Episode 103: Every battery tech in the pool

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. 

As we keep exploring what it takes to build a smarter, more resilient grid, one theme keeps coming up: storage is the foundation. Without it, renewables can’t scale, data centers can’t stay online, and communities can’t count on consistent reliable power. 

Affordable is a whole other question. 

Part of modernizing our energy system is rethinking storage from the ground up—and that means being open to brand new chemistries, designs, and business models that might shape the future. 

This week we’re talking battery tech with a rocket scientist batteries that are a safer, recyclable alternative to lithium that CAN be part of grid-scale storage and lots of other applications, too. 

Let’s get into it. 

Mike Burz 

Yeah, I'm Mike Burz. I'm the co-founder and CEO of EnZinc. And we are a high technology battery materials designer. And as the CEO, I'm responsible for strategy, finances, selling to investors, and also helping set up the lab and clean up things afterwards.

Molly Wood

I am excited about this conversation because one, as regular listeners will know, I am obsessed with batteries and battery technology. I may be the only person I know who did an entire narrative podcast about battery technology. Exactly, I am a battery groupie. But before we get into the technology itself, tell me about your background and how you came to be doing what

Mike Burz 

We like battery groupies.

Mike Burz 

Sure. Well, what's always fun is that I like to start off and just say, why, yes, Molly, I am a rocket scientist. So yes, I'm an aerospace engineer, former aerospace engineer, graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Go Mustangs, and graduate work at San Diego State University.

Molly Wood

Yes!

Mike Burz 

worked at General Dynamics and I actually have show and tell. So I worked in advanced design. So I actually designed this thing. You guys may notice this is the US's first stealth cruise missile. So I was the designer of this. And then my boss did something which strikes fear and terror into the hearts of all engineers, which is now that you've designed it.

Molly Wood 

Cool.

Mike Burz 

I want you to go work in the factory and build it. So I actually spent about three years in San Diego, you know, at our facility in San Diego, Convair, working in the factory to build what was called FSD number one, full scale development vehicle number one, all the way through to vehicle number 17, which is the first blockchain article. In other words, it's the one that is closest to production. So you can imagine the very first one was

very kind of handmade, if you will, with a lot of instrumentation. And then as it moves through its test program, it gets closer and closer to the production. So yes, so I've done missiles and fighter aircraft and all those cool things like that. And then left General Dynamics in the mid-80s to go work for Nissan. Because the other thing I liked was cars. So I worked in their advanced design facility as an engineer in La Joya, California.

And then on just a stroke of luck, some guys came down to measure a really cool piece of hardware using our digitizing machine that we used at the studio. And I said, this kind of looks like a race car pod. Where are you guys from? And they said, we're from Nissan's racing arm, you know, up in Vista, California, which was what? Probably 30, 40 minutes north of La Jolla.

And I said, that's cool. What do you do? And they said, well, you should come up and visit. You're a Nissan guy. So I did. And it was awesome. And I looked at that and I said, I know what these are. These are like fighter aircraft, but on wheels. And they said, well, we're actually looking for a program manager to lead our team to design, build our car to race at the 24 hours of Le Mans. So I said, okay, I'll apply.

Molly Wood

my goodness.

Mike Burz

And so I did and this is the result this cool thing like this now Yeah, so it's a closed closed race car What's cool about it is that this actually little model was machined from the actual CAD data that made the real race car So that was that was we were we were one of the first

Molly Wood

Yep, now he's holding up a prototype race car.

Molly Wood

my God. I mean, there are like a lot of interesting folks that come on this show, but you've had the dream career from like rockets to just regular cars, which are pretty cool, to race cars, which are next level cool.

Mike Burz

which are pretty cool, to race cars. 

Molly Wood

So then draw a brief line for me if you would about how that experience combined to lead you to want to develop new battery technology specifically with a sustainability solution in mind.

Mike Burz 

Right. So when I worked at General Dynamics, you know, that was building weapon systems, know, aircraft, fighter aircraft, missiles, et cetera, with Nissan, it was with passenger cars and race cars. Then I went to work for Computer Sciences Corporation and I took early retirement because A, I wanted to get back into hardware because Computer Sciences was a bunch of software, but it was very, very instructive.

