, but having a lithium ion or sodium ion batteries that can

support eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, not two to four hours like we commonly use them today, changes how those batteries are used and where they're deployed. It addresses other needs on the grid. that's sort of one of the main areas of focus that we have moving forward is how do you make them cost less? How do you make them last longer for duration so that we can serve more customers on the energy side?

Molly Wood

Great. David Eber? Eber? 

David Hebert 

If you're failing English, you call me Hebert. If you're failing French, you want to slow down to New Orleans, you call me Mr. A-Bear.

Molly Wood 

How do you say that? Hebert?

Molly Wood

I was honestly, I have been trying not to say a bear. It's just so delightful. David Ebert or a bear depending on where you're calling in from is vice president of global sales and business strategy at words. Hilla. Thank you so much for the time.

David Hebert

please do. I like it.

David Hebert

Appreciate it. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. A bear I swear sometimes I don’t know why people talk to me. 

Ok next week we’re going to keep talking about batteries and energy storage with a whole new type of battery that’s even different from flow because it turns out when it comes to batteries we can ALSO have everybody in the pool! 

Tell me what you’re thinking I’d love to keep featuring your voices on the show, I love it. Have you experienced blackouts or are you worried about grid reliability? Any of you got your own off-grid power islands? Send me an email or a voice memo to in at everybody in the pool dot com and we’ll put it on the show! 

Find the latest episodes and subscribe to the newsletter to never miss an episode at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And to subscribe directly to the show and get an ad-free version plus my undying love and gratitude hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Together, we can get this done. See you next week.