--- title: The Nantucket Project: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet | TIME description: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet canonical: https://time.com/video/JG98cSvY/ og:title: The Nantucket Project: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet og:description: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet og:url: https://time.com/video/JG98cSvY/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/JG98cSvY/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Nantucket Project: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet twitter:description: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/JG98cSvY/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The Nantucket Project: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Nantucket Project: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet [Watch (HLS stream): The Nantucket Project: An Energy Solution to Save the Planet](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/JG98cSvY.m3u8) (19:23)  _Published 2014-10-20. An Energy Solution to Save the Planet_ --- Jul 27, 2023 5:24 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Damilola Ogunbiyi on Energy Transformation and Hope for the Planet’s Future](/video/1ixzUWDt/) ### Damilola Ogunbiyi on Energy Transformation and Hope for the Planet’s Future [Damilola Ogunbiyi on Energy Transformation and Hope for the Planet’s Future](/video/qVG8W8X8/) ### Damilola Ogunbiyi on Energy Transformation and Hope for the Planet’s Future [Six Ways to Save Money on Your Energy Usage](/video/JzB6L38R/) ### Six Ways to Save Money on Your Energy Usage --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] [ APPLAUSE ] Hello everyone. It has been absolutely inspiring to be here. Some of the previous talks were so. Informative and inspiring that I pretty much completely rewrote what I was going to say. [ LAUGH ] Because, because usually I come and I give a talk and there are a lot of students or scientists or entrepreneurs that are just starting out. And I try to give them a message of possibility, of finding your own way. Of what you as an individual can do and how you don't have to be defined by the system. And what I usually say is you know, the frustrations that I felt in junior high they drove me to drop out and then enter college at a young age which you can totally do. If you talk to the right people and are ready to learn. And how I didn't have to wait to invent. And this, this is good. I hope that it inspires entrepreneurs to find their own path. But I have a different message for you today. Ordinarily my message is about. Possibility, this is a message about urgency. So we are at a truly critical moment and it might not seem that way, but I'm going to try to make the case. So you have heard from the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, of. Australia last night, about the Copenhagen Accord. It is nonbinding, but it is least an international agreement that says, we agree as a collective society to keep temperatures under two degrees centigrade. Now, what does that mean. That means sea level rises probably a meter, and there are some different things. That basically means Amsterdam is flooded very often but New York is safe so that's good for some of you. It means many other things. It means you know heat waves but at least in the three to four degrees celsius column Italy, Spain and Greece become deserts among other things. It means that the. Corals are bleached, but not actually dead, it means that corn and wheat yields are down, but there isn't mass global starvation it means only somewhat increased storms species of risk of extinction. But the real problem is the following ,. The power plants being built now, and by now I mean over this decade and next, are likely to define the biosphere , I'm stronger here, really I think will define the biosphere for the next 5000 years and to understand that, you have to understand a few important things about how climate change works. So the issue is that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. And it's incredibly, technically unlikely, at least in my opinion and in the opinion of many others that, we're gonna find any economic way to draw that down. So in the absence of any extreme geo- engineering, the carbon that goes up, stays up for a long time. Thousands of years. And so that gives us basically a carbon budget. The total amount that we are allowed send up into the atmosphere, forming a blanket over the Earth. And then that stuff stays around. So a lot of the problems that you think are problems, for, you know, kids and grandkids. Those are basically set [ COUGH ] by the carbon that we put up. Over there. So it's just gonna be sitting there, poisoning, doing damage. It gives us this much. We got 860 gigatons of carbon to burn. yeah. So however, we have way more than that in fossil fuel reserves. This is from the Carbon Tracker project. This is an amazing project. It basically just looks for all of the carbon that is accounted for across the world. So in fossil fuel reserves and energy companies, remaining in, in companies it could be developed reserves it could be developed and state owned reserves. There is more than enough to exceed the budget. That's with no additional exploration. So, that's not the problem. If you have the current amount of carbon being burnt and you in, include somewhat conservative increases that sort of follow the economy, we're out in 17 years. But even if we slow down, if we slow down, the entire Western world slows down. Almost everything. There's another problem. So in addition to carbon dioxide lasting a very long time, power plants last a very long time. So, here is a chart of how long US power plants last. Take a look at the coal plants. That's the black. Many of them are older than 50 years old. They last a long time, like 50 to 60 years. So they'll just keep burning coal. Our existing