Gravity energy storage - Modo: The Podcast (ep. 50: Gravitricity)

capable of fast responses capable of response in less than a second zero to 100 power in less than a second yeah I think the batteries and the energy storage Technologies of the future will be required to last longer frankly we use an extremely sort of dense Magna dense material you either need a lot of mass we need a lot of height if you go underground then you're using the geology of the earth if you like to hold up that weight and that's it and that's uh that's the sort of the secret sauce hello everybody Quentin here now in this episode we're talking about the oldest technology known to man gravity and gravity batteries we've got Robin Lane on from gravatricity who have been one of the leading players in gravity energy storage pretty much since we all heard of it and what's interesting about this conversation is the journey the gravitricity of being on from moving Magna dense material up and down mine shafts to where they're going now and in the future is fascinating so let's see what you think in the comments I hope you like it [Music] so Robin gravity gravity energy storage that's what you guys do right yes it is gravity is um is always there you can rely on it it's not ever going to go anywhere so it seemed to us to be a good thing to be making energy storage uh basing energy storage on we're actually more than that we're a company who has legacy-wise it's we've believed in I guess the power of underground spaces and the potential of underground spaces to uh to really make a meaningful difference and offer energy storage at grid scale which is what we need and gravity is the color for the First Technology off the block if you like in that respect technology love it yeah a lot a lot of ups and downs and there's there's a lot there's a there's a lot of dad jokes to be said in this episode and then so gravitricity where's gravity based gravity is based in Edinburgh and we've got a team of about 15 or 16 employees based in Edinburgh and we've we've put together our project demonstrator up in Edinburgh and that's where that has been it's it's down now and that we've sort of disassembled it but it's we did some testing on that and that was a massive learning experience for us okay cool well we're going to come back to the technology and the company in a minute but as ever I'm going to ask you about you um how are you here how long you've been doing gravitricity and what were you doing before that so we've got some frames of reference about your thinking sure so I've been at gravity for about 18 months I'm the commercial director so I've got a broad remit across um strategy identification and definition and delivery as well as managing the commercial side commercial relationships um so it's a fairly broad role and and that's one of the things I love about it going back in time so I've been in the I guess the Nexus between um uh the entrepreneurial journey and CSR and sustainability and the low carbon agenda for about I guess 15 or 16 years so going back to say 2006 very different world back then um this is pre Nick Stern the stern review pre-incconvenient truth when a rock was something that you picked up off the ground um and and nothing else and um the yeah the space was gr starting to gather some momentum I guess and fast forward to um you know 2010 2012 there was much more work around working for energy retailers food retailers who were kind of early adopter to to the sector um as well as the carbon trust and and government both Central and local so there was a lot of work to be done there um helping those organizations really identify and crystallize and realize the opportunities uh which were presented the business opportunities which were presented by I guess the low-carbon agenda so were you a consultant yeah I was I was I was a consultant working with those companies and then I worked in a house for a large corporate um identifying and and and developing businesses in a particular area of the agenda which large corporate people so I was I was at Akiva for um for for two years between 2012 and 2014 there are essentially a comms organization but they they they saw a mass of opportunity for them in smart metering and and so I was brought on board as a sort of I guess a flexibility in at smart metering Specialists to to help them identify and and track down what exactly that meant for them um and then more recently I've worked directly with technology companies I've always had a conviction that technology companies and and technology has to be a really really big part of the the overall solution to the to decarbonization and you know so I work directly with technology companies spin outs from universities Fred's Fred in a shed kind of organizations and many other different profiles directly through government grants um helping them to identify their strategy helping them to negotiate agreements and prepare for investor raising as well um I should say that before that I was a corporate lawyer so I was a corporate lawyer for about six or seven years both in the city of London and in Brussels and in Sydney training there doing um corporate and Commercial M A type transactions so that's uh that's how I began my career it's been a good grounding but I had a I had a conviction that there must be more to life and uh as it turned out I was right okay cool and then so we're going to go into detail about the technology in a minute but yeah so grab atricity this is a company based in Scotland and you guys well what's what's what's the belief because we're lithium people really most of our customers and the industry is all about Lithium-ion batteries and then