A super-battery aimed at decarbonizing industry

In this episode, Antora Energy CEO Andrew Ponec talks up his
company’s game-changing approach to thermal energy storage.


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transcript)


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Text transcript:


David Roberts


Back in March, I did a podcast on the possibility of using wind
and solar electricity to decarbonize industrial heat, which
represents fully a quarter of all human final energy consumption.
The trick is to transform the variable energy from wind and solar
into a steady, predictable stream of heat by using some form of
heat battery.


The idea is that heat batteries will charge when renewables are
cheap or negatively priced, around midday when all the solar is
online, and then use the stored heat to displace natural gas
boilers and other fossil fuel heat sources in industrial
facilities.


Among other things, this vision represents a huge opportunity for
renewable energy developers — industrial heat is effectively a
brand new trillion-dollar market for them to play in. And they
can often enter that market without waiting in long
interconnection queues to connect to the grid.


Anyway, that episode, which I highly encourage you to listen to
at some point, was with the CEO of a thermal battery company call
Rondo. In it, I mentioned another thermal storage company whose
technology caught my eye: Antora Energy.


Like Rondo, Antora is part of the broad “box of rocks” category,
but its tech can do some things that, for the time being, no
other thermal battery can do.


I don’t want to say much more here — discovery is half the fun —
but I will say I’m as geeked about this technology as I have been
about anything in ages. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I
first heard about it three or four years ago. Now the company has
launched its first commercial-scale system! So I’ve brought
Antora co-founder and CEO Andrew Ponec on the pod to talk through
how it works, what it can do, and how it could transform
industrial heat markets.


So with no further ado, Andrew Ponec. Welcome to Volts, thank you
so much for coming.


Andrew Ponec


Thank you for having me, David.


David Roberts


This is so fun for me. I've honestly been thinking about this
tech for years and really hoping that you guys would make it far
enough to justify me doing a pod with you. So I've been rooting
for you. So we're going to get to kind of the role heat batteries
and heat storage can play in the energy system a little bit
later. But I just want to start with the technology itself. So
the basic idea here is you're heating up a rock, right. And what
you do with the heat, we'll get to that in a second, but let's
just start with the rock itself. Tell me about the material
you're using for your rocks and their qualities and why you chose
that material.


Andrew Ponec


We looked at a lot of different options for the material that we
wanted to store energy in, and there are a lot of different types
of rocks, types of solid materials that we might choose. And
after a pretty thorough search, we decided to focus on carbon,
solid carbon. And that was for a number of reasons. We were
looking at different attributes that we thought were important,
one of which was cost, one of which was earth abundance. We were
also looking for things that had existing supply chains and that
were extremely stable and safe for long-term operation.


And when we went through all of that process, carbon came out on
top as the best option, although I should say that it didn't come
out on top the first time around, actually because of a mistake I
made in our spreadsheet. Carbon has a really unique property,
which is that it gets better at storing energy as it gets hotter.
So the specific heat capacity, its ability to store energy,
increases by about a factor of three between room temperature and
800 or so degrees Celsius. So you can imagine what the process
would be like to choose a material.


We built a big spreadsheet. We put all of the materials
candidates in it. We put what their ability to store thermal
energy was, did some calculations on what the cost would be, and
then stack ranked them. And in the first pass, carbon was near
the bottom, because the mistake I had made was going online and
just googling the specific heat of carbon and of course, got the
room temperature value. And it was only a few months later, after
we were exploring all sorts of other materials, that we kind of
went back and looked and said, "Man, carbon has everything we
want, except that its storage capacity is really low."


And it was kind of our disappointment in carbon that made us take
a second look and then realize this really remarkable property of
carbon, that it gets better at storing heat as it gets hotter.
And then it was by far the best choice. And that's where we've
gone from there.


David Roberts


So I think when most people hear carbon, especially in our space,
they think about carbon dioxide, they think about carbon in the
atmosphere. So what is solid carbon? What does it look like?
What's it used for? Like, what is solid carbon out there doing
now?


Andrew Ponec


Great questions. Solid carbon is one of the biggest industrial
products that most people have never thought about. We use solid
carbon in massive quantities, tens of millions of metric tons a
year of this stuff, but it's almost always used as an
intermediary in some other process. So the biggest uses of carbon
are in the aluminum smelting industry and in the steel industry.
So in aluminum smelting, it's actually part of the electrolysis
process. And in steel making, electric arc furnaces use it
because it's the only material that can survive the hellish
environment within an electric arc furnace.


But because none of those go into the final products, we don't
think about it very much, even though by mass it's only a little
bit behind aluminum as one of the biggest industrial commodities.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting. So part of what falls out of that is, as you
say, there is a huge existing supply chain. And so when you say
that there's a lot of solid carbon already in use, if it became
the de facto material for thermal batteries, would that represent
a substantial portion of total solid carbon use? Or is its use so
big and so ubiquitous that this is just sort of a marginal thing?


Andrew Ponec


It ends up being a drop in the bucket. We could make terawatt
hours of thermal batteries using just a fraction of the carbon
that's already processed as part of the supply chains for
aluminum and steel.


David Roberts


Got it. So this is a material that is already abundant, already
manufactured, already there, ready for you to go. There's no
material shortages and what know, people hear materials these
days and they think, "oh, what about mining and the social cost
of mining" and all that. So what's the sort of like the ESG
status of solid carbon?


Andrew Ponec


There are a bunch of different types of carbon, and each of them
have different attributes with regard to how much energy goes
into them. Are there any other concerns about the supply chain
where they're made, are they even mined or are they synthetic?
So, just to mention a few. First, carbon comes in many different
forms. Diamond is one very expensive form of carbon that we don't
use in our system. There's other forms of carbon that are
relatively disordered, like the carbon blocks that are used in
aluminum. And there are other forms of carbon that are more
ordered and more pure, like graphite that's used in electric arc
furnace, steel making.


And actually, if you continue going up the chain, there's more
and more pure, special forms of carbon. Usually, graphite, when
you get to the very high end that's used in things like
lithium-ion batteries and even nuclear reactors, uses a very,
very special, very high purity form of graphite.


David Roberts


Right. And for that form, there are some supply chain issues.
Like, I know that graphite for lithium-ion batteries is one of
the supply chain constraints that gets discussed.


