Iron-Air Man - Ep144: Mateo Jaramillo

Michael Liebreich  
As the world shifts to an electricity system which depends deeply on wind and solar, the focus has shifted to long duration storage. My guest this week is Mateo Jaramillo, co-founder and CEO of Form Energy, the developer of low-cost, multi-day energy storage solutions based on an iron battery chemistry. Please join me in welcoming Mateo Jaramillo to Cleaning Up. Before we start, if you're enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure that you like subscribe and leave a review. That really helps other people to find us. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to us on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform. And follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram to participate in the discussion. Also, you can visit cleaningup.live to access over 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders. And you can subscribe there to our free newsletter that's cleaningup.live, cleaningup.live. And if you particularly enjoy an episode, please spread the word tell your friends and colleagues about it. Cleaning up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini foundation. So Mateo, welcome to Cleaning Up.

Mateo Jaramillo  
Thanks, Michael. Great to be here.

Michael Liebreich  
Very good. Now, I've done my very short introductory blurb, but I'd like to hear in your own words. Who are you, what do you do?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Okay, well, my name is Mateo Jaramillo, I am the CEO and co-founder of Form Energy.

Michael Liebreich  
And- Form Energy, we're going to get into all the detail. It's an iron-air battery. And how did you- give a little bit of a- give a sort of thumbnail bio, okay. What were you doing? Where did the idea come from?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Well, I've been in batteries now for about 20 years. So I've been thinking about energy storage that whole time. And specifically for the grid, I- you know, there's sort of two branches of energy storage in the world these days. And one is, you know, most focused on the automotive space. And I have to admit, I've never been a wrench-turner under hoods. That's never been my fascination. And so I wasn't brought to the field through the automotive lens, but rather, for some reason that I can't totally explain, I just seem to be fascinated by energy storage on the grid, it just seems to be an area that I have a lot of curiosity about. And I'm super lucky to have found that professionally. So I've been doing that for a long time. And I was at a company in New York for a number of years. And I joined a little startup called Tesla in 2009. We were 300 people then and I left at the end of 2016, we were about 30,000 people. And without really a specific idea for what was going to come next, except that I knew that I really wasn't very good at thinking about much other than energy storage for the grid. So continuing on that thread and that's what brought me here today. 

Michael Liebreich  
Right, now you use a really nice phrase I've not heard before:"I wasn't a wrench-turner under the hood." Now most people would use the phrase, you know, "piston-head" or "petrol-head" for a car person. But of course, they're not really- there's no pistons and no petrol at Tesla. But you were not on the automotive side at Tesla, were you?

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right, I was on what we call the powertrain side of things. So that was the group that was headed by JB Straubel, who was my boss and one of the co-founders and CTO at Tesla. And it really is sort of the core technology of the company, but- well maybe not as much any longer. It's a phenomenal manufacturer and automotive company now, but but originally the guts of the company was really just the powertrain deal, the battery, the drive inverter, the motor, and the control system that sort of tied that all together. And when I joined, we only had one car, of course, the Roadster, and the chassis- the rolling chassis, as it was, was made by Lotus in the UK of all places and flown from- sort of improbably flown from the UK over to California, and then we put in the powertrain there, and that powertrain technology really was the foundation for the company and launched of course, many vehicles beyond that. 

Michael Liebreich  
Right now we had one of the investors, early investors, Nancy Pfund, who came on the show, and she talked about some of those early years. She did not mention that you're actually flying those Lotus chasis over to California. I did not know that.

Mateo Jaramillo  
Oh, yes. Yeah. They were pushers, as they're called, you know, they just sort of rolled on the wheels and they were rolled onto the planes and rolled off. 

That's right. But you started the Powerwall business, so that- what you call the powertrain, in wrench-under-the-hood terms, that's the battery and then getting that energy into the wheels, but you took the same battery technology and applied it to these powerwall home energy storage units, correct? 

That's right. And I was part of the powertrain team there because I saw the possibility for lithium ion on the grid in 2009. And that, to me, that was obvious that that was going to happen. And Tesla had all the required components to be successful there. They had, of course, the packed- not just the cell and the pack technology, but the controls, the inverter, everything really. And JB brought me in to run the powertrain business. We were already doing work, we had we had a contract with Daimler that we were delivering on which we built on successively with Toyota as well as other projects with Daimler. But my night-and-weekends job was to start up what we call- what became that Tesla Energy business, but which was essentially just sort of a skunkworks and internal to Tesla at the time. And what we did is we applied for some grants, we sort of made sure that it was fully self-funded, we weren't requiring any sort of corporate dollars to do that, and we modified automotive battery packs and control systems so that we could deploy them on the grid. And so we did projects very early on in California, the S-chip programme, which you're probably familiar with, the self-generation incentive programme, which was from California, spawned a number of great sorts of initiatives there, really drove the early deployment and acceptance of lithium-ion grid storage, and we fully took advantage of it. 

Michael Liebreich  
It may be hard for people to kind of spot the extraordinary statement that you made, which was that you thought it was inevitable that lithium-ion would get on the grid, would be grid-connected. I mean, we're talking 2009/10. I mean, these were little batteries, these were, you know, these were this-sized batteries that were powering, like, it was probably a little bit past the camcorder stage, but not that much. And, you know, it was a huge leap for JB and Elon to say, "this is the car technology of the future", but the idea of racking these up in vast numbers and sticking them on the grid is pretty extraordinary.

Mateo Jaramillo  
Well, like I said, for some reason, grid storage is just an area of fascination for me, and I just- I thought about it a lot. And it just- you know, one seemed to follow the other as night follows day or and then day follows night. It just seemed really, really obvious to me.

