Redefining Energy - TECH

In this engaging episode, host Michael Barnard welcomes Vincent Pluvinage, the physicist, inventor, and CEO of OneD Battery Sciences, discussing his diverse background, love for physics, and the path that led him to become involved in silicon-based batteries.From his initial work in designing chips for programmable hearing aids to meeting influential figures like Andy Grove and David Packard, Vincent shares his unique journey.The conversation delves into the development and potential of OneD Battery Sciences' groundbreaking battery technology, specifically the use of silicon nanowires, which promises to revolutionize the industry with the potential for low-cost manufacturing at scale.The discussion also touches on color perception, the complexity of electrochemistry, and the challenges of modeling larger batteries.Additional topics include the distinct characteristics and challenges of EV batteries compared to smaller consumer batteries, trade secrets in the battery industry, the importance of managing heat in EV batteries, and the complexities of different critical minerals in battery supply chains.

Michael Barnard welcomes back Elisabet Liljeblad, the sustainability and energy lead with Stena Teknik, for the second half of their conversation on redefining energy Tech. They start by discussing the efficiency of electric drive trains in shipping and compare it to reciprocating engines. Methanol is explored as a shipping fuel with lower emissions and cleaner burning properties. Ammonia is discussed as a potential transportation fuel but poses toxicity and safety challenges. Hydrogen is also considered, highlighting its clean combustion but issues with storage, cost, and low conversion efficiency. Equinor abandoned their cryogenic hydrogen bunkering due to high costs. There are doubts about the viability of hydrogen-powered ships, as batteries tend to be cheaper. However, some companies like Swedish Goslin Ferries are still pursuing hydrogen solutions. The challenges of producing and storing liquid hydrogen make it less energy-dense than diesel or ammonia. A potential solution for ships is a battery-biofuel hybrid model that gradually replaces diesel with biodiesel over time. Electrification using containerized batteries in ports and on ships is another promising option, especially for roll-on/roll-off vessels. Collaboration between the shipping and rail industries could allow shared use of battery containers for more efficient electrification efforts. Additionally, bunkering electrons instead of conventional fuel is being explored as an alternative for reducing emissions from cruise ships in Norwegian fjords by 2026. Liljeblad discusses the concept of electron bunkering vessels, which are ships with batteries that provide energy to other ships. She emphasizes the need for a total rethink in how we value companies and use resources to address environmental issues. Liljeblad closes by highlighting the importance of individual responsibility and making sustainable choices as consumers. She believes there is great potential for electrifying container shipping and using existing solutions to transition towards a more sustainable future.

Michael Barnard welcomes Elisabet Liljeblad, PhD, the sustainability and energy lead with Stena Teknik, to discuss decarbonization in the maritime industry. Elisabet shares her diverse background including studying the magnetosphere of Mercury and a stint in Afghanistan keeping the peace, and how she ended up in shipping. Full transcript.They explore the scale of the maritime industry and its challenge of decarbonization due to its size, variety of vessels, and dependency on fossil fuels. Shipping constitutes a significant amount of emissions globally. The conversation touches upon different types of ships within Stena's business units, including drilling, bulk transportation, passenger ferries, technical services, and their varying operational characteristics. They highlight the need for different fuel logistics as ships transition away from fossil fuels towards electrification or alternative fuels like ammonia, methanol, hydrogen or biodiesel blends. The challenges faced by ports in accommodating these diverse refueling options are also discussed along with onboard carbon capture as a potential solution.The potential for electrification in marine shipping is significant, with projections suggesting that 40% of container ships can be electrified within this decade.Methanol is another opportunity for shipping fuel, and Stena has converted a ropax vessel to run on both diesel and methanol. Methanol has half the energy density of fossil diesel but doesn't evaporate at room temperature. It's relatively easy to store and handle but requires separate tanks from other fuels due to its characteristics. Biodiesel, particularly hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), burns cleaner than fossil fuels with lower emissions of pollutants like sulfur oxide (SOx) and nitrogen oxide (NOx). HVO is considered a high-quality biofuel that emits fewer harmful substances and doesn't require special considerations like microbial growth.However, as green hydrogen becomes more prevalent in HVO production processes, it may become more expensive compared to other biofuels that don't rely on green hydrogen.There's no magic bullet solution for decarbonizing marine shipping; it requires a mix of solutions depending on the type of ship and route involved.They discuss the difference between N20 and NO2, both created by burning anything in our atmosphere, with a focus on their effects on human beings and the environment. Ultimately, the goal is to move away from burning fuels and transition to electric engines as much as possible for more efficient energy utilization.

