234: Under Pressure - Compressed Air Batteries

https://youtu.be/9ubh2J5vD3w

Matt and Sean talk about the pressures of entering the compressed air energy storage market. Is there a market here or is it all full of hot air?

Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How Compressed Air Batteries are FINALLY Here https://youtu.be/VS05y9mQgbw?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Still To Be Determined?

Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.

On today's episode of Still To Be Determined, we're talking about compressed air batteries. And normally this would be where I would insert some kind of bad joke or pun. Unfortunately, Matt used all of the compressed air joke puns up last week when he dropped his episode. So, slow clap to Matt.

Hi everybody. As usual, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi and I write some stuff for kids. And I'm also just generally curious about technology. And luckily for me, my brother is that Matt of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives.

And Matt, before we get into our conversation, how are you? Doing pretty well. I mentioned last week that we're taking a break. Best decision I could have possibly made. It's given me and my team time to kind of like really dig into some new topics, get caught up on things I've been meaning to do for a while and prep for my trip to Vancouver, which is going to be coming up in like, Three days I think it is.

Um, I'm really looking forward to that. So it should be interesting. You'll be there by the time this drops. Right? I'll be there the day after this comes out. As we like to, we always try to revisit comments from our previous episode before we talk about Matt's newest. So we'll get to the compressed air in just a bit.

But first to revisit our episode 233. Matt, can you believe it's been 233 episodes? ? We've been doing this a while. It's been a while. Uh. We were talking last time about age defying battery tech technology that was making it look like batteries might last a bit longer. And of course, we're talking about the big batteries, the, the ones that are maybe in your car or the ones that are in your garage, helping your home that has solar panels hold onto that power for when you need it later in the day.

And this comments kind of stood up and waved at me as I was looking through the comments, little dog says, the bigger topic than talking endlessly about new batteries should be Can we finally get rid of AA and AAA batteries? I'm so sick of getting a new electronic device and realizing I need 20 AA batteries to power it.

Little dog, I can't help but wonder what you're buying that takes 20 AA batteries. But he goes on to say a small lithium battery has way more energy storage and is rechargeable. Yes, I know they make rechargeable double and triple A batteries, but they are junk in comparison. So this is something that we Usually talk about small battery tech in the form of, Oh, well, what we're talking about is not small battery tech.

We tend to talk about it as outside of our conversation. And I remember many times where you've said, Oh yes, this iron battery that operates on rust, is terrific for long term storage, but you're not going to put it in your phone and we both laugh knowingly, but then we never talk about the actual stuff that does go into your phone.

So my question to you is, are you and your team aware of any shifts in small battery tech? Are we headed toward what Little Dog is pointing out, more inclusion of small lithium ion or other types of new smaller batteries that will be rechargeable and last longer. Or is this another case of be careful what you wish for?

Because we constantly talk about recyclability. And are we not yet prepared for devices in our homes that when they break or wear out or we just want to replace them, we now have a lithium ion battery to have to take care of as well. It's, it's a little bit of be careful what you wish for. It's like getting that monkey's paw because I mean, think about all the devices that we're getting now, like AirPods Pro, fantastic little earphones and all that kind of stuff.

You're not going to crack that thing open and change out the battery. It's like it's formed to the shape of this ear thing and it's glued in there. And when it's, when the battery in there is dead, the headphones essentially are dead. And so it's like, we're seeing that more and more for small tech. Um, I don't, I mean, you can, you can get lithium ion rechargeable AA and AAA batteries.

It could tend to be a little more costly, but. And they don't tend to work as well as he's pointing out as having something that might be more tailor fit for that consumer electronics. So it's kind of pick your poison. It's like, do you want to have something that you're having to like change out more often or, and make it easier to kind of like do DIY service?

Or do you want something that's using better battery tech, but it's a little more baked into the thing that you're buying that you can't really change out? It's like, I just mentioned, I think it was the last episode where I talked about the new toothbrush I got, the electric toothbrush. I can't change that battery.

It is like sealed inside this aluminum handle. It's going to last me years. My, my Sonicare lasted me like eight or nine years before I had to get rid of it. So it's going to last a long time, but then it's like, you have to chuck the device and make sure you're recycling it in a responsible way. That's kind of the sad reality of where we are right now.