But my wife, who is a co-founder of the company, Deborah Knuckey, was a McKinsey consultant in the energy sector. And she went to get her degree, her second master's in sustainable design. And we talked a lot about this. And what I felt was necessary was to take what I had learned and how to design, develop, and deploy high technology things and bring it to green technology. So with Deborah's urging, you know.

because we thought that was something that we could contribute back to people, the planet, the country, et cetera, and our two children. So we started first looking at electric vehicles because electric vehicles combined everything that I had been working on, right? Computers, aerospace, and automotive. And we quickly determined that...

I know it's going to be a big disappointment to a lot of people, but I am not Elon Musk. And so we decided, yeah, it might be a positive. So, so thank you. So we decided in the in the evaluation of the electric car, we saw, course, that not just 30 percent of the car is dependent on the battery. Right. In terms of cost, but without it, you know, you've just got a big

Molly Wood

I'm not sure that's a disappointment these days. That might be a, that's a plus in your column, yes.

Mike Burz 

fancy paperweight, right? So the battery was key. And we also recognized that the battery was essential to everything else within the renewable energy world, right? So solar plus storage and, you know, WEM plus storage and backup power, you know, for data centers and for homes, you know, and, other types of electric vehicles. So there was a much broader stuff and we felt we could bring our talents and focus on basically that foundation.

Molly Wood

Yeah.

Mike Burz 

versus trying to do just an electric car. We could have a bigger influence. 

Molly Wood

All right, so there you are. Batteries are foundational. You believe that this is a powerful sustainability solution. And then what did you determine was missing in the existing landscape of battery technology?

Mike Burz 

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so as you know, when we started this, you know, in the 2009, 2010, lithium ion was just kind of swooping up, You know, it was becoming quite predominant, particularly for electric vehicles and other, you know, moving out of laptops and stuff into bigger and broader applications. In our evaluation, what we came across was a group

out of UCLA called the California Nano Systems Institute and a guy by the name of Dr. Bruce Dunn and he was working on zinc batteries. And we took a look at what he was doing and we said, look, there are certain attributes that lithium has, but at the time very expensive. And of course, you have to worry about fire. You have to worry about recycling.

And we felt that, hopefully I don't step on too many toes here, but that lithium batteries in general did not fit the ethos of the green revolution. So as a systems engineer, we were trying to look at it from a know, womb to tomb is the phrase, right? The whole circular economy thing and the mining of lithium, the manufacturing of lithium, the

systems that you had to put in place to keep it safe, right? Thermal management, battery management systems, armor and stuff. And then what do do at the end of life, right? Nobody is really, I we have methods to recycle it, but it's not all that economically recyclable. We felt that that didn't fit the ethos of what we were trying to build. Whereas zinc batteries had all of the attributes. So number one, it's the fourth most mined metal on the planet.

Mike Burz 

So there is no supply chain issues. It uses an aqueous or water-based electrolyte similar to lead acid, so it has very wide temperature range. You don't need a battery management system that's sophisticated to make sure that it doesn't overcharge and catch fire. You don't have to have a thermal management system to make sure that if things get too hot or too cold, the battery is damaged. And because the battery is simple, it's totally recyclable. So we thought...

That makes sense from essentially a whole system point of view.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, the problem where zinc batteries grow weird alien spikes when you try to recharge them and you have to turn your battery design into a sponge to fix it. What this is all true. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Michael Burz of Enzinc about how we thought lithium ion would do fine for all kinds of things but you know who thought otherwise? The United States Navy. 

Mike Burz

So at that time, when I said we were looking at electric vehicles and we decided to switch batteries, why that occurred is that we got introduced by Dr. Bruce Dunn to a partner of his, Dr. Deborah Rollinson and her team at the United States Naval Research Laboratory. And Dr. Deborah Rollinson is a brilliant, brilliant electrochemist. You know, she received the American Chemical Society's Researcher of the Year Award, all that kind of stuff.

Molly Wood

Okay.

Mike Burz 

They were under direction from the Office of Naval Research to look for a battery material that had the energy of a lithium battery, but was as safe and as robust as the lead acid batteries the Navy's been using for the last 75 years. Because what had happened is, people were looking at batteries, and the Navy's been using lead acid batteries on ships and submarines and everything. Even nuclear submarines have big battery banks that are lead acid battery banks. And they said, listen,

Why don't we need more room? We need more energy, right? Let us batteries take up their heavy and they take up too much room. Let's use lithium. Good idea, right? So they built a special submarine, you know, for the seals and it worked like a champ. But, you know, after a few runs and stuff, it was in dry dock, caught fire, burned to the ground. And luckily nobody was, you know, in there. But the Navy suddenly went, ooh, you know, salt water, lithium.

