STEX25 Veir Interview

ADAM WALLEN: Adam Wallen. I'm the CEO of VEIR.

TIM HEIDEL: And I'm Tim Heidel. I'm the chief technology officer at VEIR.

ADAM WALLEN: VEIR is developing a next-generation power transmission system based on high-temperature superconductors, allowing for more power through existing rights of way.

TIM HEIDEL: Every decarbonization study that's been published in the last two decades indicates that we need to expand electricity transmission networks dramatically in the next 30 years. Many of those studies indicate you need to double or triple the scale of transmission capacity. And yet transmission is only becoming harder and harder to build over time. Nobody likes tall towers and wide right-of-ways disrupting pristine landscapes.

ADAM WALLEN: Today traditional conductors are metal or metal composites. And they have thermal limits. So when you want to put more power through an existing right-of-way or a cable, you are actually putting heat, producing heat when you send that energy through it. And the thermal limits of those metals are the melting point and sag. So while using high-temperature superconductors, you are allowed-- you can put more power because you have zero resistive losses and you're not producing heat energy.

TIM HEIDEL: VEIR seeks to unlock the capability to transport large amounts of power over long distances using high-temperature superconductors. In our case, we're using a novel class of materials that has substantially lower resistance. And we have an active cooling system. Thus, we can push a lot more power through the exact same amount of space and really limit the amount of new space that's required to expand transmission.

High-temperature superconductors have been under development for multiple decades at this point. And they're a class of materials that when you cool them below a certain threshold temperature, they cease to exhibit resistance. That allows you to transmit a lot more power through those conductors relative to conventional conductors, because you're significantly reducing the amount of heat that's generated.

Historical high-temperature superconducting transmission deployments have really been limited by concerns over cost, as well as reliability. And a lot of those concerns at their core relate to the design of the cooling systems themselves. Historically, these systems have used liquid nitrogen and relied on a temperature change for liquid nitrogen in order to extract heat. And unfortunately, that architecture required the duplication of refrigeration equipment roughly every 5 to 10 kilometers of line length, which really limits the applicability of the technology over long distance.

There had been a proof-of-concept work done historically on leveraging the phase change between the liquid and gas phases of liquid nitrogen. And some of the early results that we were able to find indicated that that could reduce cost and improve reliability dramatically. And that's really the technology that we decided to pick up and adopt and start developing at VEIR.

ADAM WALLEN: So we founded VEIR on the basis of the need for expanding transmission and new technologies in transmission lines. It was after a deep dive looking at the future requirements out of 2050 for decarbonization and the realization that to have a higher degree of penetration of renewables that are remote, new transmission capacity had to be created to bring that remotely-produced power to load centers in cities.

TIM HEIDEL: VEIR was founded in late 2019. And the very first work we did is really to kick the tires on the core concept and do a lot of modeling and analytical work. And that was really the focus of our seed round.

The results of that enabled us to raise a Series A round, which we closed about a year ago, of $12 million. And in the Series A period that we're in right now, we're really focusing on hardware demonstrations of the core cryogenic components. And we're aiming to stand up an integrated demonstration of all of the cooling components required to achieve our vision for long-distance, high-temperature, superconducting-based transmission lines.

ADAM WALLEN: The real-world application and our vision for VEIR is to eliminate the necessity for not in my backyard. So you would see a VEIR system deployed, just as you do conventional lines today. And, in fact, our development process of the product, designing the subcomponents that enable this cooling and using of high-temperature superconducting cables, would look exactly the same from the ground when you pass a power line that would be a VEIR line versus a conventional line.

VEIR's developments in using high-temperature superconductors versus conventional conductors allows for five times the amount of power through the same voltage class and the same right-of-way. This allows us for a higher cost entitlement and being more economical at scale than conventional lines, also allowing for an increase in capacity in constrained right-of-ways that conventional conductors would not be able to compete.

TIM HEIDEL: Early on, VEIR's transmission lines will rely on the same industrial gas supply chains for liquid nitrogen that are utilized by refineries and food-processing facilities and hospitals. Ultimately, we may find that it's more economical to put on-site generation colocated with our transmission lines.

ADAM WALLEN: In development of power lines, whether that's in a regulated environment or the regulated utility or a merchant development model, there are many stakeholders when you look at projects to be deployed for high-temperature or any high-voltage power lines. So the stakeholders include consumers. The real customer will be the utility or the merchant developer. But we have to and we already have begun to make contacts and communications with both regulators and legislators at the state and the federal levels.

TIM HEIDEL: Utilities have been adopting technology for many, many decades. And today operate one of the largest machines that man has ever created and achieved some of the highest levels of reliability anywhere. Obviously, with such a system and a safety-conscious industry, adoption of new technology is always going to be challenging. Ultimately, it will require us to deploy pilots and to deploy proof-of-concept systems and gain the thousands of hours of operating experience that will be necessary in order to gain wider-spread adoption.

ADAM WALLEN: Our early portions of the company were really proving the science of company-- that the phase that the company is in right now is a reduction to practice and derisking the technology. Our next phase of operation in 12 to 14 months will be in product development. All of those critical steps of the company have demonstration projects, proof-of-concepts that are milestones of proving both at where we are right now, which is the overhead cryogenic demonstration, which proves our core technology.

The next stage, as we're in the product development phase, will be a high-power, high-voltage demonstration. And that will be our precommercial stage before our next and final commercialization of the technology, grid-tied as a project. As we're developing the technology to commercialization, VEIR will explore its business models, its route to market. And that will determine how much capital is required ultimately for the company to be commercial.

There is options for public finance and underwriting those first deployments. If we go into a merchant model, we would need to then figure out project capital to deploy that, which would mean a pretty significant amount of raise. Just ballpark, a traditional, conventional high-voltage transmission line to develop, construct, and deploy is about a million dollars a mile. And an average transmission line is 40 miles.

One of the largest challenges that we've had since starting VEIR, in all honesty, in the economic climate that we have today, starting it and founding it in COVID, has been recruiting and hiring people. It's a hard tech development. We can't do a lot of the critical developments, experiments, building out our test beds, that can't be done virtually. So human capital, really qualified people with experience has been our largest hurdle.

TIM HEIDEL: We're seeking to deploy technology in an industry that is extremely safety and reliability conscious. And there's an extremely high bar for new innovations to achieve both the safety and the reliability requirements of all of our customers. It is a hard tech innovation. And we're going to need to generate a tremendous amount of data and experience in the field to really gain the credibility required by the industry.

We know this is not a sprint. This is a marathon. It's a very tough industry to innovate in. But ultimately, the size of the prize is large enough.

ADAM WALLEN: Our foundation of the company was on the ability to accelerate decarbonization and the penetration, the successful and efficient integration of renewables into the grid. Ultimately, our vision for the company is really long, high power lines that will actually allow for load shifting of renewables. When the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining in some places, we want to be able to send that power with effectively very little or negligible losses long distances.

TIM HEIDEL: We're excited to be solving a problem that is truly global in nature. Our focus as a company isn't purely on North America. But really, there's an urgent need for transmission development all over the world. It's a really exciting space to be working in right now.

[MUSIC PLAYING]