Andrew Ponec


That's right. And it was really important for us that we be able
to use not these extremely pure and more scarce resources, but
that we be able to use the kind of lower-level carbons that are
used in these massive quantities in the metal industries like
aluminum and steel. The good news is, because all it has to do in
our system is just get hot, it doesn't need to do something
special chemically or physically. We're very flexible on the type
and grade of carbon that we use.


David Roberts


I see. And if I was just looking at a block of solid carbon
that's going to go in your battery, is there anything special
about it or am I just looking at a big square rock?


Andrew Ponec


It looks like a big, square, dark block. Yes.


David Roberts


All right, so you say that carbon can hold a lot of heat. And I'm
assuming you also chose it because it can hold heat and release
heat over and over again without degradation. Like how many times
can it cycle? How long can it last?


Andrew Ponec


Graphite is a remarkable or carbon in general is a remarkable
material with regard to its thermal stability. So just a few
different aspects that you can look at it that way. One is that
it's thermally stable up to incredibly high temperatures when
it's processed to make the graphite, for example for electric arc
furnace steel making, they heat the graphite electrically to over
3000 degrees Celsius in what are called graphitization furnaces.


David Roberts


Good lord.


Andrew Ponec


So it's used at extremely high temperatures, industrially. It's
also used in industry, for example, in arc furnaces where you
have huge temperature gradients where the tip of the electrode
essentially has arcing lightning coming out of the tip and is
well over 2000 degrees Celsius in air at the bottom of the steel
pot, whereas the top of it is actually water cooled to room
temperature. So huge thermal gradients, very high temperature
capability. And another factor that makes it really good for this
is its strength. Unlike almost every other material, graphite
gets stronger as you heat it up, up to about 2400 degrees
Celsius.


So we often joke that if something is strong enough in our system
at room temperature, then that's all we have to do because every
part is just going to get stronger as the system starts charging.
And that's unlike metal ceramics, almost every other material
just gets weaker and weaker, even well below its melting point.


David Roberts


Interesting. So you're heating up carbon blocks. They're in an
insulated container, and these are what, like the size of a
shipping container? Is that roughly the scale we're looking at
here?


Andrew Ponec


That's right. It was important for us that the module be road
shippable so we could make it in a factory and then ship it to
the customer site.


David Roberts


How is the heating done? Is it just an electrical coil? Is it
like an electrical resistance heat? How does the heat get into
the rock?


Andrew Ponec


The electricity goes through a resistive heating element very
much like a toaster coil, a resistive coil, and heats it up to
the glowing hot temperatures that the system operates at.


David Roberts


Yeah, when I talked to John from Rondo, he was saying that one of
the things they were worried about is inconsistent heating. And
they've come up with all these different ways of trying to evenly
distribute the heat as it's heating up the rocks. Is that an
issue with carbon as well? Like, are the coils like, sitting next
to the rock? Are they going through the rock? Or this might be
getting too much in the weeds, but I'm fascinated by this stuff.


Andrew Ponec


It's a great question and please do get into the weeds. I love
it. So one of the things that we looked at also when choosing a
storage material was thermal conductivity. So its ability to move
heat within itself. And graphite has a thermal conductivity
that's at these temperatures at least ten times higher than most
other types of rocks. And that means you don't have to worry so
much about that inconsistent heating. So all of the companies
that are working with rocks or bricks or other materials that are
non-carbon based have to be really careful about do you
differentially heat different parts of the system or even
different parts of a single brick or rock. But in graphite it
kind of smooths it all out very quickly because of that high
thermal conductivity.


David Roberts


Oh, interesting, interesting. Okay, so you're taking this
renewable energy, you're putting it through a resistance coil,
heats up, heats the solid carbon, and then you heat this solid
carbon up really, really hot. So explain the temperatures you get
to. And then one of the most fascinating parts about this for me
is how you get the energy back out of this rock. And this has to
do with heat transfer at high temperatures. Some things that I, a
humanities major, did not know about heat transfer, I learned
from reading about this tech. So explain how hot the rock gets
and then what it looks like to get energy out of a rock that's
that hot.


Andrew Ponec


So we heat electrically to over 2000 degrees Celsius. So these
big carbon blocks are glowing white hot at 2000 C when the system
is fully charged. And those temperatures are very hot from a
conventional perspective. They're also much cooler than many of
the applications where graphite is used industrially. But at
those very hot temperatures, there aren't many options for
materials you could use to get the heat out. The conventional way
of getting heat out of a thermal energy storage system is to use
some sort of fluid. It could be a molten salt, a molten metal, it
could be air, helium, something that you're then pumping or
blowing through the system through lots of little channels to get
good heat transfer and then pulling back out of the system again.


David Roberts


Right.


Andrew Ponec


And if you go up to these very high temperatures, you find that
your options are limited. The gases end up having a very low heat
capacity. Viscosity increases with air, for instance, with
temperature. So it's very hard to pull the heat out at those high
temperatures. Similarly, there just aren't that many options that
aren't really exotic for liquids that you could use. And even the
liquids that you have have some sort of problem typically with
freezing at above room temperature. So you could immediately clog
up your pipes or pumps or valves if the system ever were to cool
off.


So these are some of the challenges that we were facing when we
wanted to get all of these wonderful qualities of graphite in our
system, including the ability to go to very, very high
temperatures, but we weren't sure how we would get the heat out.
And so the "aha" moment for us was to realize that we didn't need
a fluid at all to get the heat out. That the movement of a fluid
through the system to move heat, which is called convective heat
transfer, is only one of the three mechanisms of heat transfer.
There are two others.


One is conductive, so just moving directly through the solid, and
the other is radiative. So that's just light, that's glow. Even
though graphite is a very conductive material, it's still too
hard to conduct the long distances you would need within the
system. But light can travel long distances very easily. And so
we realized that by changing the geometry of the system, opening
gaps within the system that can allow light to move, would
actually do everything we needed as far as getting the heat out
of the system, even at temperatures where we had few other
options.


David Roberts


Yeah, so the short version of that answer is light.


Andrew Ponec


Yes.


David Roberts


The heat comes out of the rock as light. It is so hot that it is
glowing like the sun, and the heat is coming off it as light.


Andrew Ponec


Yes.


David Roberts


So what you do with that light, you do two different things. And
this is where I think your battery is different than anything
else on the market right now. One is you can shine that light on
a pipe full of some fluid. So you heat the fluid up and then you
take that fluid off and use it for some industrial purpose. Or
you make steam and pipe the steam off for some industrial
purpose. That's sort of the conventional thermal battery way of
doing things. You heat the rock and then the rock heats up a
working fluid and you use the fluid for industry.


