Are batteries the final puzzle piece for a clean energy grid?
In this episode of the Freeing Energy Podcast, host Bill Nussey talks with CEO of Volta Energy Technologies, Jeff Chamberlain, about the path to safer and much lower cost batteries.
Listen and learn how this renowned scientist is using a secret sauce to turn early stage disruptive technologies into commercial successes for energy storage and the new world of clean energy.
Listen to this podcast and others in our series on these platforms:
http://freeingenergy.libsyn.com/website/jeff-chamberlin-can-batteries-close-the-energy-gap-when-the-sun-isnt-shining
Additional reading
- One of our favorite books follows Jeff and his colleagues at Argonne National Labs over two years as they pursue the future of batteries: The Powerhouse by Steve Levine
- Volta’s website: www.plusvolta.com
Transcript
Bill: Well, today, I’m really excited to take our conversation about clean energy in a new direction that many argue is one of the most important trends in the world for getting to clean energy more quickly. My guest today is Dr. Jeff Chamberlain, who has a multi-decade history as one of the country’s leaders in identifying and inventing and delivering next-generation battery technologies just spent years at Argonne National Laboratories, which is largely credited as being one of the most advanced battery research facilities in the country. And Jeff has most recently co-founded and is the CEO of volta energy technologies, which he’s going to tell us about today. So welcome to the podcast, Jeff.
Jeff: Great, thank you. Thanks, Bill.
Bill: One of the things we love to do on this is to understand how you got into the space. So if you could roll back the Time Machine a little bit and tell us a little bit about how you got into this field and how you ended up in batteries, I think it’d be really interesting for me to understand what’s motivated you to pursue this path. When
Jeff: I was seven or eight years old, my parents bought me a chemistry kit, this over the counter play toy, which back then I have to assume the safety regulations were different than they are today, because I can vividly remember burning magnesium, a small strip of magnesium and a crucible in my basement alone, and never even telling my parents. That’s what I did. In the child’s mind, I saw a real connection between getting behind the curtain on how a magic trick operates, and understanding the physical nature of how things react. And they all go back to just solving puzzles. So what I’m about to tell you with in terms of energy storage, and the massive shift worldwide, from carbon consumption and carbon fuels, to non carbon sources, renewable and sustainable sources of energy, for me anyway, starts with this idea of wanting to understand how things work, whether that was magic tricks, and I had a suitcase with stickers on it and full of my magic tricks. And I, I could still tell you today, I can watch a magic show with you and tell you exactly how they’re doing most of the tricks, not all of them. I love it. Starting High School. And then in college at Wake Forest University, I had some really outstanding teachers and professors that inspired their students to think and think very deeply about the world, not only the sciences, but about the world and how science could impact the world. And by the time I got to graduate school, All I knew is that I wanted to go even deeper. My fellow students and I built an ultra high vacuum system to try to de con dilute the plasma etching reaction that’s used to make microchips used to make integrated circuits. I give Georgia Tech in general, a lot of credit for this, it’s a excellent school of higher education, they have a very pragmatic approach to problems if we understand the energy of how to break bonds, silicon, silicon inbounds, how can that be translated into a manufacturing process that has impact? So at Georgia Tech, what I learned is you can go all the way down, whether it’s computationally or experimentally, down to the molecular level, and always have your mind connected back to the translation of how understanding those molecular reactions can impact not only the manufacturing process of integrated circuits, but in the longer run the entire market. How can you shrink devices? How can you make faster computers? How can you make them more affordable, if you understand the underlying physics, if you have a market focused mentality, you can translate advances and the underlying physics into commercial impact.
