Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to another Climate Tech podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. In this episode, I caught up with an old friend and business school classmate, jason Goodhand. Jason has been in the renewable energy industry for more than 20 years and works globally today in pushing energy storage technologies like hydrogen and lithium. We talked about how energy storage is changing the way our world powers itself and what he sees coming down the pike. I reached Jason in Toronto. I'm Ryan Grant Little Thanks for being here, jason. It's super great to have you on the podcast. Thanks Great to see you. You're a global business leader in energy storage. Can you break that down for us? What does that mean?

Jason Goodhand: 1:24

Sure. So I work for DNV. It's a multi-discipline, multi-sector kind of engineering advisory and certification business. So there's a lot of things we do in maritime oil and gas, but I work in a group focused on energy and within that a lot of the technologies we look at are wind and solar renewables. Those are pretty well established. They've got more than a decade worth of being a fully commercial, non-experimental energy source.

Jason Goodhand: 1:51

But with some of our newer technologies like hydrogen carbon capture and battery storage, these are newer technologies that are really coming into their own and because of that we're working on projects all over the world. We have global segment leads that really tie together our strategy and what we're doing well in one region and trying to export that to our teams in others. So we're typically advising renewable energy companies that are in wind and solar and explaining to them how do you use a battery? We'll do independent engineering to vet some of their projects. We'll help do modeling, do safety. So it's pretty interesting. But anything that has to do with batteries or energy storage at DNV kind of falls under my remit.

Ryan Grant Little: 2:37

Okay and you're drawing on quite a depth of knowledge with this stuff because you've been in renewable energy in one way or another since 2002, so going on 22 years. Back then you started a hydrogen company, which was very early and maybe too early back then, and since then, as you mentioned, as you sort of touched on there, you've been in wind, solar, various forms of energy, now a lot on the storage side. Can you talk a bit about the journey, what you've kind of learned along the way through that? I mean, you've basically seen the industry from its infancy through to what it is now.

Jason Goodhand: 3:06

Yeah. So when I graduated from engineering.

Jason Goodhand: 3:09

I got an automotive, so I was working on cars for a bit, for about two years, and I started to hear about hydrogen and how it might be a fuel of the future, and this was kind of around the initial hype cycle of hydrogen, background 2001, 2002. Things were really exciting and at that point wind wasn't established the way it is today, nor was solar, and I don't even think we had maybe we had lithium batteries going into phones, but that was about it. We didn't have lithium battery cars either, and so this was a very early stage and I got into hydrogen. It was a fun job. I got to look at a lot of cool things. You know we worked on taking, you know, golf cart sized vehicles or military applications and things and swapping out batteries for hydrogen fuel cells Really exciting stuff.

Jason Goodhand: 3:56

And then I took a little bit of a break in 2004 to go back to best school, which is where we met with the hopes that when I got out the hydrogen industry would be even larger and me, with my experience and a new master's degree, would kind of jump in and take over the world.

Jason Goodhand: 4:11

And that's not what happened. In fact, hydrogen had gone quite quiet and, luckily, the company that I did work with at the time, way back when it did stick around until it got acquired in 2018. Some of the other companies did as well. So they they moved from sort of this R&D startup phase a very sort of two decade, if not three decade long process, to get to where we are today with hydrogen, and I think one of the things that's really interesting is not how much hydrogen technology has changed, but the energy space around it. You know we have solar that doesn't cost 10 times what electricity costs on average. It's the cheapest form of electricity in many regions. Wind doesn't have a huge premium over regular electricity, and then we have a you know, batteries being plentiful and used in the EV market. So a lot of things in the whole energy space are positioned differently to kind of help hydrogen into our future energy mix.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:13

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, with renewable energy the capex is high, but once it's in, the operating costs, the feedstock costs, are generally free, right, and so once it's in you and you found a way to pay that down, and if it can last for decades, then it quickly becomes the cheapest form of energy. And I remember dealing with this whole balance with wind and solar and kind of in the mid-2000s. But you mentioned energy storage, kind of where it is right now. I wonder if you could talk about what that looks like in 2024, because that's a space that's evolved, I think a lot, but it doesn't get, you know, doesn't make the headlines, even though it might have an outside importance, into, kind of our energy mix.

Jason Goodhand: 5:50

Yeah, so energy storage has always been like a great engineering solution for problems we have on the grid. So, as you know, when you're generating electricity, if you're not using it in real time, you have to turn it down or turn it off or find load to suck it up. It's something that has to be consumed immediately and you know if you're able to store that in a flywheel, in a battery in some sort of form, that's always been a solution to a problem we have of how do you match load and generation. And where we're really lucky is the electric vehicle industry has taken lithium batteries that we use in phone, laptops etc. And made that into a high volume, very commercially available, very rugged product or technology, and our industry's been able to adopt that to use it for energy storage either on the grid, in the home, attached to a building. The big thing there is that it's brought the cost down. So, unlike solar or wind, those technologies had to. They had to scale up themselves to bring down the cost. We're lucky in the grid sector that the EV industry's done a lot of that for us. So these gigafactories in China that are producing billions and trillions of cells, they've done a lot of that scaling for us and we get to reap some of the benefit.

