Eugene Beh: 0:38

We think that maybe by the end of this year, maybe early next year, the cost of our battery electrolyte will become cheaper than vanadium and then, you know, once it hits a certain discount versus vanadium, like there's no reason for people to stick to vanadium. So we think we'll be able to transform that and kind of help flow batteries in general, break below the cost floor that has been set, break below the cost floor that has been set and kind of enter the mainstream consideration. As if I want to install a giant battery, my thoughts don't just go to lithium ion, they're like hey, you know what about organic flow batteries?

Ryan Grant Little: 1:11

Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Eugene Bay is the founder of Quino Energy, a startup that's making some of the most efficient and safe industrial scale batteries in the world. Eugene developed this remarkable technology while doing advanced degrees in physics and chemistry at Harvard and Stanford Not bad. As you'll hear from the conversation, he's passionate about batteries and driven by impact. I reached him in Silicon Valley's epicenter, menlo Park. I'm Ryan Grant Little. Thanks for being here, eugene welcome to the podcast.

Eugene Beh: 1:48

Thanks very much, Ryan. Thanks for having me on.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:51

You are the founder of Quino Energy, which you started in the Bay Area in 2021. In the absolute, simplest possible terms, because I know that some of this stuff is actually pretty complicated, tell us what Quino does.

Eugene Beh: 2:05

So Quino Energy is actually developing a redox flow battery technology. That was first invented at Harvard University and you know I was a long time ago. I was one of the researchers who worked on this technology. So what's different about our technology essentially, is that it's non-flammable, it doesn't use critical materials and it's also about 30-40% cheaper than LFP batteries, not just today, but in the future. Lfp meaning lithium-ion phosphate batteries, which is the most common kind of lithium-ion batteries in energy storage facilities at the moment.

Ryan Grant Little: 2:40

Wait, does this mean that you have batteries that can't catch on fire?

Eugene Beh: 2:43

Absolutely yeah, so there are aqueous batteries and all the battery active materials are dissolved in water. So maybe you'd like me to go into a little bit more detail about what is a flow battery?

Ryan Grant Little: 2:55

Yeah, why don't you talk a bit about that and compare it with kind of the batteries we're used to, like lithium ion or the kind of the more general ones that people are used to?

Eugene Beh: 3:04

Yeah, I think when most people think about batteries, you know they think about maybe a AA battery or a slightly larger form factor, you know, which is essentially like a cylinder or a little slab or something Redox flow batteries are actually. I like to use the analogy of a car that uses gasoline. In a car you have a fuel tank and you have an air intake and you have an engine where kind of like fuel gasoline is combined with oxygen to burn it and get energy out right, and then you convert the energy and the fuel to movement in the car. So a flow battery is very similar like that. You have two tanks of liquid.

Eugene Beh: 3:42

One contains the fuel you could think of it as a fuel and the other contains another chemical which is an oxidant, and both of those are fed to a flow battery power stack, which it looks a lot like a fuel cell, if you're familiar with fuel cells, but it's a lot cheaper because it doesn't use a platinum or any other catalyst and that takes the role of an engine. So you combine the fuel and oxidizer, and then that gets turned into energy, electrical energy. And then the important thing, though, is the spent fuel and spent oxidizer doesn't just leave as exhaust or anything. It's retained in the tanks and then, when you put in electricity into the power block, the reverse chemical reaction happens. So you can take electricity and turn it back into chemical energy or the other way around. But essentially, at its simplest, it's fuel and oxidizer gets you electricity, and so, yeah, you just have these giant tanks of reactants. So it looks very different from the usual lithium ion batteries that everyone thinks about.

Ryan Grant Little: 4:48

So it sounds like it's fully circular, I mean, and that would make it more efficient and maybe that's what drives the cost down as well.

Eugene Beh: 4:54

Oh well, what drives the cost down is actually a mixture of things such as what are the raw materials that go into it? So, and also I'd love to get more into this later innovations in installation of the batteries. This is something that really hasn't dropped in cost very much over the past few years, Even while the cost of battery components and battery systems has dropped. Installation hasn't gone down, but we've actually been fortunate enough to innovate greatly on this area, and this kind of goes into our ability to make use of existing infrastructure to really lower costs and lower time to get something deployed. I probably will be able to circle back on that later, but I just wanted to drop that in first.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:39

I want to ask you about materials in a moment, but let's maybe take it back up a level right now and just kind of understand who this is for, what some of the applications are. So you know, are these like laptop batteries? Or are these industrial scale storage for solar PV plants? What should we be thinking of here?

