Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to Another Climate Tech Podcast, conversations with the people trying to save us from ourselves. In today's meandering interview, I spoke with Art Lapinsch, a tech founder by background. Art has become obsessed in the last year and a half with energy policy and gone deep down that rabbit hole where he's found that energy policy is actually everything policy. He talked about that, as well as the geographical hotspots for climate tech and his series of thought pieces called Delphi Zero. I'm Ryan Grant Little Thanks for joining Art. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, man. So you're a successful, exited founder who's worked in a few different industries, mostly in tech, but ranging from HR to FinTech to ad tech, and now you're focused largely or exclusively on climate tech. You're also a war refugee and these days you're studying energy law, so you cover a lot of ground in your personal and professional life. Can you take us through your background a little bit, how you got where you are, who? We're talking in Athens, but you're also based in Berlin, so where you are, both thematically but also physically, if you'd like.

Art Lapinsch: 1:51

Yeah, for sure. I'll give you the bullet point version and then, if there's something interesting, we can dive a little bit deeper. So I was born in the Soviet Union. My mom is Russian, my dad is Latvian, and they left, let's say, the sinking ship before the empire collapsed. They moved with me as a baby to Yugoslavia. We settled in a town called Mostar, which some people would describe as the Jerusalem of Yugoslavia because he had the three different religions there, but unfortunately a couple of one. One and a half years later the civil war was knocking at the front door and we also had to leave. Mostar, got super lucky, got airlifted out by a military machine, first to Belgrade, and then my dad, who was a musician, he scored a weekend gig back in Vienna, and that was at a time when visas were given out for six months. So my mom decided to come along and just like see what Vienna, austria, is all about for a weekend. Yeah, the weekends turned into six months, six months turns into a lifetime, and that's how I ended up being an Austrian citizen.

Art Lapinsch: 2:59

So I'm pretty much, since the age of two and a half, lived in Vienna, grown up there, did my studies first in business and then in advertising in London and Paris, and the way I got into entrepreneurship was by pure coincidence. So, picking where to study, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life and, kind of being a very uncreative person, I thought, well, there's only business medicine or law and I said law, probably too dry. Well, came full circle. So now I'm studying law medicine. I just somehow couldn't imagine myself working every single day in a hospital or private practice environment, and so that's left business. I started studying, had a bunch of my homies from high school who are also at the same university and initially, since everyone was going into consulting, I also wanted to go into consulting. So I saw an ad for ADL, arthur D Little, and applied for one of their assessment centers. They rejected me and that was the moment that was done. Was consulting so kind of lucky in hindsight.

Art Lapinsch: 4:07

And I was still looking for some sort of student job and found that there was a position at one of the institutes, which was the Entrepreneurship Institute, as a student assistant. So it's pretty much setting up tables bringing out pizza and Coca-Cola, when entrepreneurs would come visit once a week and talk about their experience to a set of students. And this is what got me hooked. Every single week I could see people who didn't hate their jobs, didn't hate what they were doing on a regular basis, and I got my first real job through chatting up one of those entrepreneurs and it was like a student organization which was trying to teach entrepreneurial principles to students. So it was like a ripoff of Startup Live Sorry, it was like a start of weekends, which was like the format where a bunch of people come together over weekends, they discuss their ideas, work on them for two or three days and then pitch in front of some sort of investors, and so this was my first connection point with entrepreneurship. So I was organizing these type of events in Austria, but also Europe-wide, for a couple of years.

Art Lapinsch: 5:12

And then I moved to Berlin to join a venture builder so a venture builder, pretty much just a venture fund that has a thematic focus. So in that particular case it was Adtech, advertising Technology, and they were starting multiple businesses every single year and my position initially was just kind of I was like a plumber. I would have to do everything, so like built slidepacks for the CEO, jump into a Fox costume for the corporate photo shoots, because the company was called Hit Fox and that was the junior, most employee and through that I got the opportunity to move for this venture builder to San Francisco, which wasn't in the cards at all. So initially I had the idea of moving to Asia after finishing my studies because my thinking was well, highest economic growth if you experience that in one region, you can probably apply some of the learnings and new developing regions.

