For decades, diesel generators have offered an unusually powerful combination of low cost, high energy density, long-duration storage, and reliable off-grid power. But their pollution, noise, maintenance requirements, permitting challenges, and growing footprint are becoming increasingly problematic as data centers drive demand for backup generation.
In this episode of Catalyst, Shayle Kann talks with Richard Wang, co-founder and CEO of Voya Energy, about the company’s effort to replace diesel generators with generators powered by aluminum.
Richard explains why diesel has been so difficult to displace, why natural gas and batteries fall short for some backup applications, and how Voya’s electrochemical generator uses aluminum pellets and air to produce electricity. Unlike combustion-based generators, the system is designed to operate without air emissions, while offering high energy density, quiet operation, rapid startup, and long-duration capabilities.
The conversation also explores aluminum’s potential as a globally transportable energy carrier and why low-grade scrap aluminum could provide Voya’s initial fuel supply.
Richard and Shayle discuss:
- The global diesel generator market and why diesel remains dominant
- Why natural gas generators and batteries haven’t displaced diesel
- Aluminum as a high-energy-density fuel
- How Voya Energy’s electrochemical aluminum generator works
- Voya vs. diesel on cost, footprint, power quality, and runtime
- Using Voya generators as grid assets and battery alternatives
- Why metal fuels are becoming viable now
- Using low-grade scrap aluminum as fuel and the long-term vision for recyclable aluminum energy storage
Resources
- Catalyst: Heavy duty decarbonization
- Catalyst: Building a supply chain for rare earth minerals
- BusinessWire: Voya Energy Unveils Metal Fuels Energy System, Closes $35 Million Series A
- MIT Technology Review: This startup is about to conduct the biggest real-world test of aluminum as a zero-carbon fuel
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by John Sheehan. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn’t just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what’s next. Learn more at engieresources.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy fuel cells deliver affordable, ultra-reliable onsite power for hospitals, utilities, and data centers – at speed and at scale. Learn more by visiting BloomEnergy.com.
Transcript
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann. I invest in early-stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst.
So, a few years ago, I, along with Greg Thiel, who you’ve heard before on this podcast, developed kind of an obsession with metal fuels. You’d be forgiven if this is the first you’ve ever heard of the concept. It certainly was for me. But the promise is tantalizing.
Specifically, the idea is to leverage certain metals which are widely abundant, readily available, shelf-stable, inert, extremely high energy density, as a better replacement for things like diesel for power generation. No green premium, just better. Ask any user of a diesel generator, and they’ll tell you all the reasons these things need replacing.
They’re dirty, they break, they’re extremely hard to permit. Even if you get them permitted, your run time is highly limited. Maintenance is hard, the fuel fouls if you’re not careful, the fuel itself is flammable and dangerous. You have permitting requirements that make you space it out, so your footprint area density is even worse, and on and on. It’s not a hard sell to replace it.
But diesel as a fuel and the engines that run on that fuel have some unique characteristics that have made them incredibly sticky and hard to displace. Which is why we still have 170 gigawatts of these things, 170 gigawatts in the United States alone. And we’re adding more every day, particularly with the rise of data centers.
For example, to wit, there are more than 10,000 diesel generators in Northern Virginia alone. So, they’re ubiquitous and, in my opinion, terrible. But no more. Greg and my obsession turned into a partnership with Richard Wang, who you’re about to hear from. Richard is the co-founder and CEO of Voya Energy, which is building a new kind of power generator, one that runs on aluminum and will put an end once and for all to diesel for power generation.
This is perhaps obvious by now, but I’m not unbiased on this one. We at EIP incubated Voya alongside Richard and his co-founders Matt and Stephen, and we led the seed round and the just-announced Series A. Hopefully, you’ll understand why shortly. Richard’s coming up after the break.
Shayle Kann: Richard, welcome.
Richard Wang: Thank you. It’s great to be here, Shayle.
Shayle Kann: All right, I want to start by talking about diesel generators. Talk to me about the market for diesel generators.
Richard Wang: Yeah, the market for diesel generators is surprisingly large. It’s this sort of invisible entity that backs up the whole globe’s energy system. So we’re looking at, if you combine generator markets as well as the diesel fuel that is burned by the diesel generators, something like $30 to $40 billion a year globally. And a lot of the fuel is for off-grid applications, things like mining and construction and oil and gas where you don’t have grid access. But most of the hardware sales are coming from backup generators, whether it’s for a grocery store or data center or something else.