Eugene Beh: 5:58

Yep, that's a great question. So flow batteries, as you can imagine, everything's dissolved in water. So in terms of energy per weight it's probably 10, 15 times heavier than lithium-ion batteries. There's no way around that. I mean, part of what makes it non-flammable is, of course, that it's less energy dense on a weight basis, right? You know, everything that has a lot of energy in a small volume is flammable. Basically Lithium ion batteries, gasoline, right, it's all the same thing.

Eugene Beh: 6:25

So if you have a great deal of water to kind of like drown things out and keep the temperature stable, you're going to have to have a trade-off on the weight. So it wouldn't be used in consumer electronics or probably mobility like vehicles anytime soon. And with flow batteries you know, because I've got two giant tanks basically conceptually it's very simple, but there's kind of a minimum size at which it starts to make sense. So you could have something like that for houses, kind of like the Tesla Powerwall, and there are some companies, especially in Germany, who are kind of targeting residential flow batteries. But we think that they're best suited for kind of large industrial and utility applications. So if, exactly like you said, if you have a PV farm and you want to avoid curtailment and avoid negative pricing, then you pretty much have to have a battery and it's going to be quite large. Can you talk us through?

Ryan Grant Little: 7:19

a little bit of the history of flow batteries, because, I mean, it sounds like the reason this company exists is because some of some of the research work you did at Harvard.

Eugene Beh: 7:28

That's right. So are you asking about the history of organic flow batteries, which is what we're doing, or just flow batteries in general?

Ryan Grant Little: 7:35

Oh well, I mean, you're introducing a distinction that I wasn't even aware of, so I'll let you maybe a little bit of both.

Eugene Beh: 7:41

Yeah, absolutely so at the core right. A flow battery is just kind of like a gasoline car If you need more energy, you just make the tanks bigger. You don't need like to buy two engines or 10 engines or something. So that really allows it to become cheap when you get to longer durations of storage. And quite early on I think this was in the 70s some really smart people at NASA, I believe realized hey, you know, I can just have a tank of fuel chemical fuel and a tank of oxidizer and just pump them together to a power block and use that as a way to store energy. And that was the first flow battery. I believe that was an iron-chromium flow battery, flow battery I believe that was an iron-chromium flow battery.

Eugene Beh: 8:23

Later on, I think in the 80s or 90s sorry if I don't exactly know my history there people discovered well, you know, I don't need to use two separate reactants. Actually the same thing can act as both the fuel and the oxidizer. And that material was called vanadium and that's actually been the basis of most commercial deployments of flow batteries to date, which is vanadium flow batteries. That's actually been the basis of most commercial deployments of flow batteries to date, which is vanadium flow batteries. The nice thing about it is vanadium has a number of different oxidation states, which allows it to act as a reducing agent or kind of a fuel, and also as an oxidizing agent the oxidizer. So the nice thing is that.

Eugene Beh: 8:56

Well you know, if you mix them together, you don't lose anything. Nothing goes bad. And that actually is one of the key features of low batteries, which is that the degradation is almost zero. It's very, very low compared to, say, lithium-ion batteries. Where, say, you look at your cell phone? You use it after two or three years. Well, what's your battery life like? Right, not very good. And there's actually a lot of nuance when it comes to batteries, especially in the like how they're used.

Ryan Grant Little: 9:25

how they're used really affects the lifetime of the batteries, the charging and the cycles and all that type of thing.

Eugene Beh: 9:31

Yeah, exactly, you know. So I mentioned your cell phone's battery is probably really bad after maybe three years, right, you know, and you can argue. Well, you know it's like planned obsolescence kind of thing. They want to make the battery worse so that you'll buy the next model of the iPhone or whatever. But part of it is also related to usage habits.

Eugene Beh: 9:51

So lithium-ion batteries degrade a lot faster if they are subject to deep cycling. That means you go from like zero to 100%, back to zero again. That's actually murder on lithium-ion batteries. Zero again, that's actually murder on lithium ion batteries. But if you drive an electric vehicle or you operate a short duration like meaning maybe up to four hours of battery energy storage system, chances are you're not actually draining it from. You know, 100% to 0%. If you drive an electric vehicle, you never want to be caught out at the side of the road with no charge, right? So everyone's got the range anxiety that. Actually that means you end up doing a lot of shallow cycles. You know, maybe you'll go like 80% to 50% and back up again, something like that, and that actually does enable lithium-ion batteries to go for a lot more cycles. So kind of user behavior kind of works in your favor there if you're using lithium-ion batteries.

