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Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal
- rms 14y ago:D
- DaniFong 14y ago;)
- sharpshoot 14y agoBeen watching this develop for a while. Congrats
- otoburb 14y agoCongrats to a transplanted Maritimer and the LightSail team!
- DaniFong 14y agoMy dad is visiting and we're playing bagpipe music on the stereo :-)
- mej10 14y agoHow are you so awesome? Also, this is really great news. I am glad to see that you've gotten such great investors!
- DaniFong 14y agoShucks. I guess I just try to deal with the truths in front of and around me. And I found myself moving in important, but uncharted waters.
- beagle3 14y agoCongrats to DaniFong and the rest of the LightSail team. Large scale energy storage is an unappreciated problem. Our current grid has to quickly scale up and down with demand, because there is no way store excess capacity when demand is down (and therefore, no way to reuse previous excess capacity when demand is up). When this problem is actually solved (crossing fingers until LightSail actually ships ...), the grid is going to undergo a serious transformation for the first time - from a just-in-time economy to an inventory management economy.
- firemanx 14y agoI think there are many more players than you hear about, in this space. The company I work for builds distributed, large-scale energy storage (I work on the management and monitoring system that controls the "distributed" part), though we're relatively unknown right now. There are several other companies that we're aware of, all shipping products today and beginning to carve out parts of the market with relatively little fanfare. I chalk it up to their / our technology not being as "sexy" as something like LightSail, but nevertheless many are beginning to deliver results right now. Hopefully I don't sound like I'm disparaging LightSail or any of the other possible avenues - I think we need continued investment in new methods as we should always be pursuing improvement, and the LightSail approach sounds very promising. I hope Thiel and Gates' involvement in this industry will bring even more visibility to it. However, I do want to make the point that there are people doing this today, in consumer and commercial applications, and having real effects.
- DaniFong 14y agoGood luck with your company! Management of the systems is a seriously underappreciated and difficult problem, especially with batteries. To do it well, you have to really know the chemistry. I think the difference in fanfare is probably because, unless you change the levelized cost of stored energy to be less than the cost of producing power from fossil fuels in the first place, you can have a significant effect, but you can't really change the way the mainstream grid operates. Existing technologies can't do that. The companies that have staked their reputation on trying to climb that mountain are those which have attracted the likes of Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates -- who are not in it to make a buck or megabuck, but to change the world. Management and monitoring is an important part of changing the world, but whether or not it happens depends on the cost of the system. The suspense, then, and pressure, is on us. But all players stand to play an important part -- and make a fortune.
- levlandau 14y agoAwesome! Fingers crossed for a 2014 ship date!
- DaniFong 14y agoOur fingers would be crossed too, were we not using them for engineering ;-)
- rdl 14y agoWhy did DoE reject them?
- DaniFong 14y agoA knee-jerk reaction by poorly informed and motivated reviewers, which included a fear of: - Hydrolock (solved by default) - Corrosion (solved) - Inability to separate water and air (easy to solve and quickly solved) - a lack of understanding that water could provide heat to air on expansion (proven...) We actually disproved all of their claims within 2 weeks of their decision. The problem, however, is that you don't get a conversation when talking with grant agencies. So most things are misunderstood and they default to funding based on seniority. At the time, our competitors were not taking the water based approach... The advantage of world class investors is that, even if they disagree with you, they think for themselves, so you can actually talk to them.
- rdl 14y agoYay, so DOE funding not only has false positives (Solyndra, at the point where they were clearly doomed by cheap Chinese imports) but also false negatives.
- jbooth 14y agoProbably false positives followed by false negatives. No bureaucrat wants to be the first guy to approve a bust after Solyndra.
- rdl 14y agoI am curious how you solve corrosion in a high pressure thermal cycling environment for what are presumably very tiny water fog nozzles. But maybe that is trade secret or whatever. Naively I'd just switch out the air for N2, since it's mechanically the same and cheap. But then, once you're using special gas, I'd look at using low and high molecular weight (say, He and maybe some long chain which isn't going to detonate under the working pressure?), and maybe other stuff, to see if it would improve the product. But maybe corrosion isn't a big problem -- there are some awesome alloys out there. I want to get into firearm sound suppressor design and manufacture (custom, tuned for a given weapon and load) just to justify an HPC/CFD capability and a bunch of awesome Inconel and other alloy samples.
- kirpekar 14y agoCongratulations Danielle!
- DaniFong 14y agoThanks!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- DaniFong 14y agoFWIW, Peter Thiel is totally awesome, and one of the most rational and brilliant and human people I know.
- hiker 14y agoI'm dying to know more about the brilliant non-human people you know =-)
- wccrawford 14y agoI pretty sure she is using 'human' as in 'humane and caring', not just homo sapien. ;)
- michaelkscott 14y agoI think you meant 'she'.
