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Hey, it's Stephen. Here we are in the last leg of summer, and the whole gang is going to be taking the last couple of weeks of August off from recording. So in place of our normal installment, we are dropping an episode of The Green Blueprint into the feed. This episode features a conversation between host Laura Pierpoint and Form Energy CEO Mateo Jaramillo. Form is one of the best-known and well-capitalized long-duration storage companies. It makes iron-air batteries with 100-hour durations. And this is a particularly timely interview because Form just closed a $750 million Series G funding round. It brings the company's total investment to $2 billion, and the company is on the IPO watch list. The new funding round is going to help Form continue boosting its manufacturing plant in West Virginia, where it's making batteries for its first commercial deployments. And this episode is all about the complexities Form dealt with in standing up that manufacturing line. Of course, building a commercial production line is one of the most important things that we're going to be talking about in this episode. It is so much different than proving the batteries work, and Form did all of it. Mateo is a really good interview. He's incredibly candid and is definitely one of the most influential people in the storage industry. And there are a lot of lessons from what Form went through and is still going through for other climate tech companies. Before we get into it, I just want to let you know that we will soon be on a new schedule. We're going to be releasing episodes on Tuesdays instead of Fridays. That'll start in early September. So the next regular episode will be out on September 8th. We've got some content in the feed between now and then. But if you're itching for our regular episodes, go on over to YouTube and watch there. We've got all our video episodes over the last year there. We're building an audience and we'd love for you to be there and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with new episodes. In the meantime, enjoy this episode of The Green Blueprint. And if you like it, don't forget to subscribe to The Green Blueprint as well, anywhere you listen to your shows. All right, let's get into it. We went from quite literally batteries the size of a cup, like a coffee cup, to batteries that are now 80,000 pounds in a shipping container. And, you know, that journey is not going to be linear, I can tell you that. Lithium-ion batteries are storing energy for the grid in increasingly large volumes. But to solve for all of the grid's balancing needs, we could use energy storage with a much longer duration and a lower price point. If you can make energy for the grid, you can make energy for the grid. If you can make a battery for $20 a kilowatt hour, you get the 100 hours, and you have a very entitled place to bring a ton of value to the grid. It is differentiated, it enhances the value of all the rest of the systems in there, and it makes the entire portfolio of resources, whatever they are, operate more efficiently, and the whole thing is cheaper. Matteo Jaramillo has been in the battery industry for over 20 years, including seven years building Tesla's storage business from the ground up. But he knew that replacing a gas peaker plant with an electric peaker would require a fundamental different approach to chemistry and to cost. When we started the company, we thought the probability of success was fairly low. Like, go invent a new type of battery that is going to solve the multi-day duration problem. Okay, that sounds amazing. There is no risk-free version of that, right? I'm Laura Pierpoint, and this is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We've already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of these solutions are not. These technologies are not yet commercial, and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don't have decades to get these solutions commercialized. We have years. In today's episode, we're speaking with Matteo Jaramillo, CEO and co-founder of Form Energy. Form is on the cusp of bringing its massive long-duration batteries to utilities around the country. But to make it happen, the company had to overcome immense manufacturing hurdles. OpenCircuit is brought to you by Energy Hub, the flexibility platform for the modern grid. More than 230 utilities trust Energy Hub to build and operate virtual power plants, delivering 3.6 gigawatts of flexible capacity. As the resources grow, okay, this is really great. This is an amazing resource. I can use it. It's really valuable. But here's what I really need to do to make it as good as or better than my existing conventional capacity. Paul Hines is the chief scientist at Energy Hub, where his team develops out-of-the-box technology. He's also the chief scientist at Energy Hub, algorithms that turn millions of DERs into flexible capacity utilities can stake their grid planning on. My team is working on the algorithms that allow us to meet the utility's goals for shaping these virtual power plants. Machine learning keeps raising the ceiling on what VPPs can deliver. Energy Hub's platform is trained on years of data from millions of devices, optimized for utility needs across every season and every grid condition. We're working with utilities not to just enable that capacity, but also make it more flexible so that utilities can use it, you know, more times per year for longer events in ways that are valuable to both customer and utility. Later in the show, Paul explains how Energy Hub's platform helps utilities scale VPPs for their unique needs as grid demands evolve. Learn more at energyhub.com. OpenCircuit is supported by Everyday Electric. You might know them by their former name, Renew Home. We are at a pivotal moment. Energy demand is growing faster than the with savings before jumping to new expensive infrastructure. They already run the country's largest residential VPP, coordinating over six gigawatts of capacity. And now they're expanding partnerships with energy providers and OEMs so that products like thermostats, EVs, and batteries can help households save money and support the grid. That's home energy as it should