Bill: I appreciate that backstory. I’m trying to imagine what most people are doing in college and comparing that to creating a vacuum chamber. And I have to say, I’m pretty impressed. And it points to some of the amazing work that you’ve done after you graduated. And the perspective that you’re bringing, this is incredible. So you graduated from Georgia Tech, to help our listeners understand what is a national lab? I think everyone knows Josie or but how does that work within the US government? And what are the goals of the National Labs?
jeff: Thank you. However, for the listener, especially the young listener that might want to go into the sciences, I want to make sure I’m really clear, I didn’t have this bold vision when I was 18 or 22 years old, and decided to go to grad school, everyone should understand. What I had was the opportunity to go to graduate school and teach part time at Georgia Tech, and earn $13,000 a year while I was getting an advanced degree. And here’s how that was translated into a young person’s mind that wasn’t sure what he wanted to do in the world. I didn’t have to yet get a job. So it sounds very bold and courageous. And the way you just responded to my answer and and deeply thoughtful, but the driving force, as with most of the young people I know today, whether they’re my own children, or my nieces and nephew us was, oh my gosh, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. And here’s this opportunity where I can continue to learn, and they will pay me as long as I’m teaching as well. They will pay me to continue to learn. So that was the full driving force. So thank you for your compliment. But it started with a question of what should I do next? How about I don’t get a job. Next? How about I? How about I keep getting educated?
Bill: I love your honesty on that. I think I’ve heard that referred to as a gap and job avoidance tactic.
jeff: Yes. And what I’ve tried to do is inspire the young listener to think it’s okay. It’s okay to have follow that path. It can lead to some very good places. To the point of your question, I spent 13 years in industry, starting with when I finished Graduate School in 1993, Bell Labs was dissolving. And that was a kind of a kick to move into industry because of the heightened competition in academia. for 13 years, I worked in industry, developing products from clean sheet of paper ideation, into laboratory experiments all the way through commercial development, to rail car quantities of high quality materials that were used by industry.
jeff: My point in mentioning that is there’s a couple things I was really very much educated on in that process. One was commercializing physical technology is not only very difficult, it’s not something that’s taught the way one receives an education, on commercializing a physical technology is to commercialize the technology. The other thing that I learned in industry was that the closer you are to your customer, if you’re an innovator, and you’re an entrepreneur, I encourage you to get close to your customer early. If one seeks out the actual problems to solve, especially those people out on the cutting edge of trying to solve the problems and working with them. The profound ability that ends up giving innovator to translate those needs back to solving the problem from the physical perspective. So Bill, you asking about the national labs, all of that work in industry led me to move into the National Lab system. My friends and I in our startup split up and all took different approaches back to energy knowing we would come back together and mine was to go into Argonne National Laboratory. And the idea back then, was to move into the lab to understand what is the next big important need in the energy space that inventors might be able to fill? What problems might there be to solve. Although I was aiming to work in the center for nanomaterials, at Argonne, I was directed towards the Office of Technology Transfer, what in the national labs they called the business office. So that I could from my business experience analyzed intellectual property portfolio, specifically in fuel cells and batteries, and work with the market to understand what it was that argon was inventing that might be useful for the world. Now, that was my path. But to answer your general question of what the national labs are, even as a scientist with two national labs in my backyard, apparently National Lab and Argonne National Laboratory, I had very little idea, the depth and the breadth of the research being done by the scientists that we all pay through our taxes, we pay their salaries, I felt like I’d stumbled in to a treasure trove of scientists and engineers, who are brilliant. And they are in a position to think 10 years out 1520 years out, as opposed to those of us in industry that are driven more by the needs of Wall Street that can only afford to think a year out, or maybe two years out in terms of product development cycles. The National Labs, Argonne National Laboratory particular sits right in the middle between those academic efforts and the industrial efforts. So the mission is not necessarily to educate young people, the mission is also not profit driven. The mission instead is to solve very large, very long term problems for humanity. And Case in point, the Genesis was the Manhattan Project, the deep concern that the world was being taken over by fascists and autocrats and there was a race towards better weaponry, including particularly the ability to make a bomb out of splitting the atom. So it was understood in our federal government, that in the long run, that it wasn’t just the development of that weapon that was important. It was the core science behind splitting the atom. These are really large groups of scientists that are has been proven time and again, over the last hundred years, large groups of scientists and engineers are required to solve very large problems.