Eugene Beh: 10:40

But once you get into the utility scale everyone you know essentially, if I'm a developer, if I paid for like one gigawatt hour of battery storage, I really want to use all one gigawatt hours that I paid for. And this is true especially when you get to longer durations. Short durations, you know, like maybe you have a battery that will discharge in four hours but then, like I only need it for 15 minute blocks, that's okay. You know that actually does make the battery last a lot longer. So one key feature about flow batteries is that the lifetime is really great. But at the end of the day, like vanadium is kind of limited in supply and the processes of extracting it is also kind of sets. You know just the global supply and the extraction process sets a cost floor which is relatively high and is less competitive compared to how quickly lithium-ion battery pricing has dropped these days. So that's where we come in.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:32

I wanted to jump in on that a little bit as well, because one of the especially in today's very complex geopolitical situation precious metals you know, this is kind of the name of the game for the future. It sounds like you're relatively insulated from that game relative to batteries like lithium-ion.

Eugene Beh: 11:48

How does that play out? Yeah, so the really nice thing about our batteries it's an organic flow battery, which means the key reactant is actually made from a carbon-containing material called anthraquinone that's what we named our company after, and anthracquinone is actually a material which is made from petroleum aromatics and coal tar, and if you wanted to, you could make it from like wood tar as well if you really wanted a, you know like kind of renewable or sustainable source. But despite the name, despite coal tar, it's not like we're burning coal or anything to make our batteries. It's we're turning a coal byproduct into a battery material.

Eugene Beh: 12:27

So there is, I believe, in the United States, like what is it? Something like 600 million tons of coal were mined and burned last year. So there's, you know, really really abundant resources of this, actually pretty much scattered around the world. So no one's putting coal as a critical material anytime soon, that's true, or coal tar as a critical material, for that matter. So there's no issue with supply and it's also not a critical material. So unlike, say you know, lithium or the graphite that goes into lithium, or even vanadium, you know those are in short supply. Those have a lot of geopolitics attached to them as well, and well, also, you know there's an open question of whether there's ever going to be enough to satisfy the needs of the new energy economy. Or even if there was, you know it's harder to see have reassurance that prices won't spike as demand does.

Ryan Grant Little: 13:26

Do you manufacture these in standard sizes or is every order custom for each application? Or do you build them in the US?

Eugene Beh: 13:35

That's actually the beauty of flow batteries, fortunate enough to come in at a time where a lot of other manufacturers have already perfected the engineering for vanadium flow batteries and other kinds of mature flow batteries, and so we're coming in with something which is a lot cheaper probably a quarter of the cost of vanadium and doesn't use critical materials as well, but we get to keep almost all of the existing hardware. So right now there are systems that are being made by other people using mostly vanadium, for sizes ranging all the way from small units for people's houses all the way to large utility scale deployments, like you see, in China. For example, there's 800 megawatt hours in one facility in China, but at the core, you know, they're all just multiple units of the same, like power block, the same engine. It's just like lots of engines.

Eugene Beh: 14:32

Okay, granted, some engines are bigger than others. Right, you have, I don't know, an eight liter truck engine versus a dinky little Vespa scooter engine. But yeah, a lot of that is already out there. So you know, we're not reinventing the wheel there. So we actually are able to produce, like small systems, big systems. Well, we don't produce the systems we're able to produce. Integrate our battery electrolyte, which is the organic compound with other people's systems.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:01

So that's awesome. You can basically take all the hardware that's already out there, that's already been perfected, and all you have to do is plug in what is essentially your IP into it and it brings down the cost and it has all these positive benefits.

Eugene Beh: 15:14

Yeah, absolutely. So. You know, it's not entirely true that it's been perfected. I think it's been pretty perfected with respect to vanadium, but if you drop a new fuel into an engine like it, you do need to tweak it. It's like trying to say well, you know, I'm going to put diesel into my petrol tank because I heard maybe you know, like diesel's cheaper. Okay, maybe that was a bad analogy.

Eugene Beh: 15:36

I would say like if I put like ethanol into my fuel tank, you know you could still burn it and drive your car, but it wouldn't be very efficient. You will need an engine that was tuned specifically to that fuel. So that's kind of how it is with us and the existing vanadium flow battery hardware. It works, but we know that it could be a lot better. However, the changes are actually really minor and I'd say 90% of all the engineering work has already been done by people. So the remaining challenge for us is just you know, I don't have a skill engineering which is quite different from a lot of other battery founders. I just have a skill chemical manufacturing. And suddenly, you know, the challenge looks a lot more digestible.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:15

So you're talking to your first customers, but these are, if I understand correctly, in kind of stealth mode. I wonder if you can talk about some kind of like broad stroke areas. You know what types of companies or industries are interested to be your customer.

