Evan van Hook, Viridi - Failsafe Battery Storage

In this captivating episode of the "Be Better Podcast," we dive into the world of sustainability and environmental innovation with Evan van Hook, a renowned expert in environmental law and a leading figure in sustainable corporate practices. Evan shares his extensive journey, beginning with his academic pursuits at Yale Law School, his influential role as a partner in the Environmental Law Group at Sidley & Austin, and his impactful tenure as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School. His profound insights are further enriched by his authorship of "International Environmental Law," published by Routledge, and his previous position as the Assistant Commissioner of the Environment for New Jersey. Listeners are taken through Evan's transformative 20-year tenure as the Chief Sustainability Officer at Honeywell, where he spearheaded the company's dramatic decarbonization, achieving over a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, as the CSO of Viridi, Evan is pioneering the development of fail-safe Lithium-Ion batteries, utilizing groundbreaking technology sourced from MIT PhD research.

The episode delves into the critical role of battery technology in the energy transition, highlighting Evan's unique approach to sustainability that blends legal expertise, policy knowledge, and practical implementation. He discusses the challenges and opportunities in the energy sector, emphasizing the importance of battery energy storage systems in leveraging renewable energy sources. Evan's narrative is not just about technological innovation but also about the practical application of existing solutions to achieve significant environmental impact. His story is a compelling reminder that the tools and technologies for a sustainable future are not just on the horizon but are already here and ready to be utilized. Through this enlightening discussion, the "Be Better Podcast" inspires listeners to recognize the role they can play in the energy transition, encouraging a proactive approach to sustainability in their own lives and industries.

Transcript

Evan van Hook (00:03.629)

Can I tell you one funny story at this time? I was doing a live interview on CNN and I was at the Department of Energy because I was on the board there and they set me up a thing and literally they had started the countdown and all of the energy in the Department of Energy turned off. And they were, and I just went into like

Bobby Hite (00:29.535)

Oh.

Evan van Hook (00:33.713)

automatic mode I had a little portable Wi-Fi. I said I have no idea if it's going to work and I turned it on literally they were like it turned on and they said go and it worked. So it was funny. Yeah. Exactly. Always be ready.

Bobby Hite (00:47.862)

Wow, good for you. Talk about fail-safe technology, huh?

Bobby Hite (00:54.922)

That's awesome. Well, Evan, thanks so much for being on the Be Better podcast today. I really appreciate it.

Evan van Hook (01:04.193)

Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. So thanks for asking me, Bobby.

Bobby Hite (01:07.658)

Of course. Understanding the technical ecosystem for me, specifically within the energy space has been, has been quite a challenge and especially for someone who doesn't typically come from the energy, energy space. And I'm, I'm curious, how does your time being a chief sustainability officer at Honeywell prepare you for your role today over at Verity?

Evan van Hook (01:33.717)

Yeah, you know, I'd like to say I was smart enough to have planned this, but when I look back sort of in retrospect, the experiences that I sort of fell into, I really couldn't think of a better preparation for what I'm doing now. And it really started before Honeywell. I was a partner at a law firm, and a lot of my practice was being lent to very large energy companies.

And they would have me actually go and set up offices there sometimes for a year at a time and help them with their systems to help get the company more organized and more process oriented. So in my private practice as a lawyer, I spent a lot of time in the energy world.

And then after that, of course, while I was still practicing and also doing some other things, I taught international environmental law at Columbia for over 10 years. And that culminated actually in a book on the topic. And that gave me that sort of complete grounding of the policy aspects of energy.

The most important international environmental issue right now is climate. Climate is inextricably linked to energy. And so coming at it from that sort of policy and theoretical perspective gave me, I think, a great grounding in that. And then I went into government as an environmental regulator for a few years, which of course gives you that perspective. And then certainly Honeywell.

was a tremendous learning experience for sure. I was chief sustainability officer there for about 20 years. I did start the sustainability organization there. And over the course of that period, we completed about 7,000 individual sustainability projects and ended up reducing our greenhouse gases by well over 90% during that period of time.

Evan van Hook (03:43.221)

And that really gave you that hands-on experience of what is it like in the real world to figure out how you can reduce emissions, implement a project, figure out how it actually gets scoped, how it continues to run over time. And that I think I feel that that's something that serves me very well now. And so when I put those all together, I feel like in my current role, I do have a bit of

that solid policy background along with the practical of actually getting this done. So that's why I feel like my background sort of helped me out.

Bobby Hite (04:23.89)

Yeah. And I think it's not only, it's all you've done, but it's all of the challenges and battle scars that you've accumulated along the way as well. And specifically, tying it back to the energy transition. There are a lot of challenges. You know, when you look at battery technology, something that Verdi is focused on.

Evan van Hook (04:31.181)

Hehehe

Evan van Hook (04:41.304)

Yes.