Bill: Jeff, I didn’t know a lot of that. And that’s a fantastic insight into the history. And what I have learned is that the United States stands unique and a degree of fundamental research and development that it does, as a country. A lot of the original research that helped clean energy was more on the side of solar, wind, and obviously, nuclear before all of that. But the challenge is solar and wind have is it they’re intermittent sources, they only produce power when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Batteries are an absolutely critical component. And in fact, a very large part of the work of the free energy project is understanding the role of batteries. Because without some kind of electrical storage, you can’t build the clean energy grid. So the fact that the national labs have been focused on this area is really intriguing. And obviously, you did some great work at Argonne with this. But a couple of years ago, you left and you started with some colleagues, a commercial firm to pursue energy storage technologies, and bring them to market as quickly as possible. And this is called volta. Can you tell us a little about the genesis of volta and what you guys are looking to do?
jeff: I can bill thanks for asking that. We named volt energy technologies as a nod to Alessandra volta, because he understood early on along with Faraday, that there was something called the electron motive force that if you put two materials together, they would exchange electrons, and that it was a reversible reaction. So it led us to volta was this idea, realizing there’s there was a handful of us that had migrated from industry in the National Lab system. So we had this experience commercializing tech. And we’d also had that positive experience of commercializing technology. We’d also had the kind of negative experience of the pressure that industry faces by wall street to think short term, short term profits. So we had this concept to figure out a better way to enable the world to capitalize on the innovations that were happening in the National Lab system. And that concept emerged from the recognition that in industry, the scientific and engineering prowess of industry was focused on short term thinking, now, disruptive technology, and that in the National Lab system, it is the reverse of that, that scientists are motivated at solving becoming experts in and solving extraordinarily difficult long term problems. So the core idea of volta was to connect these two motives. There is a third entity beyond industry, and the National Lab systems, and that is venture capital, that is investors that have traditionally over the last many decades, invested in innovations to help move those innovations from the laboratory to commercial impact. But venture capital, we see their strengths is understanding how to translate physical solutions to problems into commercial entities. But their weaknesses, the primary motive of venture capital is to turn $1 into $5, as quickly as possible. So the volta concept was to connect the strengths of each of these three bodies, again, with the motive being to translate very basic early stage innovations that are disruptive, into commercial successes. So our investors, Voltaire’s investors are not currently wealthy individuals and family offices and banks. Our investors are what the investment world’s called strategic investors, or another way to put it, large corporations. So corporations that see on the horizon, a combination of disruption and opportunity. Yes, they want to turn $1 into $5. They still want to do that. But their primary motivation is existential. It is a long term thought, how do we grasp this innovation that’s happening on the horizon and understand it and capitalize on it. And it’s very difficult to do that when you’re operating a business. So we proposed to big industry, let us help you. As an outside force you can serve on our board and you can drive us in the direction you want us to go and but we will be outside the corporate hierarchy to look at the innovations for you to adopt and change your business. So element one for volta is our investor set we have a utility. We have Albemarle, which is the world’s leading supplier of lithium on the planet. We have Ecuador, which is formerly status oil, it’s the oil and gas company out of Norway. And we have hand on systems, which is a tier one automotive parts supplier out of Korea, to volta has built a syndicate of strategic investors who are thinking long term about commercializing new technology. The second element that we bring in is the venture capital mentality. So volt is operation is that we are run by technologists. And I don’t mean just battery experts. We are a group of battery experts. But I think there’s a secret sauce and volta that goes beyond the battery expertise that the principles inside of volta have commercialized products before and developed businesses. And we complement that core technology team with the more traditional financial analysis thinking from venture capital. We have a team that has commercialized products in the past in our lives, and brought in the financial acumen to look at businesses from a purely financial aspect. And then finally, the third element is we have with the government’s permission, the US Federal Government’s permission developed a contract with Argonne National Laboratory through which we can utilize the mindshare with privately funded research. We can put on top of the public research in the national labs, we have an open contract with argon that we intend to reproduce it other national labs as we grow, so that when volta invest in a startup, that startup can use voltage contract, to look to argon, as what is in essence, an infinitely deep bench of technical know how and capability.
