Speaker 1: Hi Aksha there. This week we're playing an episode from
Speaker 1: the Zero archives, and it's all about one of my
Speaker 1: favorite topics. Batteries. Not any old battery, but a battery
Speaker 1: that uses rust to store energy. That's right, rust. It's
Speaker 1: a wild sounding idea that's been pursued by Form Energy,
Speaker 1: who have received more than nine hundred million dollars in
Speaker 1: funding to make those batteries work. Enjoy and we'll be
Speaker 1: back with a regular episode next week. Welcome to Zero.
Speaker 1: I'm Aukshatrati. This week, one question, two elements and nine
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars. Let's talk about the problem with renewable energy.
Speaker 1: Don't worry, this is not our climate denial episode. It's
Speaker 1: just that renewables are not always available. The sun goes away,
Speaker 1: the wind dies down, but our demand for energy never stops.
Speaker 1: And that mismatch is what keeps our power grid tied
Speaker 1: to coal and natural gas. And so one solution is
Speaker 1: to fill batteries with wind and solar power, but it's
Speaker 1: so expensive. Today's episode is about a company trying to
Speaker 1: change that. Form Energy started with the goal of making
Speaker 1: a really cheap battery, one that could replace a coal
Speaker 1: plant for a battery obsessive. It's an exciting quest forms
Speaker 1: only limitations with the laws of science and money, and
Speaker 1: the startup seems to have found a battery that can
Speaker 1: be that cheap. I saw it, and the battery doesn't
Speaker 1: look like much. Mateo Haremio, the CEO, and one of
Speaker 1: the five co founders, showed us different prototypes, and as
Speaker 1: we went down the line, the batteries got cheaper and
Speaker 1: cheaper looking as well.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, we're more working on something that needs
Speaker 2: to be as low cost as this battery needs to be.
Speaker 2: You can put it to the eye test. Right, does
Speaker 2: it look expensive? Right? Does it look expensive to produce
Speaker 2: the parts? Does it look expensive to deploy? We are
Speaker 2: passing the eye test. This does not look expensive and
Speaker 2: it works.
Speaker 1: I should not have left, but it was shocking. While
Speaker 1: lithium ion battery facilities, which is the battery that goes
Speaker 1: into smartphones and electric cars, requires you to wear a
Speaker 1: hairnet and a clean suit, this form battery was out
Speaker 1: in the open and it just looked like coke bubbling
Speaker 1: in a plastic milk bottley.
Speaker 3: In that case is from the side, you'll see oxygen
Speaker 3: bubbles fizzing up from the bottom and accumulating and then
Speaker 3: they're eventually sort of just removed from the out.
Speaker 1: That's Billy Woodford, the chief technology officer, describing the iron
Speaker 1: air battery.
Speaker 2: What I was.
Speaker 1: Seeing was rusting in action. Form Energy's big innovation. Rusting
Speaker 1: is a sign of iron slowly aging. It's iron combining
Speaker 1: with oxygen becoming iron oxide. It's not a desirable reaction
Speaker 1: and it happens passively, but the chemical reaction is actually
Speaker 1: releasing energy very slowly. Form Energy has found a way
Speaker 1: to speed up the reaction in a controlled way and
Speaker 1: draw out the energy as electrons. When I visited FORM
Speaker 1: I went on a tour with two of the co founders, Matteo,
Speaker 1: who you heard defending the battery's appearance, and Billy Woodford,
Speaker 1: who's the chief technology officer. Then we sat down to
Speaker 1: talk about the scale of the problem that Form Energy
Speaker 1: is trying to solve, challenges of new battery chemistry, and
Speaker 1: what goes into starting a company that has attracted nearly
Speaker 1: nine hundred million dollars in investments. Matteo, welcome to Zero,
Speaker 1: Thanks atchat great to be here, and so Mateo, this
Speaker 1: is not your first battery company. What is your story
Speaker 1: coming here?