Shayle Kann: Okay, and so let’s—I think we should start by giving diesel generators their flowers. There’s a reason why we use them everywhere all over the world. So we should talk about what’s good and uniquely good about them, and then we can talk about what’s bad, which in my opinion is a longer list. But first, like, what is good about diesel generators? Why are they fit for purpose for these applications?
Richard Wang: Yeah, there is a very good reason that they are so prevalent and nothing has been able to displace them so far, because it’s a very unique combination of capabilities. So, number one, a diesel generator is essentially a highly convenient microgrid-in-a-box. When you have the generator, you need nothing else to provide electricity wherever you are, if the grid is down or if the grid’s not available. It’s also incredibly low cost. Diesel generators are on the order of—hardware alone, $500 to $800 per kilowatt. Even the more expensive emissions-controlled ones are about $1,000 per kilowatt. You’re talking about incredibly low cost compared to a gas turbine or reciprocating engine or a fuel cell or any other—most other kinds of technologies.
And then fundamentally, it’s also about the fuel itself. When you think about what diesel is as a liquid fuel, it’s a way to store energy incredibly compactly, at an ultra-high energy density. It’s reasonably stable. It won’t just, you know, catch on fire on its own spontaneously. It doesn’t leak out. You don’t need specialized tanks like you do with natural gas or other gaseous fuels like hydrogen. Um, so it’s a very simple fuel, easy to store on site. You have a simple plastic tank, you can store 48 hours of fuel or 96 hours of fuel. What people in the battery world consider very long durations is basically trivial to store with a diesel generator. So that ability to be fully off-grid with fuel on site, providing energy whenever you need, is fundamentally a really useful capability and something that has not been replicated by any alternative technology.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, and it’s also, as—as I think you sort of alluded to, but just to put a finer point on it, the footprint area density of a diesel generator plus fuel storage, plus on-site fuel storage, is pretty small. It is way smaller than any alternative if you’re trying to get the same amount of power and same amount of on-site storage, you know, you basically can’t do it in—in the same footprint.
Richard Wang: Absolutely. Like, any kind of battery configuration with the same kind of duration, you’re talking about more than 10 times the footprint, whether lithium-ion or otherwise. And similarly with gaseous fuels, unless you have, you know, compressed gas on site, and even then, you’re not competitive with—with diesel in terms of energy density.
Shayle Kann: Right. Okay, so for all those reasons, we have so, so much diesel being used to generate power. Let’s talk about why that’s a problem. What’s bad about diesel generators?
Richard Wang: Well, I think the challenge is most obvious when you look at who these days uses diesel generators at the most enormous scale. And that’s where the problems are most acute, and that is particularly with data centers. And so data centers, typically almost all of them, will have a giant fleet of diesel generators backing up a majority or even 100% of the load. They even have extra generators behind that to back the generators themselves for extra redundancy to ensure their five-nines reliability. So you have these enormous data center fleets.
Of course, many data centers are built close to urban corridors, like Northern Virginia in particular is where we’ve seen a lot of the most acute challenges with the diesel generator fleets there. And what you see when you read the news publications is incredible community opposition to the diesel generators. Even though these are not typically running most of the year—they might only run 100 hours per year for maintenance and emergency operations—the reality is when they do run, they are, number one, incredibly noisy and the vibrations basically can shake up the whole community.
And then on top of that, it’s really the air emissions, specifically the NOx emissions that come out of the generators, that are incredibly polluting. They have substantial local health impacts, you know, millions or tens of millions of dollars of sort of negative health impacts coming out of diesel generator fleets at data centers, which really has these days a lot of communities up in arms because of this.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, and I would say those are the primary reasons diesel generators suck, but there are—there’s a set of secondary reasons, too, which is more that actually they’re just not as easy to operate and maintain as one might think, given that they are being used as backup generators.
Richard Wang: That’s right. They’re not great products in their own right, and we’ve lived with them out of necessity. But if you think about some of the additional challenges that they have for a data center, for instance, especially, or any other demanding customer: so, number one, the power quality coming out of a diesel generator tends to be very dirty in terms of the voltage waveforms for your AC. And if you have spiky loads, it tends not to respond very well, so you have a lot of voltage sag or overvoltage. All of that is very challenging when you’re trying to power a GPU or any other sensitive electronic. Requires additional buffering systems, batteries, capacitor banks, and so forth, which just add to system complexity.