there's a few few bits on the periphery like flow batteries and flywheels and gravity batteries and all these things so what's the what's the gravity play what do you guys believe about the market or about the technology that means that this is this business makes sense yeah yeah it's a really good question and I think I think the foundation belief is that the the the landscape of energy storage which we've seen develop over the last five or seven years because it's grown up extraordinarily quickly um really come from nowhere since 2014-15 um that that is fantastic story and and and we as in the UK should be proud of I guess being at the Leading Edge of that internationally and lithium-ion has played a obviously an important role and it will continue to play an important role but but I think the the future of energy storage is somewhat different and I think the reason why lithium-ion has played that role is that it was an off-the-shelf mature ready to go technology which was as I say ready to go to scale up um and uh able to deliver on those needs as as and when they were there I don't think that's necessarily going to be the case I think the I think the use case and and the demand requirement from the market has been relatively homogeneous over the last five seven years and I don't see that continuing into the future what does that mean homogeneous it means that it's insane it means that it means that the the single use case for for grid scale energy storage over that time period has been fast duration um sorry long duration also short duration high power kind of services and um that's the kind of use case that lithium-ion has fitted well into and that will that will continue but I think that um the energy storage landscape will kind of fan out and diversify and I think there are a number of different dimensions on which the markets will be requiring more and and different capabilities of energy storage Technologies than they have in the past okay so what's what's the play for the gravity do you call it the gravity battery or the gravity technology or um gravity gravity-based energy storage we can call it a gravity battery but most people regard battery as a chemical battery and that can kind of confuse matters okay so what's the what's the play here so if Lithium-ion batteries are doing their bit on the grid and there's you know there's there's billions of pounds of cat bits being deployed into that sector right now but there are some things that lithium ion isn't uh you know um there are some shortcomings especially with longer duration um and number of Cycles um although both of those lithium-ion folks pretty much think they've solved to a certain degree um what what's the gravity play here what's the secret Source about the gravity liquid of the gravity battery because they're kind of the next bit um yeah well what's all that about yeah so to just elaborate on on what I said before I think the there are at least three ways in which the capability requirements of the future Market will fan out and and sort of diversify and and the first of those is in terms of longevity I think the batteries and the energy storage Technologies of the future will be required to last longer frankly than there and and the reason for that is they're going to be seen as a grid infrastructure asset and they they will therefore have to I guess perform the role and have a lifetime to match other great infrastructure assets so so that's I see is a really important part so you mean decades and decades rather than a single decade exactly right exactly right and I think the second way is is that they will need to be uh capable of being more aggressively cycled so we're talking about not necessarily one cycle every day but potentially charging and discharging and charging again and then discharging again a little little bit and then all the way and then all the way up to the top potentially multiple times every day and again if you if you expose a Lithium-Ion battery to that it's not going to last particularly long and and the Third Way is it's long duration longer duration systems and so those are the three ways I think that the capability requirements of the future are not necessarily going to match up to the ones of the past so to get back to to our system and why we think it plays A Part well um on on the on the longevity front we have got a system which we believe can last for many many decades um there's no system or component part which can't be switched out and changed and obviously we've got operation and maintenance costs but they're not huge um and they will go down over time as well so so it's a it's a system that can last for many decades it's it's got that high power um short duration type capabilities it's capable of fast responses capable of response in less the second and less than a second so it can compete in those markets is that full power in less than a second or yeah it starts moving and yeah yeah no it's full powerless zero to 100 power in less than a second yeah okay and that's something which we validated through our concept demonstrator okay um yeah so there's that and and so there's the there's the longevity of the system there's the the low Opex cost there's a um no depth of discharge limits um it's their safety requirements and and those are the things that we think we can bring to the party which are fundamentally very different to uh I guess there is a depth there's a depth of shaft limit right which is uh which is the kind of the depth of this discharge limit so the there are there is a low and upper bounds on the the energy that can go into these things uh be stored in these things mechanically in the same