Speaker 2: This is my third battery company, and I've been in
Speaker 2: battery it's almost twenty years now, and I saw the
Speaker 2: impact that batteries could have and I hoped one day
Speaker 2: would have when I first started working on them in
Speaker 2: two thousand and four. So I can't really explain it
Speaker 2: other than they've just captured my imagination and I seem
Speaker 2: to have a well of curiosity about batteries that I
Speaker 2: don't have for much else. But just before form, I
Speaker 2: was at Tessa for a number of years and I
Speaker 2: started what became the Tesla Energy Effort there, so the
Speaker 2: grid storage component of that business, And when I left,
Speaker 2: I started thinking about what does come next for energy
Speaker 2: storage on the grid. The energy transition was very much
Speaker 2: upon us then, and I felt like I could see
Speaker 2: the direction that things were going to be going, and
Speaker 2: it was clear that there was a hole, an opportunity,
Speaker 2: frankly in the broader space for the multi day type storage,
Speaker 2: because that's what you need to be able to in
Speaker 2: the end replace and retire all of the thermal generation
Speaker 2: on the grid that cold the natural gas. From the beginning,
Speaker 2: the goal was what kind of battery lets you replace
Speaker 2: a coal plant? That's as simple as we could sort
Speaker 2: of state the mission.
Speaker 1: What Mateo says about multi day storage is really about money.
Speaker 1: In principle, you can use any battery to store any
Speaker 1: amount of electricity you want, but it is currently uneconomical
Speaker 1: to use lithium ion batteries to store any more than
Speaker 1: a few hours worth of electricity. Farm Energy's battery uses
Speaker 1: iron and air, and that means it can be one
Speaker 1: seventh the price of today's lithium ion batteries. That would
Speaker 1: make it cheap enough to build huge batteries for storing
Speaker 1: multiple days worth of solar and wind power, which could
Speaker 1: eliminate the use of most fossil fuel power plants.
Speaker 2: We did not start with iron air as the chemistry.
Speaker 2: We were looking at other options simultaneously to that one.
Speaker 2: It was one of the earliest contenders that we could
Speaker 2: think of, but we really started with that problem statement,
Speaker 2: not with the technology in hand that we were sure
Speaker 2: we're sort of force fit into the market. And the
Speaker 2: other major bet that we make was that this would
Speaker 2: become relevant in a time frame that was near enough.
Speaker 1: Right, So what was the timeframe that you had in mind,
Speaker 1: Given you've worked in a couple of battery companies before this,
Speaker 1: you know when it came to form, how long did
Speaker 1: you think it's going to take to build this iron
Speaker 1: air battery.
Speaker 2: Well, my assumption was ten years. That's how long any
Speaker 2: hardware takes to really make an impact at scale. And
Speaker 2: we are doing this because of impact, not because we
Speaker 2: want to be able to show, you know, prove that
Speaker 2: the chemistry works. That's quite trivial in fact, and impact requires,
Speaker 2: of course that we manufacture at scale and that we
Speaker 2: deploy at scale. So that was a timescale that we approached.
Speaker 2: I will say, however, that the market moved faster than
Speaker 2: I think any of us anticipated. We thought it would
Speaker 2: be relevant in a ten year timescale, but looking at
Speaker 2: just how fast it's moved over the first five years
Speaker 2: of our existence has been validating and it's only accelerating.
Speaker 1: And how are you doing on the ten year timeline
Speaker 1: of making the battery a commercial product.