Bill: That’s a great summation point of this podcast is to capture will be called clean energy champions, local energy champions, people thinking about how to make this transition happen. And perhaps among all the people that you and I know some of them will be looked upon by history as being the people that made an outsize role in this exciting transition happening.
jeff: There’s an underlying driving force or motivator by those of us that launched Volvo. And that is what you just described that there are these heroes that include people like Edison and Ford and Rockefeller and Carnegie and JP Morgan, and the founders of General Electric, etc. So we are looking for those same kind of heroes who are the heroes in the battery world? How do we find them? A hidden objective of volta is the recognition that technologists have a lot to offer, and helping identify those heroes. And what I’ve learned is the way the financial community thinks about this is they build a portfolio of investments, and they only need a few of them to succeed. And then the whole portfolio succeeds. It’s kind of like a mutual fund. What we’ve recognized is the technologists can reduce the number of defects in that portfolio, we’re approaching it from a very positive aspect, meaning we’re going to find those heroes, we’re going to find those technologists, whether they’re at MIT, or out on their own, or from Stanford from or from Berkeley or Oregon, we’re going to find them and help transition. What it is that they’ve developed into commercial fruition, we have a very positive view of that. But what we’ve learned from the financial investment community is there’s another big advantage to having this technologists involved and running volta. And that’s the negative view, we will reduce the number of defects in the portfolio, the financial community use it as Yes, it’s important to find the winners. But it’s even more important to have an early identification of those things that will not win, so that we don’t accidentally invest in them.
Bill: That is really a great point, and one that’s lost, I think, on a lot of people to think about the investment world. We talked earlier about the intermittency of solar and wind and the challenges that creates for a clean energy future. We can’t power our air conditioning and our stoves and our refrigerators at night when the sun doesn’t shine. And so the big gap in clean energy is this intermittency, which everybody agrees will be addressed if hopefully solved by energy storage, and particularly, and most notably batteries. But the challenge today is that batteries are incredibly expensive, or so say, some of the cynics, you have spent more time thinking about batteries, and just about anyone I think I’ll ever meet. And you have thought more about the prices and the costs and the technologies that can make batteries from an esoteric, luxurious solution to something that can become entirely mainstream. Can you tell about what you’re seeing in terms of battery prices and how they might be declining in the coming years?
jeff: Yes, the cost is measured in something called dollars per kilowatt hour, you achieve cost parity with a gas turban to generate power for a coal fired power plant to generate power, you achieve parity, when your battery costs are roughly at $100 per kilowatt hour. When I started at Oregon in 2006, the costs were at about $2,400 per kilowatt hour. By the time I left Oregon and 2016, the costs were at about $250 per kilowatt hour. So in one decade, there was about an 80 to 90% drop in costs. So there’s two points that I’d like to make with cost. We’re not there yet. But there are pads to get $200 per kilowatt hour that are right in front of us. I wanted to first say, Bill, that cost is king. There are two things things that are King, whether it’s for power on the grid, or portable power and electric vehicles, cost and safety, and they’re deeply intertwined. Cost is king. And what I mean by they’re deeply intertwined is, for example, last Friday, there was a battery fire on the grid in Arizona, just outside of Phoenix. And there were seven or eight firemen injured. One critically, what I want to say to you and to your listeners is cost parity matters, you must achieve parody in order for the capitalist system of the free market to work, that customers won’t switch to solar, they won’t switch to electric vehicles until they reach that point in which it’s a better economic decision to make the switch. That