way that there's a chemical lowered upper bounds within a lithium one cell yeah so I guess what I meant there is that you can drop the weight all the way down to the bottom of the shaft the shaft is always going to have a bottom and if it doesn't have a bottom which we're using um the the limitation will be the length of the cables you can use and so so bottom of the bottom there's my mind blown like it's every shaft will have a bottom but it's a question of whether we want to go all the way to the bottom and it may be that we don't or we uh you know some shafts aren't exactly sort of straight they sort of curve in as they get deeper and so that there'll come a time when you drop the weight and it will get stuck halfway down so you don't want to do that so let's be clear here because there's a few different gravity Technologies out there or ideas so um if I got this right you guys are doing stuff vertically up and down a bit like a lift right but with a big weight in it rather than something on Wheels going down a mine shaft or going down uh going down a hill if you like underground yep you guys are going up and down up and down that way if you're we're getting into technology now but if you're um if you've got a how deep do these things have to go and how much weight do you have to move to get an equivalent amount of yeah yeah so that's an interesting question so very very simple formula that governs the amount of electricity that we can store in a particular shaft and uh the formula is M MGH and energies can buy yeah physics exactly so it's really really basic stuff exactly it's those three things going back to the beginning gravity is your constant obviously there's there's no way in which you can change that to 10ish not and yeah tennis just just below 10. um and so there you feel you've got mass and height as your two variables you've got to play with and what that means is that you need heavy heavy heavy weights um and you need long drops in order to make gravity energy storage work and when I say heavy weights I I don't mean sort of a few tens of tons um you need to be talking about weights in the hundreds of tons to make this really really work and that's perfectly doable um you know we're going to be lifting up weights of say 500 tons or more at a time um and and dropping them through a drop of say um you know multiple hundreds of meters so 500 meters or plus and and if you do that you can you can generate and store and very interesting amount of electricity so what does that look like so say you've got a 500 tons I don't even know what 500 tons 500 what are the mini way mini is a half a ton right that's not the right one five what does a car weigh yeah I mean a car I mean a big car a big SUV might weigh sort of two or three tons I guess okay so so we're talking about 250 cars yeah we're gonna lift them all up at once we'll put them down and we put them how big is this thing you know how much space does it take yeah so so the diameter of the the shaft is is likely to be six or seven meters uh standard I mean if we're deploying in shafts that already exist we we obviously take on the diameters that are already there exactly like a mine shaft if you're dealing with shafts that um um well don't exist and we're digging them from scratch we can obviously customize that and choose what diameter we want but so so the parameters the weights are obviously gone by the parameters of the shaft and you've got six meters but and it'll be quite multiple meters deep in order to get to that 500 meters we use an extremely sort of dense Magna dense kind of uh material we hold it in a bucket and we and we fill it to the top and I can get it yeah it's it's it's a it's a fairly commonly used sort of ballast in in heavy industrial um uh applications uh sourceable around the world you don't want to be moving 500 tonne weights around the place so yeah what about numbers so I'm like megawatt hour terms let's get a frame of reference here so a um let's say a a ton going up and down in a shaft that goes 100 meters I don't know we can do the math live on our you might have some of these Dior so what what are some examples turn isn't going to get you much so if we go to 500 times 500 times kind of the metric we tend to use if you drop 500 tons through a distance of roughly about 600 meters you get a megawatt hour um wow electricity so see going back to what I said you do need heavy weights and you do need long drops which is why incidentally we believe that the only way to do gravity energy storage is uh below ground um and we've got competitor Technologies who are looking to do things above ground we don't believe a gravity that that is the right way to be going about it because um if you're talking about weights in the 500 ton sort of Realm you can't pick those weights up and lift them above ground unless you've got an incredibly strong structure which would prove prohibitively expensive if you go underground then you're using the geology of the earth if you like to hold up that weight and that's it and that's uh that's the sort of the secret sauce it seems like a lot of Weights move a long long way for one megawatt hour right considering a one I'm just thinking about comparison one megawatt hour of um I know it's different cycling and things in the lithium ion battery that's about half a half ship um half a shipping container so 20 foot shipping container and that will probably cost capex wise let's say installed you know 400 Grand so 400 000 pounds installed maybe a little bit more um in fact it's changing on a daily basis so and then what does a capex cost of one of these I guess you have to amortize it over a longer period right