Highview Power: Making grid storage batteries out of thin air?

hey everybody zach here from now you know and we're really lucky today to have with us javier cavada he is the ceo and president of a company called high view power and i'm speaking to him in london my first question is you know we reported on you guys a few weeks ago on tesla time news and uh you're you're storing energy but you're not using lithium uh so am i crazy are you storing energy out of thin air i mean definitely i mean we are taking you know we are a renewable purely renewable energy storage technology company but i mean you know there is another one technology that is the hider the pump hydra using water you know water sun wind well what is missing air but i mean as an engineer i mean we simply liquify there that is what we do every time that we get oxygen in in a hospital we get nitrogen in a in a factory it's liquefied it's just cool down until it can get into a bottle what tank and be transported so so very well known technology in that sense okay so you're storing this in what you guys are calling the cryo battery um and basically like you said you're liquefying in the air around us um and so explain that to our viewers so what's the advantage of of liquefying air it sounds like a lot of work absolutely no no i tell i tell you that we have been doing as a society i mean in the u.s in europe in asia in africa everywhere is liquefaction of air is a very well known process i mean when we are you know air is is made up of nitrogen oxygen and argon so three main components and when you need nitrogen or oxygen for industrial or sanitary reasons i mean you you need to liquify air so at least before i was born it was already a normal process in the industry so it's what we have been doing in high view is to take that technology to store energy with one intention is how to get pump hydro or hydro plant capabilities without limitation limitation of where do i find the water where do i find the valley where do i find the height where do i find a place that they don't care to be move out and put the waterwear and and also how to make it industrial modular and a little bit like tesla or lithium ion battery system modular replicable locatable but our let's say our market is the larger scale really large scale is that's why for us batteries are a big alliance for us so so we we go in i mean quoting some of our customers we do pump either in a box we can take our box with us put it there and not bothering the people who lives next to it that's a really interesting point because i mean we all love pumped hydro it's clean but you're right it has to be in either a perfect situation or you have to make that situation and if you make that situation with like a dam then you are making a huge environmental cost absolutely absolutely and there is on top of that i mean we all i i think it's difficult to find somebody who doesn't like the pan heidi or the hydro plants that exist already but also the same is really tough to find somebody who wants a new one especially nearby because it's a minimum it will take around 10 years to develop in really developed industry countries like u.s europe again and and can take decades in in other places so i mean our system is again purely industrial and we take components processes that are running as we speak they are running in hundreds of locations across the us already running this kind of systems but with a difference not utilized to store energy just to liquefy air and they don't gassify it again to run a turbine and a generator which is what we do i mean they do it really to store and transport the those gases it's uh which is pretty cool i can say interesting so i was going to ask you like why haven't i heard of this before but you're right i have heard of it i just didn't haven't heard of it in the way that you're using it so i guess that's my next question is why why has no one done this before like i've been reporting on this industry for years and you're the first i've heard that's uh using it to actually store absolutely i mean i tell you hiv power was was born in early 2000 in 2005 so it's in a teenager state and and we have been patenting we have a very strong intellectual property on the processes to be using these components and these parts of equipment very standard equipment but for this specific storage application and we are and i tell you i'm more than 20 years in the industry so of course i'm cleaning up my cv from from fossil fuel to cleaner fossil fuel to renewables and now energy storage really if you tell me five years ago do we need this larger scale long duration energy storage i will tell you clear no so i mean there will not be any need five years ago because there was not enough wind and solar in the grid altering creating intermittency and balancing so when the wind and solar are going over 20 percent well you start to need a lot of tesla and lithium ion a lot of energy storage a lot of pump hydro and when you go over 30 well your grit is messed up i mean we see that in places like hearing in london and what sorry for that but we see it in many many places where thermal is super stable but it's super dirty it's super unsustainable and we we can see this after three months being at home that the sky looks really blue even in downtown london and well the the reason is that this large bulky energy storage was not required if we would not run a renewable grid that's the concise reason interesting so i mean you've been in this industry for a long time and it's only been fairly recently that even you who are in a company doing this has realized that this is a necessary thing so that kind of explains why because we ask on the show all the time like why is no one getting this but you're you're saying basically it's happened very fast absolutely absolutely i tell you that if you look at the i mean if i you would be a freak like i can be looking at the library at the books of liquefaction of air for the energy storage applications you can find books in the late 20th century i mean people thinking about that and and the company took that from the university worked with some phd people from many places and and found technology meeting the market demand because indeed before the technology was there in the