YouSaid · the spoken record

Ramya Swaminathan

lines on the record: 37
first: 2023-10-12
most recent: 2023-10-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Which in utility terms, I know that sounds like it's a long way away, but in utility terms at the scale we're talking about, that's tomorrow. And the only thing I'll add is it has to be tomorrow for the scale of the problem that we're facing together”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I hope to start construction on our first plant towards the end of next year with the first fully in service by 2027.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And that's a great story, which is that it is a really fertile time for emerging technologies and storage. And those technologies are of all kinds. I mean, they're a thermal storage, gravity storage, mechanical storage. And I really think that's a terrific fact for the world at large.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I don't see it ever really at the scale of a single home, but I do see it at the scale of you could have, for example, a large town or a small city being able to essentially have a microgrid that is disconnectable from the overall electricity grid and supportable internally with the resiliency of a multi salt battery, as you called it. So I do see it getting lower in scale than where we're starting, but never really at the level of either a house or a mobile application like a car.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely, much lower, and actually in places like Spain, for example, there is so much solar being produced that they are curtailing solar production during the day. So actually, it is possible to charge for some hours of the day at zero cost or perhaps in some places even at negative pricing, which means someone's paying you to take the power. So that part, I'm very pleased to say kind of across the board, we're seeing that the cost of charge electricity is trending decidedly downwards. And that's a major advantage for storage.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A really good analogy that one of my colleagues uses all the time when you're developing projects is to think of a horse race. And you never really know which horse is going to win the race until it actually pulls across the finish line. So we do have a number of projects that are neck and neck for that status of being first across the finish line. And what I can tell you is that there are sort of in our home markets here in North America and in Western Europe. We're focused a lot in Iberia, in Spain and Portugal. And so it'll be in one of those markets, but we've got a number of irons in the fire that are running pretty much neck and neck in terms of their schedules to get to operational status.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of where Malta is, we have spent the last couple of years developing technical partnerships and validating the system. We are now ready to deploy at commercial scale. So when I say commercial scale, that's quite large scale. That's the 100 megawatt 10-hour system. We have built a small pilot in Texas at the Southwest Research Institute. We spent quite a while going through, I would say, third-party independent validations of the system and its configuration, et cetera. And at the moment, we are placing our first contracts for a full commercial plant. And so I hope to begin construction on our first plants towards the end of next year.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not crazy hot. And actually, do you know gas plants like traditional gas plants that we have right now where we combust gas get to be much, much, much hotter than that? So for a power plant, it's not that hot.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that is a great question. And the reality is much, much less dramatic. So the highest temperature in our system is 565 degrees C and so that is hot. I mean, for sure it's hot. The salt is molten. It needs to be stored in steel tanks. And, you know, certainly there's an art to ensuring that there isn't corrosion or corrosion.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the salt loop. That's the cheap, the simple part. Now, you know, I'm also being a little simplistic by saying, oh, well, salt is really simple. I mean, salt is corrosive. You know, it is definitely a difficult medium to work with. But at this point, there are very large concentrated solar plants operating worldwide and the largest such plant actually is, I think, still under construction or recently commissioned. It's in Dubai. It's called the Dewa plant and it's 700 megawatts with 12 hours of storage. So salt storage is known, understood, and used in other parts of the world.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the, you know, the land area is difficult because you need a lot of land. The mirrors, you've got to position them just so they've got to move with the sun. The receiver is extremely complicated technology because it needs to receive a concentrated solar rays from all these mirrors. And then you've got the salt loop that is kind of the passive recipient of all this heat energy. What we've done is to take the simplest, the cheapest, and in many ways the least complicated part of the system and adapt that to the Malta system.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So Crescent Dunes, their technology was something called concentrated solar. And concentrated solar essentially is a technology that concentrates the rays of the sun. So when you look at a concentrated solar plant, there's lots of little mirrors and they're kind of stretched out over a huge field. And they take the rays of the sun, concentrate them, and send them together to a receiver that becomes very, very hot. And then it takes molten salt. It takes salt, just like I described and stores the heat. So it's really concentrated thermal energy. So that's why it's called thermal solar thermal solar power. Now, concentrated solar, the most difficult part of the cost profile was kind of everything except the salt loop.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what is the pathway forward to enact an energy transition that is quick enough to combat climate change, but also meets all these requirements of safety, reliability, resiliency, and affordability? Malta's plant integrates really well into the existing legacy grid system because our system is comprised of parts and pieces, systems and subsystems that are used in power plants all over the world, including the United States. So for grid operators and utilities, we're a one-for-one like for like replacement of that gas plant, of that coal plant. And then super important in the context of the energy transition is delivering jobs to people who otherwise would be displaced by the transition, right? So when you shut down a coal plant, you're displacing those workers. And because Malta's plant looks, feels, acts, and is operated and maintained just like a traditional thermal.