because it's a longer it lasts for longer but let's let's um what what do you spend on a 600 meter shaft with a 500 tonne Magna weight in it yeah so so if you're asking it if we're competitive today with lithium ion the answer is no but I also think that's the wrong question to ask because you're comparing a mature technology which has gone down that cost curve where the technology which is um still traveling down that cost journey and frankly quite near the beginning of it yeah and if you look at if you look at other Industries I mean um I was looking at this recently and the offshore wind industry between 2010 and 2020 uh came down the the levelized cost of energy of that of offshore wind came down 70 percent now that's uh that's an achievement that no one could possibly have predicted in the in the naughties and leading up to 2010 and and there are all sorts of naysay as you're saying that it's going to stay really really expensive and uncompetitive and have we achieved that we've achieved it through efficient Supply chains better technology and and frankly also uh well economies of scale but also very very strong policy commitment from from government through rocks through cfds more recently and and that's that's what's been achieved and those costs continue to come down so so I would say that um as I say we're at the start of that journey and we believe that we've got an enormous cost reduction so so our analysis shows that we can reduce our costs by uh well over 50 percent um over time and and we believe that we can become cost competitive with lithium-ion um in time okay interesting so that's the core thesis here right otherwise no one would be doing the work absolutely because so the so the argument is the cost of this of gravity storage will become competitor with competitive with lithium ion at some point in the future yeah if we keep working on it um what about this there's a few different gravity companies out there gravity gravity companies selling gravity um uh developing gravity Storage Solutions and they're all very very different where do you guys fit in to the overall realm of this new technology yeah we talk about our gravity systems being able to offer um so we've got a single weight system so that's what it says it is it's it's it's dropping a single weight up and down a shaft and that is very much kind of aligned with the current lithium markets and where the current lithium batteries uh offer themselves into the market so so short duration high power type applications frequency regulation and scenery Services that's where they play and that's where the single weight system uh will in time play we've also got a multi-weight system um which does what it says on the tin it it picks up a weight it drops it down to the ground and as that's that weight is decelerating towards the bottom of the shaft the mechanism at the top is picking up a different weight and and repeating that process and you can potentially you can do that multiple times thereby offering um you know multiple hours of of duration capability so you go kind of up down up down with two arms to this thing if you like or is it all on one continuous yeah no so the weights get stacked on top of each other um so you've got a you've got a sort of a sort of a in time you've got a sort of quite a few weights stacked on top of each other and and obviously the second way can't travel the same distance as the first weight because the second weight goes on top of the first weight and so on so but if you've got a deep enough shaft you can actually do that quite a few times before the limitation of the shaft depth becomes an issue okay so you guys have got you've got a single way and multi-weight yeah and you go up and down in shafts and are you aiming for existing shafts or new shafts but we had a um someone on from Fitness Consulting Engineers I've recently talking about energy from waste fascinating thing in itself and one of the things he said podcast which really made me think was that going into the ground costs 10 times more than going up right that's what that was his sort of rule of thumb because he was going you know what's in the ground and you might you know there's different rock formations and it's just expensive going to the ground so um do you guys is that driving you guys to look at existing mine shafts around the place or are you going to be digging new holes or shafts what did he mean by going up do you mean I mean going about actually going up I guess you're talking about different weights though right I I would like to um I'd like to speak to this guy I I don't know who he is but please put me in touch because we don't believe it's credible to go above the ground basically for the reasons we've we've already talked about see you need to be talking about weights in multiple hundreds of tons yeah and you need to be dropping those weights through significant distances and once you realize those two things those once you have those two insights to hand you do the maths on lifting up 500 tons above ground you can't do it unless you're spending multiple multiple millions of pounds on an incredibly strong structure and that's going to blow your business case out of the water whereas if you're going below ground in multiple cases you've actually got the hole already and you're utilizing I guess the the old the infrastructure of the old Energy System to to enable the new and there's a there's a really good story there about how we're sort of re-utilizing repurposing old coal mines um but but it yeah it allows us to do that for free and and it allows us to be talking about weights um of a different order of magnitude interesting so um let's