Michael Liebreich  
And there now are- there are gigawatts now, gigawatts and gigawatt hours of lithium ion batteries connected to the grid. But you- but you made a jump, you made a jump from Tesla, and you made a jump to a different technology. Can you talk about those perhaps in turn? Why? You know, okay, so you're fascinated with grid storage? Why not, you've got this fantastic platform, why not stay with Tesla? I mean, isn't that the obvious thing to do?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Perhaps it is the obvious thing to do. And Tesla is a platform- it's an amazing platform for a lot of things, today, of course, you know that they have the whole AI initiative, and they've got, you know, deep manufacturing expertise now. And so it is truly a tremendous place. And at the same time, I like an earlier, scrapier environment. And like I said, when I left, the company was 30,000 people, it's now well over 100,000 people, it's just a fundamentally different type of entity to operate in. And as scrappy and innovative as Tesla is, sometimes, even still, the bureaucracies of a 100,000 person-company, even when it's run by Elon can get in the way. And so I wanted to, I don't know, walk through the fields a bit more, I suppose, and think about truly what would come next after lithium-ion, and a lot of my conversations starting up the Tesla Energy effort were with utility executives that were were buyers of lithium-ion, or large utilities in the United States. And over and over again, I heard the refrain, "well, yeah, we'll do lithium-ion, yeah, sure, we'll figure it out at some point," you know, this was still when we were trying to figure out the exact puzzle piece of the business case. They were pretty sure they would do it, but they also would reference the biggest problem that still had yet to be solved, which was, how do I- how do I replace the capacity in my system that is retiring today? In other words, how do I- how do I do something about the coal capacity and even natural gas capacity that's going away? And they would sort of say, "well, until you can really address that problem, you know, storage is going to be somewhat limited on the grid." And so that was sort of the idea that I carry forward after I left Tesla.

Michael Liebreich  
Right, and we'll get on to the solution you came up with. I just want to stick for a second with - because it is such a sort of fascinating and iconic company - Tesla, you know, what is it about- I mean, JB he's now doing Redwood Materials. So he left to do that. You would have said, "well, why not do that within-" you know, Tesla is one of the- must be pretty much the biggest user of batteries in the world at this point. Why not stay there? You've left because, okay, you want to do long duration storage. But again, it could have been perfectly integrated with the Powerwall business. What is it about Tesla that people leave?

Mateo Jaramillo  
People leave Tesla for all sorts of reasons. It took me three tries to be clear. It has- when you're that deep into it, sometimes it's hard to sort of even even comprehend what's happening outside of it. So there's a very strong gravity about the place to be sure, it's not like you just sort of eject out of there frictionlessly. It took me a couple of tries, like I said, and I know- I mean, JB's there for a tremendously long time and his mark is indelible. But seven-and-a-half years for me was long enough. It's an incredibly high rate of work that happens there, is probably the generous way to put it. I'm married, I have three kids, I would love to stay married and be in my kids lives. And so, you know, sometimes you just look for something a little bit different. And Elon is, you know, as great as he is, you know, there are downsides to the company. And for me, one of those downsides was just sort of the size and the growth. And I like, like I said, sort of going back to the earlier stage and figuring things out from from the very first steps.

Michael Liebreich  
So you decided to leave for an easier life is what I took away from that and decided to become an entrepreneur?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Well, not exactly. Yeah, well, yeah, maybe just say, you know, I wanted the balance to be a little bit different. And, you know, Tesla asks- Tesla will always ask for more, right? That's sort of the nature of it. And I like to work, I love to work, in fact, but I also love my family. And I needed to be able to integrate those two things in a way that I just couldn't do that at Tesla. And I don't work any less, for sure now as an entrepreneur, but I work differently. And I work in a way that allows my family to be part of the journey with me.

Michael Liebreich  
Right, and you have all of the good things about entrepreneurship, the bad thing is that you- all the stress and, and the working all the time, frankly, I mean I've done it. But you do control, I mean, at the end of the day you are in control and when you do score a win it is your win. So talk to me about, then, the technology choice, because okay, so you've honed in on longer duration, but that doesn't narrow things down very much, right, because we've got seasonal storage, we've got even multi- and it goes all the way up to multi-year where you can have a bad wind year, and suddenly, you know, the energy system's not gonna be able to cope. But at the other end, you've got the kind of lithium-ion, you know, which is great for a few hours. So how did you choose a spot within that? And how did you choose the technology that went along with it?

Mateo Jaramillo  
You're right, the solution space is incredibly broad. And, you know, the term that you hear a lot is "long duration storage", but that term covers everything from perhaps, you know, six hours of lithium-ion to, as you're saying, you know, 1000s of hours of, you know, geologic hydrogen, for example, stored- geologically-stored hydrogen. So you do need to narrow the space a bit. And I was sort of keeping that refrain in my head of these utility executives, like how do I replace the function of these things that I know I'm going to need to be able to replace? And what I did was, essentially, I'm a native-Californian, born and raised and was living in California at the time. I've since moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but I know the California grid, probably best. And more as a thought experiment than anything else, I just started with theCalifornia grid and I said, "if you wanted to replace the function of the thermal generation on the grid, what what does that look like?" And 100% of the thermal generation in California is natural gas. And so you essentially have a very gas-heavy grid, and then you have a very renewables-heavy grid, and I'm putting  hydro in there, I don't split hairs. Hydro is a green resource, we should use it, we should think of it as such. And then the one nuclear plant that's remaining in California. And I took the natural gas fleet and really tried to understand how it operates as sort of bins of units, because it's not like you have one type of asset or one type of asset which is used in one type of way. You have combined-cycle plants and you have your simple-cycle plants, peakers, essentially, and then you have capacity factors for each of those. And what I tried to do was take the higher capacity factor plants - those are the harder ones to sort of concede that you would replace - and translate that to a battery specification. And that's really what I did. I just took a combined-cycle gas plant and I said, "now pretend that's a battery, what is the spec on it?" And so that's where I started. 

Michael Liebreich  
Mateo, let me just break in there because I want to get on to, okay and then the technology. But I think it's just critically important, there's two things that I want to highlight from what you've just said. And I'm doing this for the audience, because they're not all, you know, sort of super expert on, you know, exactly what a combined-cycle plant does, what a peaker does, and so on. So we're gonna just dive in there a little bit, and you know. So one thing is, well, the roles of those different gas types. But the other thing that you've done that's incredibly important is you've focused yourself - and, you know, hopefully through you, I'm focusing my audience on - the jobs that have to be done within an energy system. You know, I just find that so often people say, "you know, hydrogen is magnificent," and they run around with this kind of hydrogen hammer looking for a nail to hit, and they look for- so they start with the technology, and then try and find a use for it. And I just think it's so important that we come back to, "what are the jobs that need to be done by the energy system," you know, keeping the lights on in the evening when the sun goes down, or helping us to fly to California with those, you know, Lotus LE's bodies or whatever it was that you were doing. These are the jobs that need doing. And in a system, you've got different sorts of gas plants. So just give us a brief primer difference between CCGT, OCGT, gas peaker. What have you got there?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah so just to reiterate your point there, which is: these are very complex systems electric grid, and you have to think systematically for trying to solve the solution at the system level, which is, of course, what we care about. So yes, the natural gas system, which is part of the electrical system overall, indeed bins out into different functions. And you have things like peaker plants, which are typically defined as running less than 5% of the time, 5% of the hours of the year, those are peaker plants, and those are more or less jet turbines strapped to a pad, which produce electricity, they really are that simple. They're not trying to capture emissions, really, and they're not trying to mitigate noise, or maybe a tiny bit, but they're sort of the simplest version of electricity generator that you could possibly have.