Speaker 2: We are on schedule effect, if anything were a bit
Speaker 2: ahead of schedule. We have been lucky. There's always a
Speaker 2: certain amount of luck anytime you're trying something brand new,
Speaker 2: and we have been fortunate to turn over a couple
Speaker 2: of cards that have come up the way that we
Speaker 2: hoped it would. On the other hand, you make your
Speaker 2: own luck and doesn't happen by accident that you make
Speaker 2: a lot of linear progress. But the other reason that
Speaker 2: we're able to do that is on the market side
Speaker 2: of things, we understood what success looked like. We didn't
Speaker 2: wonder if a certain combination of specifications would succeed in
Speaker 2: the market. And that's because of the investment that we
Speaker 2: made very early on in the deep analytics, and this
Speaker 2: is thanks to our co founder Marko Ferrara. The functionality
Speaker 2: that he built in the models allowed us to really
Speaker 2: understand those trade offs and be very precise about how
Speaker 2: to make them so that when billion team are in
Speaker 2: the lab working with the chemistry, they know how one
Speaker 2: dollar of capex trades off and the curve on which
Speaker 2: it lies with one point of roundtrip efficiency.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of jargon. What Mateo is saying that
Speaker 1: whether a battery succeeds commercially or not depends on its
Speaker 1: upfront cost, also known as capital expenditure or capex. It's
Speaker 1: why Marco puts so much care into spreadsheets that model
Speaker 1: how changes that form mikes to its battery affect its price.
Speaker 1: Another factor that plays a role in the battery's success
Speaker 1: is so called round trip efficiency, which is simply how
Speaker 1: much electricity you get back from the battery for every
Speaker 1: unit of energy you put in. You may think that
Speaker 1: you should get all of it back one hundred percent
Speaker 1: round trip efficiency, but the laws of physics and chemistry
Speaker 1: do not allow that. There will always be some losses.
Speaker 1: If the losses are like twenty five percent, then the
Speaker 1: cost of running the battery increases quite a lot. If
Speaker 1: the losses are less than ten percent, then it's a
Speaker 1: much more manageable situation. Okay, so let's look at the
Speaker 1: form battery, which is a weird battery because of what
Speaker 1: we know of batteries as these highly specialized chemicals doing
Speaker 1: very specific things like hurtling an electric car at one
Speaker 1: hundred miles per hour. The form battery cannot do that.
Speaker 2: To be clear, it could, it would be a very
Speaker 2: poor choice. All batteries have trade offs, and the trick
Speaker 2: is to pick, for a given chemistry the right application
Speaker 2: that doesn't care about the things that it's not good at. Right,
Speaker 2: and so, iron air batteries are not particularly suited. In fact,
Speaker 2: they're not at all suited for motive applications moving things around,
Speaker 2: but they are very well suited to this multi day
Speaker 2: intermitcy problem on the grid that we're solving. All right,
Speaker 2: so describe this battery. So Form is commercializing an iron
Speaker 2: air battery, and it is very much what it sounds like.
Speaker 2: We are rusting and unrusting iron in a battery. Humans
Speaker 2: are very familiar with the fact that iron rusts. Right,
Speaker 2: We had a whole age named after a period where
Speaker 2: humans were working with iron about three thousand years ago,
Speaker 2: and so we've learned a lot about how iron rusts,
Speaker 2: and that is the whole world of corrosion science. Right,
Speaker 2: how do we prevent iron from rusting? How do we
Speaker 2: make sure that those bridges stay up for a long time?
Speaker 2: And what we are commercializing is that reaction and then
Speaker 2: also in reverse, So how do we control that reaction
Speaker 2: and how do we get it to perform in a
Speaker 2: battery to the highest possible level of performance at the
Speaker 2: lowest possible cost. So that's really the task that we
Speaker 2: have been working on for the last five years. A
Speaker 2: reversible rust battery.
Speaker 1: I assume you have a fresh piece of iron, you
Speaker 1: leave it out in the open. It's going to take
Speaker 1: months before it becomes rust or at least gets a
Speaker 1: layer of rust outside, which stops the rest of the
Speaker 1: iron underneath it from becoming rust Your battery will do
Speaker 1: that much much faster.
Speaker 2: That's correct, and the idea of the rusting happening on
Speaker 2: the surface is one of the interesting things that we
Speaker 2: have figured out how to deal with. It does take
Speaker 2: a long time if you just let it happen on
Speaker 2: its own as a reaction. It's a very actively driven
Speaker 2: reaction that we have within the cell. So we know
Speaker 2: how to drive that reaction under the conditions that we
Speaker 2: are providing to get the speed of this reaction both
Speaker 2: on charge and discharge so that it's suitable for this
Speaker 2: multi day application. We do not have months to wait
Speaker 2: for the oxidization to just sort of happen naturally, so
Speaker 2: it's very much a controlled reaction that we're driving.