go back to those what these shafts that are already existing out there are these coal mines or these other types of Mines yeah they're most obviously coal mines and and one of the reasons they're coal mines is because I mean obviously it plays the the good story about the decarbonization agenda and how we're sort of using the old system but also there are a lot of coal mines which are going out of commission right now all the way around the world um they're I mean they're tens of thousands yes absolutely very good and so that I mean I was reading reports saying that 50 000 coal mines uh sorry mines in Australia alone which are just waiting to have something done with them Eastern Europe is a is a hot spot for these for these mines a lot of people are wondering how to wean themselves of coal in Eastern Europe Poland and the Czech Republic those kind of countries the move away from coal is very much of a sort of an act of gender the UK has kind of traveled that Journey already and and so a lot of our old coal mines are Legacy coal mines have been filled in or otherwise decommissioned so so that's less of an option I think on the on the coal mining front although you know it doesn't need to be a coal mine it can be a tin mine it can be a platinum minor plenty of them in South Africa um and we see South Africa is an interesting Market interesting let's come back to the the technology itself so if I got this right if it's like a it's a bit like a crane um or is with a with a generator on is that is that any is that is that true yeah it is it's it's um so you're using you're using uh heavy lift equipment which is actually on the ground um and that heavy lift equipment doubles as a generator as well so in one in one direction it's heavy lift equipment winching the the system up to the top tomorrow exactly and then once the weight is going down playing down towards the bottom you know it's it's doubling as a generator and it's pulling the cable through uh making that electricity there's lots of clever gearing in the generator to make sure that actually although we're dropping the weight quite slowly slowly the the generator is going fast and generating all we can there's something about this which is very it feels it's simple right it's mechanical it's almost primitive in thinking about storing I'm sure it's the Aztecs or someone in history has done this kind of thing before storing stuff up a hill or the top of a shaft um and it's very simple to explain and think about um how what's the vision here what's the what's well if gravity gravity energy storage takes off what does success look like so to go back to your first point I mean it is a gravity energy storage was the first form of energy storage we've had we've had um pumped Hydro uh uh pumped Hydro energy storage for multiple decades and then you know even before that we got grandfather clocks I don't know what the legacy of grandfather clocks and how far we go back in time for them but many hundreds of years you're not going to give me the Aztecs though are you look I don't know about the Aztecs I wouldn't like to say for sure I'm sure somebody watching this will know about the Aztecs the only thing I know about the Aztecs is they a lot of flax seeds my wife tells me that and that that's what for some reason made them way healthier than we are but okay so um but yeah so it's it's an old system there's no old system and and um we're just sort of um we're doing things in a slightly different way but the Technologies we're using are fairly tried and tested and the clever stuff we're doing is in the integration the way we're bringing those Technologies together um is is genuinely Innovative and novel and different to get back to your point about what does what does success look like what does good look like um so so we see a world of distributed energy storage we're not going to get um the distributed or the energy storage of the future is going to be in multiple multiple locations um and so we've got a system we've got to have a system which is um capable of being distributed around different points of the grid um serving those different applications some behind the meter applications offering those grid services in energy access kind of uh roles in the developing World in sub-Saharan Africa uh India and the subcontinent of of Asia so so we see gravity energy storage playing a really really important part in in delivering energy and enabling the low carbon transition around the world but alongside other storage Technologies or is it gonna yeah I think so I think so I think I I the way I see it energy storage will diversify it will inevitably diversify so you've got you've got lithium at the moment you've got pumped Hydro I think the the Technologies of the future will include gravity I think they will also include thermal uh energy storage Technologies um and I think there'll be others as well um you know they're great many ways in which you can store heat for the production of energy um to me the only thing that matters the cost right above all else the thing that matters is cost because it's going to be economics will win in the end and I look at something like the norweg right which is the the battery of the West wales's battery the UK's battery fascinating multi-decade long structure that essentially has been supporting keeping the lights on for for a long long time longer than I've been around and I look at that and the scale of it and um someone will tell me I'm wrong here there's a couple of gigawatts right something like that across a few units maybe even bigger and the amount of water that that thing needs to hold a move between those two reservoirs is just if