Watt It Takes: A Tesla Veteran’s Mission to Build Long-Duration Batteries
Energy Gang
Wood Mackenzie
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2019
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Watt It Takes: how a would-be priest made it his mission to spread the gospel of battery storage.
In this episode, Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Mateo Jaramillo, the CEO and co-founder of Form Energy.
Form is working on a new kind of long-duration battery. And Mateo has one of the longer-duration careers in the storage industry.
In the early 2000s, he deployed the first behind-the-meter systems in New York for demand response — seeing the grid services potential well before anyone else.
Mateo went on to start the stationary energy storage unit at Tesla, launching and building the powerwall business. He also helped launch the supercharger business.
Today, he’s working on a new electrochemical battery that could provide storage services for days, not just hours. The idea is to unlock baseload renewables.
The chemistry was spun out of work from MIT researchers. It’s being scaled by a group of engineers and entrepreneurs with deep technical experience — and like Mateo, the bumps and bruises that come from scaling an early market.
In this interview, Mateo talks about what it took to power through the early days of battery storage, when everything sale and installation was a battle. And he’ll talk about what it will take to create Form’s new storage tech to unlock even more renewable energy.
To learn more about future speakers and attending a live event, go to Powerhouse.fund and click on the events tab.
Listen to all of the episodes of Watt It Takes here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by Sungrow. We're talking storage in this episode and Sun Grow is at the leading edge of inverters for battery storage projects. |
| 0:09.0 | Sun Grow is the leading solar inverter supplier by volume in the world and it's rapidly gaining traction in the storage industry. |
| 0:15.2 | The company's inverters are the backbone of some of the most innovative projects in the world, |
| 0:18.8 | from floating PV to big projects for tech companies and they're also integrated into hundreds of |
| 0:24.0 | megawatt hours of battery projects across the US. |
| 0:27.0 | Find out more about the company's tech for solar and storage at sungrowpower |
| 0:31.0 | dot com. storage at Sungrow Power.com. |
| 0:33.0 | On more than one occasion, I recall having |
| 0:37.0 | on more than one occasion |
| 0:42.0 | I recall having to drive to somebody's house in Greenwich, Connecticut to |
| 0:47.2 | sell them a $30,000 battery system and if I didn't get a check for it we weren't going to make payroll and it really was a scrappy |
| 0:54.9 | gritty startup experience and it was it was not pleasant always you try and sort of |
| 1:00.1 | take away the best possible learnings that you can and package those into something useful for the next thing. |
| 1:05.0 | Welcome to What It Takes. |
| 1:10.0 | An interview series produced by Powerhouse and Green Tech Media. |
| 1:13.0 | I'm Stephen Lacy. |
| 1:14.0 | Welcome. |
| 1:15.0 | In this series, we hear from founders and executives |
| 1:17.4 | at the most influential clean energy companies, |
| 1:19.6 | their backgrounds, their passions, their struggles, |
| 1:22.1 | their deals, their management philosophies, their near-to-home. their Keo Harramio, the CEO and co-founder of Form Energy. |
| 1:33.7 | Form is working on a new kind of long-duration battery. |
... |
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