Welcome to episode 283 of the Energy Talks podcast. I'm energy and climate journalist, Markham Hislop. We rarely report on early stage innovations here at Energy Media, mostly because there are so many of them. An interesting study would be to compare the volume of innovations of this industrial revolution with that of previous ones. My take is that this one would win hands down.
Occasionally, however, new clean tech pops onto my radar and piques my interest so much that we have to cover it on the podcast. This is the case with the Rondo Heat Battery. John O'Connell, CEO of Rondo Energy, joins me from California to talk about how his company's innovation could help decarbonize heavy industry. So welcome to the interview, John.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.
I have to confess and and listeners regular listeners will know that we don't do a lot about decarbonizing heavy industry. I think I mentioned to you earlier that, I have a regular, economist who comes on, doctor Chris Battai, who who is very interested in this topic, and I kinda keep abreast of it through his social media posts, but we haven't done a lot of interviews. And maybe the place to start here is how big of a problem is it? And I mean, I'm referring to industrial heat, which is now mostly provided by fossil fuels. We need to transition it to something else.
So but how big is the problem?
Yeah. It is arguably the biggest problem. It's the biggest problem that people say is unsolved or hard. Half of all the fuel the world burns is for heat, and half of that, a quarter of all the coal, oil, and natural gas is burned for industrial heat, making everything from steel to macaroni to baby
food. Is this because I know that in the, I downloaded your, your fact sheet, which is very useful, full of facts, actually, and I was fascinated to see that, renewable energy, wind and solar, is intended to be the input, in intended to be the energy that is, goes into your battery. Is this one of those cases where as wind and solar approach the marginal cost of 0 for every new unit of electricity produced, that your battery, your technology really shines?
Yeah. No. That's that's exactly right. We are at kind of a second industrial revolution, a fundamental tipping point because as fuels get cheaper than other fuels, industry rushes to adopt those fuels. When the fracking revolution in natural gas happened, huge investments in industries using gas in North America happened.
We are now entering this world just over the last few years where wind and solar costs have fallen not below the cost, not just below the cost of conventional electricity, fossil electricity. It's probably not right to call it conventional anymore, but fallen below the cost of burning fossil fuel. And you're right that as we put more and more wind and solar on the grid, the time mismatch between intermittent generation and load of the grid is driving price dynamics that make the marginal value of wind and solar 0. And so we are at this moment that if you could harness intermittent electricity, you have a fundamental source of energy that you can build at any scale that's cheaper than fuel. That's a revolution.
The question is, how do you harness it?
It's interesting that you're based in California because I remember interviewing California economists 3, 4 years ago, and they were talking about surplus solar. And there was just so much solar, and it was being it was being, constrained. It was, you know, the word I'm I'm searching for here.
Curtailed.
Curtailed. Thank you. I knew it was a c word.
Thrown away. Discarded. But Yeah. Is the term of art. Yes.
And and the thinking at the time was that it wouldn't be long before other applications would rush in to take advantage of the of that really, really cheap solar. And the, at that time, we were talking about hydrogen, that that would be a big potential application for for basically free or close to free, solar. Is this part was is is that availability of that cheap solar, was that part of your development process for your battery?
Yes. And it's a problem that I and some of the founding team have been working on for decades. I founded 2 cofounded, helped get going 2 solar thermal companies that did not use electricity, but rather mirrors and pipes illuminated by intense sunshine to make solar heat for electric power and for industrial processes. Over that time, we built more than half of the solar industrial heat running in the world, but those systems, which are high efficiency, are now higher cost than electricity. And we spent more than a decade looking for the missing link.
If we're gonna use solar energy to power industry, factories run 24 hours a day, 360 days a year with a kind of a 1 week turnaround maintenance schedule on many, many typical factories. Again, making everything from powdered milk to steel. And if we're gonna repower those factories with renewable energy, we must have an energy source that's just like the one they use today. It's got to be at the same temperatures. It's got to be continuous.
