Ep. 244 - Kathy Hannun, Co-founder of Dandelion Energy, Alphabet Google X Spin Out & Geothermal Home Energy Company on Trends in Clean Energy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kathy Hannun, co-founder of Dandelion Energy, a Google X spin out and largest geothermal home energy company. Kathleen and I talk about the trends in the clean energy space and her experiences of launching a successful startup out of Alphabet's Google X Lab. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Kathy Hannun, Co-founder of Dandelion Energy

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Kathy Hannun. She is the co-founder of Dandelion, a Google X spin-out and the largest geothermal home energy company. Welcome. 

Kathy Hannun: Thanks so much for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Kathy, I'm excited to have you on. As a lot of our listeners know, we try to bring on the people that can give us insight into new trends and new perspectives on innovation, but also people who can bring us insights and perspectives on the process of innovation. And I thought you could do a great job of both. So, what is Dandelion? 

Kathy Hannun: So, Dandelion is a home geothermal company. What that means is we take a homeowner's furnace or boiler out of their home. And we replace it with a geothermal heating and cooling system. So, this is a heat pump that goes where the furnace or boiler used to be, connected to what are called ground loops, which are plastic pipes buried under the homeowner's yard.

And these ground loops are exchanging heat with the yard. So, in the winter they're drawing heat into the house, that's then processed through the heat pump to boost the temperature. And then in the summer, the whole thing works in reverse. We're actually taking heat out of the house, much like an air conditioner does and putting it into the ground.

Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things about this company, you've just raised a $30 million funding round with Breakthrough Energy Ventures. And you're taking what used to be very much a niche luxury and trying to bring it into the mainstream technology. So how did Dandelion get started? How did it come to be?

Kathy Hannun: You're exactly right. Dandelion is really trying to take what has traditionally been a very expensive niche product, geothermal heating and cooling and making it mainstream. So, to be clear, like we did not invent geothermal heating and cooling. This has existed for decades. It's very popular in Sweden, but what we're trying to do is just make it really common. You know, much more common in this country. 

And the way we got started was I was actually working as a rap evaluator at Google's X Lab. So, this is the part of Google that comes up with like the self-driving car balloon internet, or, you know, a lot of the futuristic moonshot technologies. And I was looking for a great opportunity to do something impactful in energy. Specifically, I wanted to find an opportunity to really grow clean energy and heating and cooling buildings really stood out to me because unlike a lot of other consumer energy sectors like cars or even electricity, there really isn't nearly as much activity in trying to figure out how to make buildings that use more clean energy. Right? 

When we looked at the different solutions that you could bring to the problem heat pumps stood out so clearly. Like here's this technology that already exists. It's proven to work. It's like geothermal heat pumps are the most efficient possible way to heat and cool your home. So of course, then the next question is, well, if they're so good, why is no one using them? Right. And that was because they were too expensive. 

And so, as we studied what made them expensive, we realized a lot of the reasons they were super expensive weren't fundamental reasons. They were all just either a function of the way the industry was set up or the technologies that were being used at that time. And we thought, you know, we could really make a difference here. 

Brian Ardinger: So, what do you see as the path to mass adoption compared to other cleantech types of technologies like solar out there?

Kathy Hannun: I think what we'll see with heat pumps is going to be very similar to what we've seen with solar over the past 15 to 20 years. We're just in the early innings with heat pumps and solar as well, along the way. But I think in the same way that, you know, maybe 15 years ago, solar was a very niche technology where either the very wealthy or the very committed, like hobbyist could get it.

But for the typical homeowner, it wasn't something they have necessarily heard of or would know anyone who had. And then today you literally cannot go to a neighborhood and not see solar on somebody's house. I think, I think that is what is going to happen over the next decade with heat pumps. 

Brian Ardinger: So, from a business perspective, how are you seeing the geothermal space playing out? What makes it different? What makes it exciting? And, and what are some of the challenges that you're seeing? 

Kathy Hannun: I think one of the things that certainly differentiates geothermal is you have to put those ground loops under the yard. So, one of the big obstacles we identified at the very beginning was that there isn't really like drilling equipment that's purpose built for the suburban home, right? There's like no other thing you have to do in a suburban yard that involves drilling hundreds of feet into the earth. And so that was one of the first problems that we really explored at X. And then we've continued to develop as an independent startup.

We've created a set of drilling equipment, that's purpose-built for this exact industry. So, you know, we thought about what would your drilling equipment look like if it was designed to install ground loops in suburban yards? So, we wanted to make sure it could fit in small yards. We wanted to make sure it was very clean because homeowners don't like a lot of disturbances in their yard. We wanted to make sure it was cost effective so we could offer a good price to customers. 

So that's been one sort of major pillar of what we've been doing, but there have been others as well. We had to look into really mainstreaming the heat pump and creating a product that was scalable. We had to look into how do we provide the right financing tools to customers like the solar industry has done, so that you don't have to pay for everything upfront, but you can actually pay over time as you're saving money.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's go back to the Google X experience. A lot of corporate accelerators out there, they oftentimes take on that Horizon One or Horizon Two types of innovations, you know, things that are closer to the core or slightly adjacent to the core. Google X is known for taking, like you said, moonshots. Can you talk a little bit about the Google X experience? What's it like, how do you go ...