In the second part of his conversation with David Cebon, head of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight and professor of mechanical engineering at Cambridge, Michael Barnard discusses the challenges of integrating logistics activity and energy activity in decarbonization efforts. The need for bigger batteries in trucks is temporary and will eventually become a matter of economics. Transcript.However, the challenge lies in charging infrastructure at warehouses, where vehicle turnarounds require tens of megawatts to charge during half-hour periods. This distributed problem requires warehouse owners to spend millions on electricity grid connections to charge third-party vehicles. Overhead contact lines are seen as an important solution because they eliminate the need for big fat grid connections and can be built out along heavily trafficked roads through a single contract rather than thousands of distributed warehouses needing upgrades simultaneously worldwide. Modular electric vehicle platforms with battery swapping capabilities could help cover most logistics solutions globally by allowing OEMs to make slightly different configurations depending on country needs while reducing costs compared to adding megawatt hours or hydrogen fuel cells.Finally, there is a debunked piece of folklore that heavier electric vehicles cause more road damage when truck weight laws vary widely among U.S states with Michigan having double Class 8 tractor semi-trailer weights allowed while civil engineers use something called "the fourth power law" based on outdated constructions from late 1950s AASHO Road Test results which saw most damage occur due to weather conditions rather than vehicle loading factors.Cebon discusses the fourth power law and its impact on road damaging potential of axles, which has been debunked. They also talk about the history of lane width and how it affects driver behavior. Additionally, Cebon shares his opinion on hydrogen fuel cell trucks for heavy ground vehicles and highlights their high cost compared to electric trucks due to a steep learning curve for hydrogen technology in small quantities.

In this episode of Redefining Energy Tech (part 1 of 2), host Michael Barnard interviews David Cebon, director of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight at the University of Cambridge. They discuss David's expertise in heavy ground transportation and his involvement in the hydrogen science coalition. Full transcript.Cebon spent 20 years studying how heavy road vehicles actually impacted roads. That segued a dozen years ago to look into how the segment would decarbonize. Cebon stresses the importance of thinking about the entire day of a truck's journey when considering electrification and the need for a centralized solution to charging infrastructure. It’s not about one segment of the day, but the whole day, end points and availability of charging.He worked through the implications of batteries, overhead catenary lines and hydrogen, as well as other power options. He’s settled on batteries and overhead lines in suitable high-volume road segments as the right mix for the transition. While battery energy density is clearly going to improve to the point where pure battery solutions for every range and mix of loads will be both viable and dominate, we can’t wait to start decarbonizing the segment.

Michael Barnard welcomes CEO and co-founder of Camus Energy, Astrid Atkinson, to Redefining Energy - Tech for the second half of their lengthy discussion.Astrid shares her background in big tech at Google before transitioning to grid management in the energy industry. She discusses the parallels between building reliable software systems and decarbonizing the grid. Her interest in climate change inspired her to apply her skills towards creating utility grade reliability for electrical utilities.The discussion highlights the importance of understanding what it takes to create electricity and ensure its consistent availability.The co-founders of Camus Energy both come from Google and how they came to start a company that provides grid orchestration software for distribution utilities is an interesting journey. They differentiate themselves by going further upstream in understanding conditions on the grid and integrating with wholesale markets, as well as working with legacy systems through their team's unique mix of expertise in hardware, firmware, and large-scale system infrastructure.Camus Energy leverages local resources for local services, including virtual power plant use cases and capital deferral. They integrate data from operational sources and provide utilities with universal visibility into what's happening on the grid. Camus Energy uses machine learning technologies to build a pseudo real-time view of the grid that helps in controls use cases such as peak shaving and substation deferral. Forecasting load growth is important for managing costs and feasibility of grid expansion towards 100% electrification goal.Don’t forget to like the episode and follow Redefining Energy - Tech so you won’t miss the second half of the conversation with Astrid, and don’t forget to follow parent channel Redefining Energy, where Laurent Segalen and Gerard Reid focus on how the global transition is getting financed.