be. Learn more at everydayelectric.com. What if you gave your climate donations the same due diligence you gave your investments? That's what Giving Green does. Giving Green researches the strategies and nonprofits best positioned to unlock the next big climate breakthrough and sends 100% of every dollar donated to the Giving Green Fund directly to them. Maximize your impact per dollar, no cuts or guesswork. Make your first gift before the new year and it will be matched up to $500. Go to givinggreen.earth.circuit. Forum Energy is commercializing a new class of iron storage for the grid. Its batteries work by oxidizing and reducing iron, literally rusting and unrusting the most abundant substance on earth. After years of R&D and proving the tech, Forum Energy recently completed a one million square foot factory on the site of an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia. And with demand surging on grids around the country, utilities and hyperscalers are more interested than ever. But it hasn't been easy. I talked with grueling realities of scaling up manufacturing, using AI to drive material science discovery, and what it really takes to build the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition. Mateo, thank you so much for joining us here on The Green Blueprint. I'm so excited to have you. Thanks for having me, Lara. Okay, so let's start at the beginning. I think, you know, Form Energy is probably about as close as it gets to a household name among climate and energy tech companies. But for the uninitiated, can you tell us a little bit about what Form Energy does? What is the problem you're solving, and how are you solving it? Yeah, first of all, that's a high compliment. I think probably the circle of folks who know this is, you know, my family and then some deep tech energy nerds. But I appreciate it. Otherwise known as the whole world. Right. But yeah, Form Energy is commercializing iron air batteries for the electric grid. And probably the first question is, well, why does the world need a new battery? There's a few of them out there, including lithium ion, which is doing a great job at storing energy for the grid in increasingly large volumes. And indeed, that was sort of where I cut my teeth in the market. I've been in batteries now for 20 plus years. I was at Tesla working exclusively on lithium ion for seven plus years. But what I saw there was there's an opportunity for something that is much longer duration and by direct implication, therefore much lower cost. Because absent that cost point, and therefore duration, you really can't compete with with gas, which is sort of the large incumbent technology in the grid in the US today. And so we set out Form nine years ago to discover, scale up and manufacture the kind of battery storage that would compete rather with gas. So where we are today is we have sort of created this category of what we call multi-day duration storage and the device. We're really trying to not use the word battery storage. We're really trying to not use the word battery storage because maybe it evokes the wrong thing. It's not a gas beaker, but it's an e-peaker. And so that sort of notion is one that we're really starting to put out there and be sort of front footed on going straight after that application. So that's what Form does. We have invented the e-peaker and we are selling it into the market. By e-peaker, you mean that you're addressing data center needs? Or what specifically do you mean by that? I just mean instead of a gas beaker, it's an electric beaker. Electric beaker. That's where you get an e. Got it. Okay. Very cool. So we'll get into some of the market dynamics around the kind of batteries and e-peakers, as you say, a little bit later. But one quick question, which is that when you founded the company almost 10 years ago, I feel like it was like the Wild West. There were like 80 battery technologies out there. That's probably actually a drastic undercount, but like very different things from like redox flow batteries to lithium ion to like LFP to like all of these different technologies. Is there still like a vast landscape of technologies or are you starting to see that field narrow? Yeah, I would say that that Cambrian moment there where there's like that explosion of a bunch of different approaches, it has consolidated to some degree. And what you're not seeing, especially in the last couple of years of sort of the brand new companies that are coming out you sort of have a few that have been able to sort of hold on or you know you know get through uh but but you certainly don't see um the investment cycles in the new chemistries partially because the landscape is starting to feel fairly settled like lithium ion is gonna get super super cheap and so unless you can point to you know beating lithium ion at its own game then there's really no point and then i i think where we were perhaps uh slightly pressured was identifying just how cheap lithium ion was going to get and how far away you had to be from that on cost um to to have an entitled position in the market and and for us you know the goal as we said from the very beginning of the company we always were targeting something that would be twenty dollars a kilowatt hour all in at the system level um and and that we feel is still very much the entitlement there that we're that we're headed towards um and that's sort of far enough away from lithium ion to to uh to be you know differentiated enough that you don't have to worry about it um but uh but yeah we haven't seen a lot of brand new entrants in that space and and and you know unfortunately some companies have gone away in the meantime as well so it does seem to be sort of settling out a bit uh in ways that maybe were not super easy to predict yeah totally but it sounds like you all had the right idea on coming up with something that is very low cost compared to lithium ion and that does the thing that lithium ion is bad at which is long duration storage what led you ultimately to iron versus some of the other technology options out there costs pure pure costs um in the end the duration is is the valuable thing and and to provide that duration right hundred hours plus uh you know four straight