Michael Liebreich  
And those ones you can replace pretty easily with lithium-ion. I mean, that's one of the things I talk about a lot, that that's just a perfect use case, for a short duration lithium-ion battery five percent of the year, it's an hour or a few hours a day. And, you know, that one is kind of, in a sense, that's easily dealt with by lithium-ion, correct?

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's correct. And you don't want to run it too often because actually your cost of electricity is fairly high and your efficiency is also fairly low, right. So it sort of has a combination of cost and efficiency, that means you should use it infrequently, right? But when you need it, by gosh, you're sure happy that it's there, that's for sure. And at the other end of the spectrum from the gas world, you've got combined-cycle plants, and these plants are designed to operate at much higher efficiencies, and therefore much lower costs, but you want them to run a lot, you want very high- you want as high capacity factor as possible, so that you're amortising that higher upfront cost over more hours in the year and ideally, a combined cycle plant is essentially running all the time. And it's, you know, 70, 80% capacity factors. And it's also being used to provide ramping functions. So it does ramp quickly, you know, up and down. These are like f-class turbines that are incredibly powerful and flexible, and provide a tremendous amount of just function to the grid, right, utility operators love to use them to meet their demand, you know, instantaneously and shift things around throughout the year. 

Michael Liebreich  
In a way, these are the plants that we'd be using most of if it wasn't for climate change, right? These are big, they're expensive, but they are, you know, 55, 60% efficient, they're just- they are workhorses. But they also don't like- they'll do certain amount of ramping, but they do- to make the economics work, you want to run them a lot and run them fairly continuously. Okay and those are the ones that you've tried to go after?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, those are the ones that are- that would be the hardest to figure out how to replace in the system. And so therefore, that's a worthy challenge, right, to say, "is there a different technology that could help provide that function to the system?" We want a resource-diverse portfolio, right, for all the reasons that you started to highlight there. It is challenging, it is tricky to think about largely a weather-driven energy system, which renewable power is, and all the sort of vagarities and periods of intermittencies and volatility that you then have to deal with. And so, absolutely, you want to be able to think about the hardest problem and how you can help supplant that.

Michael Liebreich  
Ok now you're not replacing, on your own, the CCGT, these big, centralised gas plants, I mean, it is a weather-driven system. What you're doing is filling in then a gap or hole, that neither the sort of - when you've got lots of wind, lots of solar, right, they're very, very cheap, but they're not there all the time. If it's a short-term outage or maybe just the evening when the sun goes down or something like that then you could do lithium-ion, but you're honing in on a specific period of supply which is- do you want to- I mean, I can tell the audience or you could tell the audience, why have you focused on the exact sort of length of duration that you have focused in on?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, so back to that specification that I sort of took from a natural gas plant and plopped over to a battery, you know, sort of conception. What fell out of that was a couple hundred hours duration. And I- we started relatively roughly, and I have four co-founders and they're all fantastic, folks. We ended up merging two very early-stage companies together. And one of the guys, that is our co founder, Marco Ferrara, built modelling software, and I don't mean, in Excel, I mean, very complex co-optimization software, you know, what was referred to as "mixed integer linear programming," you know, it was sort of world class compute approaches, and that kind of thing. And so we started off by saying that, "let's bound the problem at a couple of 100 hours duration, but precisely, what does that specification need to look like?" And so we started to really zero-in on the kind of battery you would need to replace that function. And I say, replace, but I also mean, supplant that- electricity growth- load is growing tremendously, you know, roughly one to two percent per year, which means it's going to double, electric demand will double over the next roughly 30 years, which is incredible. And it means that we need all the new resources that we can possibly bring to bring to bear. And so thinking about sort of how you're going to bring the level of reliability and capacity into the system, and as a battery, we don't, we have not really conceived of this kind of asset that could participate for those much longer periods of time that we're talking about, days or even weeks on end. And so with this very robust modelling approach, we started to be able to zero down on, "okay, there are very specific duration and cost points that are relevant for the grid." And those two things are very directly tied because the cost of energy from a battery perspective directly implies how long you can discharge it for at its rated power. And so what started to fall out of the modelling was 100 hours and $20 per kilowatt hour. And yes, you could envision, let's say, a 2000 hour battery, but then you're more like, you know, 50 cents per kilowatt hour. And that feels like a harder tradeoff to make, but it is one that you could say that we have, right. Think about the snow - again, being from California -think about the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas that we don't pay for that very helpfully melts over the course of the year, right, that's a very low-cost form of energy storage. Or you could even say on a decades-long scale: forests, right, which grow for 50 years and doesn't cost anything, we're storing energy in the wood and then you could potentially burn that. But you know, the solution space that we can go after electrochemically sort of puts you in the dollars-per-kilowatt hour range, and therefore hundreds-of-hours duration range. And that is the combination of specifications that you need to be able to have to target that function in the grid, right, those mid-merit gas plants that are running for, you know, flat out for hundreds of hours at a time to provide very valuable resources into the electric system, as well as providing sort of the ramping function. So that's where we started, was to say, that's the kind of battery with that combination of specifications that provides a meaningfully differentiated value from any other type of storages out there, and we know will be valuable going forward.

Michael Liebreich  
I just want to dive in there just to make sure that people are sort of following this tradeoff between duration and cost, right. Because, you know, you live batteries, I, you know, have spent quite a bit of time. But this is really because, if you have something that cycles, for instance, every day, then it gets- the cost gets amortised over many more uses. But if you had something that was only going to be, let's say, you know, once a year seasonal storage, it would have to be really cheap, because it would be kind of charged up in, I don't know, September and then discharged in March and that'd be it for the year. So then it has to be incredibly cheap for that one site to cover the costs. And what you're looking at is sort of combining those functions and finding a sweet-spot of sorts, where $20 and 100 hours, $20- 

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right, yeah, per kilowatt hour-

Michael Liebreich  
and 100 hours. That's going to be a sort of profitable place to land.