Art Lapinsch: 6:12

And as venture builder they had an office in Seoul, south Korea. So I said hey, boss, I want to move to South Korea. And they talked with the managing director of that office and he said well, it's a sales office, so you don't speak any Korean, no dice. But we have this opportunity in San Francisco. I've never been into the West Coast in my life and my decision took, I don't know, a split second.

Art Lapinsch: 6:36

So one day said there's this opportunity in San Francisco. I immediately said yes, without even knowing what I got myself into, but probably one of the most consequential decisions of my life. So moved to San Francisco, drank the Silicon Valley, cool AIDS, was starting a couple of Adstech and FinTech businesses for that venture builder in the US and then left the venture builder to start my own business with a couple of other people, and so we started also an advertising software company that would help businesses such as Lyft, ups, dhl to recruit drivers automatically. So it's like high volume recruitment automation. Did that for a couple of years, got lucky with the timing and the company got acquired by one of the largest recruitment marketing agencies in the world, spent two years there on integration and as an executive for the European business units and then took a sabbatical. So that's kind of like the short version of it and we can go into more detail if you want.

Ryan Grant Little: 7:39

And okay, and so what brings you to Athens right now?

Art Lapinsch: 7:42

Athens. Well, that's just like a personal decision. So we've been and we're still living in Berlin, primarily with my girlfriend, but we were just interested in exploring new cities, visited two of our friends who moved from Berlin to Athens in 2019. Berlin left with the city immediately. So we had one of these moments where you have this holy shit, this place is amazing realization, and in my life I had this only with a couple of cities in Europe. It was Berlin, lisbon and Athens. And then we started looking at the real estate market and song that is yeah, much more attractive to get a place here and much more affordable to get a place here than in Berlin and the rest of history.

Ryan Grant Little: 8:25

Yeah, I lived in Berlin for quite a while and was involved in the startup world there. I left about a year and a half ago and, of course, berlin's the first city that comes to mind when people think of I mean also climate tech. Right now it's picked up quite a bit, but it's becoming increasingly challenging. For, on the housing front, I read a stat about a year and a half ago that Immobilien Scout, which is the main kind of platform for apartments, for that, for every available apartment for rent in central Berlin, they get 72 applications. So not just visits or anything like that, but applications, and so I think that in the end, it's going to affect the startup environment because it's going to be hard for companies to scale the cities under a lot of stress.

Ryan Grant Little: 9:05

And I'm very curious, the Vienna business agency had me on a webinar recently talking about you know my reasons for moving here, and I talked a little bit about that kind of strain that's happening in some of the other places, also in Lisbon. Right, lisbon was a really, really hot place and still is for digital nomads, for kind of the crypto space as well, but they're having a similar kind of housing crisis and I'm wondering, just, you know this is a bit of a side question, but what are your thoughts on kind of the next hot spots for tech clusters and potentially specifically climate tech clusters in Europe?

Art Lapinsch: 9:40

Tech clusters. The biggest trend is probably the distribution of talent, or just the. I'd say like that Before COVID, most businesses said remote cannot be done, especially at large scales of an organization. We, like our business that we built and that we started in 2015, was remotes first, mainly because we couldn't afford to hire engineers in San Francisco and we had to rely on former colleagues who were based out of, let's say, southwestern Germany because they had families and their kids were in school. And I still remember in 2015 when I was telling my friends, hey, I work from home immediately assumed that I'm unemployed.

Art Lapinsch: 10:25

So in the latest by, let's say, april 2020, when the realization hit, even for large companies, this can be done. It's mainly just a organizational, like organizational culture issue that opens up the possibility to hire people everywhere on the planet. I mean especially, you have more infrastructure providers such as remotecom or dealcom that even allow you to hire people in a different country while being in compliance with local law. So it just just make them much more attractive to have like an international pool of talent. So I think the major hubs that we know will kind of like remain San Francisco, new York, berlin, london, yada, yada, yada, but you'll have more businesses that are just distributed by default, and that's, I would say this is the trend for general tech.