days of discharging at the rated power um you need to be in a very different cost regime from anything else that's out there you know in our case what what is the chemistry just real briefly we are we are oxidizing and reducing iron rusting and unrusting iron um so you start with iron which is you know the most abundant substance on earth and then you start with just about and um the most mined metal by a few orders of magnitude and uh and you oxidize it from obviously air out of the oxygen out of the air uh which is free we don't we don't need to scrub it or purify it or or you know um uh enhance it in any way and so you're starting with a raw cost of materials that's less than a dollar per kilowatt hour right this is as compared to let's say unprocessed minerals for lithium ion that sitting on a table is you know 30 bucks a kilowatt so you're starting in a fundamentally different regime and the trick of course then is to keep it cheap it it's really easy to start with something that doesn't cost very much and then synthesize it to extreme purities and you know strange morphologies and you of course you add costs on on top to get the performance and and the real innovations that we've had over the last nine years is to um continue to to keep the cost entitlement while driving performance up um throughout uh throughout the development cycles but but really because of cost that's really what it comes down to right okay and so you've got a very strong engineering team that's doing this with you you also did something pretty unusual when you started your company which is in addition to standing up this engineering team obviously to work on you know your technology you also stood up an analytics team to help understand and really define the business cases for these batteries so can you say a bit about why you did that and what the journey has been like for that team yeah absolutely in fact even before we picked the chemistry to work on which of course was only became iron air um we built software tools this is my co-founder marco ferrara uh who himself was an energy trader uh in for for a number of years so he really understood the energy markets and funnily enough he has a phd in uh in nuclear fusion engineering from mit so he's not doing that yeah um but marco built these what we call you know sort of complex co-optimization modeling tools and what the utility industry would call capacity expansion modeling tools um and and he built these um you know sort of complex co-optimization modeling tools and what he built them uh with capabilities that that went beyond what the industry was currently using in other words you know sub-hourly resolution data multiple years of it uh you know non-standard meteorological data coming in you know multiple decades of time series of of data um and and sort of doing the co-optimization that way as opposed to really simplifying the problem in other words take an average week out of a year and solve for that which is what they had been doing um so so go do the optimization you know with hard math and and modern compute um and you get very different answers about what kinds of storage are then therefore uh entitled to bring a lot of value on the grid what duration matters for example that that was one of the key questions we tried to answer up front you know how many hours do you need to functionally compete with the gas resources um and once you know the duration of course then cost and all sorts of other figures of merit um come in uh that you need to be able to take into account but but with that um analysis that marco built you know with lots of sensitivities that we could evaluate we sort of had a treasure map and and what what popped out of that analysis was very clearly if you can make a battery for 100 for 20 kilowatt hour you get the 100 hours and you have a very entitled place to bring a ton of value to the grid it is differentiated it enhances the value of all the rest of the systems in there and it makes the entire portfolio of resources whatever they are operate more efficiently and the whole thing is cheaper including the cost of you know this new asset and so so that was sort of a real insightful um just roadmap that we had for what we should go build and in fact that helped us down select to iron air in the first place um it was very clear that iron air was entitled to go do those things and and we like that and then of course that was the basis with which we had the conversations with customers from day one essentially so even before we had picked hardware we were engaging with utilities and saying hey this our analysis suggests that we should go build this kind of battery what do you think um and uh and that led us just have a really good conversation with the customers and we had a really good conversation with a really productive conversation um with potential buyers from from day one essentially and is there kind of a lot of variability among utilities and geographies around how your batteries are being used are you finding that they're that there's kind of one one way that folks are tending to approach this no there's there's a few very consistent use cases um what does vary is how often they sort of tap into the different use cases um and and as you would imagine that varies by by geography it also varies by by market structures um so you know what kinds of market designs are in place um the easy obvious one is just reliability event you've got a multi-day weather event you just want to discharge right so of course famously winter storm uri in texas in 2001 and you know four days of black 21 i should say and and you know four days of blackout that cost tens of billions of dollars in damage if we had been there we would have just discharged flat out right for for those four days and there you go um you know the other is just tight grid capacity uh 10 days in a row you're operating within the reserve margins right you don't want to add any of your incremental stress to the grid you you operate almost exactly like what a gas speaker would do you discharge only for 10 hours a day 10 days in a row right something like that um and uh and then the other is just how do you enable these new large loads to come uh online faster