Mateo Jaramillo  
That, and there is something that exists in the world that you can build that is entitled to be that cheap, right. Because I could come up with a beautiful specification that does not exist at all in the world, right. In which case, who cares, right? So we wanted to go after something that actually could exist.

Michael Liebreich  
Right. So there's a bunch of different things that you could do, you know, you could do $5 per kilowatt hour, and it would be- you could then do four weeks. Well fabulous, but we don't know what that's going to be. Or you can do lithium-ion, which already exists. So you've got this kind of 100 hours, 20 bucks, and the technology is, we already know, iron-air. Talk to me about iron-air. What is it? What does it look like? What does it do?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, so iron-air- when we say iron-air as a battery, really, all we're saying is that we're reversibly rusting iron in an electrochemical cell, right? So iron, when it rusts, it's giving up an electron, that's really what it's doing, it's taking on oxygen and giving up an electron. And so if you want to think about it, you know, our bridges, our buildings are very slowly discharging. That's how I think about it.

Michael Liebreich  
And presumably they're slightly- that's effectively just running out as heat, right? They are just minusculy warm as they rust. And what you're doing is capturing that and then you can stick it through a circuit. Am I on the money?

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right, put that electron through a circuit and make it be productive, and then reverse the reaction, of course. And you can- this is maybe the part that most people don't realise - you can reverse that reaction. And how you do that, how you sort of created an electrochemical cell to be cost-effective, and to be as high-performance as you possibly can make it, that's the trick. We did not invent iron-air as a chemistry. In fact, it was studied in some detail about 50 years ago, in a couple of different places. The US Department of Energy paid Westinghouse to do sort of a big seminal study on it in the 70s, Swedish National Lab did something similar around that same time, too. So we also didn't have to sort of invent from whole cloth, this brand new chemistry. We knew that the academic literature, which is essentially what that study was, pinned the performance parameters in such a way that we looked at that and said, "if we can achieve what they achieved 50 years ago, we have a minimum viable product," right. And we thought, based on our own competence, and on sort of modern techniques, that we could indeed go and do that. And so that was sort of the fundamental thesis, "let's go embody that technology in a device that can hit the cost targets and the performance targets." Well, they're what they did 50 years ago. So we think we can go do that.

Michael Liebreich  
Why didn't they do it 50 years ago? What is new? Have you had any breakthrough? I mean, you just- are you building 50 year-old batteries and going, "ha-ha, today they work!"?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, indeed we are not. It's not quite as simple as that. But the reason why it wasn't pursued previously- it was studied originally to see if there were automotive applications. And these are, these are open-air- they're breathing in oxygen or breathing out oxygen. And they're heavy, right? You know, gravimetrically, relatively low energy density. And so you do not want to sort of use these for motive applications, these batteries would never work for cars, much less laptops, or phones or anything else. Because these

Michael Liebreich  
things are heavy. And they're also, I mean, they're big, and they don't- talk to me about the kind of energy versus power tradeoff that you've had to grapple with.

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, so the other thing is that, in order to get the highest performance of the battery, and I mean that in a lot of different ways, which I'll circle back to, you don't want to put it in a use case where you're trying to get all the energy in or out in a matter of single-digit hours. In other words, two or four hours, the battery performs much lower across the board, in all the ways that matter, if you're trying to use it in as what we would call in our industry a high C-rate. So all the energy in or out, which lithium-ion, by the way is fantastic at. It suffers very little degradation in terms of efficiency or other things. And it can operate at very, very high rates. Again, that's the ratio of sort of power to energy. So how much energy can you get out, how quickly? And for this application that we're going after, 100 hours is what matters, you need the 100 hour duration. And it sort of flips on its head the approach that we've been -we collectively in the battery world have been - taking for the last 20 years, which is, "how do I do things faster at a higher current density, at a higher rate," right? And all of a sudden, we're saying, "hey, what if we just slow down a little bit?" If we slow down it makes all these challenges that much easier from a current density standpoint, from a, you know, battery kinetics standpoint. And so this sort of counterintuitive insight was, if we go after the longer duration stuff, which people say is the harder problem, it actually makes a lot of the technical challenges easier, we get to relax some of those constraints.

Michael Liebreich  
So it's a, you know, summarising that, it's a great big battery, lots of lots of energy, it'll keep you going for 100 hours, but it only kind of trickles out the electricity.

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, that's right. And, and, you know, we use water analogies a lot in the, in the electricity space in general. And in the storage space in particular, you know, the ratio of the spigot to the tank is fixed, in other words, and so you can have a larger spigot, but you're gonna have a larger tank to go along with it, right? In other words, that energy travels with the power. And so, when we think about the applications here, we are not limited by power, but you're always going to have 100 hours to go with it, right. And 100 hours is- obviously it's a nice round number, you know, humans like round numbers. So there's probably a bit of a thumb on the scale for that, you know, should it be 94 hours or 103 hours. I don't know but we picked 100 hours. And the reason for that is 100 hours does solve four days, right, which is sort of where it corresponds to, four days does solve the biggest sort of addressable, longer - and I said longer - multi-day duration period of intermittency. That's what you're really trying to solve for. And so going after the 100 hours range roughly makes a lot of sense from a solution standpoint. It also is what happens to fall out of the math on all this stuff.

Michael Liebreich  
And an example of that would be Bill Gates and Vaclav Smil, did a sit down and they were laughing about the idea of powering Tokyo or powering- you know, they were commenting on the idea of using renewable electricity for Japan. And they said, "well, Tokyo, 22 gigawatts, and every so often, there's a tropical storm, there's a cyclone and you have three days where nothing will produce." "Three days," they said, "you will not do with a battery." And what you're saying is, "Bill Gates, Vaclav Smil, "you're wrong. Come visit our factory," right?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, well, I mean, Mr. Gates is familiar with the company. Breakthrough is an investor. In fact, we were their first priced-investment. So I think, you know, Bill knows a lot about energy and I'm sure he wouldn't say, you know, publicly that you can't do it with three days. But it is an example for how sometimes you do have to take a counterintuitive approach. And one reason why people say you can't hit three days is because of the cost implied in the three days. But you know, my first reaction to that when I started down this pathway six years ago was, well, what can I trade-off in pursuit of really low cost, right. Batteries are full of tradeoffs, that's really what they are, is sort of a tradeoff matrix. And you don't get to have all things at once. You do have to trade things off. But I'll give you one example for how we thought about cycles. In the battery world, we love to talk about cycles, how many times can you cycle a battery, in other words, fully charge and fully discharge a battery. And in the world of lithium-ion, cycles are really important because we're using it a lot, we're discharging, charging multiple times per day, if you think about your phone or your car, you know, that kind of thing. But if I have a battery that let's just say runs for a week at a time, discharges for a full week, its capacity is one week, that means that I could, in the best case, recharge it also in a week, assuming 100% efficiency, and that means a full cycle takes two weeks, which means the theoretical maximum number of cycles I could have in a year is 26. And over 20 years, which you want your battery to last as a grid asset, roughly 500 right. So lithium-ion does 1000s of cycles, they're pursuing 5000 cycles, right? Full charge-discharge with very little degradation now, in the world, and for us, that's just not a relevant metric. So I should think about cycles differently. I should think about not optimising for 5000 cycles, and what do I get in return? Lower cost, right. And so that's just one way that we that we have now started to think about the tradeoffs in pursuit of the very, very low cost, which really does matter to get the capacity for the electric system. 