books was ready in the industrial portfolio of big companies like i mean we can talk about general electric abb siemens they make all components that are fundamental for this technology but do they need energy storage i mean if you run a combined cycle gas turbine you don't need energy storage or you run a picker bigger speaker i mean that's why i mean our competition i mean who is competing with what we bring to the market is the fossil fuel i mean it's the status quo of the previous 20 30 years i mean we continue burning stuff to produce electricity you don't need energy storage but then we better stop burning stuff so how long can you store energy for i mean you you can start i mean technically you can store it from seconds minutes hours days weeks months so many months i mean this you you we are all very familiar uh we use gas in in our houses for heating for for decades and you see all these gas terminals or lng terminals in the big harvards i mean those big tanks really bulky giant tanks they are exactly the same technology we use to store the air liquefied so a liquefied natural gas an lng that's a compound of building or infrastructure is identical to what we need to store the liquid air so so you will you you can of course you will be storing and dispatching back to the grid electricity we expect mostly every day but sometimes every week and even sometimes every month because uhd has a kind of safety guarantee of this patch of electricity or of energy so in that sense you are guaranteed is not eternal like anything is eternal that i mean something like three months you you can store it safely and i mean if you don't use your storage for three months i mean there's something wrong with the place where you you why did you build it so interesting i mean right so basically we just need to store it for usually hours because we're just waiting for peaks and troughs in the in the energy absolutely and of course there are days that you know i mean you have one very stormy week and then you need you need several days but i tell you the projects that we are having in the market the the normal size is from 8 hours to 12 hours i mean it's a very common profile for a very solar place a very windy place i mean eight to 12 hours of of storage really bulky and unreliable when it's so reliable in public you will not touch 365 days per year during 100 years but but maybe 98 of the days i mean if you have a cosmic interference i mean you have a very uh i mean for instance a volcano ashes event like happened a couple of uh 10 years ago something like that i mean you don't get solar power dispatch and you need to but that's that's not common and that's not gone so to make a bigger battery from a cryo battery i just need a bigger tank i mean definitely that's that's the key that's the key and that's why that's why we see i mean i'm i've been i've been in the tesla factory making the energy storage batteries several years ago being a being in an epc building then building energy storage plants with lithium ion so we lithium ion and cryo battery are very complementary in that sense lithium ion the most expensive part is the battery cell where is all the chemistry and the magic you would say happening in our case the magic and the most expensive part is in the liquefaction and the discharge so the battery cell is a tank it's a steel tank a stainless steel tank which as you can imagine is the less the least exotic thing and the most available stuff you can find you use the same skills the same supply chain no rare earths no rare chemicals or materials or recycling challenges and and you can just double the storage by just doubling the tanks uh and you can double them in diameter in height both of them adding more tanks so it's extremely modular and and well purely green really in that sense yeah let's talk about that so basically all you need to do to pump the air into the tank is use some electricity and that electricity can be renewable like solar or wind exactly exactly i mean the only input here is electricity and air so which i mean air as we all know is available anywhere that there are human beings and electricities can be funded grid can be from a solar function with a wind farm or can be from a mix so in that sense it's agnostic like any energy storage asset you you get the electricity from whatever normally you will get it from the excess of wind or the excess of solar i mean it would not make too much sense to have a combustion system to fill an energy started asset and then it's zero emissions exactly exactly and when you that's that's a cool thing that i would like to highlight when you are cooling down there and aside is extremely standard process you are just reducing the temperature reducing the temperature and then then you go from gas to the point of liquid function but in the meantime there are some components of of the air that we are breathing that don't get into liquid would get into solid like co2 if there is some pollution in the air or or the water so so we are extracting water so the air we are drying it out and we are taking the co2 out so you can really capture the carbon that you have in there in a place just to say a place like la that i was just before the lockdown and it was a bit a bit dusty atmosphere it's more yeah it's a better world it was a bit smoggy you would you would just deliver electricity and air but the air you deliver back to the atmosphere is cleaner i mean it's as cleaner as you wins so you can store the co2 and sell it for industrial applications but normally the co2 percentage in there is not very big i didn't even think about that right you're able to take out the different components because they freeze at different temperatures so you you can actually sell the co2 for industrial your medical usage i i and i can tell you that in uk applications you know that's something very typical here i'm sure that they use they they will use the co2 for the brewery for the kind of i would call food food chain but this mofo beer i could say so you could have little breweries at each of your power stations i mean that would be pretty cool high view beer liquid energy storage beer kind of but i mean it's it's like any co2 you buy you know you need to pay for the co2 and and again the co2 you