Eugene Beh: 17:30

So for us we see two broad customer bases. The first is commercial and industrial microgrids or behind the meter users, and I think there's been a lot of market penetration of batteries in residential settings and also in utility settings. But what's lagged so far in terms of adoption is actually on the commercial and industrial side. So think about, say, hospitals, medical centers, supermarkets, factories and data centers as well. I think data centers as well. I think data centers are a thing which are huge right now in the United States and obviously they use a lot of electricity.

Ryan Grant Little: 18:09

And with AI, this is going through the roof now.

Eugene Beh: 18:11

I think DeepSeek may have challenged some of the assumptions there about how much energy is required, but I'm not an AI expert so I really can't comment on that, of course. So that's one like commercial industrial microgrids or like behind the meter applications. That's one really big user base and the other is, you know, utility scale storage. Of course Everyone knows about the battery fire in Moss Landing, california, actually just about an hour and a half drive from where I live. So you know people were arguing like it's an older battery chemistry, but you know that's not going to do very many favors for public perception, right, of the safety of lithium-ion batteries. So we're coming in with a fully non-flammable solution and get this. It's actually more energy dense on a land-use metric than even lithium ion batteries. It's kind of hard to believe, right, I said it was heavy, that's true. But when you look at lithium ion batteries, if you look at a really big installation, most of the space is not actually taken up by the batteries themselves, by the battery cells or packs themselves. It's actually like you know, it's just like empty space. These have to be spaced apart from each other by a certain distance to prevent fire propagation and those rules have been pretty successful, right? Well, relatively, I guess A lot burned in that Moss Landing fire, but for fire safety reasons there's actually a lot of kind of like unused land area. You know your project space is large but then you're not using your volume very effectively.

Eugene Beh: 19:48

With flow batteries not just ours but like vanadium as well you know you can actually like everything in the tank is basically storing energy. So if you have a large enough tank and a tall enough tank, then you can have a much higher energy density. And you know if you've been driving around like airports or shipping, know if you've been driving around like airports or shipping terminals. Sometimes you'll see some really, really large tanks like use a whole crude oil or oil products, like some of those really boggle in mind just how much material they store.

Eugene Beh: 20:17

One additional feature of our organic flow battery technology besides the low cost and you know no critical is that we are actually able to make use of existing tank infrastructure, which is these tanks are made usually out of carbon steel, and vanadium is just too corrosive, it's like a strong acid. It's too corrosive to ever be used with those kinds of tanks. But we will actually be able to kind of come in, make use of existing infrastructure. And that kind of gets back to what I said earlier about innovating an installation. If you can make use of existing infrastructure, like an existing tank which is already set up for storing hazardous chemicals, you know, you just saved yourself a bunch of money and a bunch of time.

Eugene Beh: 21:01

It may sound trivial, like tanks how much could they cost? But actually money and a bunch of time. It may sound trivial, like tanks how much could they cost? But actually I heard from somewhere don't take it for gospel but I heard from somewhere, from an EPC, that the largest cost in installation is actually Civilworks. So if you can select a site that already has all this built in, you could save a lot of money on installation and at the end of the day, it's the installed cost of a battery system that matters.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:25

Yeah, coming from the biogas space, I can say that the tanks are very expensive.

Eugene Beh: 21:29

Exactly. Yeah, you know, people take tanks for granted. Like a tank, how much could it cost, right? Or, like you know, a battery enclosure is actually quite significant.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:37

You hear that tanks. We appreciate you. We don't take you for granted, dented. Let's switch it up a little bit and talk about you, eugene, as an academic, an inventor, an entrepreneur. You have three degrees across physics and chemistry, from both Harvard and Stanford. I heard an interview with you where you said that you feel more lucky than smart. Why is that? If I look at the CV, I think smart.

Eugene Beh: 22:04

I think lucky. Have you seen the college admissions?

Ryan Grant Little: 22:09

rates these days. Yeah, I mean I don't know when you were there, but I'm sure it wasn't a walk in the park then either.

Eugene Beh: 22:15

Yeah, well, I was an international student too. So you know, I was born and grew up in Singapore, so it's a lot more challenging for an international student to get admitted to one of these schools and the competition is fierce. But you know, I don't think of myself as, like you know, particularly talented or, you know, compared to my peers who had, I think, an equally good chance of getting to the same schools as me.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:41

But there probably has to be a healthy dose of luck in there me, but there probably has to be a healthy dose of luck in there. Did you feel that you kind of found your tribe when you landed in these places and are your co-founders or some of your team? Do they come from these same universities and people you worked with there?