And then on top of that, diesel generators as well require a lot of maintenance. And so the diesel fuel itself, you know, it’s reasonably stable, but in fact, every few months, you have to go in and polish the fuel, basically because the fuel will attract moisture from the atmosphere, it can start growing algae, it can go bad. And so you have to constantly be swapping out this fuel every few months, which is a big pain and overhead. And then the generators themselves, you have to run every few months, typically once or twice a quarter, to ensure that the generators are working and maintained. So all this adds a lot of overhead for a system that’s only used very intermittently, and it’s a big operational pain for users.
Shayle Kann: Right. Yeah, and so I think, you know, universally, if you go talk to somebody who owns and operates or uses a diesel generator, like, they’re not in love with the product. It’s quite the opposite. But as you said, we’ve sort of lived with them out of necessity. I think we should spend a minute talking about why there hasn’t been a great replacement. Like there are, you know, I think intuitively you might think, okay, well, we have natural gas generators, reciprocating engines or whatever. Why is that not a universal solution to the diesel generator problem?
Richard Wang: Yeah, we can look at a few of the plausible alternatives. And there are companies that are looking to replace diesel generator fleets with natural gas-based systems, especially reciprocating engines. And it partially works, but I think if you talk to a lot of the demanding users of diesel, what they’ll tell you is that your natural gas systems are dependent on the security of your gas pipeline network. And the gas pipelines typically undergo stress at exactly the same times when your overall electric grid is over-stressed. And so if there’s a big winter storm that’s rolling through that’s leading to a regional blackout, there’s a pretty decent chance, and a correlated risk, that your gas pipeline is also at risk.
And so that external dependency means that you have this common mode failure, which means that your natural gas systems can never be as provably reliable as truly having fuel on site where you’re totally independent without any kind of external intervention. You can operate for 48 or 96 hours continuously because you have your fuel stored on site. And so fundamentally, natural gas is a fuel that should be delivered just-in-time through pipelines, rather than stored on site. It’s much more painful to try to store a gaseous fuel.
Shayle Kann: Right. Um, also you have, to a lesser extent, you have air permitting issues with natural gas generators as well. This is why—part of why fuel cells suddenly are an interesting thing again is, you know, because they’re easier to permit than a natural gas generator. We can talk about fuel cells separately, but that—that is, uh, it’s not as big an issue as it is with diesel generators. In some places though, it’s a significant issue. You know, you and I are in California. It’s hard to permit a new backup natural gas generator, let alone a diesel generator.
Richard Wang: Absolutely, absolutely. And you still have the same issues with power quality with anything that’s spinning and with combustion, so you have to buffer it with batteries. Yeah, so and they all tend to be quite a bit more expensive. And honestly, CapEx is the most important cost metric when it comes to backup systems because they’re not used very often. You don’t care that the fuel is more expensive; it’s really about how cheap is your generator, and diesel is by far the cheapest solution out there. Putting a gas turbine is like incredible over-engineering for something that you’re using 50 hours a year.
Shayle Kann: Right. Okay, so speaking of high CapEx then, another alternative that one could imagine would be batteries. Um, talk about why batteries haven’t really taken over this market.
Richard Wang: Yeah, batteries play a pretty important role because they have, of course, many benefits. They have excellent power quality, basically instant cold start, so when you need power, you instantly get it in milliseconds. But the fundamental challenge with batteries is one of duration. If you actually wanted to have a battery that could last for 48 hours, which is a pretty typical minimum duration for a backup generator, you would need an incredible fleet of batteries that would be, number one, take up an enormous amount of space; number two, it would be so many batteries that communities typically are getting quite finicky around lithium-ion in particular because of local flammability concerns when you have so many batteries all at once.
And ultimately, the cost of those batteries is cost-prohibitive. Even though batteries have gotten so much cheaper, typically we’re sizing batteries for typically 4-hour durations, maybe up to 6 or 8 hours, nothing remotely close to 48 hours. It just is not the right chemistry or the right approach for something that’s so long-duration.
Shayle Kann: Okay. So, diesel generators, they’re everywhere. They suck. We haven’t had a great replacement. Let’s talk about aluminum as fuel. Um, talk to me about, first of all, just give—give the fundamentals here. Like why could aluminum be a fuel? Why can a metal be a fuel?
Richard Wang: Yeah, it’s a very non-obvious concept. Most people have never heard of metal fuels or aluminum as a source of energy, but in fact, it is a remarkably efficient way to think about storing and transporting and delivering electricity at enormous scale, independent of the electric grid. And so how it works is, when you think about how aluminum exists in the Earth’s crust, in fact, it’s found in bauxite, which is an ore that contains aluminum bonded with oxygen. That’s its natural state in the Earth.