And is small battery tech in the form of double and triple A batteries that we literally swap out of devices and chuck or recycle? Are we seeing any movement in that field, in new tech in that field? Or is that a case similar to generic medications where there's not enough money in it to make it an enticing place for

industry to actually push for advances. That's one of the things that impacts us on a daily case of like an Adderall shortage internationally. And it's because the medication is generic. Nobody bothers to make it because they can't make enough money making it. So what is the case with our double and triple A, are Duracell and Energizer simply sitting on technology that is an old tech, but nobody's bothering to enter it because they're like, we can't.

Do anything here that makes the R& D worth it? No, it's, it's the lowest common denominator. I mean, think about it. You go to a target. And you're like, I need double A batteries and you've got, let's say, uh, cause it's not lithium ion. That's the, um, a lot of the rechargeable one, I'm blanking what it actually is, but when you see, oh, I could get a pair of regular Duracells or I could get a pair of, uh, lithium energizers.

They're not rechargeable, but they got lithium in there. Or I could get a pair of this rechargeable. It's like, it gets more expensive as you go up. I could get the double A's for two bucks. I could get these cheaper chargeables for four bucks, or I could get these rechargeables that are like the better rechargeables for eight bucks.

It's like people are going to go for that two buck, two buck, two buck. It's like the lowest common denominator. So it's, it's really comes down to cost. It's not a limitation of the technology. It's a limitation of what people are willing to spend. I think that's really what it comes down to. So as lithium ion production of different battery types gets better and cheaper and more mass produced, I wouldn't be surprised if we started to see those rechargeables start to decrease in price and become more appealing.

Think about like, um, LED light bulbs, like 10 years ago, they cost 10 bucks a bulb compared to a CFL or an old school bulb. And now you can get a LED light bulb for a few bucks. It's like the prices have dropped dramatically. It's like, I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years, This isn't even a question. We still have double A's, but they're all these really cheap, good quality lithium ion rechargeable ones that we get.

Uh, so I think it's just a matter of time. You just have to be patient. I also wonder about technology that might be built around the swapping out of a battery pack that the device itself might not have the battery pack, but it would be built to be able to interact with whatever battery pack you purchase.

And I know that you've got tech in electric, is it lawnmowers and snowblowers that you have that have a battery pack that is universal for all of them and you can swap it out and change it as you need to? That of course is from the design of the manufacturer, it would be nice if there was a more universal model of that where it's like you could have the battery pack regardless of the manufacturer and swap it out to different devices.

Yeah, I wish that was a standard that the industry would agree on because right now it's like if you buy an Ego mower, you can buy all the Ego products and it works. Or you can buy Dewalt and all the Dewalt batteries will work. Or Green Power, all the Green Power will work. It's like I wish they would just agree on here's a standard.

Like locking latching mechanism for the size of battery. And then you could get any battery you want that fits that spec for any product you've got, but that's like, I don't know. I think we need another monkey's paw to make that wish. I don't think that's going to ever happen. That feels like that feels like that needs a consumer's bill of right amendment to it because like the companies, if anybody's bought an Apple phone in the past few years, who knows what type of charger you have.

Like, they keep changing the charger simply so they can sell you different chargers. It's like, we, we live in an ecosystem where the companies. Uh, they're not looking for universality. I also found this conversation interesting. This is from B Valentinus, who pointed out in regards to our conversation about research for research's sake and following the research to some ultimate end that is just driven by curiosity, as opposed to having a goal.

And B Valentinus jumped in to say this, I think James Burke and James Burke was a BBC television host of a show called Connections, which took a look at science. So basically, uh, a kind of show that was very in the same vein as what Matt and other YouTubers do on their channels with looking at science tech.

But James Burke showed the value of unconnected advances leading to monumental changes in his Connections series from decades ago. In re watching, I was struck by an episode where, with a lab gear in tow, he climbed a hilltop to demonstrate the concept of GPS. Without, I think, himself really understanding the implications of everyone soon having that ability at their fingertips.

I really like that anecdote, the idea of demonstrating the sci fi reality of this device, knowing where you are on the globe, without understanding that someday I would be standing on a street corner saying, where the heck did that subway entrance go? I know it was around here somewhere, and then just using my phone to find it.

Or my lawnmower knowing it's GPS location.

In regards to energy storage, I wanted to share this from Jim Thane, who wrote in to say, to give a small idea of the value and power of electrical storage, I'll pass along this anecdote I picked up from a video a few years ago. There's a small island off the coast, I believe in the Southern part of Africa.