Jason Goodhand: 7:08

Grid scale batteries still only make up. I think about 5% of all of the lithium used. About 90% is going into vehicles. So you've mentioned. Maybe it's not getting as much attention as it should. I think that's a very regional thing. So batteries are expensive. They don't make power, they just store it, so you have to have. You're not even looking at the value of energy, you're looking at the value of storing energy and the economics of any sort of project. You have to pan out or you're just not going to build these things.

Jason Goodhand: 7:40

And what's nice is in China. They're one of the biggest markets in the world for grid tide storage. They're just sort of mandating it and say this is the engineering solution we need. Go build it to help balance all of the renewables that we're building. In the US we're very lucky that some of the early tax credits for solar allowed you to apply that to storage as well. If they were co-located, so if you had a solar farm that you attach batteries to and that gave a bit of a capex bump or a benefit from the tax credit, and that's really why we see so much deployed in the US. Now, another market that I would say is sort of third is the UK, and that's where they're not using subsidy. But because they have a smaller grid and a lot of imbalance, there's enough value on the revenue side that they don't necessarily need any sort of a subsidy.

Ryan Grant Little: 8:30

To help them put it in Because energy costs are higher than in the US. There.

Jason Goodhand: 8:33

That's right. The spreads on energy arbitrage, like the value of high versus the value of low, is pretty good and pretty regular, but you also have some ancillary services and other things that can do on the grid to help balance it that are valuable. What's interesting that was, I feel like, last year, this year and next year is where a lot of the other markets are turning on, and the reason for that is people are very confident in the technology. Now, because of where it's been deployed, in the US and the UK, we can see that these are working. They're doing what they're supposed to do and the costs have come down, so they're now sort of getting in lockstep with whatever the market prices are in some of those other markets like Europe, australia, canada.

Ryan Grant Little: 9:14

And so I mean, if we just zoom back onto hydrogen for a second, as I kind of touched on.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:17

I worked in renewable energy in the mid-2000s and you've kind of mentioned this as well. But after we both graduated we were in the same class in doing an MBA together and we both graduated and at that time, 2006, hydrogen was kind of the hope that we'd had as a magic bullet for renewable energy, especially kind of on the automotive side. It didn't kind of pan out, but it looks like more and more, if not as a sort of a generating technology, it's making a lot of sense as a storage technology. Do you want to sort of talk about the versatility of hydrogen and kind of how it makes sense in a 2024 context?

Jason Goodhand: 10:53

Yeah, and I think it's the that versatility that actually makes it kind of confusing or distracting is that hydrogen did have this magic bullet kind of feel to it, and this is before EVs. So you're right, cars were definitely where people were looking to say, like, how do we get away from gasoline? Let's use hydrogen. And that fell through, in part because of EVs. We had better solutions that looked like they were going to be easier than putting all the hydrogen infrastructure out there. There's a lot of inefficiencies with hydrogen, but if we get back to sort of the broad view of its versatility, hydrogen is a little bit like a Swiss Army knife in the energy space, in that you could use it for a portable generator, you could use it to make electricity, you could use it for energy storage. You can also use it for things like steel production to replace coking cool, where they sort of reduce the iron ore to steel. You can use it to produce ammonia and other types of fuels. So it can do almost anything energy related and then some.

Jason Goodhand: 11:57

But the big issue is in many cases, especially for the energy applications, it's going to be more expensive and we're really used to as a society whether it's not sure that it's even due to capitalism. But just, we like to see a profit before we make an investment. We want to fix the world and try and make a bucket at it while we're doing that instead of losing money, and so we often have to get governments to subsidize things to hope that they will be cheaper on the back end. And that's what's happened with solar, which is fantastic, but with hydrogen, just due to some of the inefficiencies, there's some applications that aren't going to make economic sense unless you bring in things like carbon taxes or something else that really offsets it against the current or incumbent technologies.

Jason Goodhand: 12:43

So right now, a lot of the places where we're seeing some of the earliest hydrogen projects are going to be related to not energy but the production of ammonia. Is cities and natural gas to make your hydrogen to make ammonia. So if you're going to use green hydrogen or blue hydrogen, you might make different types of fuels and actually recombine carbon dioxide with hydrogen to make ethanol or some sort of aviation fuel. So I think there's some applications that are going to sort of get traction now. Hopefully that gets to a point where people get a lot more confidence around hydrogen. They see that there's availability for surplus hydrogen at some of the sources and they can start to create more use cases or look at how we might get more hydrogen. And then they see how we might green up certain industries or certain applications with hydrogen. But it's not, unfortunately. It's not the magic bullet when you start to include the inefficiencies of producing it and how that affects cost.

