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I'm Shail Khan. I invest in early-stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst. So for all the talk of dual-use technologies and the rise of defense tech, I realized recently that I'd never actually had a conversation on here exploring how the defense world thinks about energy. That's broad and multifaceted, obviously, so we had to start somewhere. And one place that I think is especially interesting to start is in maritime operations, where autonomy is clearly the big trend. And as we've seen on land with autonomy, that carries its own implications for energy. And of course, the requirements for batteries in particular and energy systems in general are always affected by the use case, and defense is a pretty distinct use case. So to start to understand it, I'm Shail Khan. So for all the talk of dual-use technologies and the rise of defense tech, I realized recently that I brought on Dr. Andrew Nuss, who is the head of growth and strategy in the maritime division at Andoril. That's coming up after the break. Demand flexibility is now an essential part of the data center speed to power playbook. But how do data centers actually curtail load? GridBeyond is the end-to-end solution for flexible energy management. GridBeyond's advanced DERMS and VPP platform is tailored to what data centers care about most. Maximizing reliability, intelligently meeting curtailment obligations, reducing costs, and managing all your distributed resources in one place. Ready to transform your distributed energy management? Get started at gridbeyond.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the communications and marketing partner behind the most influential companies in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped ambitious companies stand out, build market leadership, and make the world a better place for them. And become category-defining brands. From breakthrough startups to global industry leaders, their team brings the expertise, relationships, and track record to accelerate your momentum. Learn more at antennagroup.com. The power plant for the modern grid isn't a building. It's a network. Energy Hub's DERMS platform connects batteries, EVs, thermostats, and commercial and industrial sites into virtual power plants that over 230 utilities dispatch as reliable grid capacity day in, day out. VPPs deploy in 60 to 100 days at 40 to 60% less cost than traditional infrastructure. And they perform like conventional generation from day one. Learn about the flexibility platform for the modern grid at energyhub.com. Andrew, welcome. Thanks for having me. Let's start sort of high level. We're going to talk about energy as it relates to the maritime world in defense. Yeah, thanks again for having me. So, you know, I think it's really important to talk about the Here at Andral and in my division's current focus, we're really focused on robotic systems in this maritime domain. So that's a lot of the focus and investment that we have right now in developing products, both for commercial users, as well as the defense market here in the U.S. and internationally as well. Maritime is an interesting domain. Every physical domain is hard. Space is hard. The ground domain is hard. The maritime domain is uniquely hard, I think, in that it is an environment that's particularly harsh. Saltwater is particularly harsh. Saltwater is particularly harsh for any robotic systems, plus the energy system, plus other capabilities that they require. Plus for undersea systems, as you go deeper and deeper into the ocean, the ocean's pressure is trying to crush and kill you as you go deeper. And the deeper you get, it just gets increasingly hard. So you can't just take a commercial off-the-shelf lithium-ion battery and put it into an underwater vehicle and expect it to survive subsea. It will last very, very little of that operational depth to get down there to interesting missions. So a lot of what we're focused on and the needs that we have is providing robotic systems that have mission relevance for a customer. So that means sensors or they're delivering payloads and all of that requires power. But then the energy required for that platform to get to the right location to do the mission that it needs to do, whether it's going down deep to the bottom of the ocean to collect data or conduct a scientific experiment, or whether it's something on the shore, a capability, or again, execute some sort of scientific mission. So a lot of what we're really challenged around in this space is the energy density that's required for us to complete those missions to then provide the customers and the users that we have with the persistence that's required, and then also the mission that the system is going to execute against. You mentioned you just can't throw a lithium-ion, a commercial lithium-ion battery down there. But before we talk more about batteries specifically, would it be right to think about at the high level that you've got kind of like two energy challenges you have to solve for in the types of vehicles that you guys are building, which is you have propulsion, as you said, like get the vehicle to the place it needs to go, and then you have to power all the onboard robotics and sensors and whatever else you're putting in there, payload delivery. Do you think of those as like two independent systems, energy systems, or is it one energy system and it's just doing two different things? It's one energy system that has to be optimized to be able to support both of those functions. And on the propulsion side, the really high-level metric that's of interest is that seawater or water in general is about 1,000 times more dense than air. So for us to move a vehicle one nautical mile takes about 1,000 times more energy than it does in the air domain, just because you're fighting much more physical resistance from the ocean environment you have. So that just changes the quantity of energy that's really required. And it's really important to get to the location that you want them to get to. It's part of the reason why for submarines, why nuclear power is so important. It's not just to provide 90 days of on-station time, subsea, and being able to do all the clandestine things they