February 13, 2025 • 43 mins
We need better, cheaper ways to store solar and wind energy when it’s dark out and the wind isn’t blowing.
One option: Compressing air in underground caverns when energy is abundant, then blowing it back out to create energy when you need it. It’s an old idea, but it has some fundamental problems.
Curtis VanWalleghem, the co-founder and CEO of Hydrostor, thinks his company has solved those problems with a new approach. If he’s right, his firm will help fix the biggest bottleneck slowing down the adoption of solar and wind power.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Today's show is a good show, and I can give
you several reasons why. One, it's a show about the
energy transition, so we got the high stakes of climate change. Two,
it's more specifically about long duration energy storage, which may
be the key problem to solve in climate change now
(00:41):
that solar power is so cheap but also so intermittent,
the Sun's not always out, you got to store the energy. Three,
the story has some very clever, fun technical insights. Four
we get some real moments of harrowing drama. And finally, five,
perhaps most surprising, today's show includes a defense of fighting
(01:04):
in hockey. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem.
My guest today is Curtis van Wallingham. He is the
co founder and CEO of a company called the hygro Store.
Curtis's problem is this, how can you store energy by
compressing air in giant underground caverns, and how can you
(01:28):
do it efficiently almost anywhere in the world. The idea
of compressed air storage has been around for a long time,
but it's had some fundamental problems that have limited its use.
As you'll hear, Curtis thinks he and his colleagues have
solved those problems. Since co founding the company fifteen years ago,
Hydrostore has built a fully functioning plant and has recently
(01:50):
signed multiple billion dollar contracts to build facilities around the world.
Curtis told me he got interested in compressed air back
in two thousand and eight when he had kind of
a weird problem. He was working at a power plant
that was generating more energy than anyone could use.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
So I was the head of planning a nuclear plant.
I think it's the world's second largest single site nuclear
plant in Ontario, called Bruce Power. And because we have
so much hydro and nuclear in Ontario, when we started
adding wind and solar, we started to see we had
too much power. We couldn't export it, and so we
would have to shed power, which for a nuclear plant
(02:29):
it means essentially dumping steam into the Great Lakes. But
it required a lot of manual labor, moving valves and
doing stuff that it wasn't designed to do. So it
was driving up maintenance costs.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
And also it's a bummer, right, Like you're generating you
want to make energy, you don't want to dump steam
into a lake exactly.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
And so then I tried to build a pump hydro
plant because back there, this is two thousand and eight,
the only real commonplace to store power was through pump
tydro So I tried to find a site and it
was just impossible to see how you could find a site,
get permits and build something anywhere near a timeframe.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
And just to be clear, sorry, but pumped hydro is
is sort of the classic kind of long duration energy storage,
right where you pump water essentially up a hill from
some lower level to some higher level when you have
the power, and then when you when you want to
discharge the battery, you just let it flow downhill and
spin a turbine.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
More or less right exactly, any hydro electric dam, just
stop the dam from producing and start pumping water back
up to the top reservoir. And so tried to do
that and realized there was no possible way of doing it.
So I had a team of five or six people
at the time, and I asked them to research is
there other ways of storing power? And that's when I
came across my co founder Cam who had this idea
(03:45):
and it's essentially the opposite of pumped hydro. Put air
underwater and get the buoyancy. So instead of lifting water
and air, why don't you sink air underwater and get
the buoyancy. And you know, as an engineer, it was
kind of intriguing to me. So I thought about it,
ransom numbers and you know, lo and behold, they said, hey,
this is compact. It can be easier to site, has
(04:07):
all the advantages of pump tydro much easier to permit.
So took the plunge, quit my job, and threw some
money in and fifteen years later here we are.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
So your co founder's idea, it was a variation on
this old idea of compressed air. Right, when you have
more energy than you need, use it to compress air underground,
and then when you need the energy, sort of blow
the air back up and use that to generate energy. Right,
that's the basic idea. It's an old idea, and in
its basic form, it's pretty limited in what it can do. Right, Like,
(04:40):
what's the what are the classic problems with compressed air?
Speaker 1 (04:44):
The first one is around how you manage heat. In
traditional compressed air, they would compress the air, it gets hot,
they would lose that heat. But put the compressed air
underground and when you need it to discharge.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
When you say they would lose that heat, what is that?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
What does that mean? They would essentially just compress and
then hot air would get sent underground and it would
dissipate into the earth. And then it when it comes
up and you want expand that air, then the opposite happens.
It gets very cold, and because there's moisture in the air,
it'll cause icicles and snow and it'll freeze up your turbine,
(05:20):
going cryogenic we call it.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
So that's the problem. It's fine, you put it down
in the earth and the heat dissipates, that's actually okay.
The problem is when you want to blow it back
up to spin a turbine, it basically freezes the turbine
and the turbine snaps or whatever. That's why it's bad.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Exactly, it'll ce it up and it won't spin, okay,
And so to prevent that they have to preheat it.
So they would burn some natural gas. So when the
air comes up from the cavern, they would heat it
up so that once it expands, it doesn't drop below zero.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
So A, that's inefficient, it costs money. And then b
now when we're talking about doing this, to fight climate change.
It's totally not what you want.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, you have less emissions than a gas plant, but
you still have half the emissions.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Calling okay, So that's problem number one is you got
to burn natural gas to heat up the air when
you're blowing it because it gets really cold. What's problem
number two with sort of classic compressed air?
Speaker 1 (06:15):
The problem number two is just where can you build them?
And traditionally you would only build them where there are
salt caverns, and salt caverns are as rare to find
as good pumped hydro sites. So once you overlay, where
does the grid need storage? Where is their transmission? The
odds that there's a salt cavern there are very very deminimous.
So it just didn't have.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Some Why traditionally did it have to be a salt cavern?
That seems so random.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Because you need so much air and for the air
to be at quite high pressures, because it gets kind
of complicated. But as you think of a scuba tank
pumping air in, the pressure starts rising very dramatically. Well,
to get a sufficient amount of air, you got to
go to really high pressures. That's too high a pressure
(06:59):
in most rocks that it would just you would lose
all of the air force its way out.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
So it just dissipates. You pump all this air in
there and it just goes through whatever cracks or whatever
little tiny holes there are. The air just kind of
blows out and you don't have compressed air anymore.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Exactly where salt is air tight. And so that's why
you would typically do it in salt. That's why they
store a lot of the natural gas and salt. But
that just the salt formations aren't that common and they're
not where the grid needs them.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Okay, so these are our two problems and you encounter
this guy who seems to have solved them. Who is
the guy and what has he figured out?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
So the guy's name is Cameron Lewis, and he's a
traditional serial entrepreneur, engineering technician. He worked in the oil
patch and Canada, repurposing compressors and turbines for use in
the oil patch. Then he moved to Ontario to start
developing wind farms and that's when he realized, look, this
wind is so intermittent. I need storage. And then he
(07:57):
was like, how do I make storage? And that's when
his mind started going because he is a true entrepreneur.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
It reminds me I should have had the name at hand.
But I talked to that guy who who worked as
an engineer in the in Texas, Texas and Oklahoma and
and sort of brought the technologies of the fracking boom
to geothermal energy. It's kind of Ladimer, yeah, Tim Latimer.
Tim Latimer, some some parallels right to the story.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Very so.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
So there are these two problems. One you have the
problem of when you decompress, when you use your compressed
air gets really cold. And two you have the problem
that you can only put the compressed air in a
few places, otherwise it just sort of dissipates. How does
using water solve each of those problems? First of all,
how does it solve the the cold problem?
Speaker 1 (08:41):
So what we do is when the air comes out hot,
it comes out about two hundred and thirty degrees celsius
from the compressor. We run it through a heat exchanger
to pull that heat out, and we store it in
hot water. So on the surface we have a water tank.