Ryan Grant Little: 13:39

But you mentioned that there's funding for it through, like the Inflation Reduction Act, presumably in the US If it's co-located next to a generation like solar. So is that kind of like a rider or is there is broad support for hydrogen under the IRA?

Jason Goodhand: 13:53

The IRA. It's actually one of the nice things they did is you don't have to have it physically attached to your renewables. But you do have to if you want to maximize your tax credit. It needs to be tied to renewables somehow. Okay, and there's actually some of the tax language just came out I think a week or two ago, and there were some proponents that said, hey, we just want to buy Rex or something like that and say it's green, go for it. And other people were saying, hey, you can't burn coal at night by producing extra load to make green hydrogen. Yeah, but you're actually polluting tax dollars to do it. That doesn't smell right to me.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:31

Literally.

Jason Goodhand: 14:32

So I think they've kind of landed. They've landed closer to the green side of things, of the more altruistic kind of non-polluting options. But there's, I think there's tweaks they can do to try and come to the middle a little bit to say, hey, we want to make sure we're not polluting and paying tax credits under the guise of greening things, but we also don't want to kill this industry right out of the doors or right out of the gates by making it way too hard or too expensive to bother going all this greenway. So people are really trying to look at their projects and see if they still pencil or which ones are the ones that have no problem meeting those criteria.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:11

So it's an interesting time in the hydrogen space definitely, years ago the oil and gas man, t-boone Pickens, moved famously from oil into wind. But he talked about wind with natural gas kind of managing the peaks, managing the load there. And I wonder to what extent do you see hydrogen as a solution for managing kind of that load, because things like solar and wind are de facto intermittent.

Jason Goodhand: 15:37

Yeah, I think you're going to see a lot more like battery storage or storage technologies taking over that rule of of peaker plants instead of natural gas. We're still going to see natural gas and what we should be doing is really putting a target on coal Right To get rid of that Gas. I mean, it's a step in the right direction. Obviously, you want to get to zero emissions or pollutants if you can, but I think it's okay to keep some of the gas around for a bit as you're cleaning up your grid and trying to get rid of coal, and then you can kind of focus on how do I use storage in place of some of these peaker plants? Some of the gas plants that run only a few times a year are very expensive and very inefficient. Then batteries can do a great job at that.

Jason Goodhand: 16:23

When it comes to hydrogen, I think, unless you've got a really good solution for piping it around in the existing natural gas network or you have a salt cavern or some sort of really cheap vast storage that you can take renewable energy, split water into hydrogen and oxygen and bury that hydrogen for when you need it during the lean months of the year when you're not getting as much solar, or weeks where there's not enough wind, you might run a peaker on hydrogen to do that.

Jason Goodhand: 16:54

What's interesting too and this is what's great about having a global role is I'm constantly reassessing my convictions about things, so I might take a view and say, like this doesn't make sense, and I'll be doing that through a very North American, centric view of what our power price is and what is available. When you look at places like the UK, japan, hawaii, where they're not part of a large distributed grid they don't necessarily in all cases have natural gas. The UK does that's where they might look at solutions like hey, should we be importing green ammonia and trying to build a power plant that runs off that? Is it expensive? Would we do that in sort of mainland US or Canada? Probably not, but in some places that might be the only way for them to get away from importing coal or LNG.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:44

And more and more we'll be looking at the national security issues around it as well. I mean, I'm based here in Austria. Natural gas. There's, of course, you know, an ecological element to it, but there's very much a national security question as a lot of it, you know, comes from Russia, still here. And speaking of pipelines, I mean I don't need to tell you about Nord Stream 2. And you know, maybe the Baltic's not going to be the place to put a pipeline anytime soon.

Ryan Grant Little: 18:09

So these are considerations as well, I wonder. I mean, it's interesting that you do have this global perspective and you are kind of bouncing around all over the place. I wonder if you could just touch on kind of your thoughts about how energy storage and things like lithium you know this we're just starting to touch on. Like you know, I more and more look at the world like settlers of Katan and you know lithium is the one that you know it's starting to make headlines. But there's going to be there'll be war spot over it almost certainly in our lifetime, right? So what do you see was kind of evolving on these technologies that people don't think of day to day but are actually going to be completely vital to our future?

Jason Goodhand: 18:46

Yeah, I think a lot of the people have really turned an eye to the fact that no matter where the lithium comes from, whether it's Australia or South America, it's all produced in China today. And I don't just mean the batteries themselves, but even the lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide, like as you refine, the raw products that get shipped, they get processed in China. We don't have capacity to do that in the United States right now or other places, so they've kind of they had the market cornered. The US and other countries are looking at you know how do we get cell production? You know in our country how do we bring some of this processing and where are some of the new sources of lithium that we might seek out?