do. It's really about having the energy and the flexibility in that energy system to go long distances to get into an area and then also to be on station for long periods of time and also get back out. And that's maybe an interesting distinction from ground vehicles. Like I think about, okay, for, for passenger vehicles, there's autonomy comes almost necessarily, but certainly hand in hand with electrification. Like every Waymo is an electric car because a Waymo is essentially a computer on wheels. And for, and for that reason, amongst a number of others, like it just makes sense for it to be fully electrified, but you, but that ratio of like the energy required for the, you know, onboard compute and all those systems, the electric systems in a Waymo relative to the energy required to propel the Waymo is probably a very different ratio than what you face. As you said, you need way, way, way more power for propulsion or energy for propulsion than you do whatever you're going to do onboard the vehicle. Yeah, exactly. And also in, in, as you design the robotic system, it has to carry all of the energy it needs to complete that mission from when you leave the pier or launch off of a ship. We don't have the luxury of being able to through at a gas station to refill or a recharging station to refill that type of architecture just doesn't exist in the maritime domain. Um, there's not a huge commercial market, uh, yet, hopefully not yet, um, to really justify investing in that, that sort of, you know, gas station architecture of the sea for these systems to be able to not just get into an area, but then have the ability to go to a recharging node and recharge their batteries or refill their propulsion system and continue on a mission. So that might suggest then that whatever the requirements were for maritime vehicles for energy for in maritime vehicles prior to autonomy and robotics and everything that you guys are adding to it would basically be the same as we have today, because most of the problem is propulsion anyway. And you really adding just at the, at the margin, is that true? Or is there actually a change of foot? Uh, there's definitely a change of foot. I think in the last couple of years, there's been a change of foot in both in the national security space, but also in the commercial market. I think now we're starting to see more demand signal for different types of energy solutions and architectures that allow the robotic systems to go do the dull, dirty, and boring missions that they need to go do. I think over the last couple, maybe 20 years or so, the energy systems have kind of constrained the vehicle designs, but also the autonomy has constrained the vehicle design. So you never really got into a place where you're going to operate a robotic system. Yeah, you're going to operate two at a time. And typically it would be physically tethered to some manned platform where you'd be operating the system. Now that autonomy is becoming much more, more prevalent, um, and a bit more democratized in a sense. Uh, now we're starting to see some of the other maybe weaknesses in the systems and the designs. And part of that is, is definitely energy. So let's maybe be a little more specific then. So what, what is, what has changed and what is like the new paradigm or emergent new paradigm in terms of energy systems on these vehicles? Yeah, I, well, I think maybe to start, start the conversation there, I think with autonomy in general, I think we're just seeing more and more platforms, both ground vehicles, air vehicles, Waymos, you mentioned, undersea vehicles, that have autonomy that has been demonstrated to be trustworthy, to provide a mission at high assurance levels for our customers, again, whether it's commercial or oil and gas or the defense market. So now we're starting to see these systems kind of stretch their legs a little bit more in using one term. And then right now we're seeing the constraint being really the energy systems on board. So for undersea vehicles, the energy architectures that they need or the energy solutions that they need kind of run a gamut of different approaches. It really depends on the type of platform and what they're doing. So on one end, there's a really, really well-matured energy approach called buoyancy engines. They're used in gliders. It's a really simple buoyancy engine design that you just move. Oil. Oil from one bladder to another. It changes the density of the vehicle. And then that allows the vehicle to dive down deeper or to ascend. And then you put little wings on it and you move the center of buoyancy around on the vehicle. And now you have systems that can operate and kind of dive, dive long distances undersea. Then you change the buoyancy and they come back up. Really great capability. The Navy has used these for a long time. Commercial market uses these for a long time. The challenge with that is they. They do give you long endurance, but you don't get a lot of power on board to run sensors or different types of things. So there's very niche capabilities for what they can do, but they're really good at doing that. Then you start to shift into battery technology. That's a lot of what's been enabling undersea vehicles for a long time. A lot of what we're integrating into vehicles is lithium ion cells that are repackaged in different ways. And for undersea vehicles, you're either integrating them into a pressure vessel so that pressure vessel is what's fighting. Off the depth of the ocean so you can put stuff in there and they remain dry, which is a good thing for batteries usually. So that's one architecture. The second would be to make them a pressure tolerant system where you stack up all those cells in their battery module and then you pop them in an epoxy or another chemical so that that whole package then can withstand the pressure of the ocean. So those are the two different architectures that are used really in batteries. There's other systems that are out there. Like fuel cells and diesel electric engines that all have their own benefits, but increasingly some operational challenges associated with them. I mean, you mentioned energy density a couple of times before. Lithium ion batteries are great, but they're not that energy dense. So is it