Bobby Hite (04:47.442)

Um, you know, in this concept of a battery energy storage system, can you talk a little bit about what a best system is?

Evan van Hook (04:55.745)

Certainly, a BESS system is really any electrochemical device that is structured and designed to store and manage a significant amount of energy. You wouldn't call a battery and a flashlight a BESS, but here you're talking about larger systems that both store energy, but then also are able to help you manage it with things like...

internet connectivity and battery management system. So it's really a complete package that allows you to manage substantial amounts of energy.

Bobby Hite (05:33.574)

And, you know, within the entire ecosystem that is supporting the energy transition, I guess, why is a battery energy storage system absolutely essential to the energy transition?

Evan van Hook (05:52.789)

I would say for about two critical reasons and first of all I would say that increasingly as you hear people talk about energy transition probably the most frequently stated position is that. Battery storage is the energy transition will not happen without adequate battery storage and.

there's at least two really important reasons. First of all, energy transition, and by that, we do mean transition to a lower carbonized, less greenhouse gas emitting future. And that is going to rely, of course, very substantially on renewables. Renewables are a fantastic source of energy, but they are also often intermittent. And that means that

If you're relying on solar power, solar power is not generating when the sun is not shining, wind power, wind is not generating when the wind is not blowing. And so right there, that immediately tells you that in order to take full advantage of these intermittent renewable energy sources, you're gonna need to be able to take some portion of that generation when it's over generating and store it for later.

when it's not generating. And so right away you can sort of see that, it's almost intuitive that, look, I know I'm getting a lot of energy from these sources, but not all the time, so I need to be able to capture some of that, put it in a box and use it when they are not generating. And in some ways it's like, when you think about liquid fuels, what do you do with gasoline? You take it, you put it in a can, you stick it in your garage for when you need it.

and that same sort of concept is going to have to flow into the energy, the electricity space. So that's a really kind of intuitive sort of basis or reasons for a best system that I think people can really understand. Probably more important, but maybe a little bit less intuitive, is that the energy transition is going to require a much more efficient and flexible

Evan van Hook (08:18.013)

management of energy in total not just these intermittent renewable sources. The energy sector accounts for about seventy five percent of the greenhouse gases that are admitted today. It's very clear we're not going to be able to manage greenhouse gases if we can't get our hands around a better management of the energy sector.

Evan van Hook (08:48.869)

is based on an idea which has done you know god bless it it's done wonderful things particularly in the developed world but that model is essentially centralized generation largely from fossil fuels with an imperfect understanding of demand and then transmitting that energy through what is now aging and highly imperfect and inefficient

transmission lines and then distribution lines. And then finally being taken by the end user in a way that is very unpredictable and also does not account for generation that may be happening at the end user's location, doesn't take account of what the needs are of that end user different periods of time.

Probably the most important reason to need to manage this better is just the fact that demand fluctuates wildly over the course of a day. When everyone comes home, for example, from work, then they tend to turn on the dishwasher and all the lights and the television and the demand spikes. They spike at different times during the day for different reasons.

But that demand, the energy generator has to build for that level of demand so that when you turn on your switch, you get the electricity. Now, it would be much more efficient if when you are in your home, you, for example, say, well, I'm going to turn on my dishwasher, but I'm going to switch to using my stored energy at home, which I from a battery that I either charged from solar on my roof.

or i charge it at night at when there's very low demand on the grid uh... it'd be much easier for the generating company rather than saying hey we have to build huge new transmission lines for them to strike agreements with end users to say hey can we strike an agreement with you that you're going to use your battery from four in the afternoon until seven in the afternoon which is our peak

Evan van Hook (11:12.469)

doesn't make any change at all in your usage. We're not telling you, hey, turn off everything for that period. We're just saying switch to the stored energy use. And there again, it's essentially taking that energy which is really on demand generation and putting it into a way that you can store it and use it when it's most efficient and useful to do so. Now, of course, you know,

Bobby Hite (11:31.147)

Right.

Evan van Hook (11:42.285)

There's also just that really big part again, which relates to the first reason why BESS are so important is if we're gonna truly leverage all of this renewable energy, we need to be able to take it and use it when otherwise we would be using dirtier fossil fuel-based energy.

Bobby Hite (12:03.102)

Right. And I think that's one of the largest problems right now is that lack of understanding and implementation of a best system because we're having to rely on oil and gas for kind of the backup generator, if you will.

Evan van Hook (12:20.797)

Absolutely, absolutely.

Bobby Hite (12:24.43)

One thing that you talk a lot about is the importance of fail safe technology. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Evan van Hook (12:34.209)

Absolutely. And I think first of all to start thinking about fail-safe technology, you have to think about what is the best way to store energy. And right now from a battery perspective, the best technology is lithium ion. Batteries are, you know, that's essentially a chemical process to store energy in an electrochemical battery.