And then what we do when we think about producing aluminum as a metal for structural applications and beverage cans, cars, and things like this, is that you take that mining ore, you dissolve it down with sodium hydroxide, and then you get out aluminum hydroxide in a pure form as a chemical. That’s then dried out into aluminum oxide, and then the key process, aluminum smelting, is splitting apart aluminum from oxygen by using electricity to drive an electrochemical process.
And that form of electrolysis splits that bond, and then you get molten aluminum that then gets cast out and produced into whatever products you need. And then typically at that point, we forget about the energy side of the equation. You just have this great metal: it’s structural, it’s stable, it doesn’t corrode, it’s great for all sorts of uses, and sort of that’s the end of the story.
But, you know, the reality is when you look at it from a chemical perspective, that aluminum in fact has all that embodied energy held inside, and what it really wants to do is to react again back with oxygen to go back into its most stable state. And that reaction actually would then release a ton of energy, whether in the form of heat or in the form of electricity. And so metal fuels are basically a concept of: how do you take aluminum in its metallic form, react it with oxygen, whether through combustion or through electrochemical means, to ultimately get out that energy in usable form?
Shayle Kann: Okay, and so what version of that are you doing?
Richard Wang: We are taking the electrochemical approach. So, originally Voya went through a fairly deep incubation, looked at many different metals technologies and different pathways for getting out electricity or energy from the metal. First of all, we decided that we really wanted to get electricity out of metal fuels, not heat and not hydrogen, because electricity fundamentally is the most critical need facing our energy landscape today.
And then number two, you can imagine trying to burn a metal powder—for example, fine metal powders are known to be highly flammable. But if you burn it, you then have super high-grade heat, but then you have to pass it through a steam turbine. All of a sudden, you’re talking about a very expensive and challenging system that’s hard to scale and very costly.
And so we decided to really pursue the electrochemical pathway, which we believe has incredible potential because electrochemistry, fundamentally, what we’re doing at Voya leverages the fundamental investments and breakthroughs that have happened in the battery and fuel cell industries over the last couple decades. And these days, with the maturity of electrochemical technologies, with this sort of capability of the workforce and talent base that’s out there, you can really design electrochemical systems that are incredibly cost-effective and capable, and ultimately able to convert that energy from its raw thermodynamic form in aluminum out to electricity with far higher efficiency than combustion, without any of the NOx emissions that you might otherwise still get if you’re combusting at high temperatures. You just get a very clean, pure, responsive electrical signal out of that chemical reaction.
Shayle Kann: Okay, so maybe to put a finer point on it, like walk me through what happens inside of a Voya generator.
Richard Wang: Yeah, so a Voya generator is really a very novel electrochemical cell architecture where we’re essentially taking pellets of aluminum—you can imagine a few millimeter, almost like BB gun pellet size, so not a powder, but actually substantial-sized pellets—and they’re flowed into electrochemical cells. And then what’s happening inside that cell is what’s called a metal-air reaction.
And so it’s a little bit akin to a hydrogen fuel cell, if you want to think about it that way. The cathode side of the equation, the positive side, is basically a normal air cathode that comes from the fuel cell industry. Our version of it doesn’t have platinum or any other rare earths. It’s a very low-cost, commonly available air cathode. But what happens at the cathode is you have oxygen coming in from ambient air, it reacts electrochemically with the electrolyte—alkaline electrolyte—to turn into hydroxide ions inside this water-based electrolyte.
And then that electrolyte will then react preferentially with your aluminum pellets and dissolve them away. And as they get dissolved away and bond up the hydroxide, you’re basically touching an external circuit, a current collector or a wire, that essentially conducts the electrons out from the aluminum, passes it through an external load to power whatever you need, and then completes the circuit by going to the cathode.
And then ultimately, all that dissolved aluminum that gets flowed out of our electrochemical cells, and then we have a separate subsystem to treat the electrolyte and extract out the byproduct in solid form. And so with this, you can basically continuously refuel the cell as frequently as you need. So if you need to run continuously for 100 hours or 1,000 hours, you could do that with this design because it’s a continuously refuelable system.
But then when we’re on standby and you’re using it for a backup application and nothing’s happening, we don’t need to feed in any fuel inside the cell. So the cell by itself is perfectly stable when the aluminum’s not inside, there’s no chemical reactions, there’s no degradation either. And so it’s a very novel architecture that combines a lot of core concepts from the battery and fuel cell worlds, but we’ve really re-architected a lot of these common components into a very novel design to achieve these capabilities.