Think of an LNG sphere filled with water now at
two hundred degrees C. So we captured that energy and
(09:02):
that heat hot otherwise would have dissipated, and we store
it and wrap it in insulation. Okay, then when the
comes back up, we go in reverse to those heat
exchanges and use that same heat to high heat the
air so that it doesn't go cryogenic and it eliminates
the need for natural gas.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, that's it's elegant, right, It's so elegant because that
heat is actually energy that in conventional that in conventional
compressor was just getting lost, right, and then you had
to provide more energy to heat the air backup. So
in your model you capture that energy by heating up water,
and then you use the hot water to heat up
the air when you're blowing it through the turbine, so
you don't have to.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Burn gas exactly, moving the round trip efficiency from thirty
five percent to seventy percent.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Satisfying, Very satisfying. Okay. So the other problem is in
the conventional version, you need AsSalt cavern so that your
air doesn't just dissipate through whatever the little tiny holes
in the rock. And why does using water mean you
don't need that? You can do it in a lot
more places.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
So the way our cavern works is if you think
of a cavern where two thousand feet underground we hallow
out think of cubic football field. We backfill it with
water a one time fill. When you finish construction, you
fill it up with water. Okay, Now, when you're pushing
air in, it's moving the water down and lifting it
all the way to the surface.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
A ha, So you just did a hand motion that
I want to explain for people listening. So it's basically
it like it goes down like whatever in a sink
in your kitchen sink. It goes down, but then it
turns back up. It's like a j There's basically a
pipe that goes down out of the bottom of the
cavern and then makes a U turn and goes up
to the surface.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
That's right. And then at the surface we have a
little pond with enough volume that once the air is
full of the cavern. I eat caverns filled with air,
all that water that used to be in the cavern
has now been lifted up to the surface.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
And why does this solve that problem? Why does that
mean you don't need a salt.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Cavern because the air pressure will move the water down
that jhook and lift to the surface before it would
put trude through the rocks.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Okay, so this is a very elegant idea. You're still
you're working for a nuclear power plant. You come across
this idea, but you don't decide to try it for
the nuclear power plant, like what happens next?
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Well, that was my desire, and so I asked him,
I said, well, what if we wanted to pilot one
or build one with you? And he basically said, I
have a company name and a patent and that's it,
and I don't really know what to do next. And
then I started looking for other options. There was no
other options, and I said, look, we're kind of a
canary in the coal mine. Every utility is going to
ultimately see these challenges eventually. So I saw the opportunity.
(11:48):
So I quit my job, drained some savings, and joined
as the co founder and we started Hydrostore.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
And you know, now, in the past few years, basically
since solar took off, everybody has been talking about long
duration storage, right, long duration energy storage. Everybody it was
not talking about it then what solar power costs? What
it it costs then ten times what it costs. Now,
I don't know. It was not at all like it
(12:17):
is now right. It was not at all obvious that
solar power is going to be everywhere and the problem
was going to be storage, Like, what were you thinking
about at that time?
Speaker 1 (12:25):
In that context, it kind of comes back to the
nuclear power plant, because we had half of Ontario's grid
was nuclear that can't turn down and forty percent of
the rest was hydro that can't turn down.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Interest.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
So once we added wind and solar, you really started
to see the swings. And I realized that Ontario's grid
is very unique. But once once you take away your
base load, once intermittency is a decent portion of what's left,
everyone needs storage. And so I realized that Ontario's grid
was just seeing it first, but that every grid will
(13:00):
eventually see it when wind and solar penetration rose.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Interesting, basically you saw it first because nuclear and hydro
are you uniquely difficult to turn on and off really fast,
whereas most other places they're using natural gas, they're using coal,
which you can basically turn on and off. So the
intermittency was not such an acute problem.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
So early exactly interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
You were right about.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
That, And then once wind and solar started coming on,
they started saying, well, we need storage, but we only
need fifteen minutes, and then that turned a half hour,
than an hour, then two, then four. Now it's eight
in a lot of markets. Now they're moving to twelve.
They're even talking forty fifty hours of storage. And it's
true that as the wind and solar penetration rise, your
(13:45):
duration of storage keeps growing. And right now I'd say
roughly a third of the world needs eight hour storage
and the other two thirds still aren't there yet, but
it's coming.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
And it's basically, the more wind and solar you have,
the larger a share of your power, they represent the
longer duration.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
You need for storage exactly. And you can firm it
up with natural gas to a point. But then you
start curtailing so much solar, burning so much natural gas,
you stop putting solar on, whereas with long duration storage,
we allow you to keep adding more solar, more wind,
and you can that's how you get to one hundred
percent renewable.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
I mean, long duration storage is clearly the problem at
this point, right at least in places where there's a
decent amount of solar or wind, or wires going to
places where there's a decent amount of solar wind it
does seem like storage in general and long duration storage
in particular is the bottleneck.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yes, and I think the technologies are there now, but
we don't have the market structures to properly pay for
it and compensate it, which is holding it up from
really taking off. So California, Australia they've been pretty innovative.
The UK is doing some stuff now, Ontario in Canada,
but it requires you to change market reform.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah, I want to get to that. I feel like
there's a fair bit to talk about in terms of policy,
but first I want to get you from twenty ten
to twenty twenty five. So you have essentially an idea, right,
you have intellectual property and a name and two guys
in a dream like what I don't want to do
(15:26):
every day of the last fifteen years, obviously, but like,
what are a few of the key points, like the
few key marks you had to hit.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
The first one was we worked with a university, University
of Windsor to validate the engineering that it would work.
The heat mass balance and all the basic physics were sound,
so we did that. Then we ran pool tests, so
using underwater structures, we were able to show it at
a very small scale to validate the models in real world.
(15:59):
Then we moved to a bigger pilot out in a
lake and we built that to further validate. We had
a truck with a compressor in it, heat exchangers, balloons
sunk by concrete out in the lake with a hose
coming back.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
That's cool.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah. That was enough to get enough data to get
enough grant money. We secured about eight nine million of
grant money. Then we were able to attract the venture
capital investor our turn Ventures, and Toronto Hydro was willing
to host a pilot plant, so a grid connected one
megawatt one megwat hour pilot plant. So we took that
(16:36):
grant money and the venture money and we're now six
seven people and we built this pilot plant, grid connected
and it was pretty neat. We sunk giant structures offshore
in the lake. So instead of digging a cavern and
filling it with water, we sunk essentially a structure within
a lake and connected it back with drill pipe.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Like like a bubble sitting there on the bottom of
the lake like a caisson.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
It was massive and so that data it proved that
everything worked. We optimized the heat exchangers the control system
and filed a lot more intellectual property and then so
that was a five year temporary pilot. Once we had
that data, then the an ISSO was running a procurement
for piloting long duration storage.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
What's an ISO.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Electricity system operator here in Ontario, So they ran a pilot,
we submitted a bid, we won the contract to build
a plant that had a ten year revenue contract.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
A real thing. So that's a real thing.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Yeah, And so that was called our Gottarage facility and
we turned that on in twenty nineteen and have been
running it ever since. So then we had we call
that our commercial reference facility, so it references our technology,
albeit at a fairly small scale. It's two megawats eight
megawatt hours. But we ran that and then we brought
insurance companies through and engineering construction companies and said go
(18:03):
through this and tell us why this wouldn't work at
a larger scale. And they were able to then give
us insurance products and different things that would make a
larger project bankable.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
It's like you're in the infrastructure business basically, right, and
so you need like tons of capital, tons of insurance,
like right, You've got to spend a lot of money now,
and you'll get paid back every year for whatever twenty
years or something. Whatever is the life of it. It's
like a big, hard, complicated Ultimately you wanted to be boring,
although I'm sure it's not boring yet, business right, right.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
So this was setting us up for that. So then
this plant kind of got us all the financial instruments
that we would need to do a big one. So
then we went and started developing big plants. We now
are about to start construction in Australia for a one
billion dollar plant and in California for about a one
point five billion dollar plant. And because we had the
(18:58):
pilot plant, we have the insurance, the confidence of the constructors,
and we're able to get debt and project level equity
and project finance those first two big plants. So now
we're in the process of constructing those and once they're operational,
then the technology should be boring and completely de risk,
which would then allow utilities to start building it on
(19:19):
their own balance sheet without us having to mobilize all
the capital. We would say, you know, utility X or
a Google or Microsoft or a data center, if you
want one, you can pay for and build it, and
we'll just take a technology license fee.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
So you you don't want to be in the infrastructure business.
You want to be in an intellectual property business, and you're
just in the in the in the infrastructure business to
prove that it's a good idea.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yes, I think we'll always stay in the infrastructure business.
It's just the opportunity is so huge, and these plants
are so big, Like we have eighteen we're developing, but
each one is a billion and a half. Well that's
you know, twenty five thirty billion dollars and we're only
in a handful of markets.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
The idea is you're going to finance all of those
Like in the current model, you're there, they're yours.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
There, ares We're backed by some pension funds, Goldman Sachs
and so we've got a decent amount of capital. Will
keep bringing partners in. But like we're not doing anything
in India, Japan, China, like I can't do that globally,
and so the model is allow other people to build
it on their balance sheet and become that IP licensing
company while we still do the core infrastructure in the
(20:26):
markets that we choose to offerate.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Still to come on the show, competing against lithium ion
batteries making three hundred failed pitches, and also what political
change in Washington might mean for Hydrostore. I'd heard Curtis
(20:54):
talking in other interviews about how hard it was to
build his company, and of course founders always talk about
how hard it is to build a company. But somehow,
when Curtis talked about it, I really felt it, really
believed him, and so I asked him to tell me
about some of the moments when it got really hard.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
There were quite a few, to be honest. I mean,
one certainly was when that structure sunk when we were
building that first pilot plant.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah, so tell me about that. So this is the
first time you're actually doing it. What's happening there? Like
you're towing does what's it look like?
