18 | Matt Millard — Founder & CEO, CapyBara Energy

🐻 The capybara is nature's ultimate collaborator, existing peacefully in diverse global ecosystems. That harmonious disposition is exactly what CapyBara Energy seeks to bring to the energy storage market with their aqueous supercapacitor technology. How? CapyBara's Founder & CEO Matt Millard tells BioZen's CEO Nate Kirchhofer that it's possible because their technology is uniquely "Sustainable, Affordable, and Scalable." And let's be honest, all energy storage should strive for those three characteristics!

At $20/kWh capex, CapyBara "supercaps" might be hard to beat on cost, not to mention that their raw materials are carbon waste, they won't catch fire, they have an effectively infinite lifecycle, they are adaptable to intermittent generation, and they are possible to discharge for a huge range of durations from 2-100+ hours—hardly the "delicate flowers" that certain other energy storage technologies might be.

Matt has a ton of experience scaling energy storage technologies from lab to commercial scale, so stick around to hear some of his tips for that process, as well as some fresh, surprising insights from the DOE Office of Electricity Energy Storage Program Annual Meeting and Peer Review. One key theme: >4 hours of storage.

And, there's one facinating, validated metric from that meeting: Take a guess at just how much it costs (in $/kWh) to decommision a Li-ion battery at end-of-life (EOL). The answer was bigger than expected! (Ref: Dai et al. Ensuring Knowledgeable End-of-Life Considerations in Stationary Storage Applications)

Contains one sentence of explicit content.

Recorded 26 Oct 2023.

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