Art Lapinsch: 11:19

For climate tech maybe a little bit different. I haven't thought about that in so much detail, but what I see a lot is that for climate, you don't only deal with software, but very frequently with the physical realm. You're building products, you're building generation capacity, you have to deal with local laws, and that helps. It's beneficial for an organization to have a finger on the pulse where you want to be in the market, so kind of like, if you want to solve, let's say, some Greek specific problem in energy and in climate, then most likely you'll have to set up shop in Greece. You might have some of your talent work remotely specifically on the software components and maybe the, let's say, business administration components, but some fraction of the business will have to be in the spaces, and so my guess would be that you will have a lot of localized hubs, so pretty much every country will have one or two hubs that probably are closer to the research institutions and the main technical universities of that particular country. That would be my guess.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:31

Interesting. So there could be kind of micro hubs in the countries that they're present, but the overall leadership or the team might be more distributed, so seeing these different kind of variations of the hybrid model going forward. So you're an entrepreneur through and through. You've worn the Fox outfit and you've set up the pizza tables and done your time in the valley and in the last year and a half you've really gone down the rabbit hole on climate tech, but especially on things like energy policy, energy storage. As an entrepreneur, you must see lots of opportunities everywhere. What kind of opportunities catch your interest the most right now?

Art Lapinsch: 13:09

A million dollar question. A billion dollar question.

Ryan Grant Little: 13:11

The gigaton question. The gigaton question.

Art Lapinsch: 13:14

Yeah. So one thing that's like one reason why it's difficult to answer that with one sentence is energy and climate touches pretty much every single aspects of our economy. I think that's something that I've read in a newsletter by Nan Rensov, who runs Stripe Climates, and it was like a piece specifically about why it is so difficult to transition your career into climate because, like, once you start reading about it, you notice, oh, I have to know about energy. If I have to know about energy, I have to know about the physics and maybe the chemistry of energy, then production processes, then you start getting into permitting cycle and local policies and laws, then you get into consumer preferences, consumer patterns, and so it just literally touches the entire world economy.

Art Lapinsch: 14:14

I like to say, compared to the climate opportunity, amazoncom is like a lemonade stand, because if you think about it, if we believe that climate change is real and that it's caused by emitting greenhouse gases and that, if we also believe that our chance for survival are higher if we go to net zero and if this is an desired outcome, then you pretty much have to substitute the entire global economy that is currently in place, either through decarbonized solutions or completely new solutions, and that doesn't matter whether you're a service provider or if you are manufacturing, let's say, clothes, cars, or if you are generating electricity. So opportunities are everywhere. That's like why it's so difficult for me to answer. One of the things that I'm pretty interested in is energy storage, but yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit later as well.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:15

A lot of people in the industry talk about how the term itself, climate tech, is going to become if it's not already very obsolete, because, as you say, it's about just transforming the entire world, basically. And so, in the same way that in the year 2000, you might talk about having an internet company, today it's such a meaningless term, right, Because you say, okay, well, what does it do? That's sort of just a platform, and I see a lot of kind of parallels there. But in this rabbit hole you've released, so you've come up with or you've put together a sub stack called Delphi Zero and you've published 13 essays for sci-fi stories and an interview, and I have to say I'll link the sub stack in the show notes and I really encourage listeners to check it out.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:56

You have this fine balance of kind of going really deep and nerdying out on some of these specific topics and sub topics, but I also found myself literally laughing out loud at a few of them, so you're able to weave in really effectively storytelling and humor into it, which is not definitely not common so far in this sector. Why did you come up with the idea to create this sub stack, sub stacks, basically a platform for posting essays and writings. Why did you come up with the idea for this Is? It reads almost at the beginning, to me like a bit of a journal that you then started making outwardly focused. Is that getting warm?

Art Lapinsch: 16:34

Yeah, so in my previous company I ran business operations and one of the aspects in there was also marketing, marketing and just in general knowledge transfer within the employee base but also within the customer base. And one of the things that companies struggle with especially it's a traditional companies that move from in person communication to remote communication is you have these questions that are being asked over and over again, so it's kind of evergreen questions, but that you answer by verbally communicating. In an office it's very cheap. You turn around, you tap someone on the shoulder and it's like, hey, how do we do this? They answer you turn around. In a remote environment you would have to set up a meeting, go on a call and then answer the question. Then, if multiple people have the same question, you are just an endless meetings nonstop. One of the best ways to solve for this problem is like whenever you have a question or keeps getting asked frequently and where the information remains stable, it's like a solid state piece of information. You can document it, regardless if you make a video or you make a written documentation, a wiki, a blog entry, whatever.