It's got to always be available and reliable. So we are in this urgent need of energy storage, and we looked at there are lots of ways of storing energy. Most of what we do today in the world is electrochemical storage. We run electrochemistry to make lithium run lithium ion batteries or electrochemistry to make hydrogen in an electrolyzer. But if what we want is heat for that one quarter of all the fuel we burn in the world, we don't need to do chemistry.
We can just heat something up, which in principle can be massively cheaper.
Right. And and we wanna get to, I wanna talk about your battery in just a moment. But you did mention your previous experience and and the fact that you have a team. And I'm I'm kind of interested in this, and I'll tell you the the background for it. So as regular listeners will know, 40 years ago, I did my thesis on the transition from horses and steams, tractors and combines in 1900 to 1930.
And one of the most fascinating things I discovered was how many patents were filed in Canada by farmers to improve steam engines and early tractors. There were 100, maybe 1,000. They were tinkering all the time. You know? My my grandfather, for example, was a one legged blacksmith.
And and he would tinker with this equipment all, you know, well, I think I can improve it this way or this way, or what can I make to you know, he had a a great idea and it would he would he would put it into practice, and then he would maybe file a patent for it? And that kind of inventor tinkering innovation is not what drives today's energy transition and industrial revolution. It is science and technical expertise. And so your background and the background of your team, I think, is pertinent here. Can you just give us a brief explanation or give us an overview of the folks at Rondo Energy?
Yeah. Sure. We so thank you. That that's a very interesting comparison because, you know, there we are at this moment where there's an incredible diversity of technologies and approaches that are being explored to solve this industrial heat problem. You know that there are dozens of different chemistries in electrochemical batteries that are being explored.
The set of materials that are being explored for heat storage grew much wider. All kinds of liquid metals, liquid salts, combustible, interesting materials. Given who we were, who we started with, and who we are today, we are today a team of experts out of the industrial energy and thermal electric power industry. An important part of our team are the groups who work directly with heavy industry. We have a world expert in decarbonization of cement as our president.
We have a team out of GE Power that work doing combined heat and power for customers. We are a finance team working to originate projects and offer energy services contract, heat and power as a service rather than just sale of equipment. We are a worldwide engineer procure construct EPC team out of companies like Bechtel to be able to deliver turnkey industrial heat batteries on 4 continents right now. And we are an engineering and innovations group that have developed they had a one deep physics insight after dozens and dozens of different approaches that allowed us to use completely proven century old materials. And here in California is our manufacturing technology development center where we develop processes that we're now standing up at manufacturing locations around the world.
That's fascinating. I did not know that your company was that big or that, complex. And how many employees do you have? Just
Today, we're passing a 120 direct and a suite of consultants around us.
That that is absolutely fascinating. And before we get into a discussion of the technology in your heat battery, I wanna ask about this idea of this, heat as a service. I'm absolutely fascinated by this because I've talked to people who, you know, interviewed folks who were into energy as a service, transportation as a service. There's even a company in Calgary whose CEO, Amanda Hall, I know, fairly well, and they're talking about lithium extraction direct extraction as a service in Chile. I mean, this idea of being able to to provide the technology and essentially derisk it for the adopter is, I think, maybe an underappreciated innovation that we're seeing in in this energy transition that we haven't seen previously.
Indeed. That's right. And we are fortunate. We are blessed with market conditions that make this possible. I mean, whether you make potato chips or baby food or steel, when you make capital investments, typically, you're looking for those capital investments at your factory to pay for themselves in under 2 years.
There are lots of upgrades of all kinds that could expand production capacity or reduce improve reliability, and there's a very stringent rate of return needed. When we build solar and wind facilities in the world, they last for 20 35 years, and there is a huge investor community that wants to own energy infrastructure. And they the emergence of that investor community moving from building oil and gas pipelines to building wind and solar farms. And the understanding that, you know, we can put capital to work that will benefit the world for decades, for centuries, is, you know, one of the starting conditions now so that industrial facilities individual industrial facilities need amounts of energy that we used to think of as utility scale. A little dairy might need more than a 100 megawatts of wind or solar just to provide the energy to make powdered milk or make cheese or or you know?