Speaker 1: When people think of ion rusting, they don't really think
Speaker 1: about energy. So where is energy coming into all of this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so when we talk about energy, we are talking
Speaker 2: about electrons.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is a battery after all, So if people know
Speaker 2: something about batteries, they probably have heard of lithium ion batteries,
Speaker 2: and indeed that is the name because there is an
Speaker 2: ion of lithium that in fact is going back and
Speaker 2: forth from the anode to the cathode, and that is
Speaker 2: what provides that charge. Right when electron is either given
Speaker 2: up or it's given back, the lithium ion is the
Speaker 2: one that is conveying that charge for us. There's no
Speaker 2: iron ion that's going back and forth. It's a hydroxide.
Speaker 2: So this is a combination between hydrogen and oxen, and
Speaker 2: that is the molecule that is doing the work of
Speaker 2: either accepting or giving up the electron. So you're right,
Speaker 2: iron in the wild gives up its electron for free.
Speaker 2: Essentially it goes somewhere else, right, And the trick is
Speaker 2: that we capture that electron in this liquid environment where
Speaker 2: this hydroxide ion can do the work that we needed
Speaker 2: to do.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of a what just happened is Mateo,
Speaker 1: after finishing the explanation, looked over at Billy to confirm
Speaker 1: that he got it right.
Speaker 2: But of course I always check with Billy on him.
Speaker 1: So, Billy, you're the chief technology officer here at Forum Energy,
Speaker 1: there's a different way to explain this specific reaction. What
Speaker 1: is your best explanation?
Speaker 3: Sure, So the analogy here is the rusting reaction, and
Speaker 3: that reaction is actually practiced intentionally in hand warmers. So
Speaker 3: these small pocket held devices that you use when it's
Speaker 3: very cold outside and you want to keep your blood
Speaker 3: circulating into your fingertips, and those are actually full of
Speaker 3: fine iron powder that is rusting, and it's rusting very
Speaker 3: slowly and it's generating heat. And so the energy of
Speaker 3: the rusting reaction in that case is going into heat
Speaker 3: in our battery. Because we separate that and drive it
Speaker 3: electro chemically rather than just chemically, we can capture that
Speaker 3: energy has electricity. So and I know that because in
Speaker 3: the very early days of form, some of the very
Speaker 3: first iron powders that we tested I sourced by buying
Speaker 3: a bunch of handwarmers and cutting them open.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's I mean, that's how you build a billion
Speaker 1: dollar battery company.
Speaker 2: It starts with a single step. As an example of that,
Speaker 2: when they were first figuring out how to move around
Speaker 2: direct reduced iron, which is what's used for electric arc
Speaker 2: for and a steel production, and they didn't realize just
Speaker 2: how quickly this would oxize. There was a ship that
Speaker 2: had four hundred thousand tons roughly of DRI and then
Speaker 2: started to heat up because it's a giant handwarmer, and
Speaker 2: once that started to heat up, there was no stopping
Speaker 2: it and they had to sink the ship.
Speaker 3: Wow, the reaction is exacerbated by saltwater. So you know
Speaker 3: that if you have salty roads, that causes a cart
Speaker 3: to rust more rapidly. The same thing is true, so
Speaker 3: the salt in ocean water caused the rusting reaction to
Speaker 3: be accelerated.
Speaker 1: This took place in two thousand and three in the
Speaker 1: Indian Ocean, just east of Madagascar. The ship heated up
Speaker 1: to three hundred degrees celsius and understandably, the structures began
Speaker 1: to fail. Everyone who was on the ship was evacuated
Speaker 1: and got off. Okay, Billy, how did you get to.
Speaker 2: Be doing this?