Speaker 1 (21:30):
It's about the size of a basketball court, maybe twenty
feet high, and it's all concrete. Think of a culvert
pipe when you under the highways. Oh yeah, A bunch
of those strapped together, essentially filled with air, so it
would float itself almost as a barge that was then
to be lowered down onto the ground, and then that
(21:53):
would serve as our air cavity with water moving in
and out, and so we get it out to the
deep depths of Lake Ontario and we're towing it and
a kind of a rogue waves hits and something pops
and it starts filling with water where it's not supposed to,
and it drops down and smashes on the seafloor.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Are you are you watching it? Where are you when
this is happening.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
I'm at home. Our team is on a barge trailing it,
and they've got drones down there and cameras. But as
you can imagine, when it hits all the plume of
sand and stuff comes up. So it's not till the
next morning where we see how catastrophic it is. But
we knew when we lost it, you're not gonna be
able to lift this thing up. It's so deep divers
can't even go to access it. I was on the phone,
(22:37):
like speaker phone, two in the morning at sitting in
my son's bedroom while he was sleeping with my wife,
because I was pulling an all night or working and yeah,
and it was so then we all just kind of
looked at each other and I told people, safely, wrap
up the work, go home. We had a meeting the
next day called the board in and it was essentially,
(22:58):
we're toast. It was good run, but I think we're done.
And that's when we said, well, we got all risk insurance.
Surely this counts. And to the insurance company's credit, they said, yeah,
you had all risk. Here's four million dollars. Try again
however you want, but we're not ensuring the second time.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Oh huh.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
And we pulled it off. The second time. We changed
design and we got it built and so we had
our plant operational, which was a great, great milestone for
the team. There was another time when we realized we
had it to be a developer. We couldn't just jump
to that licensing model that we would have to build
a first big plant.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
So is that your initial So your initial idea was like,
let's just do a pilot and show that it works
and then license the technology, because who are we. We're
not going to get billions of dollars to build a
gigantic hole in the ground that's got to last for
twenty years. That's not us exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
And so then we realized that after talking to dozens
of utilities and developers and everyone said, there's no way
I'm building the first one on my ballogie.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Well that's the nature, right, I mean, it's a famously
conservative in right, it's highly regulated. They're not going to
take a billion dollar risk on a thing that plausibly
might not work.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
It wouldn't be crazy if it didn't work.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, exactly. And so then I had to call my
board at the time in and say we have to
be a developer, and they're like, whoa. That means we
got to park letters of credit, we need tens of
millions of dollars, and we got to staff up a
team that looks completely different than the team of engineers
we have. So then I got on my bike and
(24:38):
tried to find an investor that would back that new model,
and it took me six months.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Got on your bike, what do you do? You are
you speaking metaphorically or literally?
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, speaking metaphorically.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I was hoping you went on some crazy ride.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Well it was three hundred investors and I think it
was three hundred and sixteenth said yes, So it was.
It was a long road. We ran out of capital.
I had to mortgage my house. My wife was saying,
you're not drawing a salary. You've put in our savings.
Now you've mortgaged our house. How do you know the
investor going to come? You've already been rejected a couple
hundred times. And then we eventually found an investor that
(25:15):
saw the vision and was willing to put that risk
capital in to become a developer. I then got a
team that was working at Brookfield Renewable.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
All right, before you keep going, what did you say
when your wife said, why are you doing this? You
spent all of our money and more and hundreds of
people have said no, Like she I mean, in retrospect,
I guess you were right, But like in any kind
of expected value rational universe, she's right at that point.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah, what I said was I believe in it. When
I look at first principles, the technology makes perfect sense
and the world's going to need it like and so
I said, there's no fundamental reason. The whole the reason
the investors were saying no was I'm not the right one.
It's too much risk for me, it's too much capital,
the timeline's too long. No one said I don't think
(26:08):
it'll work, or I don't think long duration storages needed.
So to me, I just had to find the right
fit more so than there was a fundamental problem with
what I was doing, and I wasn't willing to give
up because I felt so passionate about climate change. But
also it was so many people had invested money already
at that point and the team members that had joined me.
(26:30):
I didn't want to let everyone down. So I was
wanting to turn over every stone until there was absolutely
no possible other option. And luckily an investor that had
said no before, I picked up the phone and called
them back and said, you're sure you don't want to
take a harder look, And he had just received a
big payday from another investment. I caught him while he
was in a good mood. He said, you know what, Sure,
(26:53):
let's be kindled these conversations, and that resulted in an investment,
really our Series B from Warum Partners, and that allowed
us to staff up a development team, gave us the
capital to start investing in our Australian project in California.
That's really when the ball started rolling. We had that
Goddarich facility done, and then we started winning contracts and
(27:14):
getting interconnect and now you know, the team's close to
one hundred and forty people and in multiple countries and
going going really well.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
At the moment. I've heard you mentioned this moment in
was it twenty twenty, like in the intense COVID era
of COVID when you got a contract in Australia, which
was that your first like big contract? That's right, tell
me about that moment.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yeah, So we started investing in Australia. It was a
really creative solution. My commercial team came up, so we
offered the utility something they weren't really asking for, but
they saw the benefit of it using storage instead of
transmission to essentially connect this remote community, and they won
that by the regulatory rules wasn't allowed. So then we
(28:01):
had to change the regulatory environment. So it was a
long road, but their light came on and said, wow,
this is a dramatically cheaper no emissions. So then they
became an ally for US Transgrid to help change the
rules in Australia to allow projects like this to go ahead.
And so we're going through the rules and then then
they say here's the contract. And so it's a forty
(28:24):
year contract, like I say, a billion dollar plant, and
we're starting the permitting work and engaging the stakeholders and
then COVID hits and Australia shuts their borders, so then
we had to strike a deal with a local team
so that they would be our boots on the ground
until all the border restrictions lifted, and then we ultimately
(28:45):
bought that partner back out, So it was a bit
of an expensive foray, but allowed the project to keep moving.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Did you think it was there a minute where you
thought COVID was gonna mean it wouldn't work.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
COVID was another time that had to mortgage the house
because we needed some bridge financing. No investors were investing.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Had you paid back the other mortgage or you're just
the value going off? How do you keep mortgaging your
house in this story.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
No, I got paid back that one, and then we
were running out of capital again and we had a
bunch of interested investors, but then when COVID hit, they said,
look until I figure out where the world goes, I'm
not putting new money to work. So we had to
find a way of bridging ourselves for a year, which
essentially me and some board members loaned the company money
(29:33):
from our personal balance sheets to get us through, and
then we ultimately struck a new investor came in, and
then ultimately Goldman Sacks in the Canadian pension Plan gave
us a very large check at the end of twenty one.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Just so I'm not missing any how many times have
you mortgaged your house to keep the company going?
Speaker 1 (29:51):
That would be three or four?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Three or four, Okay, I mean the bigger the company,
the bigger the company gets, the less helpful it's going
to be unless you keep buying bigger houses.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Right, I'm still in the same mouth, So it ain't
getting any bigger. It's not good.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
It's not gonna do much if you got a hundred
forty people working for you and you're building billion dollar plants,
unless it's an amazing house, in which case congratulations. So
I found out about your company when I read that
you had been awarded a provisional loan of I think
(30:27):
it was one point seven billion dollars from the US
Department of Energy. That was I don't know, a month
ago or something, which congratulations. But also, the federal government's
a lot different now than it was a month ago,
and I'm curious what that means for you. I mean,
what the what political change in the US in particular,
(30:50):
means for you.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, I think there's still a bit of uncertainty out there,
but you know, we started working with the Loan Program
Office three plus years ago, so they've done a tremendous
amount of diligence. And this is exactly what this program
is set up for, is newer technology. G's that we
have a ton of domestic content and are going to
show a new technology adding to grid resiliency in the US.
(31:17):
So that's what the loan is for. It's to provide
the debt for our project in California. And if you know,
we're putting in a lot of equity into the project,
and the debt covers obviously the debt to construct and
the interest during the construction period. So we're really excited
about the loan. It's a you know, illegally binding loan,
(31:37):
but you know, with the new administration, there's a lot
of things moving around, but I think it's aligned with
their agenda. It's actually in a Republican county, but it
drives grid resiliency and lowers energy costs for you know,
the energy dominance that is required for all the data
centers and load growth out there. So I think it
(31:59):
and like I said, it's virtually one hundred percent domestic
uh labor and content that goes into the project. So
I think it's it's consistent with the newest administration goals,
and it's a like I say, a binding loan commitment.