Shayle Kann: We’ll come back to the Voya generator in one second. I realize one thing we didn’t actually make a clear point of, I think, in talking about aluminum as fuel is its energy density. I mean, you said it’s sort of got all this embodied energy, chemical energy from the aluminum smelting. How dense is it?
Richard Wang: Yeah, so aluminum has a whole bunch of great properties as a fuel. Most critically, I would say, is the energy density. And if you want to compare it to diesel, which is sort of the gold standard in terms of fossil fuel energy density—I mean, diesel’s far more energy-dense than natural gas, for example—in fact, it’s, from a volume basis, about twice as energy-dense as diesel on an as-converted basis, so in terms of the amount of electricity you’re getting out per liter or per gallon of fuel. And then even on a weight basis, you are a little bit better than diesel in terms of energy per weight.
So, moderately to significantly better than diesel and dramatically better than every other solution out there. And then you combine this with the fact that it is a safe solid, aluminum of course. It doesn’t burn, it doesn’t rust or corrode. Basically, you can stockpile this for years on end and not lose any of the material to oxidation or side reactions.
And because it’s such a safe, simple, stable solid, it transports extremely efficiently through existing logistics chains, whether it’s bulk carriers, the way that we move ores or grains or coal around the world—some of the lowest-cost logistics options globally are available to aluminum as well. You can put it on rail cars, you can put it on trucks. You don’t need any special training or permitting to haul this around. So in fact, logistically far simpler than typical gaseous or liquid fuels that are fossil fuel-based.
Shayle Kann: Right. Okay, so that—that’s what got us excited about aluminum as a fuel in the first place. Back to the generator then. So, you know, we started this conversation by talking about diesel generators, which is sort of the initial market that you’re targeting and trying to take down. Just give me an apples-to-apples comparison then, of a Voya generator next to a diesel generator on—on all the key metrics we—we care about: cost and efficiency and footprint and, you know, all the—the performance, all those kinds of things. Just give me a head-to-head.
Richard Wang: Absolutely. And we’ll do the head-to-head comparison, and then we’ll also probably extend the point that our generator is fundamentally a different energy solution from diesel. It can do every single thing that diesel can do better, but it has additional benefits that actually make it far more valuable than a classical diesel generator. So we’ll get into that in a bit.
But in terms of just head-to-head competition, as mentioned, the fuel is incredibly energy-dense, twice as energy-dense as diesel, but even more significantly is if you’re trying to deploy a large fleet of diesel generators on a site. If you have like 100 megawatts or several hundred megawatts of diesel with 48 or 96 hours of fuel, like you have at any data center, it becomes a fairly significant fire hazard from a local fire safety and fire marshal permitting perspective.
And so there are strict codes on basically how far the generators have to be from each other and also critically how you store your fuel. Often with that quantity of fuel, you have to bury it underground in big tanks, and even between tanks, you need pretty substantial segregation. So you see a ton of empty space on a typical diesel generator install. It’s basically for fire safety.
And so when we look at what we’re doing with our generators and fuel, every single thing is non-flammable. The generator is non-flammable, it’s a water-based system; the fuel is fundamentally non-flammable; the byproduct, aluminum hydroxide, is also an inert, non-toxic, non-flammable compound. So there’s no—none of these fire permitting concerns on storing large amounts of fuel. So you can really stack this very, very densely together.
And what that means is per—in terms of megawatts per acre, the power density, how much power you can pack in per acre, we are approximately 100 megawatts per acre in our high-density configuration, which is about four times higher than a diesel generator installation. And so for any sort of application where you’re constrained on land, it’s just incredibly more compact compared to diesel.
Of course, you also don’t have any air quality permitting required. There’s no NOx, there’s no SOx, there’s no CO2, anything else coming out. So exempt from air quality permits. There’s no run time constraints; you can run this as often as you’d like. You’re not limited by the state or by the EPA. Also in terms of, as mentioned, fire safety, just very simple to permit on that side as well. Very quiet.
And then power quality as well is substantially better. So basically instant cold start, just like a battery, whereas a diesel generator often will take 5 to 10 seconds to get to full power from a cold start. So great for, even superior for backup applications. And then critically for those spiky loads, we are not—we’re not going to destroy our—our turbines or engines because of spiky loads. It can respond to fluctuating loads very, very efficiently. So those are a lot of the basic key reasons why we think it’s superior to diesel. And also cost-wise as well, highly competitive with diesel, again leveraging a lot of the learning curves on cost that have come from batteries and fuel cells. So incredibly cost-competitive compared to diesel.