Then you have this other option which is shining the light onto
special photovoltaic panels to make electricity. So you can get
either heat or electricity out of your battery. So first, explain
what this looks like inside the box. I'm a little mystified, so
you've got this insulated box and inside the box, you've got this
giant piece of solid carbon that is whatever, 2000 degrees
Celsius. So hot that it is glowing like the sun. What is between
that glowing rock and the sides of the box where all the tubes
and the PV panels are? How do you modulate the amount of light,
say, for instance, falling on the tube full of fluid?


Because presumably you don't well explain how things are working
inside that thing.


Andrew Ponec


It's critical to be able to vary the amount of light because a
hot object like that is always going to be glowing, it's always
going to be shining that light. But you need to decide whether
and how you let that light out.


David Roberts


Right.


Andrew Ponec


And so in most of the areas between the very hot carbon and the
wall of the unit, there's a layer of insulation. And that
insulation is actually just a porous form of carbon that has very
low thermal conductivity. So that's sort of the conventional
part. The unique part is in specific areas where we want to vary
the amount of energy coming out of the system: We have an
insulated door that can open and close and that door, when it's
closed, is blocking the light from coming out of the system. And
when it opens, it's allowing the light to come out of the system.


And that is how we shut the system on and off. It's also how we
change the amount of energy coming out. A really critical part of
any thermal battery is how you get a consistent discharge as the
battery cools off, as you're getting that energy out of the
system.


David Roberts


Because you don't want a declining level of energy coming out.


Andrew Ponec


No, exactly. I mean, it would be imagine that similarly in a
lithium-ion battery, if as the battery was discharging, its
voltage got down, you could almost not get any energy out of it
anymore. In lithium-ion batteries, you do get a little bit of a
drop off, but generally, you can get most of the power still out
until it's at 0% state of charge. And so a thermal battery, to be
useful, has to be able to have a consistent discharge. And so the
way we achieve that is by progressively opening those insulated
doors wider and wider to allow more and more of that light to
escape, to compensate for the fact that that light is slowly
dimming as the system cools.


David Roberts


Right, so it's like a shutter, like a window shutter almost, that
you open depending on how much light you want to let out.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly.


David Roberts


And when you open the shutter, the light comes out and it shines
on a tube of heating fluid, a tube of working fluid or a
photovoltaic panel. So I think the shining on the fluid and
heating up the fluid is pretty straightforward. And I think at
this point Volts listeners know that you get a hot working fluid
or a hot steam and there's any number of things you can do in
industry with that heat, with that hot fluid. But let's talk a
little bit more about transitioning the light back to
electricity. So you are in an environment that is unlike the
environment that normal solar panels are in, to say the least.


You've got a solar panel that is sitting next to a 2000 degree
block of rock that is shining super hot light out of it. So
presumably you need a special kind of photovoltaic panel,
something that can, for instance, resist super intense heat. And
this is a big part of what your company has done. I think you
just recently opened up your first manufacturing facility to
create these things. They're called thermophotovoltaic panels
TPV. So tell us a little bit about TPV. What is it? How do you
build it? What qualities does it need? What's it look like?


Andrew Ponec


Going one step back, we should talk about why you would ever want
to create electricity out of a unit like this. Because we have a
great system already that can take in variable renewable energy
from solar and wind, use it to heat carbon to high temperatures,
and then deliver 24/7 energy to an industrial process that
requires heat. And that's a great product. There are many
companies out there that have seen the same economics that we
have to say: This is an important problem, this could decarbonize
a lot of industry in a way that's cost-effective.


David Roberts


Right. This is, I guess, all other thermal batteries just output
heat and there's a huge market for that. But you also want to be
able to create electricity. I want to put off, just for a minute,
the use case for the electricity. Why it's important that you can
also do that. But I just want to stick with the tech for a
minute. So how does a solar panel stand up to 2000 degree light?


Andrew Ponec


The first thing is that we don't let the solar panel get to the
same temperature as the carbon blocks. We actively cool it. And
an analogy that you could think of is the sun is very hot. But a
solar panel here on Earth looking at the sun doesn't have to
withstand the same conditions that the sun is at.


David Roberts


But your sun is very close to your panels.


Andrew Ponec


Our sun is very close, yes, our sun is much closer than the other
sun. It's also a fair amount cooler, but it is still much
brighter. The combination of those two effects, it being much
closer and it being somewhat cooler, still leads to something
that is hundreds of times as bright as regular sunlight, which is
really helpful in terms of keeping the system very compact and
low cost, because you just don't have to make much of these
photovoltaic special photovoltaic cells and modules. But they do
have to be cooled. And this was surprisingly easy, actually, part
of the problem. The power densities, how much energy per area, is
not all that high compared to a lot of other cooling applications
like power electronics or computer chips or things like that.


So, we have a very conventional water-cooled metal plate that we
put all of the photovoltaic cells on. And that plate keeps the
cells plenty cool so that they're operating at nearly room
temperature even while they're facing this very intense light
source.


David Roberts


And because the light is so much more concentrated than typical
sunlight, presumably you also want photovoltaic cells that can
maximize — I guess it's just not a normal circumstance for a cell
to be in. So, what do you need the cells themselves to do?


Andrew Ponec


Yeah, the main difference because of the amount of light on those
cells is that we're getting much more current off of the cells,
there's just a lot more electricity being generated per area. And
the way we get the current off of the cells is just the same way
that solar does with metal — they're called fingers — just metal
lines on the cell that collect the current off of the front of
the cell and then carry it out to the external circuit. And so
because we have so much more light and so much more current than
conventional solar, it means we need a lot more of those current
collecting lines and we need them to be thicker in many cases
than they are in solar.


So this is certainly a difference, but one that adds only a small
amount to the cost of the cell, but allows it to be very
efficient at collecting a huge amount of power per area.


David Roberts


So it sounds like then that these are specialized. You're
manufacturing your own TPV, but it doesn't sound like it's super
high tech. It's just sort of like a modified solar panel,
basically.


Andrew Ponec


There's one other thing besides the power density that really
matters, especially to efficiency, which is what to do about all
the photons that you can't convert into electricity. So similar
to a conventional solar cell, not every photon from the sun and
not every photon from the glowing hot carbon has the right energy
level to create an electron in the semiconductor that then can be
pulled off to the external circuit. Most of the photons actually
in both solar and in our application have too low energy and so
aren't useful. In solar, all of those photons are a waste.


