2022-Korea-Showcase-Ambri

SPEAKER 1: OK, so I'm going to start-- some of us are going to be talking about renewable or clean energy. And I'm going to start that up by talking about batteries for clean energy. Ambri is a liquid metal battery company for large-scale grid energy storage.

So we are a company that was spun out of MIT in 2010, founded by a professor and his PhD student, who are still both board members and our CTO of the company. So we took an exclusive license to the technologies that they developed at MIT. And we've been expanding upon those ever since. So the problem is that renewable energy is generated in an intermittent fashion.

We don't know when clouds are going to roll over. We don't know when the wind is going to stop blowing. And the grid still needs to be stable. And that problem occurs when the percentage of renewable energy on a grid starts approaching 40% or so.

And so one of the key solutions is to add energy storage to the mix. So that basically acts as a shock absorber. And it could be a minute-to-minute type of protection for the grid. Or it could be an hour-to-hour smoothing of the times of the day when renewable energy is generated versus the demand for electricity in the grid.

So Ambri's battery actually can do both of those. It's a 4-hour to 24-hour battery. And so the second problem is that 95% of the batteries on the grid today are lithium ion. And lithium ion is a terrific battery chemistry.

It's been used-- consumer electronics, EVs, obviously, and grid storage. But the demand for lithium ion has really increased as a result of EV popularity. And the price of lithium has increased by over 10x. And the availability of lithium ion batteries is becoming a problem for the expansion of renewable energy on the grid. So there is a big push for alternative material batteries.

And it turns out that lithium ion batteries are not particularly economic at the 4-hour to 24-hour range. So that gives an opportunity for batteries like Ambri's, which uses different materials to offer lower-priced battery solution and other features that lithium ion doesn't offer. So it is a 20-year battery, whereas lithium ion is typically about 10 years.

Over those 20 years, it has a maximum degradation of about 5%, whereas lithium ion is typically about a 50% degradation over that same type of a life. The safety of lithium ion has been a challenge. And Ambri's batteries, among some other battery systems out there, have no flammable parts. They do not have a thermal runaway possibility. And I'm sure people in Korea know there's been a number of lithium ion fires. And that's been a problem for growth in that industry.

And then lastly, these materials, because they're different, they are much more recyclable than those that are used in lithium ion so it's a much more sustainable type of a battery system. And this is a little bit more about the chemistry itself. So as I said, it's calcium and antimony. So it's a completely new battery system. No other company has been working on this type of battery technology.

And it operates at high temperature. It's not the only high temperature battery out there. But in this case, it's unique because at room temperature, this battery has no voltage, does not conduct electricity.

So in the whole manufacturing, shipping, installation process, there's no risk of even a short circuit or a spark because there is no ability for it to carry current. Only when you heat this battery up once it's been installed does it now act like a battery. And it is very much like other batteries at that point.

It does not have any moving parts. You can charge it and discharge it at various rates or power levels. It doesn't really care how you use it. And it doesn't care what kind of electricity goes in or out.

So it typically will pair with solar or wind in order to essentially create 24/7 renewable power. And the economics, of course, are really important in terms of renewable energy becoming more and more successful on the grid. And low-cost batteries are a big part of those economics. And you can see in the lower right here that there's just a material cost advantage to these batteries versus lithium ion.

And this is what the product looks like it. It ships similar to lithium ion in a shipping container. Has about the same voltage as lithium ion batteries. Has about a megawatt hour in these container sizes, as you can see there. Again, no moving parts, 20-year life, essentially no preventative maintenance over that period of time.

And as you can see, we don't need air conditioning in order to remove the heat. These containers have insulation inside to trap the heat inside the container. That allows us to stack them on top of each other, which means that we have a very small footprint for this battery, about the same as the best lithium ion.

And then this is where we are as a company. We have recently announced that we commissioned our first system for a Microsoft data center. The Microsoft Advanced Data Center team has been looking at a number of new technologies in order to eliminate diesel generators and allow 24/7 renewable power.

And we've also announced that we have a series of next generation systems next year, a number of utilities. And large customers are lined up for those. And one of them is Xcel Energy, which is a large US utility. And then in 2024, our first commercial year, we'll start shipping against large solar and wind projects. And earth and wire is one of those large projects, which I'll show you in a minute.

This is the Microsoft system. So this is a container of those batteries. Essentially, it looks exactly like the picture that I showed you earlier. It has two battery management systems. And so that's Ambri's product. It's a DC containerized battery system. Ships directly to sites and essentially eliminates the integrator in this business.

This would be an example of a large scale system. This is the project for earth and wire. It's a South Africa-based wind project. And so it allows the batteries to be charged when the wind is blowing and that energy to be discharged from the battery when the peak demand in the grid exists, which allows essentially charging it the lowest price of electricity during the day and discharging at the highest-priced electricity, typically in the evening. That gives the economic opportunity, we call it arbitrage, which enables the cost of batteries to be a good investment.

You can see this occupies about two hectares or about five acres of space, which is a relatively small amount of space, particularly compared to wind and solar that are present on the same site. And so Ambri's plan is to initially build a manufacturing facility in the United States, taking advantage of a number of the government incentives that are available there and then follow with international manufacturing locations. So we are working with one of our investors, Reliance, on a manufacturing facility in South Asia. We are also looking at partners in Europe and in the Middle East.

But we really don't have any presence or any partnerships in East Asia. And East Asia really is still building its energy storage sort of demand. Korea is a little bit unique, kind of ahead of most of the countries here. But most of the other countries don't really have a lot of energy storage yet. So there's a real opportunity here to build out a manufacturing of a different technology than lithium ion.

So I appreciate everybody paying attention. And any further discussion around batteries, we can take it into the other room later. Thank you very much.