Shayle Kann: Okay, so that’s the direct head-to-head Voya versus diesel comparison. But then you alluded to, like, there’s things a Voya generator can do that a diesel generator can’t. So what were you referring to there?
Richard Wang: Yeah, and so when you think about what a diesel generator is, it’s actually not only great for on-site backup, it’s fundamentally a very valuable tool that can be used by the electric grid. Whenever the grid is over-stressed and you’re running out of peak capacity, that entire installed base of diesel theoretically would be super attractive as a grid resource. Now, you know, why don’t we typically use it as a grid resource? It’s because there are strict air quality constraints on run times when it comes to the emissions coming out, and local communities are going to be up in arms if you’re running these things hundreds of hours a year even, because of all the pollution that’s coming out of the diesel generators.
Even despite that, if you look at the Department of Energy, they’re trying to basically have these emergency rulings to allow diesel generators to run when the grid is stressed to—to buffer the grid. So the opportunity is there, but diesel is fundamentally restricted because of the local pollution that it causes from being a useful grid asset.
With Voya, what we can do is two-fold: number one, Voya can serve as a pretty idealized grid asset because you have basically instant-start capability whenever the grid needs to call upon this. You can run for tens or hundreds of hours in duration, even riding out the most severe winter storms. It’s a highly reliable grid asset. And so a super valuable tool for utilities to call upon, where all this capacity that’s already been paid for by the data centers or other commercial users now can also serve as a highly flexible grid asset.
And then it essentially is also like a super-battery on site. Like these days, a lot of hyperscalers are actually having to install large Tesla Megapacks to provide power quality so all those spiky loads don’t throw crazy harmonic distortions across the grid and across their on-site fleet. And what Voya can do as well, because we’re an electrochemical system just like a battery, we respond every bit as well as a battery, which means that we don’t need a big battery buffer next to a Voya generator fleet the way you need with diesel.
And so now this two-in-one solution of serving all the capabilities of an on-site lithium-ion battery stack as well as your diesel generator stack in a footprint that is multiple times smaller than either of those on their own is just a dramatic cost and land savings, which is very attractive for large-scale data center campuses.
Shayle Kann: We haven’t really talked about the remote applications or defense applications, which is another place where they’re pretty heavily utilized. But talk to me about what you’re seeing there in the off-grid remote defense conglomerate of markets.
Richard Wang: Absolutely. Off-grid power is an increasing need as well, certainly when you look at classical commercial uses like mining or construction or oil and gas. All of these don’t have grid access and are dependent on diesel generators and where we see we have a significant right to win. But I think in defense in particular, the value proposition is perhaps strongest when it comes to off-grid. And the reason is the military is an unusually demanding user of diesel generators, and the key things they struggle with are, number one, the generator, and number two, the fuel. So all of it, essentially.
So with the generator, the core problems they have are the diesel generators are incredibly inefficient in terms of burning fuel, especially for military uses where they’re idling a lot of the time, it’s very intermittent, it’s not operating anywhere near peak efficiency, they’re often maybe down even at like 25% efficiency. So super inefficient, very heavy maintenance loads because they’re not operating in their sweet spot, and then they’re very noisy and they run very hot.
Which for something that’s especially forward deployed, where you’re using a diesel generator for a military base or for like a drone charging station or for forward-deployed manufacturing, that diesel generator, we’re referred to in Ukraine, is like a giant homing beacon for drones. With an IR camera, you can spot that diesel generator from miles away and know where the sensitive operations are. So all this makes it problematic for the military.
And then the fuel itself is challenging as well, because liquid fuels go bad, so you have to ship them basically almost just in time to get the fuel out in the field, and they are heavy and take up a lot of space. So the fuel logistics as well are challenging.
So with Voya, we are a sort of step-change improvement in all these fronts. We have a generator that is compact, super quiet, minimal heat signature, so a very, very stealthy generator, which is highly attractive, we’ve found. And then in terms of fuel logistics, especially for the military use cases where they’re using the fuel so inefficiently, we have a substantial energy density benefit, about 20% to 30% less mass and about 70% less volume shipped to the front lines for a typical military diesel generator compared to Voya’s aluminum generator. So that logistics footprint as well is critical in terms of military exposure to risk and attacks and so forth. So we’ve seen a lot of traction for different use cases there and are excited to see this pick up more momentum.