um this is this doesn't have a neat tidy graph that i can point to uh like the other like the first two use cases um but in that case i'm you know bringing those large loads primarily from data centers could be industrial loads um without sacrificing reliability and and increasingly getting those new loads even approved in the first place um by the communities in which they're they're located because you're able to bring not just the reliability you're able to keep costs under control um and you're not bringing any local uh emissions as well which is which is a big concern of of communities too so it's it's all of those use cases as we see it and with some slight variations in between very cool okay so let's get into everything leading up to building your first factory in west virginia which is an incredible accomplishment so maybe say a little bit about the early days of the company how you kind of got your first customers and when you ultimately were ready along with your board to make the decision to build a factory to mass produce your batteries yeah so we started off as a pretty focused r&d company you know primarily scientists and you know phds studying electrochemistry at a subscale um we once we sort of got through the fundamental traps there you know for any electrochemical device you have to be able to to make it at a relative speed so we started off as a pretty focused r&d company and then after a couple of years of that sort of saying okay we feel like we've done all we can do at the at the relevant scale but using prototype production methods right in other words batch methods or very very sort of small continuous methods um we the next step is of course to make it you there's no shortcut there you at some point you have to make it at the relevant scale without knowing for sure exactly what you're going to do and then you have to make it at the relevant scale and then you have to make it at the relevant scale and then you have to make it at the relevant scale and then you have how well that's going to go right um and and you can do a lot of testing ahead of time and you know pilot production and it still doesn't give you you know perfect sense for for how well that that's going to go so we made that decision in uh i guess it was 2022 uh that that we thought we were ready to to go land a factory and start to scale things up um and uh by by the end of 2010-2 we we had selected uh west virginia is where we're going to go do that um the state stepped up with massive support um and we were excited to go there uh we are in we're in west virginia which is in the northern panhandle uh for folks who don't know where that is it's roughly 45 minutes from the city of pittsburgh pennsylvania so just just uh west of there and we built uh what today is a million square foot factory so we're operating about half of that uh first 500,000 square feet and we landed production equipment as we were finishing the building so we wasted no time doing that and we knew we knew the the machine sets that we were going to be using and so uh we started to land those and operate it and we've been doing that for the last um couple of years If I look back around the challenges of the company, it's never linear to start off with a brand new electrochemistry and say, "We're going to commercialize this." We went from quite literally batteries the size of a cup, like a coffee cup, to batteries that are now 80,000 pounds in a shipping container. That journey is not going to be linear, I can tell you that. But I would say the biggest challenges, candidly, were the manufacturing scale-up of the electrode manufacturing. That's sort of the thing that every battery company needs to be able to do. And so that was where we spent a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of just effort, grit, and ingenuity, and tears, travails, and everything else. But yeah, that's been the journey to get to the manufacturing stage. That we just got through, and from here, scale-up. I think one of the things you said to me one time is that having success gives you the opportunity to solve the next problem. That's actually what it feels like to be in the belly of this, so yeah. So let's dig in on this. Okay, so thinking about your decision to build this factory in West Virginia, first of all, there's a strategic decision. And one of the things that I'm seeing happen now, particularly for companies that are in the battery space, is they're looking at manufacturing in China and basically finding creative ways to partner with manufacturing capacity there. So you all made the very clear decision to manufacture in the United States. Was there a moment where you were considering either some sort of joint venture with overseas companies or contract manufacturing, or was it always very clear to you that you needed to be manufacturing in the United States? Yeah. It was always very clear that we needed to manufacture in the US for a couple of reasons. One, there is no existing manufacturing supply chain for an iron-air battery. We were inventing that from scratch. I don't mean we were inventing the machine sets. I mean, we were putting it all together for the first time. There was no incumbent that you say, "Oh, give me the line that makes a discharge cathode." That doesn't exist. We had to sort of piece together different machine sets from different existing industries and get them to do what we needed them to do. So that was sort of point one on why you asked. Point two is we were still improving and inventing the electrochemistry as we went, and it's now never as discrete tasks to say, "Oh, the electrochemistry versus the manufacturing." In fact, those are in many ways the same problem, and you can't say that you've solved the electrochemistry until you're making it at a relevant scale, relevant throughput, with relevant yields, with relevant costs. That's when you know you're done, I don't want to say done, that's when you know you actually have an understanding, I would say, of your electrochemistry. And so that notion that we would be making something overseas while developing it here, it just, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And then third, for any company, you're trying to do things, especially