that we just haven't commercialized a substantially more energy dense battery technology? And if we could, then it would be adopted en masse in this space? Or is there something that's actually particularly good? Yeah, I think that the benefit of lithium ion is that it is used so extensively in the commercial market. The undersea vehicle market is a small fraction of the consumer space for lithium ion batteries. So we're always going to be a fast follower for the commercial market, whether it's EV technology or others. The challenge really is in trying to match the supply and the demand for those cells. And then also, like I mentioned, the sort of packaging. The packaging problem that's required for EVs, getting to the right point where you have enough demand signal to then invest in the capability to either take off the shelf battery cells and put them into pressure vessels or take them and put them into pressure tolerance systems. It's just not something you could do on like wake up one Monday morning and suddenly start making pressure tolerant batteries. There's a lot of capital intensive equipment that's required to do that, plus the certification that's testing that's required for both commercial and national security customers. Okay. And then you mentioned fuel cells and diesel electric engines. I mean, how do you think about, maybe this gets to the other axis, right? We've mostly been focusing on like what is sort of different about maritime versus on land and maybe to some extent what's different about underwater vehicles. But how do you think about like what is unique to defense as opposed to commercial in terms of the energy requirements that you have? And then how does that affect the fuel choice, for example? Yeah. I think really what the national security customers are looking for is persistence and flexibility, is giving the user some options or some flexibility in how they employ the system. It might be you're trying to gain access to a challenging part of the world and you don't want the bad guy to know that you're there. So you want to be able to swim in undersea for long distances so they don't know you're there. This is one of the advantages of a submarine. And then once you're there, you've got to have enough flexibility to be able to swim in undersea for long distances so they don't know you're there. Presence and persistence to then execute the mission. Very infrequently, do you get into an area and immediately do the job and then get back out? You're often getting in there and then you're sort of loitering or hovering or just kind of like meandering around in that area until you're getting called on to then execute something, whether you're collecting information or delivering something. And then again, you've got to get back out. So really a lot of what they're looking for is that ability to have long reach access and then the persistence on there. I think a lot of that is kind of biased by the submarine community, that they're very fortunate in that they have a power source that gives them the ability to do a lot of that and have a lot of flexibility. So there's oftentimes where we have to have conversations with the users to say, you know, this is not a manned submarine with a big nuclear power plant on it. This is a smaller vehicle. There's some compromises that you have to make in how you mission plan and execute those missions. Right. I'm right. So that we should separate out the, are you big enough and can you afford a nuclear power plant on, on the boat? If you can, then great. Um, and that'll last you a very long time. If you can't though, my presumption then is that like energy density is by far the most important thing because you need, you want persistence and you know, you're space constrained basically. So, and, and so probably diesel just makes the most sense in most cases because it's super energy dense. Is that true? I mean, diesel has other issues that I wonder how big it is. Yeah, for sure. The big challenge with systems like that is that, um, the complexity in underwater vehicles, whether it's a submarine or a small unmanned underwater vehicle is actually getting from the surface down to the depth that it needs to operate in. And then to come back up again, there's fishing nets, trawlers, and you consume a lot of energy in doing that too. So diesel electric systems require you to have to come back up to the surface and then operate on the surface for a period of time while you're running the diesel engine and you're, you're exhausting heat, you're exhausting signature, but that's the time that you're using to then recharge your batteries. And you have to do that, you know, every couple of days, that's a really complex part of the mission. You consume a lot of the energy that you're generating and coming back to the surface and going back down, you're, you're inheriting a lot of risk. Um, so there's a lot of operational trade-offs that, that, um, that complicate, uh, um, diesel electric systems. And the same goes for fuel cells. They have their own operational challenges as well. So back to what's changing now, we're seeing, we're seeing the adoption of more autonomous systems and robotics. And so those are going to be electrically powered themselves, but they'll probably, they're, as you said, using the same sort of energy system that propulsion ends up using. Um, is there anything else that's changing in terms of requirements that is impacting fuel engine slash fuel cell, whatever, you know, source of, uh, power generation? Yeah, I think as users start to gain access to more and more of these vehicles, their concept of operation and how they will deploy these systems starts to change too. Again, going back over the last 20 years, a lot of these underwater vehicles have been deployed off of manned platforms. So whether it's a submarine or a ship, and again, whether it's commercial defense. And so that choice of energy system, uh, drives, um, how, how you certify and the safety level and the risk level of where you host these vehicles. And, and that's been one of the barriers in the market, especially on the defense market in the last 10 or 15 years is getting through the complex certification process that's required to then basically just get a sheet of