This island has never had dependable electricity, even with a fuel generator. They had problems getting and affording enough diesel to keep their small grid up. Enter solar with batteries, which had finally become cheap enough for them to install such a system. Well, now for the first time since electricity was discovered, this island has reliable electricity.

Jim then went on to point out the next layer to his question, which was, are we looking at places in Africa that will event, will effectively jump the tech spectrum, not building a grid the way that Europe and the United States and other parts of the world have built out grids, but effectively building micro grids using solar and local storage, battery storage in those ways.

And he compares it to, and I think this is the perfect comparison to how areas in Africa incorporated cell phone into their society, jumping over having landlines. There was a point in time, and we've talked about this on the podcast before, where governments around Europe and the United States were offering

loans to Africa to build out landline networks in their country, Nigeria being one of the countries. Nigeria said, we will take the money, but we want to use it to build cell towers. And the governments of Europe and America that were offering these loans said, no, you're not allowed to do that because that's not the order of how you do these things.

First you build landlines. So Nigeria did not take the money and instead they found other resources to just put up cell towers. Why are you putting in landlines? It's this first world quote unquote, first world thinking of, well, first you get a phone in your home and then you get a cell phone because that's how we did it.

And maybe the same thing is happening here. I'm curious, have you and your team come across examples like this, of a region of the world that is effectively moving from A to E without having hit B, C, and D, and just going directly to, Oh, we can, Bring in the wind turbines or the solar power and the long term storage and build a grid from the ground up with that kind of tech.

There are examples we've talked, touched on a little bit, like India is doing a lot of this because there are areas of India that are very remote and rural, and they may not have good electricity at all. And there are little towns and villages that are now completely powered by solar. And you see pictures of these little villages and it's like every building has solar on top of it.

And they're completely powered now by electricity and some energy storage that's done locally. So they're creating little micro grids that they can tie together. Um, they're going about it in a very different way because this technology is unlocking completely different ways to do it. It's not, it's not the same thing, but like my video editor for Undecided, he lives in the Philippines.

And he and I were talking recently about how the Philippines is really leaning into renewable energy production right now. They're, they have huge installations planned for solar and wind and energy storage facilities because their grid system is not reliable. It goes down a lot, depending on where you are in the Philippines.

It's, it's kind of a patchwork and it's very difficult when tsunamis and, you know, Not tsunamis, but when like the rainy season hits, power goes out in certain cities. And these aren't like little rinky dink cities. Some of these are very large cities. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, they're trying to basically bolster up their grid to make it way more reliable by leaning on this, this newer tech that's out there.

So it's not like they're leapfrogging, but it's just like, you can look at areas of the world that haven't historically struggled to have reliable electricity, whatever the reason is, and they're starting to realize, oh, wow, this tech. It's going to make it easier to roll out power for every citizen of our country versus having to build out maybe high power lines that go hundreds of miles or thousands of miles to deliver where it's needed.

So it makes it much easier to build out these more micro grids quickly and effectively to get power now instead of having to wait years and spend billions. Yeah, I think that's a good transition point into your most recent video, because your most recent video is talking about a type of tech, which is not a brand new tech.

In fact, we've talked about compressed air batteries before, but Matt's most recent video, how compressed air batteries are finally here, dropped last week on August 27th. And. Before we get into the tech itself, I want to talk about the channel itself. I want to talk about some feedback that you received from Gerald Brecht.

Who wrote in from Germany to say, hello, Matt, this is Gerald from Germany. Gerald from Germany. I wish that was your username. It's adorable. Gerald writes, since you are using this automatic translation in your videos, I don't watch them anymore, so often the German is terrible and very fast as it starts always in German.

I have to reset to English. This is a bit of a hassle and keeps me away from watching your videos. I'm wondering, do you have any advice to people like Gerald from Germany who is looking at your videos and was happily, pleasantly watching them in English before, but it's finding the tech of wherever you are in the world, we're going to speak to you in the language that you speak there.

And the translation maybe isn't doing what you were hoping. This is so frustrating. I know for everybody like Gerald, as well as myself, because YouTube is pushing creators to try to do multi language dubbing. Yeah. Which I'm doing and I get feedback like this and then I get the exact opposite feedback from somebody in Germany that says they love it.