They essentially go right through the semiconductor because
photons that don't have enough energy to create an electron
typically go right through. It's transparent to them and then
they're lost. In our application, we can do something that's a
little bit more unusual, which is we allow those photons the same
way as in solar, to hit our cells, go right through, but then we
have a really effective infrared mirror on the back of the cells
that turns those unusable photons right back around and sends
them out the front of the cell right back to the hot carbon where
they're reabsorbed.


David Roberts


No s**t — oops, uh, kidding.


Andrew Ponec


I hope you keep that in.


David Roberts


The photon goes back in the carbon?


Andrew Ponec


Yes.


David Roberts


So does that mean none are wasted? What's the efficiency here?


Andrew Ponec


That reflection process isn't 100% efficient, but it is far
greater than 90% efficient. So most of those photons that we
can't use, we do return to sender, we send back to the carbon
that they came from. And that allows us to hit much higher
efficiencies than conventional solar cells. As someone who comes
from the solar industry in the past, this just feels like
cheating. It's like mind-boggling that you could just say that
photon wasn't one that I wanted and I'll just give it back and
get credit for that. If you send photons back to the sun, nobody
tells you that you did the sun a service, but if you send it back
to the carbon, that energy is retained within the system and it
really does have a chance to come back as a good photon.


David Roberts


So what's a comparison of the efficiency of a standard solar cell
versus one of these?


Andrew Ponec


So, in conventional solar, you see cells that are in the 20%
range, a little bit higher actually, these days, which is
fantastic. And there's actually a theoretical maximum called the
Shockley-Queisser limit. That means any single junction solar
cell can't get above about 33% efficiency. And that's just
because if you look at the math, all of those photons that you
can't use limits your efficiency to that 33%. We have already
demonstrated a 40% efficient photovoltaic cell in our application
that's also just a single junction. And junction just refers to
the fact that you can have different types of semiconductor
materials that absorb different wavelengths of light.


And for us and for solar, you can boost your performance a little
bit by adding junctions. But the key takeaway from that is
because of the unique aspect of our application and that we can
return these photons back, and we do with high efficiency, we
already are able to make cells that are more efficient than the
efficiency limits that prevent solar cells from getting to high
efficiency.


David Roberts


And that's because you're recycling the photons. That's because
you're, whatever you would call it, returning the photons.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. We're sending those photons back and preventing that
energy from being lost.


David Roberts


Cool. Okay, so you get this battery, this glowing piece of
carbon. You got the shutter that allows differential amounts of
light out, and the light is either falling on a tube with fluid
if you want heat, or on a TPV cell if you want electricity. Can a
single Antora battery do both of these things? And do you have to
switch back and forth or can it do both of these things
simultaneously?


Andrew Ponec


Yes, our thermal battery can do both and is doing both. Our pilot
unit is discharging simultaneously electricity and thermal, and
they are independently controllable.


David Roberts


Interesting.


Andrew Ponec


So the easy way to think about that is you can have a separate
shutter in front of your photovoltaics and another one in front
of something that's extracting heat. And you can vary
independently at the amount, the opening of each of those to
change the ratio of heat to electricity you're getting off the
system.


David Roberts


Right. So the renewable energy goes in and you can either get
heat or electricity out, varying independently, simultaneously,
depending on your needs. So that's the battery, and as far as I
know, you guys are the only thermal battery that is capable of
also producing electricity. Is that true? Are you aware of
anybody else doing this?


Andrew Ponec


We're not aware of anyone, but we certainly hope there will be
more in the future. Because looking at the decarbonization
problem in industry, you have to decarbonize the heat and the
electricity.


David Roberts


Yeah. So, let's talk then about use cases. Listeners are familiar
with why industry needs heat and they are familiar with the fact
that today almost all that heat comes from fossil fuels burned on
site. And they are familiar from my pod with Rondo, with the fact
that the reason it's changing is that wind and solar have just
gotten so cheap. Now they're the cheapest energy available. So,
if you can use them for heat, you want to. I mean, this is true
across all energy applications. Basically, if you can use wind
and solar, you want to because they're the cheapest thing out
there.


So, this is going to enable industrial heat to use wind and
solar. That use case is familiar enough. What do you get by also
outputting electricity? Because if I'm an industrial facility
that wants to decarbonize my electricity, I just buy renewables
through RECs, right? Or whatever. Like decarbonizing electricity
is to some extent a solved problem. Like they know how to do
that. So, what does it benefit you to have a single battery that
can do both these things?


Andrew Ponec


There's two levels of answers to that question. The first is at
the highest level, industrial users are using heat and
electricity. And so they need both. They need to decarbonize
both. You mentioned that there are options out there like RECs
for decarbonizing electricity. What we've seen is that there is a
push industrially for people to use electricity that is clean and
that is being used at the same time that it is being generated.


David Roberts


Right. Hourly matching. Yes, we've done a pod on that as well.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. And so, I think some of the solutions that are out there
right now that don't have hourly matching we think are likely to
be insufficient both from a global climate perspective and for an
industrial perspective to say that you've truly solved that
electricity problem.


David Roberts


Right.


Andrew Ponec


The much deeper answer really involves the economics of a thermal
battery that has the ability to output both. And this gets a
little bit subtle and so I'm not sure I would do this on any
podcast, but let me walk through why it is so important to have
both. The way to think about this is to look at how we would
decarbonize electricity first. And you're probably familiar, as
are many of your listeners, with the large number of academic and
industry studies that have shown that one of the best paths to
decarbonizing electricity is to use wind and solar and long
duration energy storage.


In order to make that work so that you're covering every hour of
the year, you typically overbuild your wind and solar and you
overbuild your storage in that you're building way more duration
than you would ever use on a daily basis. And that combination
can get you to 100% renewables. In some cases that is an
attractive option. But let's dive in and look at what's going on
with those capital assets. Both of them are now being
underutilized. 95% of the time, you didn't need all of that wind
and solar you're over generating. And 95% of the time you have a
bunch of excess storage capacity that isn't useful.


So, let's say if you look at that long duration storage system,
let's imagine that you chose a long duration storage system that
was a thermal battery and a thermal battery that had the ability
to output heat and power. Now, during that 95% of the time that
you had excess renewable generation and excess storage capacity,
you can be using all of that excess capacity to provide zero
carbon heat. So for no additional money, for no additional
capital equipment, you've taken a system that you designed to
provide 100% electricity and you've also decarbonized, call it
95% of your heating needs as well. And that's the fundamental
economics that drives why it's so important to have something
that can do both.


