Watt It Takes: A Tesla Veteran’s Mission to Build Long-Duration Batteries

This week on Watt It Takes: how a would-be priest made it his mission to spread the gospel of battery storage. In this episode, Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Mateo Jaramillo, the CEO and co-founder of Form Energy. Form is working on a new kind of long-duration battery. And Mateo has one of the longer-duration careers in the storage industry.  In the early 2000s, he deployed the first behind-the-meter systems in New York for demand response — seeing the grid services potential well before anyone else. Mateo went on to start the stationary energy storage unit at Tesla, launching and building the powerwall business. He also helped launch the supercharger business. Today, he’s working on a new electrochemical battery that could provide storage services for days, not just hours. The idea is to unlock baseload renewables. The chemistry was spun out of work from MIT researchers. It’s being scaled by a group of engineers and entrepreneurs with deep technical experience — and like Mateo, the bumps and bruises that come from scaling an early market. In this interview, Mateo talks about what it took to power through the early days of battery storage, when everything sale and installation was a battle. And he’ll talk about what it will take to create Form’s new storage tech to unlock even more renewable energy. To learn more about future speakers and attending a live event, go to Powerhouse.fund and click on the events tab.  Listen to all of the episodes of Watt It Takes here. Support for this podcast is brought to you by Sungrow. With the world’s most powerful 250-kilowatt, 1,500-volt string inverter, Sungrow is providing disruptive technology for utility-scale projects. Subscribe to GTM podcasts via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you find your audio content.