So we've got a couple conditioned precedents we got to
get through before it we can start drawing on the loan.
But really excited and it's been great working with the
(32:20):
Department of Energy and their tremendous staff.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
I want to note that you said energy dominance. That's good, right,
you got that one. And Republican district is interesting.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
My sense is with the Inflation Reduction Act, you know,
a ton of money for the energy transition, basically a
lot of it has been going to projects in Republican districts. So,
I mean, it'll be interesting to see how that plays
out politically. Right, what you mentioned there's a couple conditions.
(32:51):
I mean, is it basically if you do certain things,
you get the money. Is that what that means?
Speaker 1 (32:55):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
What are the things? What are the conditions?
Speaker 1 (32:58):
If I had to bubble it down to two, was
we've got one more revenue contract that we've got to
sign and then our permits. Our permits are working through
the California Energy Commission. We expecte Q three Q four
we would have that permit, so we need those. We
need a permit to construct, and then the last revenue
contract to be signed.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
So let's talk a little bit about long duration storage
kind of more broadly, right, Like it's a huge problem,
as you said, it's a bigger problem the more there
there is a wind and solar power. Lots of people
are trying lots of different ways to solve it. Like
give me a sense of the landscape more broadly, and
(33:39):
where you fit, Like what are other people doing? And
then what are you particularly good at, what's the one
thing that you can do more reliably, more cheaply, whatever.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, you almost have to look at it in a
kind of a two by two quadrant. On the one
axis is like scale, is it really big like city
size or is it for the home? Okay, you know?
And then on the y axis, if you would, is duration.
So do you need an hour or two of storage
or do you need many days or a season of storage?
(34:09):
We kind of fit in the really large scale, so
we are hundreds of megawatts to give you a sense
it's like a quarter of a city load. That's the
sort of scale much bigger than any individual wind farm
or solar farm. So we're pretty big scale.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Quarter of a city, meaning like one hundred thousand homes like.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Something like that, hundreds of thousands if not a million,
so quite large. And then we tend to do eight
hours to twenty four hours, so we'll cover you for
through the night if you're a solar dominant region, if
you've got a day or two with low winds, that's
where we fit in. We're not seasonal, like we won't
(34:50):
do your spring shoulder season, and we're definitely not an
hour or two. So lithium ion at both large scale
and home for like six hours and less is dominated
by lithium ion, so they own shorter durations six hours
and less. And then in large scale, really long duration
(35:13):
that's really been the pumped hydro but they're quite limited
in what other solutions are out there. And then people
are talking hydrogen for seasonal. I'm not sure if that's
going to make sense or not, but we kind of
have a clear where we play. Now there's four or
five different technologies going at the other pockets of that
grid that I haven't mentioned.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
So lithium ion batteries are getting cheaper fast, which is
good news for the world. What does it mean for you?
I mean, is it the case that the cheaper lithium
ion batteries get, the longer the duration they can economically provide.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yes, they used to. We used to think it was
two to four hours. Now they've pushed to six. If
the cost keep coming down and tariffs don't kind of
reverse the declines, that could could move to eight. I
can't really see them moving too much farther beyond that.
To give you a sense when today's cost, if you
install the lithium ion battery, it's about three hundred dollars
(36:16):
per kill awalk hour of storage capacity and it lasts
maybe ten years with degradation and everything in there. To
add one hour of our system is fifty dollars a
killo what hour, and it lasts fifty years with no degradation.
So it's a pretty you know, on the marginal basis,
it's a pretty high bar. They would have to drop
(36:38):
by an order of magnitude, and then they still would
have to extend their life by five x to kind
of get into the same.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Rom that's compelling. So what's next, Like, what are you
working on now?
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Construct those two plants so in Australia and California, construct
them on time, on budget, show the world what they
can do at scale, while we take those other eighteen
that we're developing and stack them up ready for construction.
That'll then allow us to start licensing to utilities. And
we'd like to partner with groups in Japan and China
(37:14):
and India and Europe to start offering the solution in
those markets. As opposed to us standing up development teams
all around the world. We're predominantly focused in North America
and Australia and the UK as a development platform.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
What are you worried about at this point, Like what
might go wrong?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
No, I think it's just general team building, culture, project management.
You know, There's nothing fundamental with our technology supply chain
policy environment that I'm really worried about. It's really just
execution from our team. I guess there is a bit
of the pace for long duration storage will be set
(37:55):
by policy makers. Do they fix the rules of the
road for the grids? Do they allow q reform so
you can get interconnection spots? Will they properly pay for
long duration storage. How long do permits take? That sort
of thing will dictate the pace of the build out.
But I'm confident it's coming. It's just a matter of
(38:16):
the pace that it accelerates at.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. It'll just be sort
of random questions, is basically what it's going to be.
(38:43):
So I read that you spent many years as an
energy consultant, living in different parts of the world, and
I'm curious of all of the places you lived, what
was the most like underrated? So the places like great
that nobody knows is great.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Soul? South Korea?
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Oh interesting? Tell me?
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah. I got to spend five months in South Korea
and just it was for a guy that grew up
in Northern Ontario in a rural background, being in a
city that dnse and that intense. From just a stimulation perspective,
I found very compelling and just a very unique culture,
(39:26):
unique food, and just a great experience.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
What's one thing I should do if I go to Seoul?
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Karaoke?
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Of course? What's your go to karaoke song?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Oh? It was the Beatles. I can't remember which one,
Hey Jude, I think it's a winner.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I bet you killed with Hey Jude and Seoul. What's
one thing I should do if I go to Canora, Ontario.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
MS Canora, a little cruise ship around Lake of the Woods. Beautiful.
I cooked there growing up, helping them to pay pay
for my fun on the weekends.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
You played hockey at the University of Toronto, and I'm curious.
I have a friend who's into hockey, and I said,
I'm talking to a guy who who played hockey. What
should I ask him? And he said, ask him what
his view is on fighting in hockey. What's your view
on fighting in hockey.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
It's a bit complicated, but it keeps everyone honest. So
I'm a supporter, and you know, there's a code. If
someone doesn't want to fight, you don't fight. But it
is a way of keeping things honest.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
What does that mean? That is in fact really interesting
to me. What does it mean that it keeps everyone honest?
Speaker 1 (40:36):
You know, it can be a very dangerous sport. You know,
you think of the stick and you can wind up
and smash someone in the ankle and smash their ankle
and blow out their career. Someone does that, you know,
the ref just throwing them in a penalty box, Isn't
isn't fair retribution for something like that. So no one
runs around swinging their sticks because they know what would
happen if they did such a thing.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
That's really interesting. What's one thing you tell somebody who's
becoming a CEO for the first time.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
You know, I don't know that I'm at the stage
where I'm giving advice. Yeah, I'm still hearing a long
time man. Yeah, I guess so, I still feel like
I'm learning as I'm going. But I guess I would
say it's about the team more than anything is. You
can only do so much. In the early days, you're
doing a lot, but then it's about the team. Team, team.
Surround yourself with the best possible people, and it's amazing.
(41:31):
I wake up every day just amazed with what the
team does and gets accomplished, and you just start realizing
the power of other people and how much strength there
is and in the numbers and in the team. So
I'd just be focus on getting the right team.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
I heard you say that if you had known when
you started the company how hard it was going to
be what you know now, you wouldn't have done it,
And so I'm curious, like, do you think fifteen years
from now, if you look back at twenty twenty five,
you would say, Man, if I'd have known how hard
that fifteen years would be, I would have got out
in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
No, I think I've made it through the you know,
the J curve. If you will, like your pipe, you
on your way up to the surface, that's right. Yeah, No,
it's it now because I think if it would have failed,
call it four or five years ago, yeah, everyone, you know,
I wouldn't have had much pride in it, Like there's
some pride, but we didn't accomplish much. We didn't it
(42:28):
wasn't that big of a team. We didn't accomplish many milestones.
We didn't raise that much money. So I basically just
burned my personal capital and years of my life. And
I think people would have scoffed because a lot of
people were scoffing at us, saying, what are you guys doing?
This doesn't make any sense, And it just would have
fulfilled those and I think I would have been pretty embarrassed,
to be honest, Whereas now I think we've accomplished a lot.
(42:51):
I would be proud, and I'd look back and say,
you know, we made a really good go at it,
and but I think moving forward, it's just uh, it's
just up from here. So I'm excited for the next
fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Great, thank you for your time. It was great to
talk with you.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Thanks, Jacob has been pleasure.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Turnis Van Wallingham is the co founder and CEO of
hygro Store. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Cheng.