David Roberts


Right. So, to draw an analogy, listeners are familiar with the
fact that we have these peaker plants, natural gas peaker plants
that are rarely used for much the same reason, right? They just
serve peaks. And peaks are by definition rare. It's as though you
found something else to do with those natural gas peaker plants
while they weren't producing peak electricity. Right. Some way of
occupying them and producing value out of them while they were
not providing that peak.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. And in this case, all of that energy is coming from
renewables. So this is a ton of clean energy that we would love
to have found a use for. But that in kind of the current paradigm
of long duration energy storage for 100% renewables and
decarbonization is going to waste.


David Roberts


Right. So rather than waste it, we're overbuilding renewables,
overbuilding batteries, and rather than waste all that excess
capacity, we're using it to get heat.


Andrew Ponec


That's right.


David Roberts


And in those times when we are at peak load and your batteries
are being used for that purpose, for electricity purposes, during
those short periods of time, we need to meet those peaks that
won't disrupt the production of heat in any way. Like, are these
two uses ever, do they ever conflict?


Andrew Ponec


That's an important point because there's no free lunch. I said
that excess generation and that excess storage capacity was only
available 95% of the time. What happens in that remaining five?


David Roberts


Right.


Andrew Ponec


And in that case, we would stop generating heat. We no longer
have the excess to decarbonize heat as well. And you essentially
devote all of the energy resource, both the generation and the
storage capacity, to generating electricity and then you backfill
the heat need with some other means. This could be a fuel,
whether fossil or hopefully zero carbon. Now, the question would
be, did you actually win out of that? We said "Hey, you were
overbuilding all this excess wind and solar and battery storage
to cover the last 5% of electricity." And now we've just shifted
that all over and we're saying, "Okay, now we've covered the
electricity problem very cost effectively, but now we still have
this last 5% of heat."


David Roberts


Right. Now you got to overbuild your heat stuff to handle that
last 5% of heat.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. So the question is, is it better to have the problem in
how do you solve the last 5% of heat or how do you solve the last
5% of electricity? And the answer is, hands down, it's better to
have it for heat. And that's for two reasons. The first is the
capital equipment to make heat from a fuel is a burner. It's very
cheap, it's totally fine to have a burner that sits there 95% of
the year and only gets turned on in these very rare occasions
where you don't have solar and wind for a long period of time.


That is very different than having a power plant, like you
mentioned earlier, a peaker that sits there 95% of the time and
is super expensive.


David Roberts


Right.


Andrew Ponec


So, it's orders of magnitude cheaper on a per power basis, per
energy flow basis, to have a burner sitting there versus a power
plant sitting there. And the other thing is efficiency. We can
convert some sort of fuel into heat with 80% efficiency with a
burner. Whereas a peaker plant, because you're trying to keep the
capital cost down because it's rarely used, you end up with very
low efficiency, cheap like aero derivative turbines to provide
that peaking capacity. So, you have a huge win on efficiency and
a huge win on the capital expenditure for something that sits
around all the time if you have that problem in the heat arena
versus in the electricity arena.


David Roberts


Right. So, you'd much rather be mopping up that last few percent
of heat than you would be mopping up that last few percent of
electricity.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly.


David Roberts


Can your rock get hot enough to produce heat for any industrial
application or are there still some levels of heat that you can't
reach?


Andrew Ponec


Almost all of industrial heat is below temperatures of about 1500
degrees Celsius, which is all achievable or all deliverable with
Antora's thermal battery. The only processes that happen at
significantly higher temperatures are things like the production
of graphite. Because graphite is such a high-temperature capable
material, to produce it, you have to go up to these very extreme
temperatures. So almost all applications can be served here.


David Roberts


Including concrete and steel.


Andrew Ponec


Including concrete and steel.


David Roberts


Those are the big ones, right? I mean, those are the ones you
want to be covering.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. And this is a really important point about temperatures
for thermal energy storage that often gets missed when you have a
process that needs to have heat input to it at a certain
temperature. Like, let's just say you're talking about a
calcination process that's happening at 1000 degrees Celsius. So
you need to deliver energy at 1000 degrees Celsius you don't get
any credit for the energy you stored between 600-700 degrees
Celsius because there's no way to get that heat, that lower
temperature heat up into the higher temperature industrial
process. Which means that whatever the temperature you process
that is the floor for your thermal battery's temperature range
and thermal batteries only store energy by moving the temperature
of the thermal battery through a range.


Which means if you're talking about that 1000 C process, if you
had a 1200 C capable thermal battery, you would be storing almost
no energy in order to deliver it into a 1000 C process.
Similarly, if you have a 1500 C process, you better be able to
store energy at significantly above 1500 degrees Celsius.
Otherwise, you're not going to have an effective storage system.


David Roberts


Right.


Andrew Ponec


And that's something that I think is not well understood. It's
not just the capability of the storage material to reach the
process temperatures, it's to reach temperatures so much higher
than the process temperatures that you can take the energy from
that storage material and deliver it into the process.


David Roberts


Is it standard to just heat the carbon up to its maximum
temperature and just leave it there? And that way you can sort
of, with your shutter, release varying levels of heat, but the
carbon itself is just as hot as it will get at all times.


Andrew Ponec


So the carbon has to go up and down in temperature because that's
what's storing the energy. So if you have heated the carbon up to
2000 C when it was really windy and there wasn't a lot of demand
for electricity, let's call that 100% state of charge for the
moment. Then if you're stopping charging, if you're delivering
heat out of that, you're necessarily dropping the temperature
because that is actually getting the heat out of the material.
Which means you're going to always be having the temperature
fluctuate with charge and discharge cycles. And you're going to
have to be varying the opening of this shutter to make sure that
the temperature and power levels that you're operating your
process at remain consistent.


David Roberts


Right. But if you're supplying, say, 1200 C heat out, 1200 C has
to be the floor of those fluctuations. Right?


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. That becomes the floor and actually, practically you end
up with a floor that's call it 100 degrees C higher than your
process temperature because you still need a driving force to
push heat into the process. You can think of heat kind of like
pressure in water. In order to get heat flow, you have to have a
temperature drop. Just like in order to get water flow, there is
some pressure drop across a pipe.