- wccrawford 14y agoCripes, yes I did. Shame on me.
- socratees 14y agoCongrats Danielle.
- DaniFong 14y agoThank you!
- tocomment 14y agoI'm confused why this technique is better than just compressing air?
- schraeds 14y agoI took a tour of LightSail's operations when I was on a trip to the valley a couple months ago. They had just moved to a building that used to be a firehouse so it had beefed up power systems which they needed to test their products, a lot of neat equipment, and really nice people. From my understanding, they are using compressed air to store the energy but are also using water to cool the system and reclaim the heat energy created during the process.
- throwit1979 14y agoschraeds - You may be interested in knowing that nobody will see your useful answer to the question posed, because you were capriciously hellbanned 218 days ago due to your unpopular opinion of the baby boomer generation.
- newman314 14y agoschraeds, FYI, it appears that you are hellbanned.
- Gravityloss 14y agoAir heats as it compresses. If you cool it, you lose pressure and thus energy. So you would have to keep it hot. It's problematic because it's less dense then and because you'd have to insulate it. Water stores much much more heat per volume and you don't have to handle the pressure if you keep the heat modest. This way your air pressure vessel can be smaller and probably uninsulated.
- D_Alex 14y agoAs I read it, in the proposed system the heat generated during compression is stored, and then recovered, hence the advantage over the plain old air compression. But I'm going to be that guy who says it will not work, and cannot work, based on fundamental thermodynamic theory. Here goes: 1. The best efficiency of a thermodynamic cycle is 1-TL/TH, where TL is the temperature of heat rejection from the cycle, and TH is the temperature of heat addition to the cycle. TL and TH are ABSOLUTE scale temperatures. 2. In the proposed system, TH is necessarily low, no higher than the temperature generated during compression. Efficient compressors work at low temperatures, usually no higher than 450 K (certain INEFFICIENT compressors, eg gas turbine compressors go as high as 700 K, the mechanical inefficiency gets converted into heat). 3. If <450 K assumption is correct... and if TL is the local ambient temperature (what else?) of around 300 K the MAXIMUM efficiency of the heat recovery cycle is 1-300/450, or about 33%. At least 67% of the heat energy would be lost, leading to a very low overall cycle efficiency, far less than you would get with say pumped water storage, or batteries. Dani Fong, please comment on the above. I would be most happy if there was something wrong in my analysis, and the new technology was a success.
- tptacek 14y agoCongrats, DaniFong! You're one of those people where 10 years from now it is going to blow my mind that I got to share an Internet message board with you.
- DaniFong 14y agoBack at you tptacek!
- aswanson 14y agoDoubling down on that sentiment, Dani. Proud to see you making it happen, on something so major. I remember seeing an article in Forbes or Fortune last summer featuring you and a few other up and comers and yelling, "I know her!" in the bookstore. You're the truth, glad to see things happening for your vision.
- aswanson 14y agoHere we go: http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/30-under30-12/30-under-30-12_energy.html http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/30-under30-12/30-u...
- jpdoctor 14y agoSeries D and they don't have a product? :eyeroll:
- akiselev 14y agoYes because only in magic software wonderland can you have millions of users before you have any money. Once you exit the software bubble, almost everything, especially new technology, becomes a lot "harder" and takes a lot longer.
- jpdoctor 14y ago> Once you exit the software bubble, almost everything, especially new technology, becomes a lot "harder" and takes a lot longer. I've done hardware in spades, so I'm well aware of the differences. In hardware, Series D was either a Mezzanine round or a something-has-gone-wrong = inside/major-dilution round Maybe the world has changed, but having no product at D is not a sign that things are going well on the biz side.
- DaniFong 14y agoYou might be overfitting the data. The initial series A, and B were essentially a seed round. I can tell you, this was certainly an upround!
- tryitnow 14y agoWhat I find really intriguing about this is Thiel's participation - it's one thing to get funding from Khosla, who is a cleantech cheerleader, it's really amazing to get funding from Thiel, who is a cleanteach skeptic.
- guelo 14y agoThe Thiel quote made it sound like he invested in it because DoE rejected it. I'm not sure if having such an ideologue as an investor is a good idea, especially in the heavily regulated energy sector.
- jacquesm 14y agoIf the DoE rejects you your choices are limited to those that would still fund a company after that rejection. If that includes Peter Thiel then I'm all for it. Him being a skeptic of clean tech is a validation of sorts, you can bet that this kind of money isn't thrown around likely and that they had the basic physics checked before the investment. If someone would have been able to raise serious practical doubt about the feasibility then likely there would have been no announcement today. Yes, there is still risk, and there are likely lots of unknown factors. But this is technology development. I'm pretty sure the world will be at their feet if they manage to get the device into production at scale, no matter who the investors were. And names like Thiel, Gates and Khosla certainly don't hurt.