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and so the question for all of us as we kind of navigate this energy transition, because it's a fact that we're adding renewables faster than any other kind of new form of generation. But you and I expect that every single time we turn on any appliance in our house, the light switches, that the power is going to be on, it's going to be safe and it's going to be available as long as you need it. And so we demand that. It's a very regulated space, rightly so. And folks in the space don't necessarily want to be the first to try some newfangled technology. That's traditionally been the stance of utilities because they want to provide resilient, reliable, affordable power that is also safe at all times to their customers. So the question I think for innovation in general, not just for Malta, but for all emerging technologies, is what is the balance?”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a great question. And we don't have a single grid. We don't have unelectricity system. We have a combination of very many interconnected. And in some cases, not interconnected. So Texas in particular, ERCOT, is not interconnected.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of it available. Yes, and I think after the experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sense that, you know, energy is not only now an issue of decarbonization, but in Europe, for example, is now a core issue of energy security, energy independence, and that a hostile power could hold a country, a set of countries, a continent hostage over supplies of things used to make energy, I think has really brought into focus the importance of robust supply chains and commodity materials. So, you know, no one's going to hold anyone hostage over salt.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so it really is the whole idea was to build a system with commodity materials that had a very robust supply chain.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So we're talking about potassium nitrate and sodium nitrate, what is called solar salt. But yeah, it's a commodity.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ess Exactly Exactly Exactly. Whereas in our system, what you can do is just to add more salt and more coolant and you extend duration while keeping the power portion of it, that is the machinery, the turbo machinery, the heat exchangers, you keep those all constant. But let's say you wanted 10 hours or 20 hours or 30 hours, well, you just add some more salt and some more coolant and build bigger tanks or add more tanks and you can extend that duration. So from a cost and performance standpoint, you're going to really look for a technology where you can extend duration very cheaply and Malta's technology fits that bill very well.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10 hours would be long for lithium ion. So, lithium ion actually, yeah, lithium ion actually started really in the one hour space. They've extended to now four hours. And you do see some six, maybe even eight hour applications in the world today for lithium ion. Beyond that, it's not that lithium ion couldn't do it. It's just that...”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially, yes. So it works very much like a store of excess electricity. Now, one of the critical differences between us and lithium ion, in addition to just, well, we use different components than they do, is what is called the duration of the system, meaning how long can the system generate for once it's been charged. So if you think about that in any mobile application, it's sort of in your case of the Tesla, how long can you drive? How many miles can you drive for? You can probably drive.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly And the whole idea was really to use components and subsystems that already exist at scale in power plants all over the world and just haven't been integrated into this exact system. So there's a salt loop and a coolant loop. The salt loop is exactly what it sounds like. It's sort of where the hot salt circulates. And actually, that's the youngest part of the system. And when I say that, what I mean is the salt loop has been in continuous operation for now more than a decade, whereas the other parts of the system, the coolant loop, the general air loop, turbo machinery, heat exchangers, all those parts and pieces have been demonstrated at scale in many cases for decades.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, same properties. And so, you know, essentially what you're doing is you're taking electricity, electric energy from any source, and you're converting it into thermal energy, and then you're moving it out again when it's needed back on the grid or for some purpose, you're reconverting that to electric energy.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really hot salt, okay. Yeah, so it turns out that salt is a terrific store of heat. And when you heat salt above a certain temperature in the 200 degree C range, it actually becomes a liquid and it holds the heat very well. And because it's a liquid, you can pump it and it's easy to work with.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. The technical insight that formed the foundation of what Malta is working on today in terms of our technology was actually the brainchild of a professor at Stanford. He's a Nobel Prize winner. His name is Robert Laughlin. And he had the insight that you could take what's called a heat pump and a heat engine and put thermal energy storage in the middle in the form of molten salt on the hot side.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's a problem from grid operators. Now, it's not visible, it's not obvious, it's not something that you can see, but it is measurable and it is something that grid operators worldwide are really dealing with as they go through this energy transition.