David Roberts


Right. And let me ask this really an academic question, since I
assume these batteries are designed to be charging and
discharging almost continuously, I think certainly on a diurnal
basis. But say you were just storing a bunch of energy as heat
and not letting anything out. Say you charged it packed in as
much heat as you could, closed the shutter completely and let it
sit there, how long would it hold that power? Is there natural
leakage?


Andrew Ponec


There's really two totally different designs you could have for a
thermal battery. One which is the one that we're developing and
that I would say most thermal battery companies are developing,
are thermal batteries that are discharging continuously. So ours
is always discharging 24 hours a day into the industrial process,
and then we're intermittently charging it up and cooling it down.
So you're sometimes charging and discharging simultaneously.
Sometimes you're not charging, but you're still discharging
because you're discharging 24/7. There's a very different type of
thermal battery that would be operated where you're charging up,
you're then holding that energy, and then you're discharging
later.


But it turns out almost no industrial processes want to use
energy intermittently. If they could use energy intermittently,
they probably wouldn't need storage in the first place because
they would just run when it's windy or sunny.


David Roberts


Right. So presumably if you wanted to design to discharge
intermittently or even to maybe hold energy over long periods of
time, you would just put more insulation. Is it that simple?


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. It's as simple as that.


David Roberts


So let's talk price then. If I'm an industrial process, say, in
Ohio or whatever, and I build a big solar field and a big wind
farm and hook them directly up to Antora batteries and then I'm
getting my heat from those batteries — and my electricity too
maybe if I want clean electricity — I'm getting heat and
electricity out of those batteries. The heat I'm paying for out
of those batteries: How does it compare, cost-wise, to the heat I
could get out of a conventional natural gas boiler?


Andrew Ponec


The absolute key for determining the economics for any facility
is going to be the cost of the renewable electricity. That's the
input.


David Roberts


Of course.


Andrew Ponec


Yeah, there's two parts of it. What's the cost of the renewable
electricity and then what's the amortized capital expenditure of
the plant, just how much does it cost to pay back the thermal
battery? And in most cases, you find that the key factor is the
renewable electricity cost. And the amount you pay for that
electricity also, though, depends on the characteristics of the
thermal battery. For example, a thermal battery that has a very
long duration capability has the ability to pick and choose when
it charges more than one that has a short duration.


Similarly, one that has a faster charge rate can charge at only
the best times, and one with a slower charge rate is going to get
an average charge price that's higher because they can't be so
picky.


David Roberts


Right. Let me pause here and just spell this out a little bit for
listeners in case you're not getting it. So, the price of
electricity in electricity markets fluctuates constantly, and it
tends to be when you have a lot of renewables in the system, the
price of electricity tends to crater for this period in midday
when all the sun is out, basically. And so, you have ramps down
and then ramps back up price-wise out of that. And so, to the
extent you can charge during that very particular period when
electricity is basically free or even negative, you're going to
benefit.


But if you charge more slowly, your charging cycle is going to
extend into those ramps where it's getting more expensive on one
side or the other. So basically, you want to be able to charge as
fast as possible so that you can make maximum use of that
relatively brief time when electricity is super, super cheap. Is
that right?


Andrew Ponec


That is a great explanation.


David Roberts


And you can charge quickly.


Andrew Ponec


That's right. We charge quickly. We charge about three times as
fast as we discharge.


David Roberts


And that's just the power of carbon there. Is that why you're
able to charge so fast?


Andrew Ponec


The power of carbon? Yeah, we can charge fast in part because the
carbon is so thermally conductive that as you're trying to push
heat into it, the heat is immediately sort of diffusing deep into
the block as opposed to just getting stopped up at the surface,
which would prevent you from being able to keep charging quickly.


David Roberts


All right, say my industrial facilities then are in Iowa where I
have a crap ton of wind and an increasing amount of solar and I
have periods of negative electricity prices each day. And I have
my industrial facility, I have my Antora batteries and my Antora
batteries are charging with renewable energy during those periods
of super cheap electricity. Then what's the economics of the heat
relative to a natural gas boiler?


Andrew Ponec


We can beat natural gas long term in all of those areas that have
high renewables penetration. And that is, I can't emphasize
enough what a big deal that is.


David Roberts


Yeah, natural gas heat is very cheap. That's the whole dilemma of
this space.


Andrew Ponec


That's right. And natural gas heat in the United States is some
of the cheapest in the world. So when we're talking about being
able to go into an industrial facility in Iowa or Texas, we could
be sitting next to Henry Hub, the trading hub, and in the future
still be able to undercut natural gas on price. Which is really
remarkable and that's without any sort of subsidy or green
premium or anyone having to care about the climate attributes of
the battery.


David Roberts


And that's just by virtue of the fact that renewable energy gets
very cheap in these markets, gets super, super freakishly cheap.
When you say you can beat natural gas, is there a cut off on the
price of electricity that makes that possible? Like do you need
negatively priced electricity to do that or is it cheap will be
enough, super cheap? Like is there a level there, a cut off?


Andrew Ponec


Well, the really simple math to go through with some
approximations here is that $10 per megawatt hour, which is one
cent per kilowatt hour, corresponds to about $3 per MMBTU. And I
use that unit because that's how most natural gas is traded in
these areas. As you might be familiar, Henry Hub has fluctuated
somewhere between $3 and $5 per MMBTU for a long time. If you
account for any sort of industrial energy price, which usually
has some basis, some step up in price versus the actual trading
hub, you end up with natural gas that's call it $6 per MMBTU.


If you then apply the efficiency of the boiler, the actual price
of the heat coming out of the steam, for instance, coming out, is
between $7 and $8 per MMBTU. So immediately you can see that you
need an electricity price — even if your thermal battery was free
and 100% efficient — you need electricity that is cheaper than
call it $20 a megawatt hour to be competitive with that.


David Roberts


Right. And that's very cheap.


Andrew Ponec


And that's just the energy conversion. Like, none of that was
technology specific. The good news is almost all thermal
batteries are included, are very efficient in the 90s. So you
don't take a big efficiency hit there. Then it's just a matter
of, can you get the electricity cheap enough, and is your thermal
battery cheap enough?


David Roberts


Right. In terms of cheap electricity, you're not worried at all
that that super cheap electricity is a weird artifact of the way
we structure markets today? You're not worried that's going to go
away? I mean, presumably with more and more renewables on the
system, there's just going to be more and more of these periods
of excess production you think?