- pjscott 14y agoYou trust a short quote in a news article to be an accurate indication of anything? Have you ever read an article reporting on something that you know first-hand?
- jbooth 14y agoI'm willing to trust that he said it to the reporter who then printed it. And for the record, silly rhetoric about boots on the backs of the taxpayer is completely out of place in an article where he should be pimping his investment. It does make it look like he invested for negative sentiment towards the gov't rather than positive sentiment towards the company.
- tylerlh 14y agoCongrats! The ideas behind this are amazing, and I'm happy to see some folks really trying to make a difference in this market even in the wake of some nasty history (albeit not your own).
- DaniFong 14y agoThank you!
- foobarqux 14y agoCan you explain in detail what problem this solves and how it works to someone with a basic background in physics? Below is what my understanding: Current energy storage mechanisms (batteries) are inefficient. In theory one way to store energy that would be more efficient (why?) is to use the energy to compress air (with a conventional air compressor?). The air is stored in a container until it is converted to electrical energy through some inverse process (powering rotary screws?). Unfortunately compressed air is very hot and difficult to store. Instead water droplets can be injected into the compressed air container. These droplets will absorb most of the energy of the compressed air. The vapour is separated from the compressed air and stored in other containers (still as vapour?). How is the vapour then converted back to electrical energy? Isn't the vapour just as hot as the compressed air? Is it easier to deal with because it can be stored in a larger volume?
- BenoitEssiambre 14y agoIt is not super clear what the innovation is here as I am sure someone must have thought of storing compressors heat with water before. I think maybe the novel thing is to pass the water as a mist through the compressor cylinders where it can transfer energy from air much faster than if, for example there was just a heat transfer closed circuit around the cylinders. Their website states: "We have achieved these high thermodynamic efficiencies at higher RPMs than many thought possible. This is crucial to achieving low cost: the higher the RPM, the higher the power of the same machine and the lower the cost per kW." So basically you need fewer compressors and heat transfer systems for the same amount of power. I guess as long as the added complexity and maintenance doesn't add too much cost it could be more economical than using the higher number of compressors. They do mention in the WSJ article that one challenge is preventing 'hydrolock' which, if I understand correctly, would happen if you accidentally injected too much water in a cylinder. Since water is not compressible, you could bend or break your piston rod, crank shaft or 'cause the cylinder to explode'.
- DaniFong 14y agoThe main thing is that the mist process is higher efficiency. If you compress the air, let it heat up, and THEN cool it by mixing the air with water, the pressure will be high during the compression process, which will take a lot of energy to compress it, and then cool off and reduce in pressure. That's bad. What you want is to keep the temperature as low as possible during compression, and to keep it as high as possible during expansion. We do this.
- jacquesm 14y agoCongratulations Danielle, that's absolutely awesome. I'm still very sorry that you didn't get funding for some of your more off the beaten path ideas but this is as good as it gets. If there is one person that I wish would find a connection like this it is you, I'm sure you'll amaze us all with what you're going to achieve now that your toolbox is filled. This is really great news!
- cpeterso 14y ago> some of your more off the beaten path ideas Any references? I'd love to read more.
- jacquesm 14y agoHere's one: http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-business-landscape-and-a-patent-puzzle/ http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-busine...
- jacoblyles 14y agoI'm surprised at the difficulty I have in convincing people that eliminating the FDA is a good idea. The FDA makes the build-compile-run cycle in medicine 10x longer and more expensive. That's a mighty brake on technological progress.