Michael Liebreich  
Okay, now, tell me what do these things look like? What do they- because they're not, they're not little jelly roll batteries. 

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right, you cannot hold them in your hand. I'll describe it but I will acknowledge upfront that looking at batteries is maybe our, you know, energy transition version of watching paint dry or, you know, grass grow. They aren't terribly exciting. But our devices indeed, they're much larger, they are metre scale devices, so it's about a metre tall, about a metre wide, and sort of 10s of centimetres thick. And sort of a plastic vessel. That's what it looks like from the outside. Inside of course, is where we have the electrochemistry happening. We have iron anodes, so these are essentially plates of iron, they're porous plates of iron, but looks like a large brake pad if you will, and we have multiples of those inside. And then we have the air cathodes inside as well. And all of that is submerged into a liquid electrolyte, it's an aqueous electrolyte, but essentially a dissolved, you know, high concentration salt that's in there, and that is sort of providing the medium for the for the ions to move around.

Michael Liebreich  
That's your potassium hydroxide, right? 

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right, yeah.

Michael Liebreich  
Anything nasty, we need to know about that. Is it toxic? Is it rare? Is it expensive? Does it all have to come out of Bolivia?

Mateo Jaramillo  
The answer to all those is no, none. The worst thing about it, the electrolyte, is at the concentrations of the dissolved potassium hydroxide, it is very basic so it's about a 14 pH. And so you know, you don't want to splash it in your eyes for sure. But it is the kind of material that we collectively know how to deal with and do work with all the time. So it's not particularly nasty stuff. It's like Drano, more-or-less. 

Michael Liebreich  
Okay, and then you package all of this up into basically a shipping container, right?

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right. And so those cells go into groupings, which we call "modules", which is sort of this industry standard term, and then those modules go into a shipping container, and then those shipping containers from the outside are what you would see at a deployment. So we have n number of shipping containers, depending on the size of the installation that would be needed, and that's basically the standard for the storage industry today. Lithium-ion from the outside would look exactly the same, just about any other battery that's deployed is going to look very similar from the outside, you've got your grid-connected stuff, your switchgear and your transformer and your power electronics, and then you've got your batteries inside of containers.

Michael Liebreich  
Okay, but if I had one of your containers, how much power and energy, and a lithium-ion container, how much power and energy?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Well, so lithium-ion these days, you know, out of a container, you're getting maybe 10 or 20 megawatt hours. So it depends on the duration that you're going for, I mean, you usually have like, from one hour all the way up to four hours, even six hours these days. So the numbers do move around a little bit, but let's say you're sort of in the 10s of megawatt hours, per container. And for us, we're under 10 megawatt hours, you know, sort of depending on our configurations, also sort of between five and ten, roughly. But again, from a power basis, we're much less than that. Lithium-ion, of course, is going to have much more power and less energy. We'll have much less power and an equivalent about more energy than what lithium-ion would have

Michael Liebreich  
But the main difference is going to be- so you've got a bit more energy, or maybe even - from your description - might even be a bit less. Basically what you've got, though, is a much, much cheaper container.

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right. Yeah, that's right. And we do have configurations where we do have more energy than lithium-ion. Again, on an energy basis, you can't get it out all quite as fast, but it is much lower cost. Again, we're going after that roughly $20 per kilowatt hour range, and we expect to be there within a matter of years. Our very first projects are not going to be quite that low cost. But we're also not off by an order of magnitude. We're off by percentage points. 

Michael Liebreich  
Okay, so you've got this shipping container, looks like lithium-ion contains maybe a bit less, maybe a bit more energy, but then discharges at a much lower rate, but it's cheap. 

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right.

Michael Liebreich  
Can I ask, you say you're not quite at the $20 target, but you're not off by an order of magnitude. Can I push you a little bit more on that? Where are you? That leaves quite a big space, you're between, you know, 20 and 200. Where are you? 

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah. We're under 100 - I'll put it that way - with the very first deployments that we do.

Michael Liebreich  
How big are those first deployments? What's the scale of those first ones?

Mateo Jaramillo  
So these are sort of 10 to 15 megawatt projects, and these are projects that we're deploying with utility partners in the United States - our first market is United States. And these are for delivery in 2025. So starting by the end of next year, we will deliver to utility customers, and these are- these are real contracts, they've been regulatorily approved, so they have to go to their commissions and get them approved, which means that they do have to show the costs, and they have to show that they're reasonable and justifiable, and that the long term cost entitlements are also there, right. They have no interest - just as we have no interest - in doing dead-end type projects. And so they, you know, the initial costs are in line with how we show that we get down to the entitled costs.

Michael Liebreich  
And how many- so let's take a 10-megawatt deployment, how many shipping containers are you talking about? Because 10 megawatts would be, you know, if the average house is a couple of hundred kilowatts, so, you've got kind of five houses is going to be well 10,000. So- I'm trying to sort of translate what is- 10 megawatts is kind of a small town, you know, like one village or one- it might be one one neighbourhood, right. But how many megawatts are you talking about?