you go and you see it it just blows your mind you know it's incredible and so now I don't think about other energy storage Technologies and and as you say for for moving Mass around you either need a lot of mass or you need a lot of height and so the question to me is can we get those two things to the scale we need with gravity energy storage without moving pumping and material around like water with it being physical like on a cable I assume it is yeah that's a big challenge look pumped Hydro has done a great job and in orwig and bankrakhan and the others um play a really really important part of the um the energy grid I'll deliver really really important services to the energy grid um in this country at the moment and as you say they have done for many years but I don't see them playing a really important part or Technologies like them in enabling future renewable penetration because they're there already and frankly we're site limited with not many places in the UK where you can wear their sufficient level of drop Mountain water receptacles and and what have you to to install or create many more of these things um whereas Gravity the kind of gravity energy storage that we're talking about doesn't have that uh that location or I guess limitation it can be it can be located anywhere and that's one of the key advantages but the fundamentally the physics is the same and so um how many of these mine shafts are there around the UK say we wanted to put gravity into storage system in all the sort of megawatt hour style uh size mine shafts in the UK so 500 tons going down 600 meters yeah how many of those are there for us to tap into so look in the UK as I said the UK is not a great market for coal mines because um they're there most of them have been filled in and uh and sort of repurposed in other ways at the moment um that could change in the future and and we we don't we're not limited to to the coal mines and and the mines that already exist we we absolutely see a future where you would be digging your own minds as well creating your own shafts and deploying these systems in those shafts and and then you've got obviously you've got a you've got a challenge around the business case um because syncing those kind of shafts in the ground isn't exactly cheap and and that's where our other deployments and other Technologies come in because we've already always had a conviction of gravity that um we see gravity as a way in which you can utilize Underground spaces for energy storage but it's not the only one and so you can store fuel gases in these spaces you can use it for compressed air and you can generate and you can you can store into seasonal heat potentially down down there as well just before we come on to the other use cases so something's just occurred to me and um I might be wrong but they said digging new shaft is expensive oh it's it's not cheap interested to know what not cheap means I've got no idea what it costs a bigger shot to dig a shaft actually from a technology perspective digging shaft is not a new technology right so you'd think that the cost curve has already come down on the shaft shaft is digging the right term I don't know thinking thinking yeah um and so what does it cost us to create a new shaft well look it it depends um it's a frustrating answer but it does so much depend on the kind of geological formations you're you're digging into um you're sinking into um and and so it's hard to give a direct answer to that but we're we're at the Forefront of of that we're at the Forefront of bringing those those costs down to your to your point about whether that Journey has been traveled when it comes to sinking shafts I don't actually think it has because mining has historically been an extremely profitable industry um and not one when they've necessarily had to focus relentlessly on on cost and cost down and how can we squeeze out the cost and how can we do better um because they've known that once you get there um plus plus the fact that energy has always already been an imperative so if you if if we need coal and we've always needed coal historically you need to do the digging right so it doesn't really matter what it costs so so there's that and and and so I think um it very much depends very much depends on the but but there's also the fact that my the mind is a place of work right so and so there are all sorts of costs which relate to the fact that people human beings are working there yes which of course wouldn't apply to to this particular use case so so there are absolutely opportunities to take cost out of of um if you were to ask a minor or a shaft sinking company how much does it cost to Sinker mine for the purposes of coal digging um that wouldn't necessarily be a good guide to to what we're looking at okay just to move a way up and down um and then what about these other use cases actually before we get there I'm jumping around grab it let's go back to the company so who what who founded the company and how long has it been going and how is it funded hula backers and um what next yeah okay so um the company was founded in I think 2012 or so and and it was founded by Martin Wright and Peter Frankl uh originally um and they have a a sort of a long history of working with each other um on uh energy storage Technologies and and renewable low-carbon energy storage energy generating Technologies as well um Peter is more he's the sort of the the mad scientist he's the engineer who thinks outside the box and Martin's more of the the businessman type and they work extremely well together um so so a few patterns were filed and and uh and we've got those patterns now in the bag um the the company