It was edited by Lyddy jeen Kott and engineered by
Sarah Bruguier. You can email us at problem at Pushkin
dot FM. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next
week with another episode of What's Your Problem.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Today's show is a good show, and I can give
you several reasons why. One, it's a show about the
energy transition, so we got the high stakes of climate change. Two,
it's more specifically about long duration energy storage, which may
be the key problem to solve in climate change now
(00:41):
that solar power is so cheap but also so intermittent,
the Sun's not always out, you got to store the energy. Three,
the story has some very clever, fun technical insights. Four
we get some real moments of harrowing drama. And finally, five,
perhaps most surprising, today's show includes a defense of fighting
(01:04):
in hockey. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem.
My guest today is Curtis van Wallingham. He is the
co founder and CEO of a company called the hygro Store.
Curtis's problem is this, how can you store energy by
compressing air in giant underground caverns, and how can you
(01:28):
do it efficiently almost anywhere in the world. The idea
of compressed air storage has been around for a long time,
but it's had some fundamental problems that have limited its use.
As you'll hear, Curtis thinks he and his colleagues have
solved those problems. Since co founding the company fifteen years ago,
Hydrostore has built a fully functioning plant and has recently
(01:50):
signed multiple billion dollar contracts to build facilities around the world.
Curtis told me he got interested in compressed air back
in two thousand and eight when he had kind of
a weird problem. He was working at a power plant
that was generating more energy than anyone could use.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
So I was the head of planning a nuclear plant.
I think it's the world's second largest single site nuclear
plant in Ontario, called Bruce Power. And because we have
so much hydro and nuclear in Ontario, when we started
adding wind and solar, we started to see we had
too much power. We couldn't export it, and so we
would have to shed power, which for a nuclear plant
(02:29):
it means essentially dumping steam into the Great Lakes. But
it required a lot of manual labor, moving valves and
doing stuff that it wasn't designed to do. So it
was driving up maintenance costs.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
And also it's a bummer, right, Like you're generating you
want to make energy, you don't want to dump steam
into a lake exactly.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
And so then I tried to build a pump hydro
plant because back there, this is two thousand and eight,
the only real commonplace to store power was through pump
tydro So I tried to find a site and it
was just impossible to see how you could find a site,
get permits and build something anywhere near a timeframe.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
And just to be clear, sorry, but pumped hydro is
is sort of the classic kind of long duration energy storage,
right where you pump water essentially up a hill from
some lower level to some higher level when you have
the power, and then when you when you want to
discharge the battery, you just let it flow downhill and
spin a turbine.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
More or less right exactly, any hydro electric dam, just
stop the dam from producing and start pumping water back
up to the top reservoir. And so tried to do
that and realized there was no possible way of doing it.
So I had a team of five or six people
at the time, and I asked them to research is
there other ways of storing power? And that's when I
came across my co founder Cam who had this idea
(03:45):
and it's essentially the opposite of pumped hydro. Put air
underwater and get the buoyancy. So instead of lifting water
and air, why don't you sink air underwater and get
the buoyancy. And you know, as an engineer, it was
kind of intriguing to me. So I thought about it,
ransom numbers and you know, lo and behold, they said, hey,
this is compact. It can be easier to site, has
(04:07):
all the advantages of pump tydro much easier to permit.
So took the plunge, quit my job, and threw some
money in and fifteen years later here we are.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
So your co founder's idea, it was a variation on
this old idea of compressed air. Right, when you have
more energy than you need, use it to compress air underground,
and then when you need the energy, sort of blow
the air back up and use that to generate energy. Right,
that's the basic idea. It's an old idea, and in
its basic form, it's pretty limited in what it can do. Right, Like,
(04:40):
what's the what are the classic problems with compressed air?
Speaker 1 (04:44):
The first one is around how you manage heat. In
traditional compressed air, they would compress the air, it gets hot,
they would lose that heat. But put the compressed air
underground and when you need it to discharge.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
When you say they would lose that heat, what is that?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
What does that mean? They would essentially just compress and
then hot air would get sent underground and it would
dissipate into the earth. And then it when it comes
up and you want expand that air, then the opposite happens.
It gets very cold, and because there's moisture in the air,
it'll cause icicles and snow and it'll freeze up your turbine,
(05:20):
going cryogenic we call it.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
So that's the problem. It's fine, you put it down
in the earth and the heat dissipates, that's actually okay.
The problem is when you want to blow it back
up to spin a turbine, it basically freezes the turbine
and the turbine snaps or whatever. That's why it's bad.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Exactly, it'll ce it up and it won't spin, okay,
And so to prevent that they have to preheat it.
So they would burn some natural gas. So when the
air comes up from the cavern, they would heat it
up so that once it expands, it doesn't drop below zero.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
So A, that's inefficient, it costs money. And then b
now when we're talking about doing this, to fight climate change.
It's totally not what you want.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, you have less emissions than a gas plant, but
you still have half the emissions.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Calling okay, So that's problem number one is you got
to burn natural gas to heat up the air when
you're blowing it because it gets really cold. What's problem
number two with sort of classic compressed air?
Speaker 1 (06:15):
The problem number two is just where can you build them?
And traditionally you would only build them where there are
salt caverns, and salt caverns are as rare to find
as good pumped hydro sites. So once you overlay, where
does the grid need storage? Where is their transmission? The
odds that there's a salt cavern there are very very deminimous.
So it just didn't have.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Some Why traditionally did it have to be a salt cavern?
That seems so random.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Because you need so much air and for the air
to be at quite high pressures, because it gets kind
of complicated. But as you think of a scuba tank
pumping air in, the pressure starts rising very dramatically. Well,
to get a sufficient amount of air, you got to
go to really high pressures. That's too high a pressure
(06:59):
in most rocks that it would just you would lose
all of the air force its way out.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
So it just dissipates. You pump all this air in
there and it just goes through whatever cracks or whatever
little tiny holes there are. The air just kind of
blows out and you don't have compressed air anymore.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Exactly where salt is air tight. And so that's why
you would typically do it in salt. That's why they
store a lot of the natural gas and salt. But
that just the salt formations aren't that common and they're
not where the grid needs them.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Okay, so these are our two problems and you encounter
this guy who seems to have solved them. Who is
the guy and what has he figured out?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
So the guy's name is Cameron Lewis, and he's a
traditional serial entrepreneur, engineering technician. He worked in the oil
patch and Canada, repurposing compressors and turbines for use in
the oil patch. Then he moved to Ontario to start
developing wind farms and that's when he realized, look, this
wind is so intermittent. I need storage. And then he
(07:57):
was like, how do I make storage? And that's when
his mind started going because he is a true entrepreneur.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
It reminds me I should have had the name at hand.
But I talked to that guy who who worked as
an engineer in the in Texas, Texas and Oklahoma and
and sort of brought the technologies of the fracking boom
to geothermal energy. It's kind of Ladimer, yeah, Tim Latimer.
Tim Latimer, some some parallels right to the story.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Very so.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
So there are these two problems. One you have the
problem of when you decompress, when you use your compressed
air gets really cold. And two you have the problem
that you can only put the compressed air in a
few places, otherwise it just sort of dissipates. How does
using water solve each of those problems? First of all,
how does it solve the the cold problem?
Speaker 1 (08:41):
So what we do is when the air comes out hot,
it comes out about two hundred and thirty degrees celsius
from the compressor. We run it through a heat exchanger
to pull that heat out, and we store it in
hot water. So on the surface we have a water tank.
Think of an LNG sphere filled with water now at
two hundred degrees C. So we captured that energy and
(09:02):
that heat hot otherwise would have dissipated, and we store
it and wrap it in insulation. Okay, then when the
comes back up, we go in reverse to those heat
exchanges and use that same heat to high heat the
air so that it doesn't go cryogenic and it eliminates
the need for natural gas.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, that's it's elegant, right, It's so elegant because that
heat is actually energy that in conventional that in conventional
compressor was just getting lost, right, and then you had
to provide more energy to heat the air backup. So
in your model you capture that energy by heating up water,
and then you use the hot water to heat up
the air when you're blowing it through the turbine, so
you don't have to.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Burn gas exactly, moving the round trip efficiency from thirty
five percent to seventy percent.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Satisfying, Very satisfying. Okay. So the other problem is in
the conventional version, you need AsSalt cavern so that your
air doesn't just dissipate through whatever the little tiny holes
in the rock. And why does using water mean you
don't need that? You can do it in a lot
more places.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
So the way our cavern works is if you think
of a cavern where two thousand feet underground we hallow
out think of cubic football field. We backfill it with
water a one time fill. When you finish construction, you
fill it up with water. Okay, Now, when you're pushing
air in, it's moving the water down and lifting it
all the way to the surface.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
A ha, So you just did a hand motion that
I want to explain for people listening. So it's basically
it like it goes down like whatever in a sink
in your kitchen sink. It goes down, but then it
turns back up. It's like a j There's basically a
pipe that goes down out of the bottom of the
cavern and then makes a U turn and goes up
to the surface.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
That's right. And then at the surface we have a
little pond with enough volume that once the air is
full of the cavern. I eat caverns filled with air,
all that water that used to be in the cavern
has now been lifted up to the surface.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
And why does this solve that problem? Why does that
mean you don't need a salt.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Cavern because the air pressure will move the water down
that jhook and lift to the surface before it would
put trude through the rocks.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Okay, so this is a very elegant idea. You're still
you're working for a nuclear power plant. You come across
this idea, but you don't decide to try it for
the nuclear power plant, like what happens next?