Jason Goodhand: 19:25

I guess one of the good things, and I don't know exactly how readily available it is. But people are looking at sodium as a sort of backup alternative to lithium. It's not as good in terms of you can't run a premium car like a BMW or something with a nice dense super power packed an MC style lithium cell. A sodium one won't be much bigger, much heavier, but for sort of mass drivers or mass transit it might be completely suitable.

Ryan Grant Little: 19:56

And the availability of it is much higher. I mean it'll be perfect for my facade station wagon.

Jason Goodhand: 20:00

There you go, yeah. So people are, I would say, in the energy storage business not only within the EV sort of how do we get away from lithium? Everybody keeps going back to the periodic table of elements and looking for you know what's the? Is there a different magic bullet for energy storage? So we have people looking at like zinc based batteries, iron based batteries, there's vanadium flow batteries. People are looking at you know how do we get something cheaper or better in some capacity than what we've got with lithium?

Jason Goodhand: 20:32

The hard part is lithium is so light and dense that it's got a lot of advantages. So you're really just trying to look at cost, perhaps degradation or safety, to try and look at something that holistically displaces lithium for certain applications with cars. That's probably the best technology you can get for driving around an EV and it's certainly improving as well. Things like solid state technology, continuously tweaking the recipe of what's in a lithium battery. They're getting better. So we're kind of all these competitors are chasing a moving target. But it's exciting because as long as things are improving, as long as there's innovation and progress, we'll typically end up in a better place.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:13

And what are some things that excite you when you look at the year ahead. You know what are some of these innovations that you're tracking right now.

Jason Goodhand: 21:19

I've had an eye on what's called long duration energy storage for a while, and that's like the zinc and iron battery type technologies that I mentioned, and there's also things that are based on heat and thermal cycles, but all of them share something in common they're typically larger than lithium batteries, they're typically less efficient, some of them degrade slower, but all of them they're sort of raison d'etre.

Jason Goodhand: 21:44

I don't know if you're a French speaker, I don't know if I pronounced that right, but the whole reason that we're looking at those is typically because they promise to cost less, and so when you look at this from a, would I build a project to store energy? And you're comparing lithium to some technology. If something's like a 10 or 20 hour battery or 50 hour battery and it costs much less than lithium, then you might be able to do things on the grid that you can't do with lithium today. I guess one of the problems is a lot of the value is addressed by short duration lithium today, and so we're going to see what some of these technologies come through with and then the types of applications that they get paid to do.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:24

Okay, like jet fuel versus diesel. Basically, you and I have both been strong proponents of careers in renewable energy and an impact. For instance, we've known each other going back 20 plus years Jesus crazy. What advice do you have for people who are looking to get into this industry? I think more and more people are looking to make a change and get into renewable energy or clean tech, and a lot of times I get questions. I know you do too, because a lot of times the same people come to both of us. What advice do you give them? What do you say?

Jason Goodhand: 22:55

One thing that I would mention is you may not be able to get the perfect job you want right out of the gates, depending on where you're transferring from or how young you are, but there's so much demand in every single one of the technologies that I mentioned, whether it's storage, hydrogen, solar wind, other types of technologies to like sort of aggregated, the R type of technologies, but anything to do with the energy transition. There's so much demand for skilled people that we're even looking for people with not ideal experience and expertise, but people that can be trained to add to this workforce. And so if there is a role that is something that's kind of interesting in solar, that's not your ideal focus and maybe you're trying to get into storage at the end of the day. If you're not in the energy industry at all yet, maybe take that solar roll for a year and a half, two years or something like that. Get some experience, understand how the grid works, understand how to model capital investments and what these projects look like, think about safety, labor, how the EPC how does the EPC construction work and get some of the familiarity that is then much easily transferable into energy storage or whatever it is that your true passion is, but I would say it's a.

Jason Goodhand: 24:10

It's definitely an exciting space. It's so much bigger now that it was when we started in these spaces like it used to be. You would go to a conference and look around and kind of know everybody, because they were there last year and there's only 500 or 1000 of you. And now you go to something like inter solar in Munich and there's 50,000 people there and it's just such a big industry now and everybody's struggling to hire. So there is opportunity and you just got to figure out how to get in on the ground floor.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:40

Yeah, so if you're listening and you're interested in getting in the space, but you don't have completely relevant experience just yet, take heart, because you're still needed skills and attitude and they'll train for the subject matter expertise that's required. Yeah, jason, it's been a minute. It's great to see you again after all these years. Thanks for joining.

Jason Goodhand: 24:58

Yeah, great to see you.

Ryan Grant Little: 25:00

Take care. Thanks for listening to another climate tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climate tech podcom. Find me, ryan Grant little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.