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