Michael Barnard welcomes CEO and co-founder of Camus Energy, Astrid Atkinson, to Redefining Energy - Tech for the first half of their lengthy discussion.Astrid shares her background in big tech at Google before transitioning to grid management in the energy industry. She discusses the parallels between building reliable software systems and decarbonizing the grid. Her interest in climate change inspired her to apply her skills towards creating utility grade reliability for electrical utilities.The discussion highlights the importance of understanding what it takes to create electricity and ensure its consistent availability.The co-founders of Camus Energy both come from Google and how they came to start a company that provides grid orchestration software for distribution utilities is an interesting journey. They differentiate themselves by going further upstream in understanding conditions on the grid and integrating with wholesale markets, as well as working with legacy systems through their team's unique mix of expertise in hardware, firmware, and large-scale system infrastructure.Camus Energy leverages local resources for local services, including virtual power plant use cases and capital deferral. They integrate data from operational sources and provide utilities with universal visibility into what's happening on the grid. Camus Energy uses machine learning technologies to build a pseudo real-time view of the grid that helps in controls use cases such as peak shaving and substation deferral. Forecasting load growth is important for managing costs and feasibility of grid expansion towards 100% electrification goal.Don’t forget to like the episode and follow Redefining Energy - Tech so you won’t miss the second half of the conversation with Astrid, and don’t forget to follow parent channel Redefining Energy, where Laurent Segalen and Gerard Reid focus on how the global transition is getting financed.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) along with Canadian, EU and other jurisdictional policies are incentivizing a transition to green hydrogen, albeit in different ways and with often foolish use cases. If governmental money is a thumb on the scale, they should be insuring that the hydrogen actually is green. From that perspective, three terms become important: additionality, temporality and locality. They aren't in the debate for heat pumps or EVs, but are in the debate for hydrogen.Paul Martin is a co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition and has worked with hydrogen in chemical process engineering design and pilot plants for decades. He’s worked on almost every use case imaginable for the molecule and knows what it’s suitable for. And that isn’t a store or carrier of energy or a pre-cursor of expensive synthetic fuels.The Coalition’s members thought long and hard about their position on what makes hydrogen actually green as opposed to blackish-blue, and Paul shares his thoughts on the subject. The first principle is that a kilogram of CO2 produced when manufacturing a kilogram of hydrogen, regardless of the process used to get there, is reasonable. The Coalition is agnostic on the process, but that doesn’t mean that they are unrealistic about the costs, quite the opposite. Low-carbon hydrogen will be more expensive hydrogen without significant governmental subsidies like the $3 per kg under the US IRA.Governmental money should come with strings attached. Those strings are that the low-carbon electricity should be net new generation on the grid (additionality), that production of hydrogen should be matched to the times when the new generation is operating (temporality) and production facilities shouldn’t be on filthy grids where extra electricity will actually be generated by coal or gas with the new renewable generation a thousand kilometers away.Listen in as Paul and Michael discuss what makes sense, edge conditions and nuances around green hydrogen.Don’t forget to like the episode and follow Redefining Energy - Tech, and don’t forget to follow parent channel Redefining Energy, where Laurent Segalen and Gerard Reid focus on how the global transition is getting financed.

As heat waves bake Asia, Gerard, Laurent and Michael discuss the implications. Even at 1.2° Celsius of warming, the impacts are already very significant, and more warming is baked in. But this black cloud comes with silver linings.CATL made significant announcements related to batteries, and in Gerard’s opinion, CATL has earned credibility, so unlike many announcement in the battery space, these don’t need a cubic meter of salt. 500 Watt/hour per kilogram solid-state batteries roll over the delaying tactics of the aviation and trucking industries, and battery differentiation for different use cases is starting to increase.The EU passed Fit for 55, which includes a carbon border adjustment mechanism. That means that one of the biggest economies and importers in the world is now slapping a carbon price on significant imports from across the Atlantic and China, changing the economics of trade for the cleaner. Will the USA get there? Likely, but it’s two steps forward, one step back.US EV tax credits provide the maximum of $7,500 only for 14 of 91 models of EVs sold in the country, and only domestic manufacturers made the cut. Early union-made only requirements that excluded Tesla were dropped, so its models qualify. And one of us has finally seen a Rivian in the semi-wild, as it was outside of the Rivian showroom a block from where Michael lives.

Michael Barnard has been researching, analyzing and publishing on the biggest hitters in decarbonization transformation for years. His multi-decade scenarios of major concern areas such hydrogen, marine shipping, aviation and grid storage help shape investment, policy and corporate strategies around the world. He assists investors, Boards and start ups to pick the best course through the next few years by understanding what is most likely to still be valuable in the 2030s and 2040s. And now he’s starting a new channel under the award winning Redefining Energy group, Redefining Energy - Tech.Listen in as he and Laurent Segalen discuss what the podcast will feature. Subscribe to listen to his deep and broad discussions with global climate solution thought leaders.