behavior is any evidence. We still burn coal in the United States. Even green Germany still burns coal. The stuff that we're not burning here because it has been recently banned is being sent over there. Because they're turning down their nuclear plants. And the really big actor here is China. This is this black line is the actual coal being burned these are the projections so you'll notice actually each projection over time underestimated how much coal growth, coal demand growth there was in China. [ NOISE ] So if you do a little bit of math and you make an estimate and you basically just predict how long the coal plants that are being built now it's in relatively recently up until 2030 and you can predict most of the demand for electricity just the Chinese coal plants, just by themselves lasting for the time period that we think they'll last for would burn through three quarters of the entire carbon budget. yeah, so this is a very big problem and you may have seen it, it is a picture of the Earth. At a night with a lot of lights. And, the issue is that as the parts of the world that are not lit up light up. Where does that power come from. We have to make sure that those power plants are sustainable. So that is the challenge. The world is waking up. Now, so I believe there is a political moment where there is wind at our backs. But we have to get going on this. We absolutely do. So, back to my own story. And it's a bit rambling, so I'll try to run through it. I, I went to college at an early age. Initially I felt a little overwhelmed but as I went through, I found my own inventive capability and resourcefulness increasing. And I felt a compulsion to do the most important thing that I personally felt I could contribute to. This problem was absolutely. That. I think it's a problem of my generation. There are many others and there are some amazing causes that you've heard here today and yesterday. But this is key to the future I think. We've gotta solve it, along with other things, but we've gotta solve it. And I joined of set of very large projects. This is Nuclear fusion projects called ITER. Actually, it means the way in Latin. Unfortunately they do not get the urgency problem. Actually, the current plan is to have commercialization in 2050. As you can see, this is not good enough. The war will be completely lost by that time. So ,. I left graduate school at Princeton. My family thought I was insane. But urgency compelled me to find another way. Now, at the time, actually, going back, the price tag for the project here was less than the valuation of Facebook and has stayed as such, so I moved to Silicon Valley. Well I thought I could secure the financing to do the right energy research on the right kind of time frame. The atmosphere of possibility that Tom talked about earlier is absolutely something I felt about in Silicon Valley and I started to go. I started reaching out, writing essays. I reached out to people who became incredibly influential entrepreneurs and mentors and friends that I've worked with. I slept on couches, took odd jobs and kept trying to think of different ideas that I could use to form the base of capital and resources and capabilities that I could invest in the right energy research. Ultimately, none of the ideas that I thought were stop caps pulled me as powerfully as the energy problem, in part because throughout that whole time, renewable energy was declining in cost. In fact the cost of solar modules was declining exponentially and in much of the world, renewable energy cost was less than the cost of. Conventional sources of power. In particular here, you can pretty much see it. This is the cost of oil and this is 2004, 2005. Past this point pretty much in all the islands, all the India, Africa, the places where people use oil to power electricity that. Renewable energy is cheaper than conventional sources of electricity. And this is increasing across the world as renewables come down in cost. The problem is energy storage. So in order to power all of the electrical needs that we want, or actually more than about 30 %, we need to store the energy and we need to do so economically. And the problem is. If you use batteries which are kind of the first solution that comes to many people's minds. It's too expensive and the resource constrained and they don't last nearly long enough. And there are lots of technical reasons for this, basically you're dissolving and then replating things and it grows all sorts of crazy stuff when you do that. As you might expect. In fact, Bill Gates points out that, this is Ted 2010, he talks about innovating to zero carbon emissions for energy. That all the batteries on earth can store only 10 minutes of the world's electricity needs. We are not close to the scale necessary to power the world. And we don't have that much time. So I had this idea. I will talk about it. And I don't wanna pitch too much my own idea, but I'll go through and then have a general call to action later. What if we stored energy in air? It's practically limitless. It's inexpensive. They last a very long time. They're like power plants. People assumed it must be inefficient, but I asked, questioned, if that was a necessary truth. And I'll zip through some of the physics here cuz I don't wanna lose you. But basically, air, when you compress it, it gets hot and that hotter air is at a higher pressure than it otherwise would be. It would get really hot if you compressed it to reasonable densities, and so. And then when you cool it, you lose pressure and you lose energy that you can get out. What you want is for the air as cool as possible during compression and as warm as possible during expansion. Nobody figured out how to make that practical, so we came up with an idea. You spray water during the compression process, right into the compressor. So this is kind of yeah, I'll just run through it. You compress the air, you spray the water. You