Shayle Kann: Okay, you and I have now both spent a couple of years quietly obsessing over this and talking to people about it selectively. And I would say that the two areas of skepticism, the two questions that I get most often: the first one is like, why now? You know, you didn’t invent metal fuels, we didn’t invent metal fuels. You’re not the first person to think of using aluminum as a fuel, even. What is it that makes this possible now where it wasn’t before? Like why hasn’t this already happened if it’s so great?
Richard Wang: Yes, yes. Perfect. I think every single investor has asked me that question, so very, very fair. And I like to give sort of a nested series of responses, starting from sort of simple and obvious macro trends, which are important, but are I think clear to everyone, to things very specific to—to Voya itself.
So the most obvious is that the energy markets are screaming for a solution like this. Diesel—the pain points associated with diesel have not been so acute until only even the last couple years or so. And so the sort of time to go build a business commercially has never been as attractive as it is today.
Number two, as mentioned, the maturation of the battery and fuel cell industries is critical to this. Things like basic breakthroughs in power electronics, with Tesla and with battery energy systems, all driving power electronics and inverters to record low cost levels, now makes a system like this very affordable, whereas 10 years ago, it would have been much more expensive than a diesel generator and not attractive of a proposition. Same thing with the workforce: you have incredible electrochemical talent from the billions that have been invested in battery and fuel cell companies, and all those people are now coming out and looking for something new to do beyond batteries. So you have an excellent workforce to go and design and mature a system such as this that’s so novel.
So those I think are all things that we sort of get for free, but they are important to the timing of this. Then what’s more specific to Voya is the reality that the US in particular has completely ceded its entire metallurgical knowledge base and industry, principally to China over the last 40 or 50 years. And in the US in particular, almost every single aluminum smelter has shut down. There’s I think maybe only one left operational in the US these days.
And so along with that entire industry leaving the US is also all the universities and all the grant agencies stopping all R&D basically in aluminum smelting. What that means is that the sort of basic knowledge base you need to innovate and think creatively around what can you do with metal fuels is relatively lacking when you specifically look at the details of aluminum-based technologies.
And so when we did this deep incubation with EIP around Voya Energy, we really dug very deep into old industrial literature, patent literature, talked to experts—the remaining experts especially in Canada that still know aluminum smelting and how it works and what’s going on—to really figure out what actually is the lay of the land, first of all, and then really to figure out what are the sort of nuggets of wisdom and unique insights that we have to pull together to come up with a pretty unique thesis as we have in Voya.
And so what we are actually doing at Voya, if you look at the details, is actually really quite unique compared to any other metal fuels approach that’s been tried historically. And it’s because we spent the time to really figure out what’s going on, the lay of the land in detail, and find a much more compelling technology hypothesis to actually go make this work. So we’re pretty excited to have ignited some of the best minds in metallurgy as well as electrochemistry and electrolyte designs from the battery world to go attack this problem in a pretty unique fashion.
Shayle Kann: Okay. Second area of skepticism gets into aluminum as a fuel. You know, I think the question is, so aluminum is strategically valuable, you don’t want to divert too much of it. We need it for structural applications. It’s also pretty expensive if you’re buying primary aluminum. So this gets into your fuel strategy. Why does it make sense, and in what conditions does it make sense to actually use aluminum as a fuel, and like what are you going to do, how are you going to get fuel?
Richard Wang: Yes. So our fuel strategy is two-fold. So our primary strategy, the first let’s say quite a few 5-plus years of the business, is based on scrap aluminum. And what is attractive about the scrap aluminum industry is it’s an industry with many, many different grades of scrap that are available at a moderate to substantial discount versus primary aluminum, depending on the quality of that scrap.
And certainly, if you think about scrap aluminum and aluminum recycling, there’s the notion that aluminum is infinitely recyclable. And that is true of certain grades of scrap. If you think about beverage cans, they recycle very, very cleanly in a closed loop. We don’t want to touch any of those streams because not only are they expensive, at the end of the day, they are serving a valuable purpose by diverting the need to use more primary aluminum. So we’re not going to touch those kinds of scrap.
But you also have other forms of scrap, especially things like shredded end-of-life cars, that are intrinsically mixed alloys, they’re contaminated with iron and other impurities that really impact their ability to be recycled for any kind of high-strength structural application. And because of that, they are much more discounted versus primary aluminum, it’s not really a direct replacement for primary aluminum, the prices are much more decoupled. Even if primary gets expensive, low-grade scrap doesn’t get that much more expensive.