get it from the same process you you liquefy your liquefier and it's one of the by-products the same as water you you get very dry water out but you can i mean another option is also to to make it classify the it back and send it to the atmosphere but normally it is a good collateral advantage of anything that you you cannot right i mean so you could actually be carbon negative if you want to be absolutely no no you you will be i mean you will be it's because you will be but i said no no no water needed no water needed no no emissions something as you can imagine i mean where you you can see some smoke from the from the from the plant but it's it's not a smoke it's called the air it's a bit of color it's it's just a vapor quite fashionable name now okay so i hear our viewers watching right now at home and they're going okay zach this sounds too good to be true i mean you just told us that uh it's no emissions it's all renewable energy to make you can build these anywhere you want so there must be one piece of the equation these must be super expensive to build and and and i i got just i love this question because it's exactly the lowest cost of storage today and but with one condition which is a crucial condition is that the application needs to be large enough so i mean the same that other technologies they get better the smaller they are i mean we get better they're bigger than we are so so for that reason you have seen this one that we are we're in the construction process now in manchester in the northern part of england this is going to be double of the one from tesla in in hornsdale in the south australia but for us that's quite normal you would say the sweetest spot but the sweetest spot for us is starting there onwards so i mean the the bigger the better in a way because we use equipment that is purely industrial so and the industry in the industry has been doing oil and gas all the last 30 40 years and they have bulky equipment so so that you if you can technically make it small and then you would be fully right would be too expensive that's why that's why for the smaller we say no no let's put lithium ion let's put electrochemical that's for the smaller applications up to one hour two hours for us you can imagine the charging station the discharging station is going to be the same if you want one hour that if you want two hours but if you want 10 hours so so then and they are the most expensive parts so the more hours you have is quite clear so i mean starting by four hours we are already unbeatable in cost i mean where the lowest cost but of course it's much better with six hours and way better with eight hours and and that's that's the the real reason and to that great question of why don't we have one thousand or one million plants already built we we discuss it before there was no need there was no need and it's quite sad or the other market was considering there was no need because if unless you force the fossil fuel to stop it away or to be replaced quickly i mean the status quo remains becoming or being the status quo so and so so when i said that the competition is the fossil fuel i would say a better way to put it is the competition is to continue doing the things as we did in the 90s and the early 2000s so that's the that that's not acceptable wow this is super exciting because there's no argument to it that i can see i mean basically you're building some a battery that's bigger than the hornsdale battery in south australia that all of our viewers know about and it's cheaper than i mean on your website and is this true you say that basically you could be about half the cost of lithium it is it is but again is is that is uh very clear i mean i know your your viewers are very smart guys and girls i mean i i'm one of them as you know so but but when i mean it's pure arithmetics i mean if if a lithium-ion is is able to make one hour you want two hours you need to double the cost you want to make 20 hours you need to multiply by 10 that cost i mean in our case adding hours is is marginal it's marginal cost so if it's a long duration we call it long duration because it's more than four hours but i would not call it long i mean it's just it's just more than four hours long duration would be weeks or months but this is this is just four five ten hours uh half a day one day that's then it's it's it's not only half of a lithium ion it's much less than much less than half that but this just purely pure economies of a scale so when just if i i mean as a mechanical engineer i need to say this i mean if just a turbine a steam turbine of 50 megabytes if you double it to 100 megawatts the cost is not double it's around 40 percent more i mean and this is you everybody can see it in the catalog from the main manufacturers and and those economies of scale are getting bigger and bigger the the bigger is the the megawatts the bigger is the megawatt hour and the bigger are proportionally the diameters and the heights of the equipment so so that's why we talk about closing the the circle in a way this is so exciting for me on this channel because one of the biggest arguments we hear all the time about how i can't be right about battery storage for renewables is they say there's not enough lithium or batteries in the world we're going to be using them for cars there's no way zack you're going to have your batteries that you want and so you're basically telling me as long as we've got air we can do it absolutely absolutely you go for for the first hours for the for the for the small very decentralized applications uh households etc you go with this very nice i should not make advertisement here but these battery walls or tesla batteries also they look gorgeous and and then you have a bulky kind of gas station but in a gas station it's a tank with liquid air but you blow a steam turbine as a generator and you get i didn't mention that but on top of doing energy storage application this system also provides a lot of rotating inertias services to the grid that you know that those are being given by nuclear by coal by by gas by diesel so everything that has a rotating equipment is balancing the grid and well one of the arguments i'm sure they have told you is that the batteries cannot give inertia they just give a kind of