And a a large industrial facility making metals or refining fuels may need 1,000 of megawatts. And so the conditions exist that if we can harness that capital that's looking for places to go, we can put that together to offer energy services. And you know that solar and wind powering the grid are slowing down because the grid is clogged. This area we're discussing, using heat batteries to decarbonize industry, creates new investor opportunities that are meaningful in that community as well.
That's what I wanted to get to. That's what I wanted to get to. This is fascinating because I remember, I don't know how well you know Canada, but Alberta is kind of the Texas of of Canada. And there is a, industry consumes like 50, 60 percent of all the electricity generated in Alberta. So we're talking oil sands, which is a huge industrial, complex.
We're talking refineries and petrochemical plants and fertilizer plants and so on. And I read a report from 2 or 3 years ago where they went out and talked you know, the system operator went out and talked to various stakeholders, and the biggest concern in that report was that the big players will soon self generate, store electricity on-site, and either unplug from the grid or greatly reduce their demand on the grid. And then, of course, the transmission cost and distribution cost would have to be paid for, by other stakeholders who stayed on the grid. And so this is a a little tempest in the teapot, you know, in 1 in one province of 5,000,000 people. But what you're saying, if I understand this correctly, is that industrial operations now, because the the grid has become a bottleneck, a congestion point, they can look at installing wind or solar on their industrial premises, store the electricity, use your heat battery, and essentially become almost self reliant.
That's true, and it depends on where they are. When we look at Alberta, many of the big load centers some of the big load centers are not where the big wind resources are. Alberta's blessed with some of the world's best wind resources, and building transmission to connect those renewable resources to where the large load centers are is as urgent a problem in our day today as building the fossil fuel pipelines needed to move that energy resource from where it's produced to where it's used. And one of the really high value things about, of course, energy storage of all kinds is that it can make transmission lines move more total power by not just moving power during the 30% of the time when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, but leveling out, moving more megawatt hours with the same megawatts. So it's but this is a very local matter.
In Ontario, solar near the the, the large industrials can completely bypass, in some cases, grid needs. And in others, like Alberta, as you mentioned, the development of the grid in the system is deeply tied to the economical cost effective future of an industry there.
I have had some interest from local folks down in southwest southwestern Alberta where that, you know, wind resource that you're talking about is the strongest. And the question they asked, and I'll ask it of you, is if we have really, really cheap wind power and because our resource is so good, it's pretty reliable for most of the year, Would and there's enough storage to facilitate this. Is it possible that some of this industry might, locate in that area, to take advantage of our low low cost, reliable, and clean electricity?
Well, the answer is obviously yes. In the 19th century, why did England build its industry on the coast? That was where it was cheap to bring the coal. Why did we see huge, investments in the chemical industry midcontinent US when the fracking revolution happened. That was where energy was cheap, and we're entering a world where, of course, Canada's Canada's forward looking policies about carbon and making carbon an investable commodity so that large projects can be built.
Yeah. The places where renewable resources are strong are the places where over time, industries will be built that are globally competitive and least cost. Because for many industries, energy is a huge portion of the total cost of production. And this is partly why people have said this sector is hard to decarbonize. And, again, just recently, that's been flipped on its head because now all the projects that we're building today, decarbonized energy is cheaper than business as usual.
That's, that alone, I think we could have a a podcast interview about. I think that's a fascinating topic. But I've promised 2 or 3 times now that we would eventually get to the Rondo battery. And I think now is is is appropriate for that time. So let I'm looking at a schematic, and unfortunately listeners can't, can't see this, but, basically, the wind and the solar are the inputs into your battery.
Then the the options are to send hot air from the battery to the customer, or you can, input water, blow the air through the the, the radiator, basically, as I understand it, and then send steam to the customer. So folks, this the innovation here in this schematic, as you know someone who's not an engineer, but I would guess that it's the battery, is the huge innovation. What is that battery made out of? How does it work?