Speaker 1: I know the handwarmers were involved, but I assume there's
Speaker 1: more that you had to put in to get this job.
Speaker 3: So. I grew up in northern Pennsylvania. I studied material
Speaker 3: science at Penn State. As an undergraduate, I had an
Speaker 3: opportunity to do an internship where I worked on the
Speaker 3: development of a battery component, and that was really where
Speaker 3: I first got excited and interested in batteries. I came
Speaker 3: for the science and I stayed for the mission. So
Speaker 3: I got interested in batteries because of the technical problems
Speaker 3: inside of them, and then through my PhD, I really
Speaker 3: came to realize how impactful batteries could be on climate
Speaker 3: and on energy.
Speaker 1: What are the technical challenges that have kept you going?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's a simple reaction in principle, but of
Speaker 3: course the devil is always in the details. Many of
Speaker 3: the challenges relate to controlling that reaction, so making it
Speaker 3: be mechanically stable. You know, if you have a car
Speaker 3: rust that can mechanically detach. That has been one of
Speaker 3: the challenges and one of the puzzles that we've had
Speaker 3: to sort through. How do you design that to be
Speaker 3: robust and durable and reproducible. Others are the efficiency of
Speaker 3: the cell, So how do you have a good high
Speaker 3: fraction of the energy that you put into the battery
Speaker 3: come back out when you discharge it? And it's one
Speaker 3: thing to make an iron air battery that cycles, and
Speaker 3: it's another one entirely to design the cell that is
Speaker 3: scalable and low cost, and that is a critical and
Speaker 3: essential piece of the challenge.
Speaker 2: It is fairly easy to make a terrible iron air battery.
Speaker 2: It is very hard to make that chemistry perform at
Speaker 2: its highest possible level at the lowest possible cost. And
Speaker 2: you can only do it when you have people the
Speaker 2: caliber of Billy and the team that we built.
Speaker 1: Here after the break, how the Inflation Reduction Act helps
Speaker 1: form and when you might be able to drive by
Speaker 1: some form batteries yourself. What specifically does the Inflation Reduction
Speaker 1: Act do for you as a company.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a seven hundred page document, so it's hard
Speaker 2: to say that there's one thing that it does. However,
Speaker 2: from a broad perspective, the best thing that it probably
Speaker 2: does for us as an individual company is it it
Speaker 2: very clearly identifies the role that energy storage can sort
Speaker 2: to take a normative stance should have in this broader
Speaker 2: energy transition to a decarbonized system, and in particular a
Speaker 2: decarbonized electric grid. And so there are for example, take
Speaker 2: the investment tax credit for standalone storage. This is something
Speaker 2: that the industry has been working on for years to
Speaker 2: try and get past. This was a benefit that was
Speaker 2: already there for solar, and the storage industry wanted storage
Speaker 2: to qualify for that same credit, and so very unambiguously
Speaker 2: it's in the bill there, And so that's a very
Speaker 2: clear signal that storage is intended to be very much
Speaker 2: alongside these other large scale infrastructure type technologies being deployed
Speaker 2: in large volumes on the grid.
Speaker 1: If it's possible, can you walk through how a tax
Speaker 1: credit meant for storage would apply for a commercial project
Speaker 1: that you will be building.
Speaker 2: Sure, So the baseline of the investment tax credit is
Speaker 2: a thirty percent tax credit on the capex value of
Speaker 2: a project, and there are certain adders on top of
Speaker 2: that ten percent adders that come in for domestic content
Speaker 2: or for the location of that asset if it's in
Speaker 2: a disadvantaged community or economic development community for example. There's
Speaker 2: also adders for the owners in the case that they
Speaker 2: are nonprofit for example. So it takes the effective cost
Speaker 2: to the buyer down by as much as two thirds potentially.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is industrial policy written into the tax CUD
Speaker 2: for sure.
Speaker 1: When will you build your first commercial project?