Art Lapinsch: 17:57

Writing is my love language. That's like how I describe it. I gravitate more towards long form writing. My absolute hero is Tim Urban from Wait but why, and really fell in love with this type of style of communication of complex concepts concepts such as artificial intelligence, how to find a partner for life, how to try to genetically freeze your brain so you can live forever, like all of those crazy things this guy manages to explain in blog posts. They're almost the length of a short book, and he does it by looking at the big picture, breaking it down into like all the sub components, going very deep into all these sub components, while doing so working with analogies and stories that are easy to remember or just like easy to grasp compared to very technical language, and he's humorous, and so you are entertained while you learn, and by the end of it you've learned about all these separate buckets and he brings it back together into the big picture. So this is my golden standard for communicating, let's say, technical knowledge.

Art Lapinsch: 19:09

We tried to work with such an approach from our previous company by publishing blog posts. The cool thing was A by doing it and by writing those, we understood the concepts much better because we had a language, how to communicate it to ourselves, but also to customers. B we had a shareable assets that you could send either to your own employees or to customers when they have questions. So you save time. Thirdly, it's almost like a proof of work. So you put something out, people can interact with it and if they really like it, they reach out to you. So it's a possibility of meeting interesting people similar to you, right?

Art Lapinsch: 19:50

I don't think that without the blog, you would have had as much context about what I'm doing, like how I'm thinking, and so it's nice just to share a little bit about yourself. So why did I start the sub stack? Exactly for those reasons, and also early last year, I decided that I wanted to spend significant amount of my time like next year is, in my career in the space of energy, climate and security policy, and I have to get up to speed anyway. And while I do that, I can just write my own summaries but also make them public, and so this is what the sub stack is. I just try to convey the information in a not boring way.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:34

It's interesting that you answer that by looking at kind of the example of internal at a company, Because I've noticed that this a lot, both at large companies through the startups, is that they tend to focus a lot on communication and communication tools and storage and storage tools.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:51

So if you look at most companies right now, if you look at any startup right now, they'll have Slack and Google Drive or something like that, but they won't have knowledge management kind of in the middle there like Notion or a tool like that. What I found with the companies that I've run is to bring in that kind of middleware where you're and it's almost like blog articles or it's like how do we do a webinar, how do we do something Right, and it's you can connect it to the storage and to the communication, but to just kind of have like this single source of truth of how you do something or how you think about something, and then it does become both an internal and an external thing and it actually ends up building the culture and it creates this kind of sense of that you're building on something right and not just starting from scratch every single time which has nothing but kind of you know virtuous cycle effects within the organization.

Art Lapinsch: 21:41

Yeah, I don't know exactly who said it, but there's like this idea of there are two things that are very scalable. One is code and the other one is media, and scaling media is pretty much like scaling ideas. It's just putting some sort of insight or just like light bulb moment from your head into multiple people's heads and specifically in the context of climate, very frequently it's just people might have all the information but they don't. Somehow doesn't trigger internal change, they don't get changed as a person to care about it. And I feel this is like one of the main challenges and maybe like the one challenge that I'll try to focus on and the coming years how to translate all the magical stuff like all the technology, all the projects, all the ambition that is going on in the climate space. It's just making it palatable for people like myself and they don't have a PhD in mechanical engineering but are still excited about crazy cool technology.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:42

So yeah, one of the things you talk about is that people don't get, don't feel a connection to energy, but they feel a connection to driving their car or to being cool in the summer or to being having an oven network and that type of thing. So they think in terms of the application, and if you talk about energy just as this broad kind of concept, you just lose people. They people don't feel connected to it.

Art Lapinsch: 23:03

Absolutely. I mean, this is something and by no means have I figured this out or anything, but I find myself in these situations, maybe like you too, because you're also working in climate People, sometimes at parties, who don't know me. They just like ask what do you do? And I can see the life drain out of them within four seconds and like see the glassy eyes. When you start talking about energy, they it's one of those topics. I tried to explain it to my girlfriend today.

Art Lapinsch: 23:33

I think one of the issues is you need so many layers of context to fully grasp what's going on, so that makes it very, very difficult to communicate it in a very quick way. And if you say, well, I'm working so that the next generations of your lineage have a planets to live, I mean it's hyperbole maybe, and maybe this triggers interest and maybe they say, oh, how do you do that? And then you can start drilling deeper. Maybe that's a way of trying to communicate what you do. But yeah, a bunch of people work in energy, whether it is on the commercial side, on the technical side, and all of that is so necessary. But if you just explain what you do, you lose people so quickly.