is an obvious statement. What’s less obvious is the way to think about cost. When people measure cost and batteries by this dollars per kilowatt hour metric, what they’re not quite doing is thinking about life costs. That if you have a battery that costs $50 per kilowatt hour to make, but only last five years, that’s not as good as a battery, that’s $100 per kilowatt hour to make, but last 20 years. So there’s two points I’ll make there. They’re connected, lifetime costs matter. And those entrepreneurs out there that are thinking and looking for volta looking for capital from entities like volta, you must think about cost differently. It’s not just the cost of manufacturer battery, it’s the cost of manufacturer battery and the cost to use it all the way out to either recycling it or repurposing it at the back end, including safety. If companies are not thinking properly about safety, that’s an added cost that is extraordinarily high. So one of the key pads to getting down to $100 per kilowatt hour or lower is to move to what you probably heard of a solid state battery. If there’s one scientific point I want the average listener to absorb is that when they carry a phone around in their pocket, there are actually doing a chemical reactions. When their phone is charging or discharging, matter is being moved around inside that battery. And the chemical reaction is occurring. And when you plug your phone in that chemical reaction is reversing that is different from everything else. You work microchips. When you use microchips, you just moving electrons around, you’re not making you know, making chemistry. And here’s why that’s important. lithium ion batteries have a liquid electrolyte that is flammable inside of it. So if you have a catastrophic event, whether that’s a nail penetrating the battery, or a car accident in which the battery is pierced, or we don’t know yet what happened outside of Phoenix, but there was obviously something that failed inside that battery facility that caused the fire, in all likelihood, it’s going to be connected to the liquid electrolyte that’s flammable. So one of the key drivers, when you hear about solid state batteries is moving to a material that is not flammable, or at a minimum is very, very difficult to make catch on fire.
Bill: So that’s official tactic point. And I think it’s easy for people outside of the power industry to overlook something as essential as safety. But taking safety into account, how do you think about the costs of batteries declining in the coming years, $100 per kilowatt hour is one key metric. But obviously, the lifetime of the battery affects that, what are the biggest things that gets you excited about the declining prices?
jeff: Well, what gets me excited about the declining prices is the impact that it will have an enormous economic, environmental and security impact on humanity and our nation when we get to lower costs of batteries. But what excites us about the physics and chemistry, if you can find a solid state material that enables solid state batteries, it’s not just safety that that you end up solving, you can go to a higher voltage, one of the problems with batteries is when you go to too high of a voltage, you have a side reaction and the electric light, the liquid electrolyte and it burns, it ultimately burns. So if you have a solid state battery, you can go to a higher voltage and that there’s a relationship between voltage and the amount of total energy storage. So the higher voltage you can go, the more energy you can store in the same system, I could have the same materials and go to a higher voltage assuming it’s stable. That’s what I mean by safety, then your cost of energy your cost of your system decreases. So there’s two big things that are happening in the world of physics that are exciting to us at volta. One is solid state because you can hold more energy and be safer. Another is sustainable materials. Moving to Earth abundant materials, from the current lithium ion batteries, there’s cobalt nickel in those materials, it would be better for the world to move more and more to manganese, which is also in the batteries, because that is an earth abundant material. Same thing with sulfur, if you could use sulfur or iron. If you could move away from lithium ion batteries as a whole, and use the Canadian or iron inside of a giant flow battery of chemicals, you’re more likely to succeed in the long run, because those are Earth abundant materials.