Yeah. Great question, and that's a great overview of the basic principle. 2 thirds of let's let's go backwards. 2 thirds of all the steam used by industry. A huge portion of the heat used by industry is in the form of steam, and 2 thirds of it today comes from cogeneration, boilers that run on the exhaust from jet engines, from gas turbines.
Those boilers are all running on a airflow and exhaust flow of a little over 600 degrees c. We said at at Rhonda, one of the rigorous things we looked through at, how can we innovate as little as possible? Because an innovation does not go to scale until the lenders, the investors, the bankers all recognize, yeah, this is gonna last 30 years. I can be certain I will get delivery. I can will be certain it will work and that it will last.
Once it's there, then it's ready for project financing, and that's when you get hypergrowth. So back to the beginning of Rondo, we were seeking systems and methods that would innovate as little as possible and build on what industry already does. The largest energy storage, the largest heat storage in the world today was introduced by the steel industry 200 years ago. In the 18 twenties, steel mills found a way to build save coal by building these things called Cowper stoves or blast stoves that store heat at 1500 degrees c in thousands of tons of brick with air passages in it that captures and reuses heat in the still combusting blast furnace exhaust to preheat air to the furnace to reduce coal combustion. That brick is made from clay, certain kinds of clay.
It's available everywhere in the world, and those units being heated and cooled 20 times a day last for many decades. The challenge with brick, as you know, as we all know, why do we make fireplaces out of brick? It doesn't conduct heat very well. It's a magnificent material, but the steel industry figured out how to use it for heat storage by having huge surface areas exposed to the exhaust. Our contribution, the Real Physics Insight, was how do we combine that with the same electrical heaters that are in your toaster?
How does your toaster heat bread? A small amount of heating element uses radiation light from the heating elements to heat the whole surface of the bread very uniformly. We found a way to build a 3 d checkerboard of brick with electrical heaters that uniformly heat huge brick surface areas to rapidly heat and then deliver heat as superheated air. So we took 2 materials that were a century old, a process that was 200 years old, and coupled with with the way the industry makes most of its steam today to build these really simple heat batteries.
Okay. I have questions. You're telling me that your Rondo battery is made out of bricks? Yes.
Just bricks? Yes. Particular kind different kinds of brick formulation survive to different temperatures based on what fraction is silica, what fraction is alumina. But, yeah, there are places where you just dig up the clay, you fire it in a kiln, you get this brick. There are other places where you make the brick from a formulation of different feeds feeds, but, yes, just brick.
And it Okay. Remarkably, a brick, when you heat it to a 1,000 c, stores as much energy per kilogram per pound as a lithium ion battery pack.
Oh, get out of town.
At, you know, less than 10% the cost of that battery pack and with 100 year life.
Okay. Wow. Okay.
The trick is heating it rapidly, and to do that, you must heat it uniformly. If you heat the brick just on one side, it'll it may crack. If you heat it uniformly, though, you have something that you can use for a century, and that was the Rondo breakthrough.
Gotcha. So, essentially, this is fairly simple technology. It it really is you just how you figured Yes. You've got clever engineers who have figured out how to do this and then integrate it into a process that is compatible with industrial plants the world over.
Yeah. Now does that qualify as your as your grandfather tinkering? We could not have done this without supercomputers that allow us to do really complex simulations, but it was a very simple idea ultimately. Yes.
Well, it kind of does in a way because it's it's the modern version of that.
Yep. That's right.
And you've all got 2 legs, presumably. Fair enough. The poor fell, He was an amazing man because as a young fellow, he was out mowing grass in, you know, early, 20th century, and he had an accident and lost his leg. And as long as, you know, I knew him as a child, of course, and and he had a prosthetic, and it never slowed him down a bit. We used to go ripping around the farm on the tractor, and he would, he would, I would drive as a 5 year old, and he would work the pedals with his prosthetic leg, and we we had a grand old time.
So, yeah, I don't often get to tell that story and but it's a very fond memory of mine as you can imagine. Well, let's okay. One of the applications that, that occurs to me immediately is the Alberta oil sands. The Alberta oil sands, for those who don't know, bitumen is an amazing hydrocarbon resource, but it's like peanut butter: it doesn't flow. It has hydrocarbon, and clays and sands and all sorts of things.