Molly Wood

Hmm. Yep. Yeah.

Mike Burz

Not so good. So the Office of Naval Research tasked Deborah Rollins and her team is look for this new material. So they went back, you know, they did their literature search. They went back to look at what, you know, other people had done, particularly Edison, and said zinc. Like I said, it's everywhere. It's cool. But if we can solve this dendrite issue, because other people who were working on zinc batteries were kind of doing things conventionally. They were having this zinc powder and a paste.

Molly Wood 

huh.

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Mike Burz

and they were still getting dendrites, they were looking for ways to slow it down, but they couldn't eliminate it. Now, Deborah Rowlinson and her team, she is one of the inventors of Aerogel.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Mike Burz 

which is that cool stuff that NASA had, right?

Molly Wood 

Yes, and they use it on rockets to like insulate and keep the panels from flying off with heat. Okay, yeah.

Mike Burz 

Exactly. And so with her background in sponges and foams, this cell phone, they said, what if we could make a sponge, a metal sponge anode?

And the first thing was just seeing if we could make one, right? And the second one was what came out of that was because of this sponge structure, it eliminated dendrite growth. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Ok so let me translate a little bit the problem with zinc batteries has historically been that as they charge they tend to grow little metal spikes the dendrites. Over time those spikes pierce through the battery, cause short circuits, and kill its performance. That’s why zinc has never been a mainstream battery material, despite being cheap, safe, and abundant.

So this big breakthrough at the navy this porous 3D sponge structure stops those spikes from forming in the first place. That means zinc batteries can finally be recharged over and over without failing. So suddenly you have a battery chemistry that works and can be safer, lower cost, and way more sustainable than lithium batteries.

The team got an award from ARPA-E, the government’s advanced research projects arm for energy and continued to perfect this sponge structure within the Navy. 

Molly Wood 

So then this technology exists at the Navy, basically. How did it come to become a company that is on the verge of producing this at a commercial scale?

Mike Burz 

Correct. So at the end of the ARPA-E award called Range, Robust Affordable Next Generation Energy Storage, then the Navy then proceeded to patent it.

And so that took about two years to get it, to get a patent. And then it took us about a year and a half to negotiate a license because, know, we had worked with the Navy. We had understood it. They said, if you want to, you know, apply for a license. And we said, okay. And interestingly enough, Molly, no one else, because the government has to put it out, you know, and tell the public.

They have to announce it and they say, look, we've developed this, we got a patent for this stuff, here's what it does. And we had to wait like, I think a month, because it was published in the Federal Register. The Navy intends to license this technology and so we waited with bated breath, right? Because someone else could have walked in and said, yeah, we'll do that. And nobody did.

Molly Wood 

Fascinating. Why do you think nobody wanted to take a chance on that?

Mike Burz 

It's because it was too wild, a metal sponge structure. Nobody knew how to make it. And people were relatively comfortable with what Clayton Christensen would call incremental innovation, right? Instead of disruptive innovation. You know, we'll just work on improving our existing, the way we've always built zinc batteries.

or even alkaline batteries will continue to do that and improve it incrementally in the hopes that we can kind of solve or mitigate some of these issues rather than taking the great leap forward and saying, let's try something completely different. And this was indeed different. So that's how it got there.

Molly Wood 

Is it, what is the manufacturing challenge? I mean, I could imagine that somebody saying not only is it wild, but we don't even know how to make that. What is the manufacturing? And I am excited because I have actually gotten to see this at, Oakland. but talk about the manufacturing challenge in creating a zinc sponge structure that no one's ever really created before at scale. Yep.

Mike Burz 

Hahaha

Mike Burz 

Yes.

Mike Burz 

that no one's ever done this before. Okay, so speaking as an engineer, it kind of starts off with the first thing that every battery developer faces. Every battery developer faces, right? Is can you scale this? Everybody can make batteries that are little coin cell things, right? But the big challenge is can I make them production size?

at rate and at quality. So those are the things that we had to try and figure out. When the Navy made these things, they were this big. And I'm holding up one of our first coin cells. It's all of one centimeter in diameter. It looks like a Neco wafer.