really started to gather Pace when we got Charlie Bell on board and he joined I think in 2017 and he's really pushed the company forward um recruited all the people we've got now and uh and sort of been the sort of the the driving the driving charge um of the company and and so that's that's where it pre uh goes back to um but really in the last I would say two to three years is we've really really sort of gathered momentum and gathered Pace um we've raised about eight million pounds in funding through a combination of um Founders Equity High net Worth's crowd raises and r d funding cool wow I and what does it cost you've already done some some I saw you I trial one in Edinburgh um and it was that 250 kilowatts yeah that's right so fairly fairly humble in terms of um the the output and the duration but that wasn't really the point it wasn't about um making money or even demonstrating that it could make money it was it was more about uh validating the technical performance of technology so there are a few really important things that came out of that um firstly that we could respond in less than a second which is really really important for eligibility for those high power short duration type Services um that we had a really um competitive round-trip efficiency was so it's sort of nudging up towards 80 percent um and we think we think we can improve on that in a full-scale system but it's sort of um up to 80 is where we got to on the concept demo um and then our standstill losses were pretty pretty negligible so in other words that weights can can can sit there at the top of the top of the drop for as long as you want it to um pending the right sort of Market signals for it to to be let go okay cool and then your so you raise eight million pounds did you have to spend a lot of that on the the um because these are capital intensive things yeah did you have to spend a lot of that on getting your your first projects off the ground or um was that funded by r d yeah so so that the the concept demo that I've just been talking about was funded through Innova UK um and uh to the tune of you know 60 or so say percent so we we had to provide the match funding and that's part of the course in these kind of instances yeah and and so yeah so so absolutely that was that's part of that eight million pounds that we just talked about and um other than that it's been uh operational expenses taking the technology for forward um developing the feed um front-end engineering design kind of work uh the detailed design delivering projects um on a consultancy basis so these are the kind of things that we've we've worked a lot on and um so you guys had a big announcement recently do you want to talk about that for a moment yeah so so we're we're pushing to the Forefront the the second way in which um we believe uh underground spaces can be used for the purposes of energy storage and and that's to store fuel gases and in particular to store hydrogen um we see hydrogen as a massive part of the energy transition and and a really important part of of that agenda um you've um I know you've talked a lot to different people and different uh episodes of this podcast about hydrogen so don't talk about it so much but but obviously our take on it is on the storage side and and other people will have their own view on different parts but but on the energy storage side we see hydrogen storage as being a really important part of the hydrogen economy um because um with your generating green hydrogen you need somewhere to put it because the production is intermittent and so you need somewhere to put it isn't hydrogen isn't the thing about hydrogen apologies I'm uh very basic thinking on this isn't the thing one of the things about hydrogen is it takes up a lot of space right um and so it takes up a lot more space than methane for the same amount of energy and uh generally volumetrically it is a big thing and so for a shaft I think like a 600 meter shaft with it needs to be bigger shafts because 600 meter shaft with a nine meter diameter um I don't know how much hydrogen can you store in one of those yeah so you need a Bloody big shaft yes so we wouldn't actually be using those kind of shafts we've been using purpose-bilt shafts um but we can we can store about 100 tons worth of hydrogen in in the shafts that we're talking about and we believe and and this is I guess crucial to our proposition in the market we we believe that that actually is the right level of hydrogen um to store for for the kind of use cases that are going to really start Gathering Pace we don't see hydrogen necessarily being used in all these different applications um very controversial topic where hydrogen will be used where it is which one which ones are you guys focused on so yeah so so we're focused on the industrial applications we see hydrogen being used in those kind of applications where electrification is either challenging or fairly impossible um so those those industrial uses where you need very very high grade heat and frankly hydrogen is the only game in town in terms of low carbon option so steel making oil refining to some extent Ceramics glass potentially large-scale Transportation as well as long duration energy storage so into seasonal storage of hydrogen for filling in those those still cold but not very sunny winter days as well so so we see most of the hydrogen which is going to be produced in the hydrogen economy it's going to be produced and stored and then used in fairly close proximity to each other which places an emphasis Less on the transportation of it and more on on the storage of it and and so we see the storage element is a really really critical part um again