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Well, that was my desire, and so I asked him,
I said, well, what if we wanted to pilot one
or build one with you? And he basically said, I
have a company name and a patent and that's it,
and I don't really know what to do next. And
then I started looking for other options. There was no
other options, and I said, look, we're kind of a
canary in the coal mine. Every utility is going to
ultimately see these challenges eventually. So I saw the opportunity.
(11:48):
So I quit my job, drained some savings, and joined
as the co founder and we started Hydrostore.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
And you know, now, in the past few years, basically
since solar took off, everybody has been talking about long
duration storage, right, long duration energy storage. Everybody it was
not talking about it then what solar power costs? What
it it costs then ten times what it costs. Now,
I don't know. It was not at all like it
(12:17):
is now right. It was not at all obvious that
solar power is going to be everywhere and the problem
was going to be storage, Like, what were you thinking
about at that time?
Speaker 1 (12:25):
In that context, it kind of comes back to the
nuclear power plant, because we had half of Ontario's grid
was nuclear that can't turn down and forty percent of
the rest was hydro that can't turn down.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Interest.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
So once we added wind and solar, you really started
to see the swings. And I realized that Ontario's grid
is very unique. But once once you take away your
base load, once intermittency is a decent portion of what's left,
everyone needs storage. And so I realized that Ontario's grid
was just seeing it first, but that every grid will
(13:00):
eventually see it when wind and solar penetration rose.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Interesting, basically you saw it first because nuclear and hydro
are you uniquely difficult to turn on and off really fast,
whereas most other places they're using natural gas, they're using coal,
which you can basically turn on and off. So the
intermittency was not such an acute problem.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
So early exactly interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
You were right about.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
That, And then once wind and solar started coming on,
they started saying, well, we need storage, but we only
need fifteen minutes, and then that turned a half hour,
than an hour, then two, then four. Now it's eight
in a lot of markets. Now they're moving to twelve.
They're even talking forty fifty hours of storage. And it's
true that as the wind and solar penetration rise, your
(13:45):
duration of storage keeps growing. And right now I'd say
roughly a third of the world needs eight hour storage
and the other two thirds still aren't there yet, but
it's coming.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
And it's basically, the more wind and solar you have,
the larger a share of your power, they represent the
longer duration.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
You need for storage exactly. And you can firm it
up with natural gas to a point. But then you
start curtailing so much solar, burning so much natural gas,
you stop putting solar on, whereas with long duration storage,
we allow you to keep adding more solar, more wind,
and you can that's how you get to one hundred
percent renewable.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
I mean, long duration storage is clearly the problem at
this point, right at least in places where there's a
decent amount of solar or wind, or wires going to
places where there's a decent amount of solar wind it
does seem like storage in general and long duration storage
in particular is the bottleneck.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yes, and I think the technologies are there now, but
we don't have the market structures to properly pay for
it and compensate it, which is holding it up from
really taking off. So California, Australia they've been pretty innovative.
The UK is doing some stuff now, Ontario in Canada,
but it requires you to change market reform.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah, I want to get to that. I feel like
there's a fair bit to talk about in terms of policy,
but first I want to get you from twenty ten
to twenty twenty five. So you have essentially an idea, right,
you have intellectual property and a name and two guys
in a dream like what I don't want to do
(15:26):
every day of the last fifteen years, obviously, but like,
what are a few of the key points, like the
few key marks you had to hit.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
The first one was we worked with a university, University
of Windsor to validate the engineering that it would work.
The heat mass balance and all the basic physics were sound,
so we did that. Then we ran pool tests, so
using underwater structures, we were able to show it at
a very small scale to validate the models in real world.
(15:59):
Then we moved to a bigger pilot out in a
lake and we built that to further validate. We had
a truck with a compressor in it, heat exchangers, balloons
sunk by concrete out in the lake with a hose
coming back.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
That's cool.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah. That was enough to get enough data to get
enough grant money. We secured about eight nine million of
grant money. Then we were able to attract the venture
capital investor our turn Ventures, and Toronto Hydro was willing
to host a pilot plant, so a grid connected one
megawatt one megwat hour pilot plant. So we took that
(16:36):
grant money and the venture money and we're now six
seven people and we built this pilot plant, grid connected
and it was pretty neat. We sunk giant structures offshore
in the lake. So instead of digging a cavern and
filling it with water, we sunk essentially a structure within
a lake and connected it back with drill pipe.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Like like a bubble sitting there on the bottom of
the lake like a caisson.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
It was massive and so that data it proved that
everything worked. We optimized the heat exchangers the control system
and filed a lot more intellectual property and then so
that was a five year temporary pilot. Once we had
that data, then the an ISSO was running a procurement
for piloting long duration storage.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
What's an ISO.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Electricity system operator here in Ontario, So they ran a pilot,
we submitted a bid, we won the contract to build
a plant that had a ten year revenue contract.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
A real thing. So that's a real thing.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
Yeah, And so that was called our Gottarage facility and
we turned that on in twenty nineteen and have been
running it ever since. So then we had we call
that our commercial reference facility, so it references our technology,
albeit at a fairly small scale. It's two megawats eight
megawatt hours. But we ran that and then we brought
insurance companies through and engineering construction companies and said go
(18:03):
through this and tell us why this wouldn't work at
a larger scale. And they were able to then give
us insurance products and different things that would make a
larger project bankable.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
It's like you're in the infrastructure business basically, right, and
so you need like tons of capital, tons of insurance,
like right, You've got to spend a lot of money now,
and you'll get paid back every year for whatever twenty
years or something. Whatever is the life of it. It's
like a big, hard, complicated Ultimately you wanted to be boring,
although I'm sure it's not boring yet, business right, right.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
So this was setting us up for that. So then
this plant kind of got us all the financial instruments
that we would need to do a big one. So
then we went and started developing big plants. We now
are about to start construction in Australia for a one
billion dollar plant and in California for about a one
point five billion dollar plant. And because we had the
(18:58):
pilot plant, we have the insurance, the confidence of the constructors,
and we're able to get debt and project level equity
and project finance those first two big plants. So now
we're in the process of constructing those and once they're operational,
then the technology should be boring and completely de risk,
which would then allow utilities to start building it on
(19:19):
their own balance sheet without us having to mobilize all
the capital. We would say, you know, utility X or
a Google or Microsoft or a data center, if you
want one, you can pay for and build it, and
we'll just take a technology license fee.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
So you you don't want to be in the infrastructure business.
You want to be in an intellectual property business, and you're
just in the in the in the infrastructure business to
prove that it's a good idea.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yes, I think we'll always stay in the infrastructure business.
It's just the opportunity is so huge, and these plants
are so big, Like we have eighteen we're developing, but
each one is a billion and a half. Well that's
you know, twenty five thirty billion dollars and we're only
in a handful of markets.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
The idea is you're going to finance all of those
Like in the current model, you're there, they're yours.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
There, ares We're backed by some pension funds, Goldman Sachs
and so we've got a decent amount of capital. Will
keep bringing partners in. But like we're not doing anything
in India, Japan, China, like I can't do that globally,
and so the model is allow other people to build
it on their balance sheet and become that IP licensing
company while we still do the core infrastructure in the
(20:26):
markets that we choose to offerate.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Still to come on the show, competing against lithium ion
batteries making three hundred failed pitches, and also what political
change in Washington might mean for Hydrostore. I'd heard Curtis
(20:54):
talking in other interviews about how hard it was to
build his company, and of course founders always talk about
how hard it is to build a company. But somehow,
when Curtis talked about it, I really felt it, really
believed him, and so I asked him to tell me
about some of the moments when it got really hard.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
There were quite a few, to be honest. I mean,
one certainly was when that structure sunk when we were
building that first pilot plant.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
Yeah, so tell me about that. So this is the
first time you're actually doing it. What's happening there? Like
you're towing does what's it look like?