paper that says this battery system with this vehicle is safe to operate off of this ship or out of this base. I, we have, I have let a lot of batteries on fire in my last 10 or 15 years. And so I think that's, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's one of the things that I've learned in the last 10 or 15 years, um, to go through this testing process. It can take up to a year or two and nevermind the cost and the time to invest in that, uh, testing regime. Um, you're then losing the ability to keep pace with the commercial market as battery technology changes. So if, if it takes two to three years to certify a battery system for use, then you've now missed out on two or three cycles of commercial investment in this space. So you start to, you know, again, it's a cost of the actual batteries and the testing more importantly, it's your, the opportunity cost of losing out to access to some of that, that, um, new technology that's coming out of the commercial market. For data centers, connecting to the grid quickly means two things, building distributed energy and having a plan for demand flexibility. GridBeyond helps with both. GridBeyond's DERMS and VPP platform unlocks the potential of distributed assets and dispatches flexibility into the right market at the right time. And this is in software. GridBeyond supports developers every step of the way from modeling your highest ROI energy mix to orchestrating the full set of outcomes. around a data center. The track record speaks for itself. GridBeyond manages over 1,400 sites and more than 3.7 gigawatts of load across Europe, the UK, and the US. Learn more at gridbeyond.com or click the link in the show notes. 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Energy Hub's DERMS platform has been trained on years of real dispatch data from over 2.6 million DERs, so utilities can plan with confidence. That means consistent load reduction across a four-hour event window, even during the most uncertain peak periods. Utilities target, shape, and verify capacity, down to the meter. Unlock flexible capacity that costs 40-60% less to deploy than traditional infrastructure in a fraction of the time it takes you to break ground on a peaker plant. Learn more at energyhub.com. On fire risk from lithium-ion batteries, do you end up having to do anything unique and special, or is it just testing the batteries to make sure that the fire risk is sufficiently low? There's a lot of different ways to do it. There's a lot of definitely a lot of design considerations that have to get made into the packaging of the full battery to comply with some of these policies. Some of them are designed for good reasons. There's a lot of really important submarine safety requirements that you would expect for putting these kinds of systems onto a submarine, let's say. But there's also a lot of really strong commercial policies and regulations that the EV market has to comply with as well that we should be able to adopt and to be able to use or sort of grandfather into some of these systems. So, some of the defense market applications. But then on top of that, we have other certification requirements that complicate the design, but again, complicate the ability to move at pace with new battery technology. Is there anything that doesn't exist today that if you could wave a magic wand, you think would be a game changer? I mean, I'm sure like a 2,000 watt hour per liter battery or whatever that works perfectly, but what is it that you think the market hasn't built yet, possibly because there isn't a big enough? Yeah, I think there's probably two things. I think one is compressing the time to take new batteries at the cell level and to be able to package them into applications that are suitable for the maritime environment. Again, part of that is design and the physical potting or integrating it into pressure vessels, but also the certification and testing processes. So, collapsing that timeline would be, I think, really an impactful capability, again, both commercial and defense. On the other side, it would be really interesting if there was the ability to set up depots both on the surface and subsea, much like an EV charging station that was open to all kinds of different systems to be able to come to and recharge, whether it's underwater vehicles or surface vehicles or unmanned aerial systems to kind of find a hub, recharge, and then move on with your missions. It would allow, it would sort of unlock a lot of opportunities for you to use them. So, I think it would really energize the market. It's just really understanding and establishing the commercial viability of this kind of ecosystem. It's not probably as economically viable as having an EV charging station every other block in a town, but, you know, setting something up every 150 miles, maybe that might be interesting. Does recharge time matter? Right? Like, could it be a slow charger? It doesn't, right? Because, you know, you're probably, your time between missions is not so tight. Yeah. For underwater vehicles, you're typically operating at two to three knots is like an optimal speed. So, these are really slow missions typically. So, if it was a slower recharge time, I think that would be acceptable. Yeah. So, we've been talking a lot about the underwater vehicles. Have we talked about surface vehicles? Is there a different dynamic at play and any different changes underfoot? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think the commercial shipping market has kind of gone stagnant in the last couple of decades and really anchored around gas prices, I think, is driving a lot of this. There's always some interest in wind-powered vessels, and there's been a little bit more chatter about that in the last couple of years. Those are interesting to kind of augment your normal propulsion systems. But in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of interest in in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of interest in wind-powered vessels. So, in the last year, two years, really, I think nuclear power has become more of a popular topic around surface platforms. The Maritime Administration here in the U.S. that's tied under the Department of Transportation has put out some public requests for information around applications for nuclear power and commercial shipping, which there's a lot to unpack there. There's a lot of policy and regulatory challenges. There's a lot of investment that's required, and there is a lot of investment in that space. But it will also change a lot of commercial shipping design and how we operate these systems. So, it'll be interesting to see how that takes off and if the administration has the commitment into that space and helps kind of jumpstart the markets, and then we try to find a way to bring in the commercial investment that's required to really scale it. I guess the question for nuclear propulsion and commercial vehicles is like an economic one. My presumption is that in defense world, you're going to have to have a lot of investment in that space. So, you know, the mission requirements and so on, Trump, like, is this energy super expensive? And so, the energy, if you were just measuring the levelized cost of energy off of a Navy nuclear power system, it would be really, really high, I'm sure. And it would also be really, really high in a commercial vessel, probably. And so, is the presumption that we could tolerate that or that the cost could come down a lot? Or like, what would make that economically feasible, I suppose? Yeah. Some of what I've read and just conversations with commercial shippers is that it opens up some different operations for them. A lot of the commercial ships, and I'm speaking as a non-commercial shipping expert here, other than, you know, a couple of white papers that I've read, is they're typically operating right now around 10 to 12 knots. That's like their optimal speed for most commercial ships now. And that's kind of optimized around a combination of gas price and gas consumption, and then also the amount of energy that they're going to be using. So, I think that's one of the things that's going to be really, really important. Something like nuclear power would allow those ships to go faster. So, maybe they can go 20 knots or 25 knots because they're not as concerned about gas prices and emissions specifically. So, there might be opportunities for them to compress the delivery schedules from port to port, and they can get, they, you know, they might be able to offer a premium or sell their services at a premium to some customers that want something in five days instead of seven days. But it might also open up some opportunities for them to compress the delivery schedules from port to port, and they can get, they, you know, they might be able to offer a premium or sell their services at a premium to some customers that want something in five days instead of seven days. opportunities for them to compress the delivery schedules from port to port, and they can get, they, you know, they might be able to offer a premium or sell their services at a premium to some customers that want something in five days. If I, let's say I wanted to dominate the selling listing my own cells for undersea vehicles or something, would I have a market size in the megawatt hours, gigawatt hours, in the tens of gigawatt hours? How big is this? Yeah, I think off the cuff, we're probably, as a full market, not just as Andrew, but as a full market, we're probably in the couple hundred megawatt hours, if I had to guess the number. And I think what we're trying to all forecast is whether that magnitude of megawatt hours is actually gigawatt hours three years from now, because we're seeing enough demand signal from our commercial and national security customers to provide that demand signal. And then we can, again, start to get ahead of the design and architecture of new battery technologies. Right. And I presume you're low volume, high willingness to pay on a relative basis compared to commercial. Yeah. And for us, especially in maritime and especially in undersea, we need very reliable systems. There are times. Where we're executing very sensitive missions or very important missions, and we just have to have the energy system be super reliable so that we know that we get the vehicle back. There might be other cases where it's a low cost, a tradable system, and you're willing to sacrifice maybe an 80% reliable battery system, and that might be fine. But for a lot of the missions that we're looking at right now, and some of the use cases and the cost of the systems, we need something that's very reliable. I guess last question for you is, there are some things that are more novel and newer, but. I could see being pretty attractive for this application, often the types of things that also are people thinking about for space applications. For example, nuclear batteries, radiovoltaic devices. Has that been on your radar? Yeah. We've talked to a couple of partners that are in this space. There are a lot of space technologies that have been operated and used for decades now. And there is a use case to be able to augment them for the maritime domain. These are typically lower power systems, but for some of our systems, maybe persistent sensing, or other systems, and maybe not vehicles, there's a lot of really interesting use cases for it. I think a lot of the barrier there is to accelerate the supply chain there also. Where are you getting isotopes from? Where are you getting the subcomponents from? But then also working through the policy and the regulatory challenges associated with it. It's not even really a challenge. It just has not been done in the maritime domain in quite a while. So working through the regulatory partners to be able to accelerate that and really open up that market. All right, Andrew, this was fascinating. Thank you for educating me and appreciate your time. I appreciate it. Thank you. Dr. Andrew Nuss is the head of growth and strategy in the maritime division at Andoril. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. This episode is produced by Max Savage-Levinson, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Anne Bailey edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. All of our episodes, they're on YouTube. Subscribe to Latitude Media for episodes of this show and OpenCircuit. And you can find the audio version of this show anywhere you get your podcasts. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.