So it's like, I don't know, do I, do I stop doing it or do I keep doing it? I'm having a hard time figuring out what to do. Um, this dubbing tool I use, is making improvements on that speed issue. They're doing things to try to make that better. So it might be the kind of thing, like, maybe I pause it for a while until that stuff gets worked out.

Uh, the flip side, this is YouTube's fault. They shouldn't be defaulting. They, for some reason, will always default to whatever your Google accounts native language is set too.. Right. And they don't remember and they don't care to remember what you've set it to in the videos. And that's what's driving me nuts. It's like, if you set my channel to English, it should stay for English forever for you.

It's like, I don't understand why it's video to video. It always does this. Part of the reason is it's Google. They release minimum viable products, MVPs, and the MVP of this multi language stuff they're pushing is half baked. It's not completely baked yet. So I, I don't know. I, if, if you have thoughts on this, comment below, shoot me an email, use my contact form, my website.

I love to get feedback from people that are struggling with this. Cause I'm curious what you think. Should I keep doing it? Should I pause it until the tools get better? Um, I have sent my own feedback to YouTube multiple times and I'm going to do it, keep doing it again, pass along what Gerald just said.

Yeah. Because This is something that YouTube could fix very easily. I just hope they do it soon. How horrible and ironic that it's referred to as MVP and yet it means the exact opposite from most valuable player to becoming barely operational is enough. That's now the standard. It does a thing and it does it just good enough that 51 percent of our users will use it, which means it's a win.

And that is absolutely, that's ridiculous. And this is a tool. Just to be clear that Matt was excited by when it first dropped and he shared it with me. He's like, check this out. This is incredible. But to find out from the perspective of the people it's intended to reach in a beneficial way, especially somebody who is already happily watching you.

I mean, Gerald's comment is in English and it's in perfect English. It's Gerald was watching you and enjoyed watching you and then to have over fast, and as he puts it, poor German, push him off of it is just, it's just unfortunate. So from, Both of us, I would like to say, if you're watching us in some other language and you're finding the tool confusing, or you're finding it useful, jump into the comments and let us know what your feedback is.

And as Matt said, providing that feedback to Google may be one of the things that moves the needle. Also, before we get into the deeper conversation, I thought this anecdote was an interesting one. This one from MZM who wrote in to say, I met a structure work construction worker in the 1980s. I assume it's the 1980s, it just says the eighties.

I don't think it was the 1880s , but MZ, you can jump into the comments again and let me know if I've got that wrong. I met a construction worker in the eighties who built his own windmill using a 260 gallon fuel tank, to make curved blades mounted on a truck rear end that was only 30 feet in the air, turned in low wind and ran a generator.

It generated more electricity than he needed, so he compressed air into big propane tanks, which he buried in his yard. I assume they were buried in the yard in some sort of network that would actually allow them to be accessed as opposed to just taking full propane tanks and burying them in the yard.

Uh, at the time he was puzzling over a more efficient way to run the compressor backward for generating electricity from the compressed air. I did a patent search for him, but to his surprise, it was not a new idea at the time. I'm sure he's passed away by now. He lived in central Minnesota somewhere. So there was this gentleman in the 1980s.

Who was living the DIY dream that Matt and I talk about all the time, which is it's really remarkable what people are able to put together in their garage. It doesn't come quite to the level of what was that Clint Eastwood movie where he's a farmer who builds a rocket in his, was it Clint Eastwood or was it Tommy Lee Jones who builds a, uh, rocket goes into space in his backyard, but that's pretty remarkable.

Building a windmill, first of all. Wow. It actually generates electricity. Okay. Now you got me listening and I'm storing the energy in compressed air tanks, and I'm trying to figure out how to do it. And when you look up the patent, you discover the patent already exists. This goes right into Matt's video.

This is not brand new tech. This is stuff that's been around for a while. And then there's this from B. B. Hundon, another anecdote from Denmark. We had an inventor named Jacob Ellenhammer, who was among the very first to fly. In 1906, he was very interested in precisely, in precisely compressed air and built several boats with compressed air among the famous Tivoli boats in our well known Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, which was later electrified only 20 years ago.

He also invented the ejection pump, which is used on ships all over the world. The whole world is full of compressed air tools, so it's probably high time we looked at it again. Although a pressure tank can explode, it's not dynamite or lithium batteries. So that goes right to some of the content of your video.