Bill: And by being Earth abundant, they’re easier to obtain and therefore less expensive.
jeff: Yep, they’re they’re easier to obtain, they’re generally more stable, they’re less expensive, they let cause less environmental impact, which again goes back to cost. The other big wave that’s coming is in hardware and software, the integration of batteries into the grid into the energy operation around the world is going to require new equipment. So volt is examining early stage technology right now, for example, sensors that use sound waves to directly measure the degradation of the materials inside of a battery instantaneously. Wow. And the reason that’s important is if you can instantaneously understand the degradation of material inside of a battery, so you can manage that pack of cells better. So right now in the Tesla, for example, there’s roughly 8000 cells in the vehicle. And for the most part, Tesla does a great job of their battery management. But still, for the most part, they manage the battery to the weakest link, because there’s no way to avoid it, these cells age at different rates inside the battery pack. If you could have a sensor that tells you exactly which cells are aging at different rates, you no longer have to manage the pack against its weakest link. So in theory, you could increase the lifetime of lithium ion batteries by 50, or even 100%. So most people are thinking, can I go to lower cost materials can I go to solid state, and those are important thoughts. But a wave that’s coming is new sensors that enable me to manage the battery better, so that the overall lifetime costs also drop. There’s another batch of hardware that’s coming, that’s extremely important. And that is fast charging technology. There’s an obsession with range, people want a large range in their vehicles. And I think that those of us that talk about batteries, a lot need to invert the thinking of the listener. And here’s what I mean, the range that the consumers are used to inside of their vehicles today is infinite. Meaning in the United States where I live, I can drive around with impunity and not worry about my gas tank emptying, because I know I can plug into my GPS, I’m usually within a few minutes of a gas station, if I’m driving out in the middle of the country, maybe I’m 20 minutes from a gas station, but I’m usually close. And I can feel my car with energy and the time it takes for me to take a break, get some coffee, etc. So the next big innovation that’s coming for batteries is this integration hardware. If I can charge my battery quickly, here’s why that’s impactful for the grid, we’re moving to a situation where school buses, new policies around this country and around the world want to move away from diesel, to electric buses. Those are assets that sit for about 20 hours of every 24 hours a day. So if we develop fast charging tech, the grid operators will be able to use the batteries inside those buses as a grid asset to store solar and wind energy. But you can only do it if you have fast charging tech that helps you integrate those batteries into the system. But these innovations that are coming from the materials perspective, and from the integration from the physical perspective, in terms of fast charging, and sensors, there’s another key element that’s going to drive all of this. And this is software, putting an intelligent brain on top of the battery. So that batteries are going to be like a bank. And in the analogy electrons are like dollars. So if we move properly to the right integrated system, there will be so much intelligence in the system that the battery itself will know how much the consumer values energy to be placed one place or another. So for example, in my home, if I have an intelligent system, it will be monitoring my behavior. And responding to that behavior. The artificial intelligence system will know that I don’t need my electric vehicle very much on Sundays, as compared to Mondays or Tuesdays. So it can distribute its energy differently, it can use more energy in the house instead of the car. And more importantly, my neighbors that don’t have a battery. If it’s storing energy from the sun during the day, it might know how to sell those electrons, how to barter those electrons to my neighbors. And more importantly, it will understand the value of that power, versus the cost of damaging the battery every time I put energy in and out of it. So we will be able to make instantaneous economic decisions based based on the behavior of the provider and the user of that energy. So we are also investing in artificial intelligence centered around energy distribution, because it’s so vitally important to the integration of storage into the electricity system.
Bill: Excellent. That’s great. And for a lot of the people who listen in on our podcasts, there’s a heavy software interest because the electricity industry is probably one of the least software enabled industries in the world today. And you’ve just painted a great picture of how software and a multi layered approach is going to be transforming the electricity industry in the coming decade.
jeff: Just voltage review volt was role in that to help identify those innovations that are most translatable and commercially viable, so that we can translate them through an investment vehicle as in venture capital.