hard tech where costs are high, you want to get through your iteration loops as quickly as humanly possible, right? Your learning cycles. And so having everything on site that you own, that you control, you can work 24 hours a day if you want, it was really, really important. And so for all those reasons, plus we all believe that we should be manufacturing, again, in the United States, and there was a good chance to do that. You know, there were reasons why we never really considered, you know, something overseas. Earlier, we met Paul Heinz, Energy Hub's chief scientist. His team develops the machine learning that orchestrates 3.6 gigawatts of virtual power plants. When you see a utility using algorithms that we wrote on the whiteboard, running 250 megawatt events, I think that's pretty amazing. Utilities need capacity. They need time. They need energy. And they're finding it in virtual power plants, which are precise and configurable. I've got customers that have time-of-use rates. We need to make sure we respect that. I need to pre-cool during these hours. Maybe there's some hours that have a lot of solar power. So let's make sure that we soak up as much of that solar as we can. But I need to really manage my peak during this other period of time. And so figure out how do we take all those goals and then come up with schedules for all the resources, whether it's batteries, thermostats, electric vehicles. Energy Hub maps that evolution through a four-level research project. It's a project that's been going on for many, many years. And so we've been working on it. We've been working on it for several years. And so we've been working on it for several years. keeps gas on one side and liquid on the other, and in our case has a reaction happening in the middle of it so you know very sensitive piece of technology um that that has to you know last for tens of thousands of hours and you know no pinhole leaks and uh you know have very high performance and all sorts of things and and um and so that that's probably the the hardest part to get right and i'll circle back around to that and then we have sort of a you know sort of relatively automated but with some humans in loop sort of cell assembly so these are sort of classic you know welding and uh sort of assembly operations that you would sort of maybe envision looking at like an automotive type type environment and then the last one is you know very manual assembly for the complete um integrated sort of systems you know the shipping containers if you will and that looks more like you know rv style manufacturing so you know human assisted left um sort of you know getting things in but a lot of wiring and you know connectors and you know these kinds of things so so very different manufacturing environments and the hardest part is that first one right getting getting those electrodes to be performant um at scale at at rates uh with yields right all these things uh simultaneously and the reason it's hard is because it's a sort of a compounding goldilocks problem 25 times in a row more or less right so everything's too hot or too cold or you know uh you know too much mixing or not enough mixing or you know too much pressure not enough pressure and you know goldilocks is never happy uh you know you got to get you know nothing is ever just right um but you do in the end of course have to get it just right and you know i think that's one of the things that's really important to me is that you know and so you know those are those are sort of the fundamental challenges when you're doing things at a scale that maybe that chemistry has never been done before because you've never been exposed to you know those effects of getting up to that scale and you have to sort of relearn things um as you go and um and so that that was you know sort of the real challenging part initially of of getting that right um we ended up making more than a hundred thousand electrodes um so these are meter scale devices uh so hundred you know sixty miles worth of material kind of flowing through the factories or try and you know put a number on it um and until you gain process control you can't you can't say you're really done with your battery and uh and so that that's really what what we had to do um and there aren't any shortcuts either it's either it works or it doesn't and at that again at the rate with the volume with the yields and you know cost entitlements and and so there were just a ton of learnings along the way a ton of very systematic designs of experiments tons of root cause analyses right um and uh and just kind of you know tunneling your way through the mountain uh so to speak because this is a case where you know you're building you're on a timeline you want to get the manufacturing up and running presumably you've got you know delivery dates for customers and things like that how do you think about the decision like did you ever have to literally sort of pause or freeze everything and kind of do some re-engineering or were you able to really keep things moving and simultaneously make the engineering and sort of fundamental changes you needed to make how did you think about that sort of time trade-off there well let me expand the scope of challenges there for a little bit yeah because you know while we were working our way through the challenges on the electrode it turns out that the the sort of system does not sell and system of design was not nearly where it needed to be to to sort of scale up you know that that first version of the design and and so we we realized fairly early on that we needed to go fix that and there's just there's a time scale to fixing it and more by tooling lead time than than you know design validation and then tooling lead time that's not like can i get the chemistry of the work that's this particular part doesn't work this way in the manufacturing environment and therefore leads to you know this condition as a deployed asset we need to fix it let's make sure we go fix it um and and so we were sort of simultaneously working on both ends of the problem right the electrode manufacturing and then and then the sort of cell and system design we got the first design to to work and to to prove 119 hours charge and