This is arguably safe compared to other things, as was just pointed out. If in the system of compressed air storage, a leak occurs. The worst thing that happens is some fresh air gets released as opposed to, uh oh, these lithium batteries are starting to expand and they could potentially explode, or we've got a chemical leak, or we have a fuel leak that is a combustible material.

So all of this starts to look like this is finally high time for it to be reaching the point where it's going to be used. And you even call your video, finally it's here. But then also in your video, you say, but some of this is actually kind of like large scale lab work. So I'm wondering how finally is the finally here?

It is finally here. Like this is like, as we were putting together, my lead researcher was helping me with this pointed out. There are dozens of these things in the world already. There's a ton of them in China. There's others in some areas of Europe. They do exist. Compressed air energy storage is being used.

It's just not widely used everywhere. And part of the reason for it was we touched on it in the video. There's the, uh, diabetic and adiabatic forms of compressed air energy storage. And the one that's being used in a lot of places is the diabetic, which is the one that requires you to produce your own heat when you're trying to decompress air.

It gets cold. So you gotta, you gotta heat it up so that it doesn't freeze your turbines and you get the best efficiency when it's, the air is warmed up as it's, as it's being decompressed. So you have to burn fuels or produce that heat in some fashion. And that eats into the efficiency, it eats into the costs, it eats into all that kind of stuff.

And the adiabatic systems are the ones that basically store the heat from compression and then reuse that exact heat As it comes back out, that's, that makes it a cleaner process. You don't have to burn fossil fuels to generate that heat. And it helps drive the cost down in theory. So like in the lab stuff we were talking about, it's the stuff that Hydrostor is doing that's trying to bring to market.

It's still on its way out and it's like as that stuff comes onto the market more is when we would expect there's going to be a drop in cost because it's so much more efficient than the existing forms of compressed air energy storage that are out there. So it is finally here. It's here. So it's like, I want to make that extra, extra clear.

Um, this is not some kind of fantasy, but it's one of those, the thing that the giant question mark is. Can the adiabatic systems, like what Hydrostor is doing, catch on because they do show so much promise and it solves one of those big issues with existing systems. It's not enough to have a system, I mean, I'm sure it is enough, and I'm sure some people are using this as the

storage system. I know you mentioned in your video, there is a process, which is like some places they actually have to burn diesel fuel to create the heat that is then used in the process of releasing the energy that's been stored, but it wouldn't have to be diesel would it? It could be if you had a solar panel array and you're using the compressors driven by solar panel to store the electricity generated by the solar panels.

You could use the electricity from the solar panels in the release process as well and capture the energy that way. It starts to become, though, a using energy to release energy is maybe That's the problem. Right. So that's why it eats into the energy efficiency of the entire system because you're having to use all, you're having to use new energy to create that heat to even take advantage of that compressed air as it comes out. Where the adiabatic systems are

you don't have to do that anymore because you're storing the heat from the process and you're reusing it later. So it's thermal energy storage paired with compressed air energy storage to kind of get the best of both worlds. It's like a peanut butter and jelly. sandwich they've created, which kind of is what makes it super interesting, especially when you look at the, the costs of these systems, when you're talking about long duration energy storage specifically.

Is there a problem lurking on the horizon for this tech of potentially being an also ran from the perspective of how much better can the price point that this tech is currently exercising get, even if they harness the, oh, we figured out how to Like, I think the number at one point was something like 70 percent in your video of like captured energy is then able to be used in this new system.

And so 70 percent is a really high percentage. That's great. And the price compared to lithium ion storage was better than lithium ion storage's price per, was it megawatt? It was per, it was the per, uh, kilowatt hour price. Per kilowatt hour. So you have a better capex cost of like, right, it was the capex cost of how many, how many dollars per kilowatt hour is it to build out this system versus that system was specifically we were talking about.

My question though is. How much better can that price get for compressed tech, which is, as we've already talked about, it's an older tech. This type of energy release process is probably going to be the biggest advance this tech can make, potentially, for a really long time. Whereas other storage technologies That we talk about on the channel are relatively newer and undergoing far different levels of improvement and could conceivably, I looked at those numbers, the price point, kilowatt hours.

Wasn't that big, it would be big on a huge scale, obviously, if you're storing enough power for an entire city, then you're talking about a huge amount of money, but kilowatt to kilowatt, it wasn't that big a gap. And I kept wondering if this new compressed air tech manages to shave off a few more dollars and improve, and it's now down here, but the other battery techs, the, the Not even necessarily lithium ion, but some of the other types of batteries that we talk about.