Speaker 1 (21:30):
It's about the size of a basketball court, maybe twenty
feet high, and it's all concrete. Think of a culvert
pipe when you under the highways. Oh yeah, A bunch
of those strapped together, essentially filled with air, so it
would float itself almost as a barge that was then
to be lowered down onto the ground, and then that
(21:53):
would serve as our air cavity with water moving in
and out, and so we get it out to the
deep depths of Lake Ontario and we're towing it and
a kind of a rogue waves hits and something pops
and it starts filling with water where it's not supposed to,
and it drops down and smashes on the seafloor.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Are you are you watching it? Where are you when
this is happening.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
I'm at home. Our team is on a barge trailing it,
and they've got drones down there and cameras. But as
you can imagine, when it hits all the plume of
sand and stuff comes up. So it's not till the
next morning where we see how catastrophic it is. But
we knew when we lost it, you're not gonna be
able to lift this thing up. It's so deep divers
can't even go to access it. I was on the phone,
(22:37):
like speaker phone, two in the morning at sitting in
my son's bedroom while he was sleeping with my wife,
because I was pulling an all night or working and yeah,
and it was so then we all just kind of
looked at each other and I told people, safely, wrap
up the work, go home. We had a meeting the
next day called the board in and it was essentially,
(22:58):
we're toast. It was good run, but I think we're done.
And that's when we said, well, we got all risk insurance.
Surely this counts. And to the insurance company's credit, they said, yeah,
you had all risk. Here's four million dollars. Try again
however you want, but we're not ensuring the second time.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Oh huh.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
And we pulled it off. The second time. We changed
design and we got it built and so we had
our plant operational, which was a great, great milestone for
the team. There was another time when we realized we
had it to be a developer. We couldn't just jump
to that licensing model that we would have to build
a first big plant.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
So is that your initial So your initial idea was like,
let's just do a pilot and show that it works
and then license the technology, because who are we. We're
not going to get billions of dollars to build a
gigantic hole in the ground that's got to last for
twenty years. That's not us exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
And so then we realized that after talking to dozens
of utilities and developers and everyone said, there's no way
I'm building the first one on my ballogie.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Well that's the nature, right, I mean, it's a famously
conservative in right, it's highly regulated. They're not going to
take a billion dollar risk on a thing that plausibly
might not work.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
It wouldn't be crazy if it didn't work.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, exactly. And so then I had to call my
board at the time in and say we have to
be a developer, and they're like, whoa. That means we
got to park letters of credit, we need tens of
millions of dollars, and we got to staff up a
team that looks completely different than the team of engineers
we have. So then I got on my bike and
(24:38):
tried to find an investor that would back that new model,
and it took me six months.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
Got on your bike, what do you do? You are
you speaking metaphorically or literally?
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, speaking metaphorically.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I was hoping you went on some crazy ride.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Well it was three hundred investors and I think it
was three hundred and sixteenth said yes, So it was.
It was a long road. We ran out of capital.
I had to mortgage my house. My wife was saying,
you're not drawing a salary. You've put in our savings.
Now you've mortgaged our house. How do you know the
investor going to come? You've already been rejected a couple
hundred times. And then we eventually found an investor that
(25:15):
saw the vision and was willing to put that risk
capital in to become a developer. I then got a
team that was working at Brookfield Renewable.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
All right, before you keep going, what did you say
when your wife said, why are you doing this? You
spent all of our money and more and hundreds of
people have said no, Like she I mean, in retrospect,
I guess you were right, But like in any kind
of expected value rational universe, she's right at that point.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah, what I said was I believe in it. When
I look at first principles, the technology makes perfect sense
and the world's going to need it like and so
I said, there's no fundamental reason. The whole the reason
the investors were saying no was I'm not the right one.
It's too much risk for me, it's too much capital,
the timeline's too long. No one said I don't think
(26:08):
it'll work, or I don't think long duration storages needed.
So to me, I just had to find the right
fit more so than there was a fundamental problem with
what I was doing, and I wasn't willing to give
up because I felt so passionate about climate change. But
also it was so many people had invested money already
at that point and the team members that had joined me.
(26:30):
I didn't want to let everyone down. So I was
wanting to turn over every stone until there was absolutely
no possible other option. And luckily an investor that had
said no before, I picked up the phone and called
them back and said, you're sure you don't want to
take a harder look, And he had just received a
big payday from another investment. I caught him while he
was in a good mood. He said, you know what, Sure,
(26:53):
let's be kindled these conversations, and that resulted in an investment,
really our Series B from Warum Partners, and that allowed
us to staff up a development team, gave us the
capital to start investing in our Australian project in California.
That's really when the ball started rolling. We had that
Goddarich facility done, and then we started winning contracts and
(27:14):
getting interconnect and now you know, the team's close to
one hundred and forty people and in multiple countries and
going going really well.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
At the moment. I've heard you mentioned this moment in
was it twenty twenty, like in the intense COVID era
of COVID when you got a contract in Australia, which
was that your first like big contract? That's right, tell
me about that moment.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yeah, So we started investing in Australia. It was a
really creative solution. My commercial team came up, so we
offered the utility something they weren't really asking for, but
they saw the benefit of it using storage instead of
transmission to essentially connect this remote community, and they won
that by the regulatory rules wasn't allowed. So then we
(28:01):
had to change the regulatory environment. So it was a
long road, but their light came on and said, wow,
this is a dramatically cheaper no emissions. So then they
became an ally for US Transgrid to help change the
rules in Australia to allow projects like this to go ahead.
And so we're going through the rules and then then
they say here's the contract. And so it's a forty
(28:24):
year contract, like I say, a billion dollar plant, and
we're starting the permitting work and engaging the stakeholders and
then COVID hits and Australia shuts their borders, so then
we had to strike a deal with a local team
so that they would be our boots on the ground
until all the border restrictions lifted, and then we ultimately
(28:45):
bought that partner back out, So it was a bit
of an expensive foray, but allowed the project to keep moving.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Did you think it was there a minute where you
thought COVID was gonna mean it wouldn't work.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
COVID was another time that had to mortgage the house
because we needed some bridge financing. No investors were investing.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Had you paid back the other mortgage or you're just
the value going off? How do you keep mortgaging your
house in this story.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
No, I got paid back that one, and then we
were running out of capital again and we had a
bunch of interested investors, but then when COVID hit, they said,
look until I figure out where the world goes, I'm
not putting new money to work. So we had to
find a way of bridging ourselves for a year, which
essentially me and some board members loaned the company money
(29:33):
from our personal balance sheets to get us through, and
then we ultimately struck a new investor came in, and
then ultimately Goldman Sacks in the Canadian pension Plan gave
us a very large check at the end of twenty one.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Just so I'm not missing any how many times have
you mortgaged your house to keep the company going?
Speaker 1 (29:51):
That would be three or four?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Three or four, Okay, I mean the bigger the company,
the bigger the company gets, the less helpful it's going
to be unless you keep buying bigger houses.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Right, I'm still in the same mouth, So it ain't
getting any bigger. It's not good.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
It's not gonna do much if you got a hundred
forty people working for you and you're building billion dollar plants,
unless it's an amazing house, in which case congratulations. So
I found out about your company when I read that
you had been awarded a provisional loan of I think
(30:27):
it was one point seven billion dollars from the US
Department of Energy. That was I don't know, a month
ago or something, which congratulations. But also, the federal government's
a lot different now than it was a month ago,
and I'm curious what that means for you. I mean,
what the what political change in the US in particular,
(30:50):
means for you.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, I think there's still a bit of uncertainty out there,
but you know, we started working with the Loan Program
Office three plus years ago, so they've done a tremendous
amount of diligence. And this is exactly what this program
is set up for, is newer technology. G's that we
have a ton of domestic content and are going to
show a new technology adding to grid resiliency in the US.
(31:17):
So that's what the loan is for. It's to provide
the debt for our project in California. And if you know,
we're putting in a lot of equity into the project,
and the debt covers obviously the debt to construct and
the interest during the construction period. So we're really excited
about the loan. It's a you know, illegally binding loan,
(31:37):
but you know, with the new administration, there's a lot
of things moving around, but I think it's aligned with
their agenda. It's actually in a Republican county, but it
drives grid resiliency and lowers energy costs for you know,
the energy dominance that is required for all the data
centers and load growth out there. So I think it
(31:59):
and like I said, it's virtually one hundred percent domestic
uh labor and content that goes into the project. So
I think it's it's consistent with the newest administration goals,
and it's a like I say, a binding loan commitment.
So we've got a couple conditioned precedents we got to
get through before it we can start drawing on the loan.