you've got these two incumbent Solutions at the moment you've got salt Caverns which are very geographically constrained I think in the UK there are any two areas where there the the geological conditions are right for salt cabins and they're sort of Cheshire and and East Yorkshire so they're not really the answer I think for for the kind of hydrogen storage that we need and then at the other side you've got the you've got the above ground systems which can store hydrogen but they're extremely expensive they take up space um above ground and they're quite questionable health and safety um is the play here that by storing hydrogen a shaft it's cheaper than above ground yeah absolutely I think it'll be I think it'll be in time it'll be both cheaper and more attractive in other ways um because it's not taking up valuable space um and and it's safer okay interesting I want to ask you the two final questions so first is there anything you want to plug I mean you've just talked about your press release I gave you that one there's anything else that you guys want to plug and then the second more interesting one in my view of course is what do you believe or what does the company believe that no that that's good this contrarian that perhaps not a lot of other people believe and as a when you're when you're growing a car a company especially a startup you have to have some beliefs that other people will think of wacky so um let's do the first one anything you want to plug and then that one yeah so it's on the plugin site so we're we're currently uh involved in a fairly significant fundraise for the company so we're we're going out to raise some roughly 40 million pounds and institutional race it's a significant amounts of money um and that fundraise will support and develop um or enable rather um our our um our next three r d projects which are sort of on on the on the roadmap um so two on the gravity side one on the hydrogen side and we see that as a really really critical part of our development process and so so yeah so so we're involved in that at the moment we're sort of in the early stages of talking to uh potential investors we're looking for strategic corporates um and and impact investors and and any investors who really really see that not only that they they get the play of gravity energy storage but also think that they can work with us and help us pull the technology into the market that's what we're really really looking for okay plenty of investors listening so uh get in touch and then the second one what do you what do you believe that a lot of people think you're crazy for believing yeah so I I think on that I I would say that um the the energy industry and I I think it looks at the future and it and it regards the future is probably being more of the past and so they look at um how we're going to carry on decarbonizing the electricity Supply and and particularly respond to the decarbonization of heat and transport which we all know is sort of happening already and think always we're going to need more solar and we're going to need more wind and we're going to need more Lithium-ion batteries and and um and I'm certainly in that camp yeah okay well let me sort of slightly push back on that so we'll definitely need more wind and more solar and and to a certain extent we'll need more lithium as well but I I think the the the future isn't always or the past isn't necessarily a good Guide to the Future and and what I would say is I think the next stage the next sort of phase of that decarbonization Journey will involve other things as well um so I think I think there'll be a much more realization in the UK of the incredible potential of smart meters and and the way in which they offer um engagement at a customer level and the time of use tariffs that they they potentially offer I don't think you know 10 years 15 years ago I think we would have been a bit disappointed to know that we we really haven't got going on that yet and I and I think there's a lot more we can do on that to to really get engaged consumers but I'd say on the energy storage side I think um I I think there will be a plethora of different Technologies coming to Market I don't see lithium-ion delivering on all the capabilities that the market will require for some of the reasons we've we've talked about and so I think I think the the energy storage landscape of the future it will be of course it will be lithium but it will also be mechanical and gravity and and compressed air and it will also be a thermal energy storage so so we we don't think we can deliver on all those different Market requirements but we certainly think we can deliver on some of them so um that's how we see ourselves fitting in this is the wonderful thing about this industry which is it's so early and nobody knows um and there's going to be some winners and some losers and I yeah things that will win in the end in my viewer cost cost what was it um I can't remember who said it I think it was on his podcast um there's only three three things that matter cost cost and cost and uh it's true so um fingers crossed we can get the cost down on gravity energy storage and also on digging very deep holes I still can't imagine how long it takes to drop a penny from we can do the maths drop a penny from the top of a 600 meter shaft and it gets to the bottom there's a little brain to you we'll do the calculation and put it in the show notes follow the show notes all right thanks everybody for listening and thanks for having for coming on it's been uh it's been a pleasure thank you Quentin it's good to be here thank you

2023-03-22 03:34

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