So to make it flow underground, you either have to mine it and then put it through a heat process, or you have to heat it underground so that it will becomes viscous and then will flow into your pipes, and then you can pump it, to above ground. So it the industry uses an enormous amount of natural gas, something like 4,000,000,000 cubic feet of gas per day. And Alberta is one of the biggest gas producers. It makes about 11 1,000,000,000 cubic feet a day. So 4 of the 1,000,000,000 of that goes just to the oil sands industry to make heat for these these various processes.
And it occurs to me that perhaps this might be an application up north where they could build their own wind farms, their own solar farms, heat, you know, basically adopt your process with the Rondo battery, and eliminate all that gas, that natural gas combustion, which is in fact the basis for why, the oil sands heavy crude is so emissions intense per barrel. It's one of the dirtiest crude oils in the world, but that could be potentially cleaned up using your process. Yes?
Indeed. No. You're absolutely right. It's an area that I and the team have a lot of experience with previously, building solar energy systems that replaced that gas combustion producing heavy crude. And as you say that the emissions per barrel of that crude, the total emissions per barrel are something like 40% or more above other crude from other places in the world, all of that energy, all of that natural gas can be replaced economically in Alberta by wind power at Canada's carbon price, at the cost of resources.
They're an example of where interaction with the system operator and the grid, is needed. Fort McMurray and Peace River are far from some of the major wind resources in Alberta, but it is one of the great opportunities of our time to make that crude the lowest carbon in the system, not the highest. Because, yeah, we are at a moment where that is profitable to do.
And I and I wanna explain why this is important because I know that some listeners are sitting there going, why would you want to spend all this time and effort and capital decarbonizing crude oil, which is predicted to be peak in 2030 by the IEA? And, you know, why would you spend this on a sunset industry? And the reason is this, I mentioned before that bitumen is an amazing resource and the reason for it is not its molecular structure is very different than a regular hydrocarbon. It is like a sheet of of, carb of, hydrogen and carbon atoms. And once it's a sheet, it can be manipulated and turned into other kinds of materials.
And that you mentioned materials before, and how important that was to your innovation. And I've done interviews about how not only are we having an energy transition or, an energy transition, we're having a materials transition. This is so important. And there is work going on in Alberta that in a year or 2, we will have a commercial process to turn bitumen into carbon fiber that is automotive grade and half the cost of current carbon fiber. This is a potentially revolutionary, development, but it still uses bitumen as an input.
And if you could decarbonize the the, the bitumen, so that it could then be used, to make materials, feedstock for materials instead of fuels, that would be a key part of making that innovation viable. Particularly, you know, these days, everybody, every, company is trying to get its suppliers, its supply chain, to squeeze emissions out of the supply chain. So there's no way you can use dirty crude as an input without decarbonizing it. And this idea could be the missing piece in that in that puzzle to make that whole thing work and to do it economically.
You know? That's absolutely right. And, of course, carbon carbon fiber is a key material for the future of transportation and all kinds of things because its strength and its potential sustainability are phenomenal, its strength per pound, and it takes a ton of energy making that material as it takes tons of energy to make all kinds of materials. Rhonda is building projects that are are powering some of the most advanced plastics recycling projects in the world to making food, but materials of all kinds, whether it's a aluminum or carbon fiber or advanced polymers are an important area where we can essentially set to 0 the emissions at those production facilities. And as you mentioned, what are the upstream sources of those materials?
How are they produced? Yeah. Bitumen can be produced in essentially a zero carbon manner where all the pumping power and especially all the steam, which vastly dominates the energy use needed to produce to produce it, can be made from wind power in Alberta, and we're entering an era where that can be the same cost or lower cost than business as usual. And your point is correct, of course, that the world, our civilization needs materials forever.
That okay. That's fascinating. Where has the Rondo heat battery been applied? Can you give us some examples?
