$85M for Green Iron with No Premium — Sandeep Nijhawan, CEO of Electra

My guest today is Sandeep Nijhawan, the Cofounder and CEO of Electra.

Electra is decarbonizing ironmaking for green steel production using intermittent renewable energy and low-grade iron ores, and producing higher-quality steel at the same time. Backed by $85M of VC and corporate VC capital, they will do all this at zero cost premium to existing steel manufacturing.

In addition, Sandeep is the former:

• President of AquaHydrex, which was focused on developing a novel electrolyzer for the hydrogen economy
• Operating Partner for True North Venture Partners
• President of Staq Energy, a distributed energy storage solutions developer

In this episode, we talked about:

• Their new partnership with Nucor, the largest steel manufacturer in the U.S.
• How he transitioned from a PhD in mechanical engineering to leading energy tech startups
• Why his “midlife crisis” led to the clarity to build novel energy solutions among small teams of bonafide geeks
• The importance of producing green steel at 60 degrees Celsius instead of 1,600 degrees
• How they balanced strategic and financial investors, ignoring conventional wisdom in the process
• The ways in which steel plants can get access to their solution as an OpEx, instead of just as a CapEx
• The prioritization of self, family, and team – not the reverse order – and this is anti-selfish
• Perspectives on really knowing the “why” in order to allow the “how” to be easier
• And lots more

Hope you enjoy.

And give Sandeep and Electra a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people.

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