Molly Wood 

Right, it's like the, it's about, I was gonna say, or it's maybe like the one that you put in your car key fob, yep.

Mike Burz 

Yeah, key fob, yeah. In fact, this was designed to fit into those little cells. So we started with this so that we could test it and then make sure that it actually worked as a sponge, right? 

So then we scaled it to this, and this is about what? It's the size of a dollar bill, a little bit smaller than the dollar bill.

Now we have a couple of challenges. One is the size, because we went from this size to this size, but the other is that.

Molly Wood 

very thin.

Mike Burz

to make it thin and to make it flat. So this took a bunch of time to come up with the processes to make it that big and that flat.

Molly Wood 

and explain to us why it needs to be flat.

Mike Burz

OK, well, funny thing about it, doesn't have to be flat for all kinds of reasons. But for for batteries that will go into a vehicle or, you know, into a home and stuff like that, the typical structure is a bunch of prismatic cells, right? Did you want to stack these up? Plus, the fact is this has to be bonded to a current collector so that you want the surface, you know, to be nice and flat so that it bonds.

properly so we have low impedance and get as much energy out of this anode as possible.

Molly Wood 

Right, so if you make it that shape and you make it flat, the benefit is that you can slot into existing battery technology. People don't have to redesign battery. You may be designing a whole new material, but they don't have to redesign batteries around your material, which is super important for adoption. Yep, okay.

Mike Burz

That's it. Very cool. And at that point, after we did this, and by the way, we actually took these, put them in a pouch cell and powered an e-bike with them. Okay, so we could show that it could be used for mobility. Everybody assumed you can be for stationary, but it's very difficult for zinc to be used, you know, in a real e-mobility application. Okay.

Molly Wood

Okay, so your dollar bill is power to bike.

Mike Burz 

Right, so now comes two things. Now you have to say, can we actually use it for something, you know, in the commercial world? Right? And that results in two things. One is, can you make these things at rate, at cost, at quality? And the other is, how do you deploy them into the world quickly? How do you make money at this? And this is where we won our third award.

from the California Energy Commission, which was Cal Testbed, where we then worked with the University of California, Riverside. But we didn't want to just test the battery where we just give them a battery and say, there, tell us if that's good or not. What we said is, how do we make this more commercially interesting? So we started something called the Industry Advisory Group, and we invited a bunch of battery companies to be part of our test program. And users of the battery, because...

what we did and if you'll pardon me, but just like every startup in the Bay Area, we pivoted.

Molly Wood 

Yep. That's what you do. That's the process.

Mike Burz 

You got to do it because what we looked at is look at the amount of money and time required to set up a battery company. It takes tens of millions of dollars of equipment, if not hundreds, in fact, for one line for a lithium, it's like $150 million just for one line. For a lead acid line, of just your lead acid, what's called an absorb glass mat sealed battery that you put in your car,

That's like 25 to $30 million. And all those people have been doing it for 75 years, which means people know them, people trust them. Nobody knows who N-Zinc is. So we said, how about since we've designed this thing so that it looks like a drop-in, what happens if we take kind of a cue from Intel?

Molly Wood

Yep.

Molly Wood

Yep.

Mike Burz

And what Intel said is, we are gonna specialize in chips and then we'll work with computer companies who already know how to build the computer. They already have the sales and distribution channels, right? They've already got a brand name, right? We'll design the chip for an application and then we'll sell them millions of chips. And that's what we decided to do. What we decided was we'll help battery companies who build batteries.

We'll help you design the battery to take advantage of this material and we'll show you how it can be drop-in and then we'll sell you millions of these.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: At this point, Enzinc has gone from the key fob coin four years ago to a flat sheet the size of like an 8 by 8 brownie pan maybe and that sheet can be dropped into a standard battery container like you might see in your car or on a golf cart. So the zinc battery would replace what would otherwise be a nickel-cadmium or maybe lead-acid battery with no factory retrofit required. With that simple swap, those old designs suddenly become lighter, longer-lasting, and competitive with lithium.

Molly Wood 

Is the long-term goal, what is the long-term vision? Is the long-term vision to replace lithium ion also or to at this point replace any other battery and keep lithium ion from kind of making more inroads, I guess it sounds like, into places where it's just not appropriate to be. It's not like we hate them.