thing called synthetic inertia that is is like a bad copy but i mean if you put a large-scale energy storage with rotating equipment like ours so i mean and things like pump hydro can do the same you solve the equation so so you you don't need only one technology you need all the available energy storage technologies but don't don't let them tell you that we need to continue burning stuff that's like the stone age that's awesome to hear wow it's just it's so exciting to hear that there's a company like yours that's starting up that is uh doing this in a completely different way and yet like you said it's a proven technology it's not some crazy thing that we have to prove works exactly exactly i mean if something we don't have in our team in our companies that we don't have those crazy inventors or native professors where there's industry people who have been doing this for decades gigabytes in the back in the shoulders of install of course in a lot of renewables but a lot of fossil fuels also and and well the company has built already two plants that have been running for several years and and now we are building the largest in the world but well stay tuned because expect to come with the largest in the world again pretty soon really so i hear that you're coming over here across the pond to vermont is that true absolutely absolutely i mean we have a we have a large project in vermont that is that is bigger than the one in the uk and and well provided that borders are open and i can take a flight but not me i mean we have a big team in the u.s already we have a a great office in alexandria in virginia we have an office in san francisco in california so we are we see the u.s as as the market in terms of demand today and size and and need and well it's it's the customers the utilities the ipps the municipal utility energy companies so it's it's overwhelming i tell you but it's great because that's why we're in in the business of partnering with people we partner with good jobs like tenasca tenasca power services to be our ally they are in in aircraft in the texas area to to be able to to deliver as many as we can because i mean if we if we rely only one company is is going to be too slow to what we need so that's why we need we need to create a club a bit like tesla has been doing i mean uh on top of buying the cars we want uh the battery on the wall and we want even we want the cap and the and the jumper so that's that's what that's what we are doing here i mean we for the for the good for good for everyone and it's cleaner smart and honest and it's available and proven you look at 2019 i mean last year i mean we were talking about couple of gigabytes of new energy storage projects globally in lithium ion but i mean you are talking about one hour one point something of duration and that's i mean it's clearly that the business is in that frame of time and well we we cover all all what goes over four hours five ten twelve twenty so it's and that's that's why i mean this is not a game of uh one one one technology in town this is as many as we can so but but the thing is that in larger scale there are only three technologies which are deployable today one is pump hydra as we discussed the other one is compressor that that's pretty much the same as we would do but it has the need of uh underground cabin a place underground to to have it tightly so it's a i mean technical is totally feasible it's a bit of quite costly to find a government that fits that demand and and then the cryo battery which is which is in a way the learnings of the other two to make it industrial and make it modular so that's why we're a bit of of the brother or the sister of the other two in in a way purely modular so and in short duration i mean let's get all the lithium ion we can into the ground because there is plenty of need of this fast speed and fast response frequency regulation assets everywhere so the more wind and more solar will deploy and then finally because i want to let you go so you can go build some more cryo batteries for us uh my last my last question here is how has the conversation changed with people in the industry i'm sure you're talking to people friends who work in the industry is it is it still hard to convince them that this is something or are they getting it now i mean that's a wonderful one i mean i i said i mean i've been i've been in these industries long enough i wouldn't say it so long because i'm enjoying like a little kid and and we have a with one like all the industries and this is like a small village so we are always the same people moving sometimes from company different technology but but we all know what others are doing and and i can say that in the last year and a half we see a drastic almost dramatic change and and the changes that be and that's why i said about the competition who is the competitor the big change is that customers the the big players are not able to build new gas plants and they are not able to continue running the coal plants and and if they could run the coal plants and they could still build the gas-fired power plants and they would say this looks great but i mean i mean there is such a such an industry in the fossil fuels that is they have such an inertia that that and and we we are not here to stop them we're just here to surround them and do the the right stuff and let them fall down the cliff that's well this is super exciting i hope that when your vermont plant gets to a certain point jesse and i can come visit because that sounds really exciting i want to show people first hand what you guys are doing will be fantastic i i can tell you that vermonting winter will will will be a big advances we will need so much temperature drop down to liquify there but that's uh that's that's a you kind there's no big influence but let's meet in the spring or summer before

Channel: Disruptive Investing

Views: 18,238

Rating: 4.9320989 out of 5

Keywords: disruptive, investing, stock market, stocks, stock exchange, new york, usa, companies, startup, invest, what to invest in, future, technologies, tech, company, disruptive investing, club, top, investments, money, save, bank, growth, exponential, science, sustainability

Id: cZ1efF6ntcM

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021