Speaker 2: Our first commercial projects will start to be deployed with
Speaker 2: our partners towards the end of twenty twenty four. And
Speaker 2: that's also the pace at which this industry moves. You
Speaker 2: can't turn large volumes of infrastructure on overnight.
Speaker 1: In December, Forum announced that it will build a seven
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty million dollar factory in West Virginia to
Speaker 1: make its batteries. That site will start manufacturing the batteries
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four. This is a critical steps ten
Speaker 1: year timeline of making the battery affordable for its customers.
Speaker 1: Power companies looking to eliminate the use of coal and gas.
Speaker 2: So our relationships with utilities go back to even before
Speaker 2: we've formally founded the company, when we were just talking
Speaker 2: about ideas and talking about that kind of storage that
Speaker 2: could replace a coal plant, and really working on on
Speaker 2: what that could mean with the utilities, so that this
Speaker 2: is not something new to them that we understood, the value,
Speaker 2: that we understood the key drivers for their participation in
Speaker 2: the energy transition and storage within that.
Speaker 1: Now, let's talk about the battery and its application on
Speaker 1: the grid. What would it look like when you do
Speaker 1: put one of these on the grid, Like somebody's driving
Speaker 1: past one of the farm energy battery application, what is
Speaker 1: it going to look like to them?
Speaker 2: It will look like shipping containers sitting in a field.
Speaker 2: That's really what it will look like. Not exactly sort
Speaker 2: of a charismatic megafauna power project, if you will, but
Speaker 2: in order to get to the cost targets that were
Speaker 2: going after it sort of can't afford to look like much.
Speaker 1: Now most people know of Tesla as an electric car company.
Speaker 1: Why did you move away from a company that does
Speaker 1: that to something that is working to help the grid.
Speaker 2: Well, I was never a car guy in the beginning.
Speaker 2: I'm not somebody who turns wrenches underhoods off time. In fact,
Speaker 2: I think we should try and do with fewer cars
Speaker 2: in the world, if I'm allowed to say that out loud. Now.
Speaker 2: Tesla is a wonderful place and I really enjoyed my
Speaker 2: time there, But the car was not why I went there.
Speaker 2: The powertrain was why I went to Tesla. That was
Speaker 2: what was compelling to me. Tesla at the time was
Speaker 2: the only company that I could find that had all
Speaker 2: the pieces that were necessary to succeed putting lithium ion
Speaker 2: on the grid. And I had already been working in
Speaker 2: the grid entergy storage business for about five years at
Speaker 2: that point, and very clearly the next wave would be
Speaker 2: lithium minin. This was this was two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2: That was as clear as day to me. But to
Speaker 2: be successful, you can't just buy a lithium eye on
Speaker 2: cell and slap it on the grid. That's simply not
Speaker 2: how it works. You do need to make a safe, controllable,
Speaker 2: robust system, and Tesla, because of the cars, of course,
Speaker 2: had already designed one. Now it happened to be in
Speaker 2: a mobile application. But it wasn't hard for me, and
Speaker 2: it wasn't hard for JB. Stravel, one of the co founders,
Speaker 2: my boss, the CTO of Tesla at the time, to
Speaker 2: see that same thing. And that was essentially my night
Speaker 2: job for the first four years that I was at
Speaker 2: the company. For five years I was at the company,
Speaker 2: but it was in many ways my passion. That's why
Speaker 2: I was there at Tesla.
Speaker 1: You had a pretty good job, you left that and
Speaker 1: came to form Probably have a better job now, but
Speaker 1: it's more complicated than that, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Actually you sound a little bit like my parents.
Speaker 2: I left a perfectly good job. Why would I do that.
Speaker 2: I was fortunate that I was able to leave that job.
Speaker 2: For me, that was long enough, seven and a half
Speaker 2: years at Tesla. I was ready for a new challenge.