Sure. We, for the last for more than a year now, we have been running our first small commercial unit, delivering heat as a service to a biofuel producer in, Central California. There you know, the world has this enormous demand seeking sustainable aviation fuel and seeking the absolutely lowest impact, lowest carbon aviation fuel. Corn ethanol has some advantages over other pathways. It's twice as many gallons per acre as other systems, but it is twice the carbon intensity of, for example, soybean or canola.
Rhonda, at the ethanol refinery, cuts the carbon intensity of that fuel in half, and the ethanol refineries also produce biocarbon that if you sequester it, you essentially get a zero carbon feedstock. The little 2 megawatt hour unit that we've been operating now for more than a year is part of that customer's journey to 0 and to a multiple 100 megawatt hours installed at that refinery. That unit is made of the same bricks operating at the same temperatures as large units. And today, we are in construction and development of projects on 4 continents. The Department of Energy has made major awards over a $100,000,000 for Rondo projects that will end the food and beverage and other industrial sectors.
We have projects that are, announced in Europe, and we have investors, the world's 2nd largest mining company, the world's leader in AI, the world's largest fuel producer, the world's largest chemical producer, who are seeking to use this technology at the largest scale to decarbonize their own operations in lots of places in the world. So our biggest challenge today is building the delivery organization.
Scaling up. A common problem with, with companies that bring innovations to the market. You mentioned the Department of Energy and that, of course, I immediately thought of Jiggersha on the the loans program there. And, Jigger Shaw is, anytime there's a big innovation, there's a transition like this, a major structural change in an industry, there are always evangelists and and you know important people who come to the fore to make this happen, and Jigger Shaw, that was one of the smartest hiring decisions that the Department of Energy ever made. And and I I so I'm interested the fact that you, the Department of Energy is providing some capital to your company.
So maybe you could talk about that and also the impact of the inflation reduction act on your expansion plans.
Yeah. Thank you. We are speaking on a on an auspicious morning. The bipartisan infrastructure law and the inflation reduction act created an opportunity for the Department of Energy to dig deep and really go after root causes and and seek ways to build American manufacturing capacity and do deep decarbonization. This morning as it happened, the Biden administration announced the largest decarbonization investment in world history, a $6,000,000,000 decarbonization program with 33 projects across every sector from steel to macaroni.
We were honored to be selected in 2 of those projects in different industries, to build heat batteries driving decarbonization. And there's a growing understanding of the impact that the the thing that people said that electrification is the way that we will drive decarbonization. We have now intermittent electricity that's cheaper than any other source of energy. Humans have known since we became humans. And so energy storage is this enormous thing.
There's become this understanding that heat batteries, hours and from others, play this key role in allowing industry to decarbonize without placing new stress on the grid, without re making us need to build lots more thermal power stations. Heat batteries allow deep decarbonization, 80, 90% more decarbonization without taking a single kilowatt hour from a conventional power station. And among all there so the this DOE grant that's program that was just announced is trying all kinds of things, new processes making cement, all kinds of things, but, we I think heat batteries were 10 or 15% of the total grant project, and we were 2 out of the 33 projects.
Well, congratulations on that. And I wanna that raises another question that has emerged, in the work that I do, which is the role of China. I just saw Rocky Mountain Institute study come across my inbox today that argues something that I have argued for quite a while now, which is that China is driving the energy transition. They have scaled up, you know, all of their clean energy technologies, plus they're adopting them at scale, and and that's a major, competitive challenge for the United States. It just flat out is, and I I think that the various acts like the IRA are partly in response to that.
So the question then becomes, you might not be able to beat China at scale in these things, but there's still it's true that the United States is has the biggest innovation engine, the most sophisticated and complex innovation ecosystem in the world. Does that then innovation kind of that you're talking about here that the DOE funded and the work that you're doing, is that an example of how innovation beats scale?
The 2 go side by side. That is, innovation is one part of the equation. Industrialization is another. There are in norm the the Wright's law, the learning curve that applies to industries that are in series production, production volume kind of regularly results in cost reductions that are observed across every industry from, you know, baby strollers to solar panels to airplanes and have you know, that's been understood for a long time. So industrialization, having predictable demand, serving that demand results in cost reductions.