And right now lithium ion is the most energy dense and it's the most, it has the most energy per weight and per volume that you can find. Okay, so that's great. There's all kinds of reasons why having an energy dense vehicle is important. That means you can get a lot of it in a smaller space. You can just...

magnify the amount of storage that you can generate. So that's terrific. But lithium ion batteries, as great as they are for storage, they have one fundamental flaw, and that is that they have a very low probability, but still not zero, potential to fail.

And they fail for any kinds of reasons. There may be a minute flaw in what's called the jelly roll or the separator that separates the anode from the cathode. There might be excessive heat. There might be some kind of a small puncture. There's all kinds of reasons when they can start to fail. So if you have a very low probability potential, that's, you know, it's great. It's low probability. But in a best system...

you're actually taking tens of thousands of these batteries and putting them together into a best system. That's how these are made up. These larger systems are made up of thousands of individual batteries. And so now, because there's thousands of them, you've taken what's a very low probability event and you've multiplied that probability substantially.

Bobby Hite (14:44.074)

Mm-hmm.

Evan van Hook (14:48.385)

So it's still a small probability, but it's a lot larger. So you have a best system. There is a non-trivial possibility that one of those batteries will fail. And then the problem is in what's called propagation or thermal runaway, that one failing battery has enough power to start affecting the battery next to it and then they fail and the next one and the next one. And that's from heat.

It's from what they call ejecta, as it essentially explodes and it releases particles from sound waves. So when you see these tests, it's really striking. You see one because these batteries are all tested and you see one start to fail. And then a few minutes later, the next one's failing and the next until they have all failed. And lithium ion fires in particular have certain chemical properties that make them.

very, very dangerous when they catch fire or explode. It happens to be, they have the capability of generating their own oxygen, so it's a self-perpetuating fire. It reacts very poorly to water, and so it's a real problem. So, what fail-safe, when we say fail-safe, what the reason why we use that term is that

Bobby Hite (15:55.655)

Oh, wow.

Evan van Hook (16:13.117)

You have to be able to avoid that conflagration of having multiple of the individual batteries start to fail one after another until you get these really significant events. And anyone that looks at the news these days can see there are unfortunately quite a few lithium ion batteries failing.

And we have to solve that or else we're really going to hurt this whole industry.

Bobby Hite (16:43.934)

Yeah, it sounds like there's some real challenges there from an implementation perspective, but something that you guys are actively working towards solving. I admittedly had to Google thermal runaway and it does sound quite precarious and violent at times. But can you talk a bit about... Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about...

Evan van Hook (16:58.199)

Ha ha.

Evan van Hook (17:01.617)

Yeah. Well, fortunately, there's a reason.

Bobby Hite (17:08.962)

Veridi's approach to eliminating that risk of thermal runaway in those batteries.

Evan van Hook (17:15.249)

Because that's what we're really proud of and that's really the core and the heart of Veridi batteries and Really this was started out as the brainchild of our CEO John Williams. Who's this kind of? incredible serial innovator He's run a number of companies and he was really started to be very interested in the energy transition And of course he saw what a lot of folks see right now is that we're not gonna make

the energy transition happened without storage. He also really understood the issue of battery, of thermal runaway. And he teamed up with an absolutely brilliant researcher as a PhD out of MIT, Dr. JR Linna. And Dr. Linna's got an entire research team. And what they realized is that chemistry

Is the right chemistry l i it's the most energy dense is what we really want to store. What's up for not gonna change the chemistry we need to be able to stop any failure at that single battery cell and so that's what they worked on how are we gonna do it and the approach that they took was structural and so i'm essentially what they've developed after years of r and d is a battery pack.

Bobby Hite (18:23.508)

Right.

Evan van Hook (18:40.589)

that separates the individual batteries with a phenolic resin barrier. And so there's basically three components to the failsafe result. You've got a phenolic resin barrier between each of the batteries, that's step one. Step two is there is a release area built into the battery packs. So that the, it's essentially like a chimney so that the energy can

dissipate if one starts to fail because these batteries have a lot of energy so there's essentially a chimney to dissipate the energy and then step three is there's a proprietary coolant system which was actually developed for the mars program by nasa and that is what we utilize it's very heat sensitive and so is one battery starts to fail that coolant is dispersed.

so that it cools not only the failing battery, but more importantly, all of the batteries surrounding the failing battery. And I'll tell you, it's really fascinating. First of all, this pack has passed every relevant UL testing for battery, battery failure. They have been approved in multiple jurisdictions for installation in and around occupied spaces. And when you see the data,

from one of these tests it's really fascinating because you can just see the test requires you to force one battery into failure through heat and you see that battery shoot up and then you see all the rest of the batteries literally right next to it that don't change at all and so the temperature is just remarkable uh... you know the temp that the temperature uh... you know that the

Bobby Hite (20:23.635)

Oh wow.

