22 | Ben Bollinger — VP of Strategic Initiatives, Malta, Inc.

🌡 What's the difference between a heat pump and a heat engine? What is synchronous inertia? What are the four horses pulling the chariot of a startup company? Why does a technology need its own sandbox? For answers, we're joined by Ben Bollinger, a career early-stage tech startup pro, PhD scientist, and currently VP of Strategic Initiatives at Malta Inc.—where they're working on molten salt thermal energy storage for grid-scale synchronous long duration energy storage (LDES). See Ben's slides here.

Ben tells BioZen's CEO Nate Kirchhofer that Malta's mission is "to enable the broader deployment of intermittent renewables and help with the energy transition decarbonization." The discussion ranges from the California "Duck Curve" and why we need to time-shift energy generated during the day to when it's needed at night, to Malta's electricity-in-electricity-out molten salt thermal energy storage, to considerations of marginal costs and separation of Power and Energy (a hallmark of LDES), to "policy and remuneration" being the biggest challenge for alternative energy storage. 

Stick around to hear about the present load following capability of gas and coal plants and how incentives are moving LDES towards that role (internationally!) and away from its problematic classification as either a power plant (while discharging) or end-user load (while charging). This is critical because renewable wind and solar generation plants cannot turn their power output up and down to follow people's consumption of electricity—necessitating complementary storage. "And that's where technologies like Malta come in, that can provide those same synchronous inertia, short circuit current, resiliency, and the other grid stability attributes that really complement the clean kilowatt hours that are produced by solar and wind," says Ben. That's also what the recently-formed LDES Council is advocating for. 

The conversation finishes with some international trends in energy storage policy, Malta's recent funding announcement with Siemens Energy as a strategic investor, the 9-figure cost scales of 100 MW scale energy projects (which is beyond the scope of VC) that requires consortia of companies to achieve rather than single startup companies, and some startup journey advice from Ben. Get in touch with Malta at [e-mail].

Recorded 19 Dec 2023.

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