Ryan Grant Little: 25:19

And you have the advantage of not just saying energy, but energy law and markets, which compounds it even more. Yeah, but so the timing you got really interested in this around the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and, to a large extent, because of these energy security markets the interrelation of all of this kind of stuff in the last year and a half looking into this, what are some of the things that have surprised you or that you found really interesting?

Art Lapinsch: 25:46

Good question. Before the beginning of the war, I didn't really read too much about energy, climate or policy at all. I thought that policy is the most boring thing on the planet, and energy and climate was very technical and somehow I just couldn't develop an interest for that. And I was more interested in indie hacking, creating no-code websites, just smaller stuff, which was also fine, but I didn't really think that much about energy. And with the beginning of the war, for personal reasons, it hit really close to home and mom has business for many decades now in Ukraine, in the region of Zaporizhia, which is maybe known through the news due to a nuclear power plant in Erhodar, and so it felt super shit. To be honest. There was frustration, crying, everything.

Art Lapinsch: 26:40

A good friend of mine said maybe there's a way how to use this energy, that you have to do something about it which makes sense, and I think that was the right snap out of it recommendation that I needed. So I just didn't know where to begin. It was so complex and what to do. So the only thing I could think of which was I started reading about it and going down the like a splitter rabbit hole of the updates and I ended up, I don't know through algorithm or interest, but I ended up reading a lot about security analysis, mainly on the military side, and then ended up reading a lot about the interconnection between military and policy. Kind of makes sense. And there is this quote like war is the continuation of policy, or like politics if you know what I mean by other means yeah.

Art Lapinsch: 27:30

Or by other means exactly. And then, if you remember, early on in the war, like, as a taxpayer and resident of Germany, I was asking myself why the policy response, or at least the public policy response, from the German government was so muted compared to other countries. What's to do relative to Russia? And one of the arguments was well, germany has a very high imports share of its fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, coming from Russia. What is the gas used for? Is primarily industrial applications, and so like, if you would turn off the imports immediately would have a huge economic impact on Germany, on its citizens, political stability and so on. So this was the first aha moment where I saw well, energy and security policy is heavily intertwined, heavily intertwined. Policy is pretty much just like energy policy and vice versa. And at the same time, energy policy also plays a huge impact in like climates. Specifically as to, like, how did we get here? And, more interestingly, like, how do we get out of it? So my first insight was well, policy is pretty much a question about a, what are we trying to do for the future? Like, what are the policy objectives? And B, how do we try to achieve these objectives?

Art Lapinsch: 29:06

Policy instruments and non fancy word for policy instrument is loss. So you draft up a piece of writing that says you can do this, you cannot do that permissions, prohibitions and then you run it by parliaments. They say yay or nay, and then, if it goes into action, you suddenly have a rule change for the system in which everyone else plays every citizen, every business and so on. So very powerful, you have the possibility to change the rules. So that was like inside number one. Second thing that was surprising was if you assume that policymakers have this unfair advantage, they can come up with rules at any point in time when they want it. It's like well, why don't they put up rules in place that set us up for net zero immediately? Why don't they just like ban fossil fuels starting tomorrow? And so there's this concept of the energy trilemma, and I think that really describes pretty well what's going on, like the challenges that policymakers have to face.

Art Lapinsch: 30:12

The energy trilemma is pretty much saying you have three objectives. A it has to be good for the environment. So you're looking at the climate. Is it good for, let's say, future generations and so on? Sustainability. Second objective is is it economical? So is it affordable? Is it cheaper than current alternatives, thinking along these lines, along business and financial matters. The third objective is political stability and security national security, energy security. The problem is and that's why it's called the trilemma is because if you favor one over the other two, usually the other two, or at least one of them, will suffer.