Bill: So that’s some incredibly inspiring and insightful stuff, Jeff, and I really appreciate it. I think everyone’s taking away a different broader perspective of not only what storage and batteries mean for the grids of the world and electric vehicles, but also how fast and how much innovation is going to be driving the penetration. So let me let me wrap up with a couple of our favorite questions we like to ask all of our esteemed colleagues who sit in this podcast with us. First question is, tell us something that you think that non industry people would find most surprising about the energy storage business and the new world of clean energy.
jeff: I think non industry and non scientist folks would find most surprising that they’re carrying around with them an active chemistry set, that they’re performing a chemical reaction in their pocket as they use these devices. And the thing for them to remember is, that’s why solving the problem for storing energy is so difficult. You’re not just figuring out a new way to move electrons, you have to reinvent the entire chemistry set.
Bill: Great. A lot of the folks who listen to our podcast are early stage inventors and entrepreneurs. And volt is now in the business of working with those many of those early stage companies. But what advice would you give to anybody who’s looking to get into the clean energy space or starting a company in the clean energy space?
jeff: The advice I’d give to an entrepreneur getting in the clean energy space, specifically around batteries, but even not batteries is to focus on the customer early focus on developing a trusting relationship with your end user early enough to the point where you feel uncomfortable, how early it is even so early, that you’re engaging the customer before you have a clear idea on what you want to develop. It’s vitally important to be solving a problem. And the best way to understand that problem. I come from the world of perfectionism. With scientists and engineers, I have really want to know everything. Before they tell the outside world what they’ve learned. What I would say to an entrepreneur is you have to get over that you have to talk to the customer early, so that you don’t accidentally invent something that is not useful to them.
Bill: Great advice. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing that would help us get to clean energy faster, what would that be?
jeff: This might sound strange bill, have patience. I could talk a lot about innovation and invention and are important that I could wave a magic wand and innovation can happen. But I think the thing I would like to change is to have patience, and recognize the transition from carbon based fuels to renewable energy system. It is inevitable. It has started and it is inevitable. So what I’m preaching to now is kind of the political environment, politics matters, policy matters. For those who are very conservative and the conservative and recognize that this is an inevitable switch that humanity is going through. And it represents enormous opportunity, enormous commercial opportunity, opportunity to create jobs, etc. And on the liberal side of the policymaking arm, live in the world of physical reality, we cannot make the switch in five or 10 years. That’s not based in reality. So my point is, have patience and recognize this inevitable switch as an enormous opportunity for humanity.
Bill: I’m inspired listening to that. I love it. So jumping to the very last question, you probably get asked a question that I do all the time. Individuals are excited, inspired by the transition coming up? And the question I get a lot i’d love your perspective, what what do you tell them? What do you tell an individual who’s not in the industry? What can they do to help?
jeff: As you were asking that question, Bill, I thought, what is it I would put myself in the position I do get asked that question like you do, would I find myself going to this, get out there and drive an electric car, the more people that get out there and drive an electric car, the more people will and I don’t mean, go buy one, just go test drive an electric car, you will have a flash vision into the future and the impact that renewables can have, from that, look into buying solar, look into buying an electric car, there are companies now that will help you finance in a way that makes financial sense, regardless of where even in Chicago, we’re at a pretty far northern latitude. It actually is beginning to make financial sense to put solar on your roof tops in Chicago. So first and foremost, physically do something, just do it. Look into it, you’ll be surprised.
Bill: Well, that is a inspiring answer from one of our most inspiring guests on the free energy podcast. Jeff, I have to tell you that in our time today, I have learned a tremendous amount. And you have given me even more optimism about how the world’s going to get to clean energy quickly. And to do it intelligently. And I think also to the joy of Wall Street, etc. There’s a lot of money to be made if we do this the right way. So I really appreciate you taking some time to educate us to share your inspired vision with us today. Again, thank you for your time today, Jeff.
jeff: Well, thanks, Bill. Thanks for having me. And really, thanks for communicating to the world, kind of what’s happening inside of the world that you and I live in, that this transition is upon us at communicating this to people outside of the world that you and I live in is extremely important. So thank you for doing that.
Bill: Excellent. I look forward to staying in touch and I really appreciate your sharing your time and insights.
jeff: All right. Thank you, Bill.