Andrew Ponec


That's right. There are going to be many periods, and there
already are when the renewables do line up with demand and that
energy is really valuable. And so you're going to end up wanting
to install more solar and wind to cover those periods. But then
you're just, along with that, going to get a bunch of energy that
comes at periods where the grid is already saturated, and that's
going to be very low value power. And that's the power that we
want to soak up. And I really want to emphasize the difference
there between the charging price is not necessarily the same as
the levelized cost of energy of the solar and wind, because
you're looking at some of the energy from the solar and wind
going to the grid to some productive use that commands a
relatively high price and then some of it coming at these wrong
times when there's over generation and that is at a very low
price. So the price some of the time is going to be lower than
the levelized cost of energy.


David Roberts


And what about the electricity? So I'm that same industrial
production facility in Iowa, you can get me heat cheaper than
natural gas boilers, which is a big deal. What if I choose to get
my electricity out of those Antora batteries rather than off the
grid. What's the kind of the typical price differential there?


Andrew Ponec


So when we look at supplying heat and electricity to an
industrial site, we end up with an overall cost that is cheaper
than buying natural gas for the heat and buying grid electricity
for the electricity. Now, there's a little bit of a question of
do you call that the electricity being cheaper and the heat being
equivalent or do you say that the other way around? So you can
kind of put it into one bucket or the other, but the outcome is a
combined energy bill that is lower than a conventional energy
bill would be.


David Roberts


And that is true anywhere where there are enough renewables on
the system to produce these periods of kind of overproduction
which, god willing, will be everywhere soon enough.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. And that's the bet that we're making as a company, and
that I certainly hope comes true for our sake, but also for
climate's sake. Because right now there are a few places in the
world, like some of the windy areas in the Midwest where this
makes sense today. We see the signs already and a bunch of other
geographies of as more and more renewables come online, the
economics of a thermal battery like this making more and more
sense. But we are absolutely counting on that, extending beyond
the geographies where it makes sense today, to nearly every
geography over the course of the coming decade.


David Roberts


Right. And it seems like it just unlocks so much for renewable
energy developers. Because if I'm building a solar field in Texas
now during midday, my solar is competing with all the other solar
and I basically am losing money on it. So I'm only kind of making
money on my solar on these weird shoulder periods. But if I can
take all that electricity during that peak period and sell it to
a heat battery, that means I'm selling all my electricity rather
than just ride the shoulder periods.


Andrew Ponec


Yes.


David Roberts


It's just huge for renewable energy developers. This seems like
such a huge thing. It's just like here's another sink —


Andrew Ponec


Yes.


David Roberts


into which you can dump all your renewable energy regardless of
timing.


Andrew Ponec


Yes, exactly. This is such an important point. We are working
with and have partnered with some of the biggest renewable energy
companies in the world. And what they are seeing right now is
that the primary impediment to continuing to deploy renewables in
the areas that have great renewable resources is the fact that a
huge chunk of their power is now worthless.


David Roberts


Yeah. It's getting curtailed.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. So if we can put a price floor on that power, even one
that's very low, it enables far more renewable development than
would otherwise be able to happen in those regions.


David Roberts


Right. And this is a point I made also in that previous pod,
which is there's enough demand for industrial heat to soak up all
the excess renewables that you want to generate. Like this is not
a small sink we're talking about, right? Like if you can get all
of industrial heat onto thermal batteries rather than natural gas
boilers then you're never going to curtail renewable energy
again. Right? Like you're never going to waste another electron
of renewable energy. You're going to have all the demand you need
out to the horizon.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly.


David Roberts


It would basically end curtailment.


Andrew Ponec


That's right. And that requires you to have thermal batteries
that can charge quickly, as we talked about, it requires having
thermal batteries in the same geographies and have some overlap
between the generation and those energy intensive industries. But
I think that is where we are going to continue to see energy
intensive industries move as they always have to where energy is
the cheapest. And in the past that was where is the fossil fuel
the cheapest, where are those molecules coming out of the ground.
And in the future that's going to be where are you going to have
a lot of excess wind and solar production that can drive these
energy intensive processes.


So the great news for the United States by the way is we have
some of those best resources in places like the midwestern United
States. So, I think you're going to see a pretty dramatic
reindustrialization of a lot of these regions because they're
going to have the cheapest energy on the planet.


David Roberts


Yes, the new oil, the new energy geography. Who has the intense
wind and sunlight and where? Yeah, I was talking with John in
that previous pod about: Long term you can imagine the physical
migration of industry to these areas where there's lots of sun
and wind, which would be a total sort of just a mind-blowing
reconceiving of industrial geography. That's just like a huge
social and economic shift. I think that's on the way. We're
running out of time but I wanted to ask this. You just have the
battery, you say you're charging the battery from renewable
energy but there's nothing that requires the energy going in to
be renewable.


Like theoretically you could just charge your battery off-grid
power. What percent of your batteries do you think are going to
be saying we're charging on renewable energy based on either RECs
or hourly RECs. We're just charging off-grid electricity but
we're doing some sort of financing scheme where we're just paying
for renewables which is what most businesses that are running on,
quote unquote, 100% renewables are doing today versus developers
actually building wind and solar off-grid and just attaching them
directly to these batteries. At which point you could say clearly
and incontrovertibly we're using renewable energy.


What do you think is going to be the balance of those two?


Andrew Ponec


I would say there's one in between that's important to talk about
which is where you're building renewables, you have local
renewables that are splitting their production where some of the
production, the low value production is going to the thermal
battery and the high value production is being sent to the grid.


David Roberts


Right. So grid connected, but that would be a grid connected
renewables.


Andrew Ponec


That's right, grid connected but still directly connected and
hourly matched to the thermal load or to the industrial load.


David Roberts


Got it. So the renewable energy developer, again, this is like
financially such a big deal for renewable energy developers. It
basically is like here's a second market that's going to sop up
the power that I was not going to be able to sell previously. So
you have two customers there. But do you think — I'm trying to
figure out whether to be excited about this idea of off-grid
renewables. Do you anticipate people building? Because one of the
roadblocks now for renewables, one of the big impediments is the
slow interconnection process is the difficulty of getting
connected to the grid.