hit their round trip efficiencies and that kind of thing but it but we also knew that it was not going to be the version that in the end would be cost entitled that we wanted to scale uh given all the sort of mitigations and belts and suspenders we had to put in to sort of get it to that place um so so we were also doing that um so though both of those challenges were sort of on the same timeline right to to work out all the challenges on the electrodes while we were you know fixing the system design and making sure that it was really robust um going out okay and so and ultimately these are kind of like different almost like generic generations of batteries that you're building right so can you say a bit about sort of where like how different is where you started i don't know if like the cup size analogy is the relevant starting point but maybe how different like when you when you like open the factory in 2024 and you're like we're gonna go build this battery and you have an idea for what it's gonna look like how different is what you're doing now have a lot of things really fundamentally changed about what you're building and are they still changing or is it well i would say from like for all the things that have not changed going sort of through subsequent designs um and that's because once you get that process control and you really understand the electrochemistry you do not want to change it right you might keep it you know all the same um the only changes we've made to the to the electrodes um since we sort of started production was to make them a little bit a slightly different form factor so that it's in fact easier to manufacture uh but but fundamentally the exact same material sets the exact same processes the exact same people involved right um what has changed is sort of how you then take those electrodes and put them in a in a device how you how you combine them but but the fundamentals of all of the electrochemistry of an iron air battery are are very much the same um but but sort of the packaging of that you know all the parts that i mentioned where we already had very high yields um you know from the cell all the way through the complete system you know making design changes that still keep it super high yields but but lead to a much more manufacturable and reliable product um you know once it's deployed and so you know just kind of i'll give you one one sort of example um you know batteries need to be sealed ours happens to be air breathing so there's some some some ways that we do a lot of ingress but you do have to sort of have seals and we reduce the amount of seal path you know from the first design to the second design by more than 75 right if you look at the connections inside of a complete enclosure we reduce the total number of connections by two thirds right so you know the just those kinds of things also the different types of connectors that you even have we we also reduce those by two-thirds right so just like a lot of simplification a lot of um feedback from the manufacturing process that we went through from from the first time how do you how do you delete steps how do you delete parts um how do you simplify you know across the board so while keeping performance and safety and everything else um so those were kind of a lot of the lessons at the at the i would say cell and above parts of the of the system um but we definitely did not change the the sort of internal guts of of what makes an iron battery an iron yeah very very cool okay so let's let's talk for a second actually about time pressure associated with all of this because so you built the factory itself in a record amount of time it was i think well a little over a year that it took you to get it built is that right nine nine months nine months less than a year so um so really incredible but now so you're going through and you're you're making some of these changes was it were there moments where you got stressed were there moments where things legitimately took longer than they were than you were expecting did you have to kind of manage expectations with your financiers or your board or your customers or were you able to do all of this and kind of keep to a schedule that you were excited about yeah i i'm not sure i recall actually a time where i don't i'm not sure i remember what it's like to not have stress sounds about right uh yeah i guess my only conclusion of that is i guess i like it that's i i don't really have any other conclusion at this point um uh yeah it yeah incredibly stressful um to kind of go go through that period um and to have to work through those challenges and of course you know be be super transparent with with our investors and our board about where we are and what those challenges are and what we think we need to do about them um uh yeah it's it's a it's a challenging thing to do um and and especially when you know it's a relatively large company with a large factory right that the carrying cost of that is extremely high um and uh and so there's a huge amount of responsibility and burden i think that you know we the leadership feel and felt um getting through that and you know fortunately you know i'm part of a team uh overall that you know our response to challenges is to take total responsibility and ownership and say here's here's where we are um here's what we're going to do about it and here's here's here's the plan to success and you know our investors support us through that um and and thankfully you know we're in a much different position today um but it was you know two-ish years of you know working in the salt mines a little bit um and uh and so that was yeah super challenging but um i don't i'm not sure there's another way i mean in retrospect are there things i wish we had done differently absolutely you know a thousand percent um were we perfect definitely not um at the same time you know when we started the company we thought the probability of success was fairly low like go invent a new type of battery that is going to solve the multi-day duration problem uh okay that that sounds amazing uh there is no risk-free version of that right in fact it's a high risk proposition almost almost by definition through every single stage that we've been