- DaniFong 14y agoGovernment is an accretive process. Like evolution. What you want is a separate program, with some fast track process. :-)
- robbiep 14y agoIt's one thing to say that the FDA stands in the way of progress in medicine, however what regulatory framework would you suggest be put in its place to protect consumers if it was removed? I would argue that the break is not on technological progress, (I could scarcely imagine it possible that 10, or even 5 years of current progress could be achieved in 1, as you imply) - but in the practical application of these advances to patients. I believe that for the most part this is warranted, because despite the in Vivo or on paper promise of a technology, in the biological sciences it often takes about 10 iterations to make it safe and efficacious in Vivo, and this translatory delay allows this to happen. Not ideal, but IMHO better than an alternative that puts lives at risk. I just don't see how we can circumvent RCTs as the burden of proof for efficacy and safety. Probably, yes, we could slash a lot of fat from the FDA, and trim a lot of processes... But do away with it entirely? I would be interested to hear what your alternatives are
- robomartin 14y agoHow much air would you need to supply all the power required by all the homes in California? Here's my attempt to answer that question: The first stop is to get a sense of what the realistic energy density of these approaches might be. A quick search lands you here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage#Energy_density_and_efficiency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage#E... My take-away: 1 m3 of air = about 300,000 J How much energy does a typical house in the US use per day? http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_electricity_does_an_average_2-story_3-bedroom_house_use_per_day_per_month_or_per_year http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_electricity_does_an_avera... I'll use 50KWh per day 1kWh = 1,000W x 3,600s = 3,600,000J This typical house, then, consumes 180,000,000J per day How much air do we need to compress to provide all of the energy needs of this one house (per day)? 180,000,000J / 300,000J = 600 m3 How many homes in California? http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html Let's say it's about 14,000,000 homes How much air do we have to compress every day to service these homes: 600 m3 x 14,000,000 homes = 8,400,000,000 m3 OK, there's a number, whatever it means. Hmmm. How much of the available air are we using? What's the volume of air of the atmosphere? Tough question to answer. I think the number we'd want would be that of the Troposphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth I am going to use an over-simplification (you know, "assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk" type stuff) to try to get a number. Sphere within a sphere to get the volume of the troposphere. Average Earth diameter: 12,742km http://www.universetoday.com/15055/diameter-of-earth/ http://www.universetoday.com/15055/diameter-of-earth/ Troposphere thickness: 17km http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troposphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troposphere Troposphere volume: 4,341,334,943,758,290,000 m3 That means that California would use 0.00000019% of the troposphere per day if every single home was powered using compressed air energy storage. Put a different way: It would take nearly 1.5 million years to process all of the air in the troposphere. I'm not sure if the above is complete nonsense or not. The problem is far more complex than these quickie calculations might suggest. On first inspection it sounds like we have plenty of air to go around. Would there be any environmental and/or air quality issues stemming from this approach? Do we end-up with cleaner air locally because of the process? Interesting stuff. . EDIT: A few more data points. How big of a container is required to store all of this air? The original assumption was that 1 m3 of air would compress into a 5L bottle, or 0.005 m3. Storage cube side length: 348m Storage sphere diameter: 431m How much would this much air weigh? 1 m3 of air at 20C = 1.204 kg 8,400,000,000 m3 = 10,113,600,000 kg The question, for me, begins to be about how realistic it might be to construct enough smaller storage vessels to capture this volume safely. The article mentions something about 40ft standard shipping containers. Assuming that the storage vessel has the internal dimensions of a standard 40ft container: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container Container volume: ~ 67 m3 Containers required to store enough compressed air to supply homes in California: ~627,000 units. That's a lot of containers, even if the calculations are off by 100%.
- bbuffone 14y agoAn old bad idea -> Many years ago i thought up an idea of creating a FEC - A self contained unit that would convert heat from a forest fires, etc... into energy. The units would be taken by helicopter and dropped into forest fires. Once the fire was over move the units into a grid that could supply energy to millions of homes. This technology is one missing piece.
- jacquesm 14y agoI'm sorry but that does not sound feasible. Large scale forest fires are accidents and not energy generation stations. The logistics would be prohibitive and absent any forest fires (usually considered a good thing) you'd be babysitting a pile of rust. Also, the heat produced by a forest fire would handily destroy your equipment. Forest fires at scale tend to be pretty much unmanageable, people are more than happy just to put them out without having to think about extracting energy from them. 10 points for out of the box thinking, minus several for a lack of feasibility. But keep at it, maybe one day you'll hit the jackpot!
- pjungwir 14y agoMy own crazy green energy idea is . . . harvest energy from lightning! Apparently other people have thought of this too, and it doesn't look like it'd work. But if someone could figure it out, it might not be the most steady source of energy, but it'd be the awesomest.
- creamyhorror 14y agoGreat news, congratulations on the deal! I dare say you're a big inspiration to a lot of young inventors out there, and we here are all awaiting big things from you and LightSail in the near future (no pressure!).
- mhartl 14y agoCongrats, Dani & co.!
- DaniFong 14y agoThanks Michael!
- anewguy 14y agoBUT does it do social? Does it have a mobile strategy?
- codex 14y agoThis looks very promising. Can anyone compare and contrast with supercapacitors, flywheels, and/or simply pumping water uphill and running it through a generator when needed?
- ck2 14y agoWhy not use excess energy to lift millions of tons of worthless rock off the ground and then when power source fails, use the winding down via gravity to turn generators? Gravity is never going away and never going to run out.
- jswanson 14y agoThis is already being done, by pumping water uphill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity I'm sure there are a bunch of interesting tradeoffs between using water or a bunch of rocks though.
- technotony 14y agoI believe that the problem with this is that it's very weak, ie you need to lift a large amount of weight to a great height to store much energy. More details: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor...
- DaniFong 14y agoThere's a company called Energy Cache attempting that. Major design and construction challenge to achieve low cost. Maybe possible.
- tjmc 14y agoAwesome news congratulations Dani! I've just finished 6 exams in 3rd year mechanical engineering and it's visionary companies like Lightsail and SpaceX that inspire all of us to keep going.
- DaniFong 14y agoThanks!