And the ones we've talked about more recently, which are like solid state and safer and longer. And at what point does it become, well, yeah, at one point there was this compressed air tech, but it just didn't have the legs. Do you think that this is a tech that as you're watching all of this and you're, and you're learning about all of this, do you think it has

terrain where it could land and say like, this is the best case scenario for this tech because it has advantages over the other ones so that they would run in parallel. Yes. You're asking a very good question. It's also a question I saw bubble up in some of the comments myself. So I came prepared today, Sean.

But to answer your question, Is there a chance it could be an also ran? 100%. Battery prices for lithium ion battery technologies have been dropping like a rock over the past one to two years. I mean, like, like falling off a cliff. So the cost of a four hour, one megawatt system for lithium ion batteries is way cheaper this year than it was just two years ago, like way cheaper.

And so as that cost, it's not even like new technology I'm talking about. It's just how cheaply these batteries can be made, period. Because my thing about when people bring up efficiencies, efficiency is a little bit of a red herring. It's like, it's kind of like, it's important. But it's not the litmus test if this is a good system or not.

So 70 percent for this versus 92 percent for a battery. It's that's not the ultimate designing factor. It's cost. It's money. How much money does it cost to build this system? How long is it going to run? What's the LCOE of the entire system or LCOS in this case, because it's storage. That's what ultimately matters.

That's what's going to make people want to use it or not is the cost of the value that the system provides. And I brought this. It's a little graph. We, I should, I wanted to show a graph in the video, but I couldn't find a good graph based on the most recent data. And, There was a number of years ago I saw this graph that had like, if you imagine like the x axis was um, how many hours of storage that you wanted.

I want 2, 4, 6, 10, 12, 24 days, you know, whatever. And then the y axis was the cost per kilowatt hour. And if you looked at the line for The lithium ion batteries, it wasn't a straight line, but it roughly went up at a pretty steep diagonal angle. And then if you looked at the compressed air energy storage, it was also kind of a straight line, but it was at a gentler slope.

But the earliest part of that slope started way higher than lithium ion storage. When you got around that four to eight hour mark for one megawatt, it crossed. And then suddenly it became cheaper and more efficient to get a compressed air energy storage system than a huge battery storage system. I couldn't find, that was several years ago, so the data is wildly out of date, but this, the graph I have right now, it's two years old, so it's not super up to date.

It's from 2022. But on this graph, what I think is important to look at is that there's one megawatt systems, 10 megawatt systems, a hundred megawatt systems, gigawatt systems. When you're talking about utility scale storage for a city. You're talking about gigawatts. You need massive storage systems. But if you look at the one megawatt, it's like, there's like little squares and, you know, icons indicating what battery technology. Lithium ion battery is like a little gold square.

It dominates on one megawatt. It dominates on 10 megawatts. It's even still on a hundred megawatts when you're talking about two, four, six, eight hours, it's still the number one. But as soon as you get to a full day, At 100 megawatts, that's when compressed air suddenly does like come sprinting out and is like dramatically cheaper.

And if you get a gigawatt scale, it's no contest. It's like compressed air is just dramatically cheaper than doing a lithium ion storage system. So that's, that's the niche. That's where it's still can land. It's less in danger of being an also ran in that specific use case. But, but still, that's lithium ion battery technology is racing in cost going down.

It's like, this equation may change quick. So it really depends on how well Hydrostor, how quickly Hydrostor can bring their technology out to market, how quickly they can drive their costs down and what kind of markets they can kind of seize on and kind of prove it out. Um, but just looking at data like this, to me, it's pretty clear.

It's massive utility scale gigawatt energy storage systems where compressed air has a lot, has a, has a place to land. That's interesting. That's a very interesting graph. And of course it will be part of the video, but I also think that we'll likely, uh, include a link to it in the show notes. So if you want to take a closer look, please do.

Yep. So listeners, viewers, what do you think about all of this? Do you think there's something that Matt and I missed in our conversation? Would you like to hear more about any of it? Jump to the comments and let us know. The comments are a great way to support the podcast. As you know, they are a huge part of the production of this program and they help inform the mothership, which is of course, Undecided with Matt Ferrell.

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Both of those ways let you throw coins at our heads. We Pretend to dodge out of the way, but we really like getting hit. So, uh, we appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the business of having these conversations. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen.

And we'll talk to you next time.