Mateo Jaramillo  
10 megawatts will be a couple of hundred containers. And maybe it's also helpful to think about sort of from an acreage perspective, like an areal density perspective. 10 megawatts will be a few acres, we're still dialling in the exact sort of, you know, density from a land basis there, but roughly three to five megawatts per acre. That's sort of the range that we're in right now. Just to give you sort of a point of comparison, you know, wind and solar are sort of, you know, 1/5 megawatts per acre. And coal, roughly one megawatt per acre. Natural gas can get up to, you know, 30 or 40 megawatts per acre. So, we are more dense than- or rather, we're sort of right there smack dab in the middle of the spectrum, I would say.

Michael Liebreich  
So do you say- how many acres was your ten megawatt deployment? So I was just doing maths on the number of homes, it's 5000 homes, how many acre would it be for 10 megawatts?

Mateo Jaramillo  
For 10 megawatts it's probably going to be about three acres. 

Michael Liebreich  
Three acres, okay. So you've got you've got a village or a town of 5000 homes, and then you've got a three acre plot, which is just shipping containers, one next to the other, is that a kind of a decent- 

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's right. 

-decent model? Okay. And, I mean, which is kind of cool, but then the question is what happens when it's not 5000 homes, what happens when it's, I don't know, Pittsburgh, PA, which is- how many people live there, a couple of million, you know? 

Yeah, yeah. So this is where it's important to keep in mind that portfolio perspective. We're trying to solve a system, right. And one of the benefits of having this type of asset in your system, in other words, very low-cost and therefore multi-day duration energy storage, is it relieves a tremendous amount of pressure on the overbuild from the renewable perspective. And we see this over and over again in the modelling that we do with our utility partners. And as a rough rule of thumb, when you have this type of asset available to you to optimise your system, your demand to build the renewables drops by about half. In other words, I need half the land to build solar that I needed- that I need if I don't have this type of resource available to me. And so does it take up land? Absolutely. As part of a portfolio, does it dramatically reduce the demand on the amount of land that I need overall? Absolutely. 

Michael Liebreich  
Now, the audience almost, there will be by the way, there'll be some people who've done more energy modelling than, than you or I, and maybe even your co-founder, there are some real specialists, but most of them won't have done and they won 't realise that these kind of deeply renewable systems where you get to 60,70, 80% renewables, they kind of- you start having a lot of overcapacity, you start building 2, 3, 4 times as much renewables and storage really brings that down, as you pointed out, whether it's the short duration, the lithium-ion, in vehicles or grid-connected, but what you're saying is that giving extending that out to the 100 hours, you don't need much of that to really push down the overcapacity, the overbuild?

Mateo Jaramillo  
That's absolutely correct. And you make a good point as well. We also don't- you know, we most cost effective, multi-day storage also does not crowd out lithium-ion. You want lithium-ion in your system as well, because, again, you're co-optimising across these different types of assets. And, you know, lithium-ion has a very different profile, or frankly, anything that's going to compete with lithium-ion, it doesn't- I use that as a proxy, it could be some great flow battery may  show up and be cost effective in that range, sort of 10 to 12 hours. But you also want that multi-day storage. And you want that, in the end, because you're trying to again, optimise the system. And we know that we're going to have multiple types of assets, multiple classes of the same asset, because that's exactly what we've ended up with the natural gas side of things. So again, back to sort of the peaker combined cycle plan, the co-optimization of those two very different types of assets, has led to the least cost, most reliable system. So something similar, we expect to happen on the battery side. 

Michael Liebreich  
Ok, so, you know, slicing and dicing those sort of jobs that the energy system has to do, you've matched, it's fantastic. But there will be people listening to this who say, this is all such nonsense. The answer is nuclear. They're talking about, you know, megawatt, 0.2 megawatts per acre, 0.3, and then there's nuclear, which is, which is I don't know, potentially many 10s of megawatts per acre, and completely eliminates all of this complexity, because you switch it on and it just works. And what do you say to them?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Well, I think we should build as much nuclear as we possibly can build and keep all the nuclear on that we have currently running. It's a tremendous resource. But we also need to build things very quickly. And we also need to deploy at very, very large scales and having another type of asset only helps to solve all the challenges that we have on the electric system. So that's generally how we think about it at Form Energy. It is not- there is no panacea for the grid, there is no single thing that you can conceive of that will just solve all the problems, and nuclear is included in that. It has its own challenges, right, whether you're talking about fission, you know, large scale, centralised fission, or you're talking about small modular reactors. One of the biggest challenges right now is cost. And you just saw that Nuscale had to pull out of a project very prominently, and very, I would say, unfortunately, because we need these kinds of assets to show up. What is a a fact, a feature of the electric system today is that the renewables are very, very low cost. And what we need to do is help figure out how to turn those into dispatchable and deterministic resources. And having multi-day duration storage allows us to do that. And so we're sort of, we're going ahead no matter what, I hope that nuclear is able to come on and show up in meaningful new ways on the grid, because we need it all. Both for the low growth as well as for the decarbonisation. But it doesn't change our picture whatsoever. Having a new type of asset, cost effective multi-day storage only makes things easier.

Michael Liebreich  
Right. And I'm sure that if you did look at the modelling, you'd find that actually, this kind of 100-day storage probably plays quite nicely with nuclear in terms of some of the maintenance cycles and resilience requirements there. 

Mateo Jaramillo  
It does.

Michael Liebreich  
You use the word there or a phrase, which is really telling, you use the words, "large scale", and you've got your 10 megawatt hours system, which presumably if I multiply by the ratio between power and energy, becomes a 10 megawatt hours becomes one gigawatt hour system. The world is using 25,000 terawatt hours today. And as you've pointed out, it's going to double in the next 30 years. So there's a huge, huge gap between what you're doing and anything that can be called large scale, correct?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Absolutely, completely correct. It's sort of mind boggling just how large the electric system is, and is going to be. And it can be daunting starting off as a startup saying, oh, I'm going to have an impact in that world. But that's precisely why we chose the pathway that we ended up choosing, at the very least there's an entitlement to operate at that scale. You have to do think- you do have to think in the terawatt hour scale, for sure to think that you could ever have an impact there. And so yes, 10 megawatts is a is a drop in the bucket. You know, the United States has 1,000 gigawatts of installed capacity, right, about a terawatt of installed capacity. And we'll be adding a ton over the next couple of decades. And so you do have to look at that and say, do I have an entitlement both from a fundamental sort of materials abundance perspective, as well as from a manufacturing perspective? Can I make enough this stuff? What are the means of production? What are the designs? What are the material sets, all of it, not just the active materials, everything else right. I mentioned the vessel, right? Well, can I scale that kind of thing? And to have an impact in a relevant timeframe, which is the other thing, you do have to say, I could build hundreds of gigawatts, right? That's the scale at which I need to be able to build things over the next let's say, 30 or 40 years. And so that is indeed, where we started. We didn't want to work, you know, I'll speak for my co-founders, we didn't want to work on anything that would not fundamentally sort of scale to that level. Now, can we? I think we can, but we are entitled to go do that, again, from a materials manufacturing perspective. It will take some time to be clear. And our first factory that we're building annually will produce about 500 megawatts by roughly the end of 2027, early 2028. That's 50 gigawatt hours, so still a tiny drop in the bucket. But from that point, 500 megawatts per year, we can start to see 1000s of megawatts per year, gigawatts per year. And then going from there.