And in fact, because it’s not so useful inside the US, where we don’t tend to do the kinds of low-end manufacturing that might even use the low-grade aluminum, a lot of it is just either landfilled and wasted or often exported to Asia for cents on the dollar to be sort of put into other low-end applications.
And so that kind of scrap we think is highly attractive because there isn’t a lot of value, it’s fairly cheap, and it’s also a very mature industry where it’s well distributed across the whole country. Every major population center has scrap yards, has recycling centers that are already processing all the scrap. And instead of shipping all that stuff over to Asia or other countries, we can harvest that and convert it from a waste resource to an incredibly valuable energy resource.
Shayle Kann: And I’ll just add, you can use low-grade scrap. That’s like a key point, right? Like you don’t need to go upgrade it first.
Richard Wang: Yes, that was a key point of our thesis and we have been able to prove that out in terms of our cell designs and our chemical compatibility. It is compatible with all the common grades of scrap that are out there, including the low-end grades.
We just had a nice breakthrough a couple days ago—I don’t think you’ve heard about this yet—where some of the common impurities found in the lowest grades of scrap actually have a significant beneficial impact on the stability of our electrolyte. So that was, I think, not planned for, but a nice surprise that’s come out. But yes, the compatibility with low-end scrap is a unique aspect of our technology approach and key to unlocking that as a resource.
Shayle Kann: Okay, so that’s part one of the fuel strategy, is to leverage this existing broad liquid supply chain for scrap, particularly low-grade scrap. What’s part two?
Richard Wang: Well, on part one, I’ll maybe just wrap up and say that ultimately, when you look at the net cost of the fuel, we believe even in early days, even the scrap in the US being more expensive than other countries, with US scrap, you’re already at diesel parity when it comes to fuel costs, which is a critical thing for us. We’re not commanding a green premium or any other sort of premium. Direct cost parity with diesel for fully delivered cost, including all the processing, all the logistics steps, and so forth. So wanted to lay that out there clearly, like from the beginning, we’re on cost parity with diesel in the US. In other countries, we’d actually be far cheaper than diesel, where aluminum’s cheaper and diesel’s more expensive, like in Europe or in Asia, for example. So very cost-competitive even early days.
But then long term, we believe the vision for metal fuels goes far beyond using scrap as a fuel resource. And ultimately, if you wanted to really drive aluminum fuels into a foundational new technology for the global energy system, you need to drive incredible volumes of fuel on the scale of fossil fuels when you think about oil drilling and oil refineries and so forth, and you also need very cost-competitive, something ideally that’s far cheaper than diesel and can really compete for grid power with things like liquefied natural gas or nuclear or other forms of prime power.
And so long term, the vision is to take that byproduct that comes out of our generator, the aluminum hydroxide, and instead of selling it off as a commodity chemical, as we plan to do early days, that aluminum hydroxide is the exact same feedstock material that goes into all aluminum smelting today.
And so Voya is working on a longer-term set of technologies, really exciting breakthroughs around aluminum smelting. We’ve seen some real exciting things happening in the industry that we think we can leverage in a unique way for metal fuels production. And what that allows us to do is to build these highly cost-efficient aluminum smelters to ultimately close the loop, recycle that byproduct, and then re-create the metal fuel.
And then that becomes an infinitely recyclable fuel, far, far lower cost than diesel, infinitely scalable, and allows you to build these smelters wherever in the world globally you have abundant energy resources, places like the Western Sahara with solar and wind, or Australia, or the Middle East, and capture all that ultra-low-cost 1-cent-per-kilowatt-hour energy into the form of the metals, and then very elegantly ship them across the globe for wherever you have an energy shortage, especially in places like island economies, the Japans of the world, Hawaii, all these are huge net energy importers, and having a fundamentally secure and diversified and clean ability to import energy at large global scale, we think will completely change the energy landscape.
Shayle Kann: All right, Richard. I’m glad we were finally able to do this publicly. Thank you for your time.
Richard Wang: It was a pleasure. Thank you, Shayle.
Shayle Kann: Richard Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Voya Energy.
The show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today’s topics. This episode is produced by Max Savage Levenson. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Ann Bailey edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
All of our episodes are now on YouTube. You can subscribe to Latitude Media for episodes of this show and Open Circuit. You can also find the audio version of the show anywhere you get your podcasts.
I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