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and the spinning mass provides what's called inertia, which really supports that frequency regulation. It supports the stability of the grid. Malta helps not only time shift that power as we were talking about moving solar that's available during the day to being available at night, but we're also replacing the inertia, which helps maintain the reliability of the grid. You know, a good example, a good mental image to think of is if you have a generator in your home, you're adding appliance after appliance and you can actually sometimes hear the generator stall. If you think about that and zoom out to a grid environment, right, if you add too many appliances or too many loads on the grid and you don't have that large spinning mass on the grid to support the inertia, you can stall out the whole grid.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're taking those out because we're retiring coal plants, we're retiring gas plants, and that's all that's great from a decarbonization standpoint, but it leads to a real problem in maintaining grid reliability.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's another non obvious problem that Malta is also trying to solve, which is that when you add what's called intermittency to the grid, so intermittency is that power sometimes available, sometimes not available, when you add more and more of this onto the grid and at the same time you're retiring the traditional fossil-based assets, coal-fired plants, gas-fired plants that you talked about. Well, it turns out that the original grid environment was really architected for those fossil assets. So reliability, the support of frequency, the resiliency of the grid, all of those are really supported by large moving spinning turbines on the grid.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That happened during the morning and the evening. And actually, in that middle of the day at 12 noon, you're producing way too much power to serve that maximum demand. So that's the problem that you can see. That's very obvious. It's evident. It's that time mismatch.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“California, et cetera. So when you think about this abundant resource that's available, well, great, let's build more solar. But what are you doing? You're really stacking more and more and more power in the same hours of the day because the sun is only available during daylight hours. Now, however, let's look at the demand side of the equation because in most grid environments, peak demand actually doesn't happen in the very middle of the day. There's a peak in the morning when people wake up and there's a demand. It's steady during the day because people, most people work during the day. And then there's a real peak in the evening hours as people get home and there's a lot of activity going on. And then it settles into a bit of a dip overnight. And so when you look at the solar profile relative to that demand, you'll see that it's a mismatch, right? And as you stack more and more and more solar during the day, you're actually not addressing the peaks.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So there are two things you should know about renewables, right? So, one is what you just said, which is they're not always available. And when they are available, it may be too much availability. So the easiest way to exemplify that is in the case of solar. So think about a place that has abundant solar energy. So the south, yeah, the Sahara Desert, the southwest, California.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. Wind and solar are now the cheapest form of generation. And the problem with that is, of course, what you just said, which is electricity has to be in balance, essentially supply and demand have to balance each other. And the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. And the ability to time shift, to take power when it's widely available. So in the middle of a day, for example, at the maximum irradiation, and move that to a time where it's not available, like in the middle of the night when the sun doesn't shine, is in many ways the linchpin that is needed to unlock the renewables revolution. And that's really the idea that Google was working on from 2015 to 2018. They had in-house at X, the Moonshot Factory, what they called Project Malta, which then ultimately became the company I now lead, Malta Inc.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. They're not being used to generate power at all. They're there for some reason. You know, it could be navigation. It could be irrigation. It could be all kind of water control, et cetera. But they're not being used to generate power. And you might stipulate for the record that a good number of them actually probably shouldn't be there and should be taken down. You know, there's certainly an environmental movement to take down several dams. And even accounting for that, there's still an enormous amount of potential in the dams that remain, the dams that for one reason or another shouldn't be taken down, can't be taken down. And so the thesis that we morphed into, we pivoted into in this in free flow power and then its successor company ride development was as long as you have the dams you may as well have the power and the opportunity set is really enormous.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, you have to put them under the surface of the water so that they are turning. And you've got to maintain them. You've got to operate them. You've got to interconnect them, et cetera. So the economics are challenging. And particularly as gas natural gas prices in the US through the gas revolution plummeted. Yeah, drove down electricity prices, that business model became more and more challenging. But what we had really understood through the process of advancing this hydrokinetics business plan was that there are 79,000 dams in the United States and only 3% of them have power.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bundled to make sort of a distributed energy generation system through hydrokinetic turbine. So that was the idea. And this was an emerging technology in the hydropower space, hydropower, of course, is the oldest form of electricity generation, well-known, well understood, etc. Yeah, exactly. I got it.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really felt like the world was ending. And so a few colleagues and I felt like we needed to leave the financial services industry and decided to kind of go all in on a hydro kinetic business. And so when I say hydropinetics, the idea was to harvest power from free-flowing parts of rivers. So if you think about the lower Mississippi down from Missouri on down to the Gulf of Mexico, you know, huge amount of water power, but no dams or impoundments. So it's, you know, lots of small turbines harnessing relatively little amounts of power at each one of them.”
2023-10-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT