These low-carbon visionaries have big plans — for laser furnaces, atomic batteries, smart windows and flywheels.
By Chris Helman, Olivia Peluso and Hank Tucker
When Ben Parker worked as a battery engineer at Tesla for four years, he spent countless nights in casino hotels in Reno, Nevada going through “production hell” on the gigafactory Model 3 line. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit and he needed a break and a breath of fresh air. So Parker left Tesla and rented a 30-foot Winnebago RV for three months. On the subsequent 6,000-mile road trip around the western United States, he befriended many other RV enthusiasts, and realized the electric vehicle movement had been ignoring a large segment of drivers on America’s highways.
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This was more than a whim. Parker had for several years been dreaming of building an EV-optimized aerodynamic travel trailer. In 2020 he met Toby Kraus, who predated him at Tesla in its finance division, and together they founded Lightship, America’s first all-electric RV company. Their mission is to build hundreds of thousands of RVs with a range of hundreds of miles so travelers don’t have to spend more time charging than driving.
“The electrification of transportation is a watershed moment,” Parker says. “It’s a piece in the larger electrification of everything.”
Lightship has raised $27 million from investors including Obvious Ventures and Prelude Ventures to produce a battery-powered travel trailer, and 28-year-old Parker now leads a team of 20 people. He’s aiming to have a prototype ready by the spring. “There’s a shot clock on climate right now,” Parker says. There are some forces that are just not waiting on any of us.
Parker is one of this year’s Forbes Under 30 Energy honorees, joining a group of entrepreneurs, standout executives and policy advisors making an impact in everything from traditional oil wells to more sustainable tinted windows. Here are few of our favorites, as selected by our esteemed panel of judges (including Kay McCall, Juliana Garaizar and Jessica Matthews).
POWER UP
No surprise, batteries are hot right now, with the Inflation Reduction Act extending billions of dollars in tax credits for renewable energy projects that increasingly rely on batteries to smooth the intermittent flow of electrons from solar panels and wind turbines that go up and down with the clouds or breeze.
Nicholas Grundish, 28, earned a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering as the last student of John B. Goodenough (a co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in developing the rechargeable lithium ion battery). Grundish now leads battery tech at EnergyX, a lithium supply-chain startup, where he started the Battery Innovation Laboratory and large cell prototyping line from scratch. EnergyX is now scaling its technology to large format cells and designing a pilot facility to produce its batteries with the goal of extending the range of electric vehicles and drastically reducing their charge time while also lowering their cost. The company has raised $22 million.
Will radioisotopic batteries be the next big thing?
Joanna Patsalis
Now, although lithium ion batteries have been vital in enabling large-scale adoption of EVs, there’s no reason why the technology can’t eventually be supplanted by a new entrant. Would you drive a car powered by an atomic battery? Joanna Patsalis, 29, is the chief operating officer at Direct Kinetic Solutions, which has raised $3.68 million to commercialize advances in radioisotopic batteries–that is, long-lasting batteries that run off of tiny amounts of nuclear material. These nuclear batteries have energy densities 1,000 times higher than chemical batteries. It’s not a new idea, but it is out of this world. NASA put an early nuclear battery on the moon to power the Apollo 12 landing.
Another far-out battery concept is being pursued by Joey Kabel, 29, at Electrified Thermal Solutions, which is building the Joule Hive thermal battery — which can store cheap renewable electricity as heat. The Hive consists of stacks of electrically conductive firebricks in an insulated container that can store heat at 1,800 degrees Celsius for days with minimal thermal loss. It has raised $5.5 million in funding from government and venture capital sources since incorporating in April 2021.
Shivani Chotalia
NRstor
A cousin to the battery is the flywheel, a mechanical device that stores rotational energy. As development director at NRStor, Shivani Chotalia, 29, has worked on battery microgrid systems and is building Canada’s first large-scale commercial flywheel energy storage project, which will be paired with carbon-free hydropower. NRStor is also building a 1,000 megawatt-hour battery project with the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation. In 2020, Chotalia became the youngest board member of Environmental Defense Canada, a leading non-profit defending clean water, a safe climate and healthy communities.
BUILDING BETTER
Our buildings use a tremendous amount of energy. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, everything going on inside our residential and commercial real estate eats up 21 quadrillion British thermal units each year — about a third of total domestic energy consumption. This is a rich vein for innovators to attack.
About a third of the energy your family will use this winter to stay warm will escape right through your windows. In summer, concentrated sunlight through windows adds to cooling bills. Tyler Hernandez, 29, and Michael Strand, 29, intend to change that. Their startup Tynt Technologies makes windows covered with tiny particles of metal that respond to minute electrical charges by altering their position. This means windows with adjustable tint, to optimize visual and thermal comfort and to reduce HVAC use. The duo teamed up while earning Ph.D.s at Stanford, where they were awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships that freed them to focus on their innovation. They calculate that broad adoption of their windows could save 2 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions each year. Tynt has raised over $11 million in seed round funding and now has 22 employees at its Boulder, Colorado headquarters, prepping for product launch in 2023. Asked what company they would seek to emulate, Tyler says, “Honda or Ford. A company that provides a product that everyone can afford, utilize, and enjoy.”
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Naturally, you need a smart roof to go with your smart windows. UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jiachen Li, 28, helped invent a material called Temperature-Adaptive Radiative Coating (TARC), an all-season smart roof coating that keeps houses warm in the winter and cool during the summer, akin to an energy-free air conditioner. The key was in discovering that a metallic compound called vanadium dioxide is a “phase-change” material, that acts like a metal to electricity but like an insulator to heat — a contrast to most other metals that conduct heat and electrons proportionally. By simulation, TARC saves more energy than any existing roof coatings in 80% of the U.S. climate zones and for most cities globally. His team has raised $1 million in funding from multiple government agencies and companies. In time, he imagines the material being used in clothing, to shield electronics or to coat tents.
And for the foundation of your smarter building why not use some biopolymer concrete alternative? Benjamen Gao, 20, helps lead Stanford Mars BRIC, a research team exploring the potential of sending an autonomous robot to Mars to build radiation-shielding igloos and other structures out of biopolymer concrete — ostensibly made from Martian dirt, water and a protein binder. Their research won the NASA SPOCS contest and recently sent a research payload to the International Space Station to study how variable gravity impacts biopolymer concrete strength. He also leads the Stanford Solar Car Project, collaborating with Autodesk on AI-assisted car design. Benjamin says his first job was as a “regional adaptogenic citrus refreshment distributor” — neighborhood lemonade stand.
EVOLVING FROM FOSSILS
Cofounders Andy Zhao and Olivia Dippo.
Limelight
Ok, so this year’s 30 Under 30 crop has us covered with new ways to build our smarter, more efficient homes, plus the innovative batteries to deliver cleaner energy. But how about our core need to reduce our direct need for fossil fuels? Reactionaries will insist there are some jobs that only fossil energy can do — like providing the metallurgical coal for smelting steel. Well Olivia Dippo, 29, and Andy Zhao, 29, two Ph.D.s from UC San Diego, are looking to change that. Their startup Limelight Steel is perfecting “laser furnace” technology, which can rapidly heat iron ore using zero-emissions energy sources — an improvement on the traditional iron smelting process, which involves burning metallurgical coal. Their breakthrough is in discovering that powerful lasers can be precisely tuned to heat iron oxide as efficiently as microwaves can heat water. They’ve raised $3.25 million in their pre-seed funding round.
Meanwhile, Caleb Boyd, 29, and his cofounder Kevin Bush at Molten have raised over $2 million to develop their technology, which generates a stream of pure hydrogen by using electricity to split methane into solid carbon and gaseous hydrogen. They claim the technique uses one-fifth the energy of producing hydrogen via water hydrolysis. The team was also just selected by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Fellows as part of their 2022 cohort, providing substantial funding to take the garage prototype to commercial reality over the next two years. Molten is hiring engineers and building out a pilot facility in Oakland, California to scale up their technology to take on the $100 billion hydrogen market for clean fuels, steel and fertilizers like ammonia.
Inspired by concern.
Tejeshwar Grewal
After his family moved to Canada from India, and he found himself living next to old and gas fields, Tej Grewal, 29, became passionate about monitoring such industrial operations for greenhouse gas emissions. He founded Qube Technologies, which deploys environmental sensors that monitor for leaks of methane and carbon dioxide. Qube’s analytics platform helps locate the source of the leak and estimate the quantity of the emissions. The oil and gas industry is responsible for approximately 30% of U.S. methane emissions, so mitigation of these leaks can have a significant impact on climate change. To date, Qube has raised $25 million in government grants and venture capital and has deployed more than 3,000 detection devices around the world. An early inspiration: as a child growing up in India, Tej started each day by singing a verse in school – “Pavan guru paani pita, maata dhart mahat.” It means “Air, our teacher, Water our father, And the Great Earth our mother.”
This year’s list was edited by Chris Helman, Olivia Peluso and Hank Tucker. For a link to our complete 30 Under 30 Energy list, click here, and for full 30 Under 30 coverage, click here.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2022/11/29/meet-the-under-30s-powering-the-future-of-energy-and-sustainability/