Mike Burz 

Yeah, well, it's, it's, yeah, no, good. Yeah, it's no, no. In fact, in fact, you know, without lithium batteries, right, we don't have these, right? We don't, we don't have cool phones. We don't have cool laptops and frankly, electric cars that go well over, you know, what 175 to 200 miles lithium is, is awesome, right? But.

Molly Wood 

Right, we don't have phones.

Mike Burz 

There's a whole class of what we call urban electric vehicles, Delivery vehicles, the golf carts kind of things. In fact, I have to tell you a real funny, we had Yamaha come and visit us. And Yamaha is the second largest golf cart manufacturer in the world. And so we let them drive the little golf cart that we had powered with our nickel zinc battery around. we let them throw the battery around. And we said, look, look at all the weight you can save.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Mike Burz 

But the reason that it's so lightweight is we're not even filling that battery up. It's only a third full. If we filled it up totally, it would go back to 30 kilos per battery. But the difference would be your golf cart instead of going 30 to 35 miles will now go well over 100 miles. the Yamaha guy goes, well, maybe we should stop calling it a golf cart.

Molly Wood 

That is not a good idea.

Mike Burz 

Because now it becomes a platform, right? They can use it for urban delivery, urban electric vehicles, right? And it can be used for industrial things like scissor lifts and forklifts. It can be used for mining equipment where, you know, you're deep underground and you do not want a lithium battery fire deep underground. You don't want lithium battery fires, you know, in an airplane, right? You don't want them on ships, ferries.

Molly Wood

Right?

Mike Burz 

telecommunication platforms, et cetera. So there's a lot of applications where a high performance but very safe battery is really more suitable. So for instance, like in New York, right? They don't like lithium batteries, you know, put all in there. Like the fire department of New York has said, we're not all that comfortable with that, you know, but we can go there. Data centers, we can go there.

Molly Wood 

Yep. Cool.

Mike Burz 

So our objective is not to simply, quote unquote, displace lithium because we think lithium is important. But where it's appropriate, this is a really, really good alternative because like I said, it uses existing infrastructure. In fact, to modify one line is like three and a half million dollars compared to 30 million, say for a new lead acid or 150 for.

lithium ion. So you can very cost effectively do that, use material, and it's recyclable. Now you asked about flat and this is part of your question, where do we go from here? Remember I said it doesn't have to be flat, it's only flat because those are existing batteries. We can make them like this and I'm holding up something, what would you say that looks like? Like a little spoon.

Molly Wood

I mean, it looks like one of the inserts that goes in a sports bra or a swimsuit, if you're familiar with that, yep, or maybe just a little scoop.

Mike Burz

scoop. How about a scoop? But because it's a sponge structure, we can make these curved. Now, as a former aerospace engineer, what I think is cool is that, remember, I said it has three attributes. One is no dendrite growth. The other is it's a sponge, so it has more surface area. So we get twice the energy of any other zinc battery. And the third is that we're cathode agnostic.

because we're not using any kind of fancy methods or materials and stuff like that to get it to work. Therefore, we're starting with nickel because nickel is well characterized. We can get to market quickly. But the next one is manganese, which is really cheap. So you can have a high performance battery that's very inexpensive. And then, like I said, my favorite as an aerospace engineer is a zinc air battery. And now what you have is a battery which has well over 300 watt hours per kilogram.

is very, very safe, right? But can be built so that the battery fits the fuselage or the wings. And by the way, it can also do long duration energy storage, know, like form energy is iron air, right? Well, this would be the zinc air version of that. And that's the future.

Molly Wood 

All right, everyone, keep an eye on EnZinc I really, really mean this. Mike Burz, thank you so much for the time.

Mike Burz 

Thank

Mike Burz

It was such a pleasure. Thank you very much, Molly. Appreciate it.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening and imagining all kinds of battery possibilities with me 

Next week a little more on the energy beat but a lot simpler to understand 3-D printed solar that can roll up and go just about anywhere for power almost wherever you need it. 

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. Subscribe to the newsletter to get updates on new episodes and you can support the show directly by becoming a paid newsletter subscriber OR a paid podcast subscriber and that’ll get you an ad-free version of the show in addition to my love. Just hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

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