Speaker 2: The company change a lot while I was there, so
Speaker 2: did I. Of course. We went from three hundred people
Speaker 2: to about thirty thousand people over that time period, and
Speaker 2: that's just a very different place and I really like
Speaker 2: working on the earlier stage stuff, and so that was
Speaker 2: sort of the main reason why why for me it
Speaker 2: was a good time to leave Kendilly. There are people
Speaker 2: who were going to be better at the job that
Speaker 2: I was going to have to do going forward that
Speaker 2: I was too, but going through the moment's transition. The
Speaker 2: place that I did that was a very fertile place,
Speaker 2: and that was or now it's called Activity, used to
Speaker 2: be called Cyclotron Road. My good friend elan Ger was
Speaker 2: the founder executive director there and he basically invited me
Speaker 2: to sort of hang out at Cyclotron Road up there
Speaker 2: at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. I think officially I was
Speaker 2: an entrepreneur in residence there. You be a part of
Speaker 2: that community there. There's just a lot of great innovative
Speaker 2: thinking that's happening there, and so it was sort of
Speaker 2: an easy community to tap into and just give me
Speaker 2: sort of a place to do that. And my pathway
Speaker 2: to becoming part of the founding team at Forum started
Speaker 2: as a thought experiment where I thought I would end
Speaker 2: up discarding the notion that you could replace a coal
Speaker 2: plant with a battery I thought it was going to
Speaker 2: disprove a thought rather than prove one. But somewhat to
Speaker 2: my surprise and I guess happy outcome, that turned out
Speaker 2: not to be the case.
Speaker 1: It's very rare that you hire a chief executive officer
Speaker 1: of a startup who wants to prove that the startups
Speaker 1: idea is not going to work.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's a good way to go about it. Frankly.
Speaker 2: You might as well try and prove that it's a
Speaker 2: terrible idea first rather than finding it out later on.
Speaker 2: And I think that's part of the reason why the
Speaker 2: founding team is to me, was so compelling, is we
Speaker 2: all had that same mindset. None of us wanted to
Speaker 2: work on something that we thought would not scale for
Speaker 2: some fundamental reason, and we really kicked the ideas around
Speaker 2: as hard as we possibly could. And you know, that's
Speaker 2: how good science is done, frankly, right, You try and
Speaker 2: disprove the hypothesis. That's the scientific method, and so we
Speaker 2: took that same approach.
Speaker 1: Since Mateo has been at three different battery comps of
Speaker 1: very different sizes, I wanted to know did he have
Speaker 1: any entrepreneurial advice?
Speaker 2: Do I have an entrepreneurial advice. Be a part of
Speaker 2: a great founding team. It's all about the people, it
Speaker 2: really is. And the other is make sure that you
Speaker 2: are working on a problem that matters. And one thing
Speaker 2: that we talk about here at FORM is that we
Speaker 2: have built a great team of problem solvers. But before
Speaker 2: we solve problems, we have to be great problem finders.
Speaker 2: And I would say that at Forum we have found
Speaker 2: a great problem to work on to solve, and that
Speaker 2: unlocks a lot of things beyond it. And what I
Speaker 2: mean by that in part, if you find the right
Speaker 2: problem to solve, it attracts the right people. And solving
Speaker 2: multi day storage, coming up with that battery that does
Speaker 2: allow you to replace a coal plant is a big enough,
Speaker 2: hard enough, compelling enough problem that you get the best
Speaker 2: people who want to work on that.
Speaker 1: That was a fascinating conversation. Thanks for giving us the tour.
Speaker 3: Thanks very much, Thank you, Thanks for coming in to day.
Speaker 2: It's great to meet you.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about Form Energy and
Speaker 1: especially the story of those handwarmers, you can check out
Speaker 1: a link in the show notes to a feature story
Speaker 1: I wrote. Thank you so much for listening to Zero.
Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to
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Speaker 1: If you've got a comment or question, send us an
Speaker 1: email at zero pod at bloomberg dot net. You can
Speaker 1: also tweet at me I am at Akshatrati. Zero's producer
Speaker 1: is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Drisco. Our
Speaker 1: theme music is composed by Wondering Special thanks to kirubindrim
Speaker 1: i'm Akshatrati back next week.