Art Lapinsch: 31:03

I'll give you an example. If we say it's 1990 and we know by now earning fossil fuels is bad for the environments and we know that installing solar panels is really good for the environment, well, let's draft up a law that mandates 100% of electricity coming from solar panels. But A back in 1990, it was so expensive that you just could not afford it, even with your entire GDP, to just replace the entire generation capacity from fossil fuels to electricity. And B because you couldn't afford it, or maybe because you couldn't even produce it and install it in time, suddenly you wouldn't have electricity and that means you don't have energy security. Your citizens literally cannot tap water from the faucet and if that happens, wait 24 hours, wait 48 hours and you'll see what happens on the streets. It's not as simple for policymakers to say starting tomorrow, we have to change everything, and so like. Once you have this trilemma in mind, I think just gives a little bit more context of what's going on.

Ryan Grant Little: 32:54

And in Germany. This is because all of the Russian gas that's coming through the Nord Stream pipeline and the complete dependence on there, so that's why there is a slower response basically there, relative to some of the other countries. I like that you said that you got into this either out of interest or algorithm, which I think captures our times quite well. I mean, I don't even know if I was interested in it myself, but Twitter seemed to think that I was, and so the prognosis for the future of energy now is rising demand, hopefully the decarbonization of the grid just attempts at this at least and an increase on grid security, and I would say both in the physical sense, but also in terms of ransomware and things like this, which are becoming more and more problematic. And you hold that the lowest common denominator across all three of these trends is storage. So this is an area that you've kind of you've gone through the rabbit hole of the rabbit hole. And two why is that?

Art Lapinsch: 33:53

Well, so I'm currently researching for, like my thesis projects, the business of energy storage, and so one thing in particular is like what are the current limitations of the energy law and what are current, let's say, opportunities and arbitrage opportunities in it? The way I arrived at the topic of energy storage, as you mentioned these three mega trends, like the first one is electrification of everything. So if we assume that on a high level, we believe that there's gonna be more electricity demand in the future. So there are certain estimates to say what we're consuming today, we have to add at least 50% of that over the next 30 years. We assume that and we like why is that? Specifically is like, think of your household. Maybe you're heating with a gas boiler. So, like in winter to stay warm, you're burning gas to stay warm. Maybe in the US, if you're cooking something on stove, it's a gas stove. And then, like the way you commute is like you take a bus, you take a car and it's powered by gasoline. So like all of these three can be electrified with heat pumps, induction stoves and EV cars and that will require a lot more electricity. Let's say, just thinking of the current energy consumers, but don't forget that there is a lot of countries in Asia, such as China, india, indonesia and so on, where a large chunk of the population, millions and millions, even billions of people, are increasing their living standards and they also wanna live well. They wanna have AC in their homes, especially in those regions. So more electricity needed.

Art Lapinsch: 35:33

Number two the grid has to be the carbonates. So currently, if you look at the total global emissions, like roughly 40% of all global emissions come from generating electricity. Crazy amount, crazy amount. And so this is because electricity is generated by burning coal, by burning gas. Yeah, those are like, let's say, the biggest emitters. And if we wanna transition to renewable energy, that means we need to install a lot of solar, affordable take panels. We need a lot of windmills, either onshore or offshore, and it has to be installed, and there are some challenges with that.

Art Lapinsch: 36:13

So, first of all, typical example that everyone gives is this beautiful German word called dunkelfläute. Dunkel means dark, flaute means if there's no wind going. So imagine a scenario where, at night, no wind, meaning you don't have any electricity generation capacity from solar or winds. What do you do? People still need electricity to run the traffic lights, to run the critical systems in a hospital, and this challenge is called intermittency. So renewables have this issue that at times they generate a lot and at times they don't generate anything at all, and that's a big issue.

Art Lapinsch: 36:52

And then the third one focus on security, as you mentioned. If electricity is becoming more important, just think of exactly what happened with Germany and gas, where suddenly they didn't have supply from electricity sorry, from gas, from Russia. The storage tanks didn't hold any gas and suddenly German was in a pickle. So the same might be true for electricity in the future as well. I would say energy storage, specifically electricity storage, can solve the first problem, because electricity storage can be a substitute to generation. The consumer doesn't care if they plug in their iPhone, whether the electricity, the electrons, are currently being generated somewhere and have been farmed or if it's just coming from the battery, doesn't?

Ryan Grant Little: 37:37

matter, it's coming from your Tesla and your garage, Exactly exactly.