Evan van Hook (20:34.113)

that failure is absolutely remarkable.

Bobby Hite (20:36.85)

Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating work.

Evan van Hook (20:45.633)

Yeah, we're very proud of it. And I'll tell you, they're not stopping there. There's some tremendous new developments that they're working on now, but this battery really works. As I say, it has passed all relevant UL testing. It's been what's called stickered in Canada under what's called the CSA, the Canadian Safety Association standards. So people see it and they say, yup, this works.

Bobby Hite (21:15.054)

That's awesome. And it sounds like you guys are alleviating a lot of the stress, anxieties, rebuttals that you might get for this type of solution. And I'm curious, another thing that I hear from leaders as I'm communicating with them about this option and the energy transition just in general is that battery storage is very expensive. Having just come back from COP28, you yourself,

Evan van Hook (21:25.172)

Mm-hmm.

Evan van Hook (21:32.11)

Mm-hmm.

Evan van Hook (21:39.181)

Uh-huh.

Bobby Hite (21:44.438)

Do you think we have, you know, kind of a line of sight into making this a more feasible option moving forward?

Evan van Hook (21:54.545)

It's a terrific question and I will say that many aspects of the energy transition are going to benefit from federal or from governmental policies and those policies can be of multiple different types. They can be in terms of government procurement, actual, you know, tax benefits.

the uh... if there can be actual you know grants and so financially there are there are some uh... some benefits for the entire energy transition ecosystem i will say however that because yet we do this work allot a good best system can really pay for itself

Bobby Hite (22:41.928)

Mm.

Evan van Hook (22:53.945)

Most, virtually all utilities now charge different rates depending on when you're pulling energy from the web. Just to shift your load away from the least expensive or most expensive to the least expensive, you can have tremendous savings. Also, many industries have a tremendous need for what's called uninterrupted power sources or UPS.

Bobby Hite (23:00.919)

Right?

Evan van Hook (23:24.001)

and battery conserve as a UPS so you may all you may otherwise be you know very frequently you're buying diesel generator and that diesel generators providing your under uninterrupted power source and the battery can replace that so there's a lot of ways once you get into this to make it a really economically feasible

Bobby Hite (23:53.814)

Yeah, that's awesome to hear. I guess which industries specifically do you see being most impacted by, you know, a truly fail safe, you know, best system that you guys are developing over there?

Evan van Hook (24:10.041)

Sure. Well, I think that the fail-safe aspect of it, anywhere where you have safety is really at a premium. And that means any kind of built environment, any kind of, certainly any urban environment.

Bobby Hite (24:27.918)

Hmm.

Evan van Hook (24:33.353)

Anywhere where you want what's called a micro grid, it's sort of a self-enclosed grid where you're perhaps generating power through solar on site. You wanna be able to capture it and manage it, which is very prevalent these days. One thing about the Viridi batteries is they also include what I like to call almost an oversized internet of things component in that it's a company that...

John and Verity purchased and it pulls virtually any existing data from the batteries, from their use, how well they're balanced, their state of charge, ambient temperatures, and it allows you to manage them literally globally. You can pull them up on a website and see where all your batteries are. And we have some really like, for example, where we're powering a Harry Potter.

Fantasy Village in one state and we powered Burning Man this year. And so, other industries that are really very interested in developing BESS further are the mining industry and the shipping industry has a very strong interest in BESS. And so...

Bobby Hite (25:33.44)

Love that.

Bobby Hite (25:36.875)

Awesome.

Bobby Hite (25:48.436)

Mm-hmm.

Evan van Hook (25:58.497)

When you think about just the built environment and then these other areas where there is again a critical need for safety, clearly in mining and particularly if you're going down shaft, you cannot have a failure, same thing on shipping. And even frankly, although we're not there yet, but I think aerospace in a few years is gonna have some real.

use cases there.

Bobby Hite (26:29.898)

That's absolutely fascinating. Um, you know, Evan, thanks so much for, for coming onto the podcast. I really appreciate it. If you could do us a favor and, you know, my last question for you here, how can we all be better?

Evan van Hook (26:36.486)

Absolutely.

Evan van Hook (26:41.176)

Hahaha

Evan van Hook (26:47.217)

That's a great question. And I saw you told me you asked that and I thought about it a little bit. I think that, and it's gonna sound a little bit loosey goosey, but not giving into fear. Fear is what keeps us from changing. There is a wonderful prospective future out there with a green economy.

where rather than having utilities that are based on fossil fuels that are generating greenhouse gases, that are generating lots of other emissions, whether they be particulates, mercury, etc., there is a future out there. The one thing I just point to is Honeywell. We reduced our greenhouse gases by more than 90%.

We clearly did not do that with technology from the future. We did that with technology that exists now. So this is not something to be afraid of. This is get out and the change should happen. And so just be part of the change.