But really excited and it's been great working with the
(32:20):
Department of Energy and their tremendous staff.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
I want to note that you said energy dominance. That's good, right,
you got that one. And Republican district is interesting.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Right.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
My sense is with the Inflation Reduction Act, you know,
a ton of money for the energy transition, basically a
lot of it has been going to projects in Republican districts. So,
I mean, it'll be interesting to see how that plays
out politically. Right, what you mentioned there's a couple conditions.
(32:51):
I mean, is it basically if you do certain things,
you get the money. Is that what that means?
Speaker 1 (32:55):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
What are the things? What are the conditions?
Speaker 1 (32:58):
If I had to bubble it down to two, was
we've got one more revenue contract that we've got to
sign and then our permits. Our permits are working through
the California Energy Commission. We expecte Q three Q four
we would have that permit, so we need those. We
need a permit to construct, and then the last revenue
contract to be signed.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
So let's talk a little bit about long duration storage
kind of more broadly, right, Like it's a huge problem,
as you said, it's a bigger problem the more there
there is a wind and solar power. Lots of people
are trying lots of different ways to solve it. Like
give me a sense of the landscape more broadly, and
(33:39):
where you fit, Like what are other people doing? And
then what are you particularly good at, what's the one
thing that you can do more reliably, more cheaply, whatever.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, you almost have to look at it in a
kind of a two by two quadrant. On the one
axis is like scale, is it really big like city
size or is it for the home? Okay, you know?
And then on the y axis, if you would, is duration.
So do you need an hour or two of storage
or do you need many days or a season of storage?
(34:09):
We kind of fit in the really large scale, so
we are hundreds of megawatts to give you a sense
it's like a quarter of a city load. That's the
sort of scale much bigger than any individual wind farm
or solar farm. So we're pretty big scale.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Quarter of a city, meaning like one hundred thousand homes like.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Something like that, hundreds of thousands if not a million,
so quite large. And then we tend to do eight
hours to twenty four hours, so we'll cover you for
through the night if you're a solar dominant region, if
you've got a day or two with low winds, that's
where we fit in. We're not seasonal, like we won't
(34:50):
do your spring shoulder season, and we're definitely not an
hour or two. So lithium ion at both large scale
and home for like six hours and less is dominated
by lithium ion, so they own shorter durations six hours
and less. And then in large scale, really long duration
(35:13):
that's really been the pumped hydro but they're quite limited
in what other solutions are out there. And then people
are talking hydrogen for seasonal. I'm not sure if that's
going to make sense or not, but we kind of
have a clear where we play. Now there's four or
five different technologies going at the other pockets of that
grid that I haven't mentioned.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
So lithium ion batteries are getting cheaper fast, which is
good news for the world. What does it mean for you?
I mean, is it the case that the cheaper lithium
ion batteries get, the longer the duration they can economically provide.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yes, they used to. We used to think it was
two to four hours. Now they've pushed to six. If
the cost keep coming down and tariffs don't kind of
reverse the declines, that could could move to eight. I
can't really see them moving too much farther beyond that.
To give you a sense when today's cost, if you
install the lithium ion battery, it's about three hundred dollars
(36:16):
per kill awalk hour of storage capacity and it lasts
maybe ten years with degradation and everything in there. To
add one hour of our system is fifty dollars a
killo what hour, and it lasts fifty years with no degradation.
So it's a pretty you know, on the marginal basis,
it's a pretty high bar. They would have to drop
(36:38):
by an order of magnitude, and then they still would
have to extend their life by five x to kind
of get into the same.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Rom that's compelling. So what's next, Like, what are you
working on now?
Speaker 1 (36:53):
Construct those two plants so in Australia and California, construct
them on time, on budget, show the world what they
can do at scale, while we take those other eighteen
that we're developing and stack them up ready for construction.
That'll then allow us to start licensing to utilities. And
we'd like to partner with groups in Japan and China
(37:14):
and India and Europe to start offering the solution in
those markets. As opposed to us standing up development teams
all around the world. We're predominantly focused in North America
and Australia and the UK as a development platform.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
What are you worried about at this point, Like what
might go wrong?
Speaker 1 (37:33):
No, I think it's just general team building, culture, project management.
You know, There's nothing fundamental with our technology supply chain
policy environment that I'm really worried about. It's really just
execution from our team. I guess there is a bit
of the pace for long duration storage will be set
(37:55):
by policy makers. Do they fix the rules of the
road for the grids? Do they allow q reform so
you can get interconnection spots? Will they properly pay for
long duration storage. How long do permits take? That sort
of thing will dictate the pace of the build out.
But I'm confident it's coming. It's just a matter of
(38:16):
the pace that it accelerates at.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Let's finish with the lightning round. It'll just be sort
of random questions, is basically what it's going to be.
(38:43):
So I read that you spent many years as an
energy consultant, living in different parts of the world, and
I'm curious of all of the places you lived, what
was the most like underrated? So the places like great
that nobody knows is great.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Soul? South Korea?
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Oh interesting? Tell me?
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah. I got to spend five months in South Korea
and just it was for a guy that grew up
in Northern Ontario in a rural background, being in a
city that dnse and that intense. From just a stimulation perspective,
I found very compelling and just a very unique culture,
(39:26):
unique food, and just a great experience.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
What's one thing I should do if I go to Seoul?
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Karaoke?
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Of course? What's your go to karaoke song?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Oh? It was the Beatles. I can't remember which one,
Hey Jude, I think it's a winner.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I bet you killed with Hey Jude and Seoul. What's
one thing I should do if I go to Canora, Ontario.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
MS Canora, a little cruise ship around Lake of the Woods. Beautiful.
I cooked there growing up, helping them to pay pay
for my fun on the weekends.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
You played hockey at the University of Toronto, and I'm curious.
I have a friend who's into hockey, and I said,
I'm talking to a guy who who played hockey. What
should I ask him? And he said, ask him what
his view is on fighting in hockey. What's your view
on fighting in hockey.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
It's a bit complicated, but it keeps everyone honest. So
I'm a supporter, and you know, there's a code. If
someone doesn't want to fight, you don't fight. But it
is a way of keeping things honest.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
What does that mean? That is in fact really interesting
to me. What does it mean that it keeps everyone honest?
Speaker 1 (40:36):
You know, it can be a very dangerous sport. You know,
you think of the stick and you can wind up
and smash someone in the ankle and smash their ankle
and blow out their career. Someone does that, you know,
the ref just throwing them in a penalty box, Isn't
isn't fair retribution for something like that. So no one
runs around swinging their sticks because they know what would
happen if they did such a thing.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
That's really interesting. What's one thing you tell somebody who's
becoming a CEO for the first time.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
You know, I don't know that I'm at the stage
where I'm giving advice. Yeah, I'm still hearing a long
time man. Yeah, I guess so, I still feel like
I'm learning as I'm going. But I guess I would
say it's about the team more than anything is. You
can only do so much. In the early days, you're
doing a lot, but then it's about the team. Team, team.
Surround yourself with the best possible people, and it's amazing.
(41:31):
I wake up every day just amazed with what the
team does and gets accomplished, and you just start realizing
the power of other people and how much strength there
is and in the numbers and in the team. So
I'd just be focus on getting the right team.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
I heard you say that if you had known when
you started the company how hard it was going to
be what you know now, you wouldn't have done it,
And so I'm curious, like, do you think fifteen years
from now, if you look back at twenty twenty five,
you would say, Man, if I'd have known how hard
that fifteen years would be, I would have got out
in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
No, I think I've made it through the you know,
the J curve. If you will, like your pipe, you
on your way up to the surface, that's right. Yeah, No,
it's it now because I think if it would have failed,
call it four or five years ago, yeah, everyone, you know,
I wouldn't have had much pride in it, Like there's
some pride, but we didn't accomplish much. We didn't it
(42:28):
wasn't that big of a team. We didn't accomplish many milestones.
We didn't raise that much money. So I basically just
burned my personal capital and years of my life. And
I think people would have scoffed because a lot of
people were scoffing at us, saying, what are you guys doing?
This doesn't make any sense, And it just would have
fulfilled those and I think I would have been pretty embarrassed,
to be honest, Whereas now I think we've accomplished a lot.
(42:51):
I would be proud, and I'd look back and say,
you know, we made a really good go at it,
and but I think moving forward, it's just uh, it's
just up from here. So I'm excited for the next
fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Great, thank you for your time. It was great to
talk with you.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Thanks, Jacob has been pleasure.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
Turnis Van Wallingham is the co founder and CEO of
hygro Store. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Cheng.
It was edited by Lyddy jeen Kott and engineered by
Sarah Bruguier. You can email us at problem at Pushkin
dot FM. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next
week with another episode of What's Your Problem.
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