Innovations are an important part of those cost reductions, so are lots of little tinkering in the factories to make things a little better and a little better, and both are urgently needed. At Rondo, 4 months ago, we announced the world's largest energy storage manufacturing capacity of any company in the world jointly with our Thailand based production partners, Sayam Cement Group, who are an award winning producer in 60 countries. We have really focused on rapid ramp to scale. As I said, we focused on using nothing new in making boilers and electrical systems and focused hard on finding a world class production partner so that we could be immediately delivering at scale. You're right.
The IRA is in part responding responding to world competition because the places where the primary feedstocks used by industry are domestic, reliable, and low cost are places where the
next downstream industry grows and the next one
after that. And we see industry grows and the next one after that. And we see that in US leadership in making semiconductors all the way to making automobiles. Right? There are different materials, and the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law are really watershed moments.
The Biden administration has done more for US manufacturing competitiveness and decarbonization than anyone anywhere in the world ever. And we're already seeing early fruit, giant investments in manufacturing in the United States that are bigger than anything since World War 2 have been happening. And, you know, today's announcement, this morning's announcement is gonna trigger another wave of those.
I'm gonna close out the interview with this observation, John, because I just came back from a week in Alberta. We were doing town halls. A client hired hired me to act as kind of a a resource on stage for these town halls about the energy transition that they were doing out in rural Alberta. And there was a lot of opposition to this idea of an energy transition, and it struck me that and it and it and it's particularly poignant today as I talk to you. Clearly, you're on the the cusp of the leading edge of thinking about the energy transition and heat and and manufacturing and how all that gets put put together.
But the folks that we talked to, it was like talking to somebody from 2014 or 2004. And I suspect the same is true in many parts of the United States. The thinking about the energy transition is way behind where the energy transition is, and that becomes important because so much of policy and regulation, and and government inducements to support manufacturing, the kind of stuff you're doing, are really critical, but they rely on a political consensus. You can't get too far in front of the the the voter. And I wonder if we don't have a a job to do to bring the rest of North America along and to kinda catch up so that we are not inhibit because Canada and the US are joined at the hip in this.
Let's not kid ourselves. Where the US goes, Canada will follow, and we either, you know, compete against Europe and China, or we've got problems down down the road. So it's this is a really important question, and it seems to me that we need to put some effort into bringing the folks along to where the energy transition is at and what's required. I don't just an observation, what are your thoughts?
I I think you're you're exactly right on, and thank you for the education work that you are doing to drive that. It's you know, there's a science fiction writer, I think, who said, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And, it's remarkable that 2 or 3 of the decarbonization projects just announced in, by the Department of Energy, the governor of the state of Kentucky gave a stood up and gave a press conference today because multiple of those projects are in the state of Kentucky where I think most of the voters would say something that analogous to what you said that, you know, the energy transition is gonna harm us. We don't believe in it.
And we many of, you know, industrial decarbonization in particular, if it's now profitable, we can keep the jobs in those communities. We can grow them, and we can eliminate the burdens of pollution that particularly affect those communities. You know? The the story about the energy transition has been, oh, it's gonna mean energy poverty and job destruction, and it's exactly the opposite. We are building energy infrastructure that our grandchildren will use.
It will lower, not raise the cost of making basic commodities. And, you know, when you have a 20 year permanent low cost source of energy because you built a wind farm in Southern Alberta that powered a factory, that factory is gonna be there for 20 years. It's not gonna be vulnerable to fossil fuel price volatility or carbon regulation. And the communities that move early will be the ones that benefit the most. So the education that you're doing is, you know, it's it's not just bringing people along.
It's like helping them understand the the future is much brighter than people think.
Oh, I'm very fond of saying that the future is electric.
And that's absolutely
entre intended. Well, John, this has been a fascinating conversation. This is not I have to confess. This is not what I expected we would have, but I'm very glad that we did have it. This, the Rondo heat battery sounds like an amazing innovation. I wish you all the luck in the future, and, you know, all the best.
Thank you, Mark. I'm so grateful I got a chance to speak with you.