And this is as you're well aware, a subject of much angst these
days. And one of the main things slowing down renewable energy
buildout, what these heat batteries enable is you could just
build all the renewable energy you want and hook it directly to
these batteries and then you don't have to worry about the grid,
you don't have to worry about interconnection, you don't have to
wait for interconnection. Do you anticipate that being a big
piece of this, a big market for this just off-grid renewables
connected directly to thermal batteries?


Andrew Ponec


Yes, we think there's going to be a fair amount of that in the
future. We have some projects in our pipeline that are exactly
that; off-grid renewables being turned into industrial energy
without those electrons ever touching the grid. But we do think
that the highest value you can do is to allow those electrons at
the times when they're really needed on the grid to flow to the
grid rather than to thermal battery. Because that's the whole
beauty of having thermal batteries. You don't always need those
electrons going to that process. You could give them to the grid
if the grid is really needing that.


David Roberts


That's right, the grid is handy. It's nice to have. I'm just
saying — this would not be like a blank sheet of paper thing you
would do. This would just be a response to grid congestion
basically. It would just be a response to interconnection
dysfunction.


Andrew Ponec


Yeah, and to be clear, in this case, the grid is really handy.
It's more that we could help the grid at those times if we were
connected rather than we're relying on the grid to fill in. It's
really the addition there. But if you have a use for the
electricity that's behind the meter and not related to
interconnection, you can imagine how this provides a really
useful hedge too against interconnection delays because you might
be able to fund projects that have some sort of interconnection
risk or timeline risk where there's still a use for that energy
at an industrial site.


David Roberts


Yeah, you could say I'm going to build this and use it to power
heat batteries until I'm allowed to interconnect.


Andrew Ponec


Yes.


David Roberts


Interesting. That alone would just throw open the doors. I mean,
what do they say, there's like a terawatt of renewable energy
projects waiting in the interconnection queue. If you could just
soak all that up with heat batteries while we're waiting for
interconnection. That is a lot of renewable energy to unlock.


Andrew Ponec


Absolutely.


David Roberts


Give us a little sort of like reading on where Antora is now.
You've built a commercial scale battery that is operating
commercially. What stage are you at and what's next?


Andrew Ponec


Yeah, so we've built one of our modular thermal batteries. So
it's a modular unit, but we only have one of them so far. We've
deployed that, it is operating at a pilot facility and we are now
ready to go to larger scale commercial customers. So we just
recently leased a facility to start the manufacturing of those
thermal batteries and we're going to be delivering those to much
larger customers that need multiples of them rather than just a
single one in the future.


David Roberts


Every time I talk to a new company with a new type of product,
part of what you need to break into markets is good technology,
but part of what you need is financing. And big money is
notoriously conservatively, right. It wants to finance boring,
proven things here. And this is a battery that can output heat
and electricity is a new thing in the world. How long do you
think it's going to take to get big financiers comfortable with
this so that you can get your cost of capital down?


Andrew Ponec


It's a great question. It's one we're always thinking about how
to accelerate the path to low cost of capital with big financial
players. We're already working with a number of big firms that do
finance these sorts of projects. It's key to mention that while
we have talked a lot about the thermal battery that does both
heat and electricity, which is great, and a very important part
of industrial decarbonization comes with some big economic
advantages in the future. Our first product is a thermal battery
that outputs heat only, just like most other thermal batteries
do. And in that case, the technology that we're looking at here
is a very simple, boring technology.


What we're doing looks pretty much the same as an industrial
graphitization furnace that is running at a far lower
temperature, but just that also has these insulated doors that
can open and close to release some of that energy on demand.


David Roberts


Yeah, like storing heat in rocks. Goes back centuries, you could
say.


Andrew Ponec


Yes, and we love that. It's actually funny. We get this all the
time. Potential investors in our company or project financiers
that they almost seem embarrassed to call our technology simple.
And they're like, "Well, I'm sure there's been a lot of work put
into it, but is that really all there is to it? Is it that
simple?" And we're always like, "Yes. It's a matter of pride for
us to create a simple technology. We don't want to be engineers."


David Roberts


That's my favorite thing about this whole space. Like, I could
sit down a fifth grader and explain how this works. There's no
advanced physics here. You heat the rock up and then you get the
heat back out of the rock.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. So we have a phase two that involves some new technology
that solves a second part of the decarbonization puzzle for
industry. But the first product is a pretty boring box with some
hot carbon blocks in it.


David Roberts


Because it's so simple, it's not obvious where you'd get
innovation. Right? I mean, I can imagine costs coming down with
scale and with manufacturing scale, obviously, and capital
getting cheaper, obviously. I can imagine ways that the costs
could go down. But in terms of technological innovation, where do
you see room to improve? Or do you or do you think this is, like,
good to go?


Andrew Ponec


The first product doesn't have that much complexity in it. There
are a lot of ways that we're going to continue improving the
manufacturing process, bringing the cost down over time, but
there's nothing big and fancy and shiny and new that's going to
be introduced into that process. It's a lot of the just
unglamorous engineering of working through supply chains to
squeeze costs and improving manufacturing in the factory. I think
it is important that it is made in a factory. I think that's been
one of the lessons of climate technologies thus far, that we're
not doing each of these as a bespoke construction project, that
we're making them in a standardized way in a centralized place
and then shipping them to customers.


David Roberts


You got to hop on that learning curve.


Andrew Ponec


Exactly. So that's the first product. In the second product,
which includes the thermophotovoltaics to make electricity as
well, that's where there's a lot of really interesting
technologies that we're pursuing right now to bring that cost
down. And the reason why that product is being released a little
later is to give time for all of those kind of fancier
engineering things to make sure that we can produce them at very
low costs and high efficiency. And to have shown the reliability.


David Roberts


Is that mostly around the TPV itself? Is that mostly around the
thermophotovoltaics themselves, that you're going to be doing
those tweaks?


Andrew Ponec


That's right. It's photovoltaics, which are well understood, but
it is a photovoltaic that has some unique properties. The high
power density that we mentioned, the ability to reflect the
unusable light. So this is new. Anytime you're scaling up a new
technology, it's going to take some time. But the first product
doesn't really have any new technology in it, which allows us to
move much faster.


David Roberts


All right, well, Andrew, thanks so much for coming on. This is a
real delight for me. I love this whole space. I love the shutters
with light coming out. And I love all of this. So thanks for
coming on and talking it through with us. And good luck to you.


Andrew Ponec


Wonderful. Absolutely. A pleasure. Thank you so much and looking
forward to chatting again sometime soon.


David Roberts


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