Michael Liebreich  
Right. You also use the word, you used in a different context, you said, a ton, you've got to do a ton of this right. Now one of your shipping containers is 35 tons. That factory, that 500 megawatt factory will use a million tons a year of iron. And to put it in perspective, there's about 2 billion, just under 2 billion tons of iron, primary iron production each year worldwide. So you know, a million tons is kind of like order of magnitudes, starts to actually be, you know, in the same sort of in the same kind of timezone as the amount of iron that we're reducing. And, you know, I did a little bit of noodling of numbers because I get excited when things can solve, you know, 1% of a problem. And so the numbers I calculated, I'll share with you. I took that 25,000 terawatt hours of electricity, and I doubled it just as you did. I said, look, the real problem is 50,000 terawatt hours by let's say, 2050. That's the electricity demand. Maybe 1% will go through this kind of 100 hour storage. That's 500 terawatt hours. So your first project is doing a gigawatt hour, we need 500 terawatt hours, and then blah, blah, blah, I went through my backup envelope, and I worked out that you would be using about, if you were to start producing enough of your Form batteries to do that, it would be using about 2% of all of the world's primary steel between now and 2050. Is that really realistic? 2% of all steel going into this?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Well, I would take a slightly different view. I'm gonna come back to the numbers specifically because I think it's important. But I would say, if you rerouted 2% of all steel, and you solved the storage problem for the grid, that's a pretty good deal, I would take that deal. But by going back a little bit. On the numbers, it's not quite a million tons per 500 megawatts per year. And that's simply because the container is not entirely made of iron, right. There's other things that are sort of going in there for the way and so it's more like a couple hundred thousand tons to produce that 500 megawatts per year. Nevertheless, it is a lot of iron, for sure. Iron, except for coal, is the most mined substance on Earth, about 3 billion tons per year. And of that, about 100 million tons per year goes into what's called direct reduced iron. That means it's metallic iron. You take an oxide out of the earth and you reduce it, you drive off the oxygen and you end up with a metallic iron. That is what's used for electric arc furnace steel production today. So we have two major types of steel production: blast furnace and electric arc. Electric arc is what uses that DRI - direct reduced iron, as well as recycled scrap iron. If you took just what is used for the direct reduced iron today, 100 million tons, and rerouted all of that to go into battery-making, you would produce roughly 200 gigawatts worth of energy storage. 200 gigawatts translates to 20 terawatt hours at 100 hour duration. Michael, you said 500 terawatt hours per year, right?

Michael Liebreich  
Oh, yeah. And of course, I'm only cycling it once. That's my mistake.

Mateo Jaramillo  
You're cycling it once. Let's cycle it 10 times a year. Okay. All right. Now we're down to 50 terawatt hours, right, in which case, I need roughly two and a half years of production from just the direct reduced iron. Now we're never going to reroute all direct reduced iron right into this particular field. But it puts us in the ballpark and says, this is realistic to sort of contemplate, right, you can go build a lot more direct reduced iron capability, if you absolutely had to. Now the implications are also, well, how do I decarbonize that, right? Because steelmaking needs to be decarbonized as well. And you can think about, yes, green hydrogen, you need a lot of it to go do that even more compelling, and which is what is really fun, you know, on the entrepreneurial side is to say, well, how do we avoid that altogether? How do we just use the oxides right directly? Because after all, we are reducing iron inside the battery. And so that's, you know, I'll be candid, I'm not going to share a lot of details on it, but that is one of the really fun parts of being inside of a company that has a tremendous innovation engine to think about these problems and solve them.

Michael Liebreich  
Right. So I was trying to do, it wasn't really an attempt at a gotcha, because it's not a gotcha, it's just that it isn't, the point I was making is it's an awful lot of iron, you've pointed out correctly, it's not quite as much as I thought probably by a factor of 10. So it might be 0.2% of all iron for the next 50 years, but that's still an enormous, it's still a lot. And it's probably about, if you did do it through hydrogen reduction of the iron, it's probably about 0.2% of all electricity as well, because that's very power intensive. Which actually brings me to the final sort of topic in a sense, which is, you're not doing this in a vacuum, right? There are other solutions for longer durations storage, whether it's 100 hours or not. And, you know, there's liquid air, there's hydrogen, there's high-temperature thermal storage. You've got one sort of, I don't want to call it a- it's not a fatal flaw, but you're not very efficient. Your roundtrip efficiency is only about 50%. Correct?

Mateo Jaramillo  
 Yeah, a bit lower, year.

Michael Liebreich  
Does that give you a sort of discipline, you have liquid air, you have people like Highview Power talking about doing 85%. And the high temperature thermal folks talking about 65%. And the hydrogen people, of course, are much less efficient. But they have salt caverns, right, which are much, much cheaper than iron. So how do you win against those other options?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, and I would add into the mix, there are substitutes, not just devices that are trying to do the same type of thing. But transmission, if you had a perfectly built out transmission system, you would dramatically reduce your need for storage, or carbon capture, frankly. If you could get put a magic box on top of the flue gas of a natural gas plant, you would solve all the problems associated with carbon with natural gas as we talked about already. They're wonderful machines. They're tremendous technology, right? It's the carbon that we really are caring about there. So we see certainly competition coming from all sides. As far as the efficiency, what we have found over and over again in the modelling, is the overriding value comes from having the low cost, not from having very high efficiency, again, because you're doing something different, right on the electric system. And just as peaker plants, gas peaker plants have very low efficiencies compared to combined cycle plants, that's okay, because they're providing a very valuable resource. Well, some similar things are at play for energy storage as well. Now, it doesn't mean you can't you can be, you know, 10% roundtrip efficient and still solve that's too low, right. But it does come down to trade offs and talk about how all batteries are trade offs, and how we we should think about trading off the right kind of thing here. And so what we have mapped out very precisely, based on the modelling, is that curve which is capex and roundtrip efficiency. And so we understand very precisely, you know, where on that curve we are, and what that trade off should look like. So how should I trade $1 of CapEx for one point around roundtrip efficiency? And how does that matter in the system, right? We talk about in the battery world, all sorts of figures of merit to try and compare things: levelized energy of storage or levelized energy of cost, I would submit to everybody that the only real way to value energy storage or to compare energy storage is in a financial model, in a portfolio-driven resource sort of optimization. That's the only way to know whether any of this matters. And so that's what we've done. And that's been our approach from the very, very beginning. And so we know that $20 per kilowatt hour, 100 hour duration, and a little bit less than 50%, round trip efficiency solves. That is, you are in the solution space to provide a lot of value into the system. Would you take more efficiency if you can get it? Absolutely. But you better be precise about how much you're willing to pay for every point of roundtrip efficiency. And we know that extremely well.

