Energy Cache Media Presence

Energy Cache was written about recently in a posting on Earth2Tech.  The source of that post was the recent Wall Street Journal’s Eco:nomics conference where Bill Gates commented on a company that he was involved with that was doing “gravel on ski lifts.”  Also, included was a link to our patent and our operational video.  I'd like to comment on a few of the things mentioned, and not-mentioned, in the article.

Reduced Technology Risk for Ease of Market Adoption
Energy Cache's design philosophy, from the company's founding, was that energy markets want minimal technology risk.  This has been my experience starting with my early engineering career developing fuel cell technology, to my more recent experience as an investor in solar companies.  In both those cases, the technological unknowns were the least appreciated by the established, conservative, market. While Energy Cache has made impressive technological developments, we developed the technology so that we could, as much as possible, co-opt the existing expertise, supplier base, and operational knowledge from existing industries and use them to solve the problems that we wanted to address with energy storage.  This is how our small team has been able to design and construct our 50kW installation on impressively efficient schedule and budget.

Ease of Siting
The difficulty, for current technologies, as stated in the article, is siting and permitting times. Pumped hydro needs two large reservoirs; compressed air energy storage (CAES) requires an underground cavern that doesn't leak (the efforts of "above-ground" CAES solutions excepted).  At the recent ARPA-E Summit, Secretary Chu stated that "geologic solutions" would be necessary going forwards, regardless of the current siting and permitting difficulties.  This is a view echoed by Pike Research.  However, one of the pieces of brilliance in Energy Cache's approach comes from the fact that we will likely not experience the same siting and permitting difficulties of pumped-hydro and CAES.  This comes, in part, from the flexibility achieved by using a low-cost base unit.  A typical pumped hydro facility consists of a single, or very few pumps/generators (PG&E's Helms Pumped Storage facility consists of three 400MW turbines, for a total of 1.2GW).  This is the only way to make either the technology, or the economics, work - build at very large scale.  In doing so, such installations become very difficult to find appropriate sites for.  Energy Cache's system deploys many units and can be far more flexible in terms of economic operating size.  Therefore, we have already found a tremendous number of sites suitable for our more flexible technology that would be inappropriate for CAES or pumped hydro.  In addition, we have several other benefits, which I won't discuss here, that we expect to greatly reduce the permitting difficulties that have previously been mentioned.

Outstanding Economics
The article says that "Terrestrial storage isn’t cheap."  This is true in absolute terms, due to the size of these projects (as mentioned above).  However, on a kW or kWh basis, pumped hydro storage and CAES are among the cheapest technologies currently known, as listed in EPRI's Energy Storage Report, page 4-22.  Pumped-hydro storage is the de facto storage solution that every utility would like to deploy.  We believe, and this is backed up by the data, that Energy Cache will have a compellingly competitive cost structure as compared to these technologies. In addition, Energy Cache has solid data that demonstrates that we will be one of the highest revenue earning storage technologies possible.  This puts us in a class of our own in terms of potential profitability.

With a substantial number of operating sites identified, extraordinary economics, a rapid path to market, and the backing of some extraordinary investors and technology visionaries, I'm very proud of what Energy Cache has accomplished in such a short time, and where we'll be headed in the future.

The Gates Notes

Bill Gates had a really good writeup on the need for energy storage and what we're doing at Energy Cache.  Check it out.

Energy Cache Triumphant at TCA Pitch Event

The company I've started, Energy Cache, came out with top honors at the recent Tech Coast Angels pitch competition.  Considered the "Best Investment Opportunity" of 2011, the award was granted to Energy Cache from a very competitive field of around 170 entrants.

It's great to be receiving this recognition from the Tech Coast Angels as this pitch event is a premier event in Southern California's technology scene. What's particularly gratifying is that the competition, at this level, was extremely talented, and so to actually take away the top prize is a real privilege.

Energy Cache is an early stage technology company, backed by Pasadena incubator, Idealab. Our extremely low-cost energy storage solution improves grid reliability, better manages the transmission network, and enables wide-spread adoption of renewable energy at the lowest possible cost to consumers.

Energy Cache was founded to provide a solution to the grid's problem of increased volatility. Mass adoption of renewable energy, the fact that peak demand continues to grow faster than average demand, and the fact that it is getting harder and harder to build transmission lines, is really driving the need for energy storage at a very large scale. Without storage, these problems will be solved the way the grid has always solved problems - by building more capacity and putting in greater capacity margins. This will result in far greater electricity prices than without storage. There are a whole bunch of other advantages for storage, which I'm pretty excited about, but this boils down to building the grid that we need for the future.

Idealab's mission is to create and operate pioneering technology companies. Founded in 1996 by entrepreneur Bill Gross, Idealab has founded more than 75 companies including eSolar, Inc., Energy Innovations, Overture Services, Inc., CitySearch, Picasa and Internet Brands. Current operating companies are providing innovative technology solutions in industries such as software, search, robotics and alternative energy fields.

So, congratulations to the other finalists in the competition, and thank you to the Tech Coast Angels for putting on the event!

Energy Storage - the next "next big thing"

I had a great time at the ESA conference in Charlotte. The energy storage industry looks, to me, like renewable energy did in 2002. I think people are starting to understand that in order to meet the RPS targets that many states have demanded will require massive deployment of storage resources.

However, in other ways, it's not clear that this is like 2002 at all. It's more like solar in 2004 or fuel cells in 1996. There is so much interest in different technologies and everyone is trying something new. Just like solar has concentrating thermal-2-axis fresnel, dish (2-axis parabolic), 1-axis fresnel, 1-axis parabolic, monocrystalline silicon, polycrystalline silicon, front contact, back contact, triple junction, CIGS, thin film, concentrating PV, and many others, and just like fuel cells had companies developing PEM, phosphoric acid, solid oxide, direct methanol, molten carbonate and alkaline cells (and others if you start getting into metal air batteries), storage is seeing the same explosion of choice.

The established players are the battery companies. NJK, in Japan, has been selling Sodium Sulpher (NaS) for years to firm renewable capacity (due to policy decisions). Recently IPO'd A123 is moving from its transportation focus to sell utility scale battery solutions. Several other battery companies were also there.

The newcomers included flow batteries and flywheels. Beacon Power, of course had a strong presence, but it was neat to see other developments in flywheels by other early stage companies present.

With the ARRA funding now deployed and the ARPA-e storage grants getting underway, it will be very exciting to see what happens in the next 12 months. Given how things have been over the last 18 months, finding a sector that looks like 2004 is welcome indeed.