Art Lapinsch: 37:41

Secondly, storage can help with those intermittency issues, because if wind and solar is generating so much electricity that last weekend was a great example Germany had negative electricity prices for an entire day because there's so much electricity generation capacity that ISIS went negative. And so in those instances, instead of shutting down the solar panels and the windmills, wouldn't it be amazing if we can just take these electricity prices and store them away in the battery or some other type of storage facility to use it when you have these stunkard-flotter moments when no renewable energy can be generated? And then, lastly, I think if you have storage facilities of a certain size, then this gives you, let's say, strategic reinsurance. If someone attacks your grid and say, every household has, for example, an EV battery, well, let's use the electricity from that EB battery for the next 24 hours to tap our water and not rely on the sample grid.

Art Lapinsch: 38:55

But it's a pretty interesting field and I think energy storage just checks a lot of boxes from a commercial perspective. What's really interesting is that you can you can be really creative with business models you can offer. It's the sort of electricity to end consumers. You can offer the electricity to industrial and commercial consumers, but you can also offer the electricity to the grid providers, the infrastructure providers, and that's called like flexibility services. So a lot of interesting aspects from a commercial perspective, and I think it'll just grow in importance.

Ryan Grant Little: 39:33

And once upon a time the thinking of storage for electricity was about having dedicated batteries to storing that, you know, that surplus of electricity. But these days, as we're electrifying other things, especially transportation, we can look at dual purpose batteries. So, like the electric car in your garage that can that serves as a power plant also when energy is needed, and not at kind of a surplus.

Art Lapinsch: 39:57

Absolutely. And I guess like one of the obvious questions is like well, if electricity storage is so important, why don't we have it yet? I think can be also explained with the energy trilemma. Right, Like in the past, it's really expensive, prohibitively expensive, to store electricity, specifically renewable electricity. That it didn't make sense. But now, like through the European energy crisis, with gas prices going up, with more renewable electricity generation capacity coming online, we're seeing for the first time that these price curves have intersected and are going different directions. So fossil fuels are becoming more expensive on average, Renewables are becoming cheaper at an increasing rate. And so now the question is well, we can generate renewable electricity, we can store it. Now, what are the different technologies we can use to tap this excess electricity and how can we store it in a cost competitive way?

Ryan Grant Little: 41:04

Yeah, the good thing about renewables is that the feedstock is almost always free.

Art Lapinsch: 41:09

Yeah, there's a fantastic quote by Names Ram. He said the good thing with renewables is that it's not a commodity but it's a technology, because the feedstock you don't have to mine it right it's available, it's renewable and the cost of the energy that you sell in the market is not dependent on the combination of commodity example fossil fuels, gas plus extraction technology and process, plus refining, plus transportation.

Ryan Grant Little: 41:38

And then still plus capex.

Art Lapinsch: 41:39

It's then just the capex and renewables. It's capex plus the generation and the operational costs and transportation. You don't have the cost of the commodity, which makes a huge chunk of the price for fossil fuels, which we will not go away.

Ryan Grant Little: 41:54

So I'll link to your sub-stack in the show notes and I highly recommend that people check them out. And, as I say, there's some serious laugh out loud moments in there. Anything else you would suggest that people have a look at? You've done a huge amount of reading in the last couple of years on these topics. Anything else you'd like to suggest?

Art Lapinsch: 42:11

a website, a book, anything, a pamphlet, it depends on what you're interested in, like what your knowledge level is already. So one interview that was really helpful to me was on a sub-stack called Innova Opinion by the writer Noah Smith. He does a lot of economics writing, essays, interviews and so on, and he had an interview guest called Ramez Nam, who is an investor futurist, also a science fiction writer, has an amazing trilogy called the Nexus Trilogy. I highly recommend it. But they talk about the connection between why renewable energy is getting cheaper. So they talk about learning curves. They talk about the impact of the Russian invasion in Ukraine on the general energy landscape and a couple of other predictions for the future. So this is a good starting point. Other than that really depends where your interest takes you. I have a collection of links on my personal website. I can send you the link afterwards, but it's ardlypinchcom slash climate and there I usually just store all the stuff which I think other people might benefit from reading. Thanks a lot. Thanks, man.

Ryan Grant Little: 43:28

How cool you made it all the way to the end. Why not go one step further and subscribe, rate and share this podcast? Get in touch any time with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.