store the air in a tank. You store the heat, and then you, when you want the power you expand it and you spray warm water back and you get electricity. And the whole process is reversible. You connect it with a motor generator and this connects, you know, we drew a plug. It's kinda more hardcore than that but it's basically, [ LAUGH ] [ LAUGH ]. It's basically that. It's a cartoon. So I had that captured me. And it captured some of the smartest, the minds of some of the smartest people that I knew. Steve Crane, he's here, my cofounder, he's our CEO. He actually came up with the idea for dramatically less expensive. Air tanks that, they're like half or a third of the price of steel tanks. Leaves carbon fiber. And Ed, he is the consulate engineer. He's so handy that he had a machine shop in his garage and we were able to build the first prototype. Very quickly, based out of essentially scrap that he had in his garage. Here it is, doesn't look like much, looks like it should have de, be in a state science fair, or maybe [ LAUGH ] earning second place. But we proved the basic concept. And quickly we scaled to industrial scale. This took an industrial scale natural gas compressor and we converted it to take the the water spray process. We did compression and expansion. We improved it working at scale and at speed. We've showed the science we've run for more than 600 hours. We showed that we can dramatically increase the efficiency, probably double the efficiency of a comparison process if we did it the old way. We formulated the cost formula that you would have to do if you were going to make renewable energy plus energy source more economical than the conventional sources of power. So this is pretty much it. Offpeak Energy plus Energy Storage. Cost has to be less than the cost of Peakers. That's power plants that don't run all the time. Just when people need the power most. And the good upgrade is necessary to move that power to where people want it. We devised a product and cost strategy that would make that happen. As you can see, this is levelized cost of energy. These are the previous battery systems that have been out there on the market, they're not close. This is the comparison peaker cost. And this is where we're going to hit when we start out and as we improve. We commenced design, we raised money and we built it. And this is it, this is what it looks like. It's not the complete, it's just the high pressure stage but it works at 200 atmospheres, it's half a megawatt, it operates quickly, and we built. Full scale carbon fiber tanks, they're the cheapest pressure vessels in the world, they can move air and natural gas and a bunch of other things, we've had a lot of sales in that which is helping us in financing and so on, and that's really great. We're going to deploy across the next two years and it's incredibly satisfying work. This is actually after, this is just after we ran at full pressure. During compression. So this is the sum of the team. And their very, very happy. It was a long time getting there. So, in many ways, there is a wind at our backs. People understand this is a problem. Energy storage is a problem. People understand. I'm running out of time here. I've got twenty seconds open. People understand that. This is something that we need to do. But in many other ways its more challenging than ever. The Silicon Valley venture capital system invested too heavily in thin film solar and they lost their shirts. This is early stage financing for Cleantech. You'll notice its gone basically to zero. There are almost no other startups that are even getting funding for stuff like this. I mean I, we're basically abandoning it. we, we've done okay, we've beaten the odds so far we raised 58 million dollars in capital and, and maybe we'll be able to raise enough to get to profit. with, with no further bounds but. The point is, as a society, there's the possibility to make the difference now, before it's too late. And we need to do a few things to make that happen. A, now, it's not gonna be easy. A lot of venture capitalists lost their shirts investing in things they didn't understand. It's difficult to understand. It's difficult to make progress in hard technology, but we have to do this and we have to do it soon. I mean very soon. The effects will happen later, but basically we will seal our fate in the next two decades. So I beseech you. Because your not young, you know, bright eyed, bushy tailed entrepreneurs seeking your own path. You're accomplished, empowered individuals. Many of you command immense organizations, much capital. And maybe you don't like this idea. But you've gotta like something because this energy storage or its nuclear or its carbon sequestration or its radically reduced usage of power or something or we will seal our fate. We've got to try. So I'm gonna end here. I'm running a little overtime, but I hope you'll spare me. The moment this, this is a picture when Voyager spun around in 1990, 4 billion miles away from Earth, and that little blue dot is us, right there. This is. A beautiful passage from the great Carl Sagan, and I wanna read it to you, so that you'll understand what personally compels me, to protect the environment and the species and the ecosystem that we would lose to make sustainable energy possible. From this distant vantage point the Earth may not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their life. The advocate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer. Every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, supreme leader, saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least not in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit yes. Settle not yet. Like it of not for the moment the earth is where we make our stand and it has been said that astronomy is humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. Thank you. 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