Eugene Beh: 22:55

Yeah, you know, actually, 2025, this year marks 20 years since I came to the United States and I've been. I've just struck by how many really, really smart people I've met. So, you know, I'm I think I feel justified in calling myself more lucky than smart, but I'll take it right, I don't want to be unlucky either. You know, my yeah, my co-founder is also someone who worked in the same technology at Harvard just at a slightly later time, and his name is, and I'm really, really happy that we're in this team together Because it's been actually, you know, in our founder dynamic. It's actually been pretty smooth sailing ever since we started the company.

Eugene Beh: 23:33

That's awesome, that's a real blessing, yeah. And kind of going back to the lucky versus smart thing you know a lot of like when it comes to business opportunities or personal growth. You know a lot just happens to be like being in the right place at the right time, you know it's. I think someone said that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. So that's my luck, I suppose that's awesome.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:58

What I mean, as you said, we're early 2025. If you look at the year ahead, what are you most excited about and what are you most worried about, kind of in the climate or clean energy space?

Eugene Beh: 24:08

I am most excited to see organic flow batteries finally take center stage. I think this year and the next we will see. Just through a purely economic reason we will see organic our organic actually supplants vanadium as the flow battery reactant of choice. So we think that maybe by the end of this year, maybe early next year, the cost of our battery electrolyte will become cheaper than vanadium and then, once it hits a certain discount versus vanadium, there's no reason for people to stick to vanadium. So we think we'll be able to transform that and kind of help flow batteries in general break below the cost floor that has been set and kind of enter the mainstream consideration.

Eugene Beh: 24:51

As if I want to install a giant battery, my thoughts don't just go to lithium ion, they're like hey, you know what about organic flow batteries? So we're really excited to see our large projects come alive. And then, what am I most worried about? You know, there's, I think, like top of our mind is like uncertainty in policy, especially driven by the new administration in the United States. But in there I also see opportunity. So just in general, without wading into politics, in general business hates uncertainty, right, and that's no exception for me. But we see a lot of opportunity because we're not reliant on supply chains that involve China, for example.

Eugene Beh: 25:30

We can source our raw materials If you wanted to. You could do this. You know from like the raw materials all the way to the final product. You could do this all in the United States, and, in fact, the raw material one of the key raw materials that we use, is actually a clothing dye. It's actually the same dye that's in the shirt that I'm wearing right now. Sorry for everyone in the podcast you may not be able to see the color of the shirt I'm wearing, but it's this orange-brown dye and actually, up until the 70s, the United States was a really big producer of dyes. Well, and then everything moved to China and India, but there's no reason why it can't also be brought back to the United States.

Ryan Grant Little: 26:07

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a really great point in there about energy security and how important this is going forward as well.

Eugene Beh: 26:13

Yep. So we don't just want to sell in the United States. Right now, flow-bearing manufacturers, especially vanadium, have a presence and sales in many, many different countries, you know, and chief of which is China. I think China last year put about three gigawatt hours, 2.something gigawatt hours of new flow battery installations. That's I think it was 320% increase year on year from 2023. So there's already some real economies of scale out there in the world. And all that just uses vanadium, which has a cost floor. So there's lots of opportunities for sales outside the United States as well.

Ryan Grant Little: 26:52

It sounds like everything's going very well.

Eugene Beh: 26:54

Yeah, we want to just go out there and partner with all the rest of the players in the ecosystem and drive volumes. And with higher volumes comes lower unit costs, which will allow us to overtake vanadium and then eventually lithium ion.

Ryan Grant Little: 27:11

So if people are listening and they're thinking, how can we get involved with Quino Energy, are you hiring? What kind of partners are you looking for? Are you fundraising? What can people do to get involved, to support your mission? Well, maybe buy our products.

Eugene Beh: 27:24

Well, actually the best thing that people could do is actually kind of raise awareness. You know that there are alternatives to the lithium ion, like hegemony that's out there. You know everyone's thinking well, if I install a big battery, it has to be lithium ion and the only question is like which manufacturer of cells or what form factor of cells do I use? We want more people to know that there are real alternatives to lithium ion which are viable, which are cheap, non-flammable, higher energy density and don't have issues of like supply chain exposure, to say, china, for example.

Ryan Grant Little: 28:00

I think that's a great place to leave it and I've learned a lot from this conversation, so thank you very much, eugene. It's really cool what you're doing.

Eugene Beh: 28:07

Thank you very much, Ryan. Thanks for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

Ryan Grant Little: 28:11

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 climatetechpodcom. 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.