through so you know that it's part and parcel and like these are venture investors who who know and understand you know risks and risk in a complex way that that most folks don't um and that doesn't make it any easier to sort of you know get through that you know especially in your when you're in the thick of things are there a couple of people on your team that were incredibly critical hires? As you're giving advice to other companies who are entering this phase, what are the things that you did to get the right people and right interactions among people in place in order to be successful? Yeah, I think if there's one area in particular that we should have leaned on earlier, looking back at the retrospectives, what could we have done better? I think we certainly could have brought a much more robust manufacturing mindset to the design engineering work much earlier. And that's hard. You know, design for engineering is, you know, or design for manufacturing, rather. That's the whole point, right? So, you know, there is no just like design for aesthetics or design for design purity's sake, right? Like that doesn't, there's no point to that, right? We're not trying to win, you know, beauty contests here. We're trying to win functional cost contests. That's what we're trying to win. And, you know, we could, I could have done a better job early on bringing in, you know, that mindset part and parcel of the design exercise. And, you know, I mentioned we were an R&D company. We added engineering with them. We sort of added manufacturing. And in fact, it needs to be much more integrated than that. You know, as you go at every step, it is never too early to really rigorously probe and test, you know, the design process and push back on design from a manufacturing standpoint. Precisely because the only thing that matters in the end is the manufactured product. Like that's the thing. And so we could have, should have done that, I would say, more early or earlier in the process in a really integrated way. And so, you know, that's overwhelming, sort of my, overwhelmingly my advice to the extent I give it, you know, on these topics is ensure that the design process is that you're thinking all the way through, you know, to the manufactured product in a factory with actual machine sets that make things and a vendor base that can support it, right? With material sets that support it, you know, with designs that can be made on tooling that is six weeks, not 28 weeks. And, you know, like all of those things, right, are critical to sort of surviving that, okay, go, go figure out how to make it phase of things. Okay. Let's talk about the financing for a second. How did you finance this plan to get it built? Because it is no joke getting the funding to do something like this. Yeah. So we, when we were looking at where to go for, for the factory part, the reason we are in West Virginia is because the state provided $290 million of financing in exchange for 750 jobs by the end of 2028. That let us go, go build the building and stand things up from scratch there. We could have gone to a cheaper, lower risk option there, just rented a building and sort of deal with whatever legacy type infrastructure you're dealing with there. We love that site for a lot of reasons that I, that I mentioned. And we liked the idea of sort of building our own factory if we could, right? We didn't want to pay for it with equity, but, but, but given the support of the state, we were able to go do that. And additionally, we won a $150 million grant from the Department of Energy in the US for the CapEx equipment. So scaling up the manufacturing equipment. This is out of the manufacturing and energy supply grants that, that we're going to be paying for, that we're part of the infrastructure bill. And, and so we're very actively invoicing on that project and scaling it up here. And then of course we do need to use equity dollars to finance beyond that because it doesn't, doesn't pay for everything. And so it's, it's a combination of, of those things. We have some equipment financing debt, but it's not a huge piece of it. Okay. So really big on the government grants. Were there any moments where you were nervous about the status of those government grants or have they been pretty stable, especially given your manufacturing focus? In the administration, of course, every grant was reviewed. And we always had a very, have always had a very strong open line of communication with the Department of Energy and, and then built one with the White House. So, so we didn't, you know, and we knew that, that we were supported there. So we were just sort of wanting to let them get through their, their own reviews, but in the end, yeah, none of our grants were affected. So, yeah, I think that speaks to the acknowledgement, broadly speaking, that many, many companies are manufacturing energy storage out of, you know, 85% domestic contents, you know, batteries, you know, for electric grid reliability and affordability and load growth. It's generally a good thing. And, and it can be supported by, you know, any politician of any stripe. Yes. And with really incredible results, which is so exciting. Okay. Let's change gears a little bit because you all are also a little bit becoming an AI company. And it's so fun to say that because the first thing that pops into my head is like, oh yeah, it's like all birds, you know, you manufacture, you build, you build, you build. You're manufacturing shoes. Now you're manufacturing AI. That's not exactly how it's working for you all though. And one of the things I love about this story is that it's not just about like creating AI models or trying to sell things in an AI market. It's about actually using the results of the, of the AI work that you're doing. So can you say a bit about how you're incorporating AI, what it's doing for you at this stage? Yeah. More than of course, AI data center demand driving, you know, our own growth, you know, the demand for our product. We are heavy users of the tools. We are heavy users of the tools themselves, maybe no surprise. And, and of course, like in all the typical corporate ways that you would expect to, you know, have efficiency for information retrieval and, you