Michael Liebreich  
So what you're really saying is $20, 100 hours, bring it. If you can beat it, then Form Energy is done. And if you can't, Form Energy is going to win. 

Mateo Jaramillo  
Absolutely, yeah.

Michael Liebreich  
So what are the next milestones for you, just to round it out, what happens next? You've raised a bunch of money, you've got Bill Gates as one of your investors. Has he written you a blank cheque forever? No. So what are your milestones, and what happens next?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, so our milestones really now are associated with scaling up the manufacturing and that's really where the overriding focus is. I mentioned I lived in California and now I live in Pittsburgh. The reason for that is our manufacturing facility is being built about 30 miles from Pittsburgh in West Virginia. There's a Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, and we're building a factory 

Michael Liebreich  
I was going to ask you, is that because that's where all the steel comes from, and since you will use all the iron you might as well be right there next to those iron reduction plants?

Mateo Jaramillo  
Not only that, we're going into an old steel mill site, in fact, in West Virginia: the old Weirton Steel Works, which was the largest producer of steel, for example, in World War Two for the United States, which tells you something, they employed 14,000 people at one point.

Michael Liebreich  
I love the historical sort of connective tissue, okay, but back to what's your what are your milestones? What happens next?

Mateo Jaramillo  
So it really is around the the scale-up of the manufacturing side. So that plant is being built. It was an old steel mill, like I said, but it's been taken down. It's a brownfield site, we're building it back up. And our first customer deliveries will start in earnest in 2025. So we've announced projects with a handful of utilities here in the United States. Again, those are real- those are contracts we have to deliver. And they're in sort of that 10 to 15 megawatt range, five to fifteen megawatt range, depending on the utility. And so that's really the key focus. That will be the- our, you know, our full market entry, we'll be delivering in '25 in the United States and we expect to start to deliver into Europe relatively shortly after that. So '26 is when we expect to see those first markets. Perhaps not surprisingly, as you would guess, the island markets are the most compelling markets for us right now in Europe, Ireland in particular, and then in its own unique way, because everything is special about it, the UK shortly after that as well.

Michael Liebreich  
And you have a team here already, right? 

Mateo Jaramillo  
We do. Yeah, we have a couple folks. And they're working on policy, they're working on market entry and they're working on analytics, to make sure that we really deeply understand that market and how it all dovetails in there. And things are moving quickly across all those fronts there. Of course, there's a tremendous amount of governmental support, that is there or coming and the market designs are also evolving fairly quickly, to be able to take into account these new kinds of resources. And the operating facts on the ground are saying, hey, we need this kind of storage to show up. Think about all the offshore wind in the North Sea or adjacent there to Ireland, for example, and the constraints on the grid today. Tremendous low growth, constrained nodes, and highly variable renewable resources. That's a sort of a perfect mix for us to show up and enter that market? 

Michael Liebreich  
Do you not have to be careful if there are salt caverns that could end up being filled with hydrogen? Does that not sort of destroy the market for you? Do you not- because there are, you know I've just been in Japan, they have no storage solutions that are obvious. And so they're gonna have to kind of create them from nothing. That's very different from the UK, which does have huge amounts of potential hydrogen storage.

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, I mean, certainly you could store a lot of hydrogen there. You also need to figure out how you're going to burn it efficiently in a turbine. And so this is sort of the next big puzzle that's gotta be there. And those geological resources have to be in a very handy location, you can't really afford to move it. And so, you know, there's a lot of challenges that need to be solved there, which is typical, right? And all we're focused on, all we can focus on, frankly, is how quickly we come to market and how, you know, how we prove that the solution works. It works and we're gonna show folks.

Michael Liebreich  
And in fact, you missed a trick when I asked about, you know, the liquid air storage and all these other options: yours just produces electricity straight back through the same connection that it came in, as opposed to needing a generator to go along with it. So there you go. I'm rehearsing your lines for your next podcast for you there.

Mateo Jaramillo  
Yeah, I mean, it is a wonderful thing about electrochemical cells, they are extremely deployable in the end, especially when, you know, we're working with such benign materials, like what we have. It's one of the benefits, right, of the approach to sort of electrochemical storage. And that has huge impacts on the speed and scale with which you can deploy, right, you don't have to look for sort of this perfect set of geologic conditions to make the project pencil.

Michael Liebreich  
Fabulous. Look, it's been a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for spending some time on Cleaning Up. And you know, I wish you luck. And I look forward to tracking your progress and checking back in with you as you hit those milestones or not. But I've got a feeling you'll do just fine. Thank you very much. Thanks Mateo

Mateo Jaramillo  
 Thanks very much, Michael. Pleasure to be here.

Michael Liebreich  
So that was Mateo Jaramilo, co-founder and chief executive officer of Form Energy, which is developing 100-hours electricity storage based on an iron-air battery chemistry. And as always, we'll put links into the show notes so you can find out more about the company and about the guest. And those of you who are interested in long duration storage will want to catch Episode 122, which was with Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith, and he was talking about storing hydrogen in very deep salt caverns. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, please remember to like, share, and subscribe to Cleaning Up or leave us a review on your chosen podcast platform. And do please please spread the word on social media or by telling your friends and colleagues. And, if you want more from Cleaning Up, sign up for our free newsletter at cleaningup.live where you'll find our archive of over 160 hours of conversations with extraordinary climate leaders. Cleaning Up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, the Liebreich Foundation and the Gilardini Foundation.