know, that kind of thing. But, but being, being a company that has a very core function of material science discovery and innovation, we found that the, that the models now are, are quite capable in a way that we didn't expect maybe a year ago, I would say. We sort of, around that time, we sort of noticed a step function of the capabilities. there. Again, led by Marco Ferrara, who originally built those models that, that helped us sort of, you know, understand this, this space from a value perspective. And, and so now those, those are being very actively implemented in the discovery process and in the improvement process. And, and specifically, you know, we have built our own physics based models of, of each of the electrodes and then of the entire system for some time. And inevitably, when you build physics, you know, multi-physical models, of, of electrochemistry somewhere doesn't correspond to the empirical results that you have, right? That, that's just sort of, you know, an accepted truth that's out there. And, and what the models now are able to do is propose designs of experiments that help collapse that gap between the prediction of the multi-physical models and the empirical results, which we have started to utilize to great effect. And so that, that collapse means that you can actually have a mechanistic understanding of what's happening in a way that lets you drive performance forward because it now suggests new ways to, to really control the electrochemistry. And so, you know, we were noting a real acceleration here. I mean, quite, quite literally, we sort of were able to do things on electrochemistry in a few days that previously would have taken us a few months. And, and so, you know, the acceleration is, is really starting to, to pick up here. And, and as everybody I think is generally aware, you know, the world is segmenting out into sort of data halves. And as it happens, we, we happen to have the world's most robust data set on iron air chemistry and tens of millions of operating hours, you know, going, going back nine years now. And, and so that, that data set is now starting to sort of provide its own benefits to the sort of acceleration of, you know, what is possible, frankly, with this electrochemistry. And I would say that we definitively can say right now, the frontiers are not clearly, you know, laid out in front of us. There's, we're, we're able to push very, very far. This is so cool. I really love this piece of the story because I feel like there, to be honest, from my perspective, there are so few concrete examples of AI really driving incredible value, particularly in a way that affects the things that you and I care about, like greenhouse gas emissions reduction. So this is, but this is it. This is something that like, it's actually tangibly helping you all get where you need to go. So do you think that this is, this is going to be sort of a continued feature of the company's operational existence? Like, do you imagine a world where you're really continuously improving? And relying on these AI tools? Or do you think it's like, the AI is going to help you answer a set of questions, and then you're going to really have your sort of optimized battery and hold the design relatively still at that point and kind of move forward? I think it's going to continue to really be able to drive, you know, the notion of what's possible. Just a quick brag on the team real fast. Today, we discovered something that humanity did not know about iron oxidation previously, sort of in the discovery of this. And I can't get into too many more details. But that's pretty astounding, right? Humans have been sort of pretty deeply immersed about iron and oxidation of iron for a very long time. And so we actually are. And the reason we knew that is because we were getting results of, of accessibility of iron, so milliamp hours per gram, sort of the per unit of iron, how much energy can get in and out, that was higher than the predicted theoretical limit of what you could get for that reaction. So we sort of said, well, something is not, you know, right here, according to what we think we know. And we when we go figure it when we went and figure it out, turned out that we had, you know, done something that had never been observed before. So, you know, those kinds of things, I think, will continue to be true about this chemistry. And there's still just, you know, a wonderfully large amount of innovation still to be had on Iron Air, frankly. So I just got goosebumps, which I'll tell you probably more than anything what a huge nerd I am. That is so unbelievably cool. I don't know if it can be overstated how amazing that is, because I think one of the truisms in the world that we live in is we've always kind of framed out this tension between basic science and sort of applied problem-solving technology development. And what you just described is turning that entire paradigm on its head, where here you are, you're a company, you're solving something really specific, you're operating in a business environment, and the tools that you're using are enabling you to make scientific discoveries. That's pretty wild, actually. Yeah, it's a super exciting time, I think, overall. Very cool. Okay, well, I'm going to ask my standard final question to you now, Mateo. You've all raised a lot of money, so this isn't going to be as life-changing for you. But if I had $100 million and could wire it into your bank account at your company tomorrow, what would it be? What would you do with it? What would I do with it? I would put it to scaling up as fast as we possibly can, which is what we're currently doing, but do it even faster. Yes, faster is always better. I love it. Mateo, thank you so much for joining me on the show. This has been a great conversation. So cool to hear about your scaling journey and all the things that you've accomplished in a very short time. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Laura. It's great to chat with you, as always. Thank you. You can listen to The Green Blueprint at LatitudeMedia.com or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have a fellow clean energy or climate tech traveler who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy.