Insider's Guide to Energy
The Energy Industry is uniquely evolving as traders are under increasing pressure to manage costs, cash, limits, and risks. The Insider’s Guide to Energy Podcast addresses current and emerging challenges business executives face daily through stories shared from peers and industry experts while covering topics such as innovation, disruptive technologies, and emerging trends.
Insider's Guide to Energy
200 - Long-Duration Energy Storage with Zinc Batteries: Insights from EOS Energy CEO Joe Mastrangelo
In this episode of the Insiders Guide to Energy podcast, hosts Chris Sass and Jeff McAulay welcome Joe Mastrangelo, CEO of EOS Energy Storage, to discuss the transformative potential of long-duration energy storage solutions. Focusing on EOS’s innovative zinc-based battery technology, Joe explains the advantages of a non-lithium battery system for applications that demand flexibility, scalability, and safety. He highlights how this eco-friendly, fire-resistant technology offers a promising alternative for sectors requiring durable, sustainable energy solutions, from utilities to industrial applications.
Joe shares EOS’s journey to establishing a resilient and primarily U.S.-based supply chain—a move that has not only driven growth but also strengthened the company’s position amidst global supply chain disruptions. By building in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley, EOS has brought jobs back to an area once defined by manufacturing while creating a streamlined, secure production process. Joe emphasizes the importance of using widely available raw materials, which allows EOS to lower production costs while contributing to the U.S. economy and reducing dependency on foreign supply chains.
Listeners interested in renewable energy will appreciate Joe’s insights on the demand for long-duration storage, which he sees as essential for a sustainable energy grid. He discusses EOS’s growth strategy, including upcoming pilot projects and the critical role of customer trust, bankability, and partnerships in scaling new technologies. This episode offers a compelling look into how EOS Energy Storage is paving the way for a cleaner, more resilient energy infrastructure by overcoming financial, logistical, and technological challenges.
We were pleased to host: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-mastrangelo-ab974357/
Visit our website: https://insidersguidetoenergy.com/
00:00:00 Joe Mastrangelo
I'm excited about changing the way the world powers its future, proving that difficult challenges can still be solved and manufactured in the United States, and as a result of those two things, creating green tech careers for people to grow themselves in the future.
00:00:19 Chris Sass
Your trusted source for information on the energy transition. This is the Insider's Guide to Energy podcast.
00:00:30 Chris Sass
Welcome to another edition of the Insiders Guide to Energy Podcast. I'm your host Chris Sass, and with me is my co-host Jeff McAulay. Jeff, what are we talking about today?
00:00:39 Jeff McAulay
Chris, today's topic is long duration energy storage and we're joined by Joe Mastrangelo, the CEO of EOS Energy Storage that is producing a zinc based chemistry.
00:00:51 Jeff McAulay
Joe, welcome to the show.
00:00:53 Joe Mastrangelo
Thanks, Jeff. Thanks Chris. Great to be here.
00:00:56 Jeff McAulay
So I think we have to start off with what is long duration energy storage.
00:01:02 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah. So that's a great question, because a lot of people do find it a lot of different ways. For us, it's anything from three to 12 hours and being extremely flexible around that time frame and being able to deliver, you know, multiple cycles, if you will, within that time frame. So it's not really thinking about discharging over that entire amount.
00:01:22 Joe Mastrangelo
But doing multiple cycles without degrading your battery or reducing performance.
00:01:28 Jeff McAulay
Or exotic iron or sodium based. There's even more flow battery designs. How do you Orient the zinc based chemistry that you're working on? The design within that range of other chemistries?
00:01:40 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah, so, so, so we we call it, you know it the hybrid technology and hybrid and the fact that you know we're a static battery so. So you know if you look over, if you look over my shoulder there you.
00:01:52 Joe Mastrangelo
See.
00:01:52 Joe Mastrangelo
A white square and a Gray square. The Gray Square is the current design of the battery itself contained aqueous water based electrolyte.
00:02:00 Joe Mastrangelo
That like flow batteries, you wouldn't. You know, you, you you have abundant raw materials. We don't use a pump system like a flow battery use. And unlike lithium ion, we don't use any fire suppression because the battery is inherently.
00:02:16 Jeff McAulay
Wonderful. And that's so the supply side. Tell us about the demand side. You you talked about fluctuating demand on the grid and for insiders listening, they know that could be anything from behind the meter demand charge management to demand response to frequency regulation. So especially as you get into the longer durations, what?
00:02:36 Jeff McAulay
Are the applications you're targeting and help us understand if that's mostly behind the meter or front of the meter applications?
00:02:42 Joe Mastrangelo
So it's a, it's a mix of.
00:02:44 Joe Mastrangelo
Both. When you look at that, the way the way the company started, you know the guy who the inventor by the name of Steve Amendola, you know, he, he he had a he had a solar panel company that went out of business when Chinese entered the market in the US, but he looked at solar and said what solar really needs is is is an energy storage.
00:03:04 Joe Mastrangelo
System that could be at minimum of four hours to make it a base load technology. So he was on to the intermittency and having longer duration energy storage, you know 16 years ago.
00:03:14 Joe Mastrangelo
When Neos was founded.
00:03:15 Joe Mastrangelo
As we move forward and through the development of the product, we started looking at how can we, how can we meet the demands in the market and if I look at, you know I've been with EOS for the last six years, those demands have evolved over time like when I first got here, we were talking about minutes and we started talking about a couple of hours and we started about four hours and now people start to look at this, this 12, this 8.
00:03:38 Joe Mastrangelo
To 12 hour range, which is where our technology fits.
00:03:41 Joe Mastrangelo
So less so on.
00:03:45 Joe Mastrangelo
You know specific applications and more so like we think about we think about use cases of how customers use use the technology for those discharge types. So we've mostly been going after utility scale and large developer projects and that's been more because of the size of the company. Now when we start looking at applications that we can.
00:04:05 Joe Mastrangelo
Address. We're also looking at going after industrial applications, commercial applications that require smaller systems are more dispersed now that we have the capital to be able to grow the business.
00:04:16 Chris Sass
Is there a lot of pent up demand then for storage? I mean, everything we've talked about, I've been doing this podcast now for 4 1/2 years and we always talk about storage and when we have storage and what you know, you said about the size of the company and who you're targeting is.
00:04:31 Chris Sass
Is it like easy hunting? Is there just so much pent up demand that that's there? Or is it just that sweet spot of that eight hours that number of hours? Does that limit?
00:04:38 Chris Sass
The market quite a bit.
00:04:39 Joe Mastrangelo
So I mean, Chris, I think there's a lot that goes into that question.
00:04:44 Joe Mastrangelo
You know, so I think there is a pent up demand, but there's a pent up demand surrounded by a couple of facts. When you think about how how the industry works, right, you know fact number one is it's not easy to get approvals to bring projects online. So that's one thing that that kind of hampers the demand as you kind of go through the process of getting projects.
00:05:05 Joe Mastrangelo
You know, fact number 2, when you look at.
00:05:06 Joe Mastrangelo
The When you look.
00:05:07 Joe Mastrangelo
At the market as showing that you're that you have a proven technology that's going to work like I always say in the in the energy industry, everybody wants to.
00:05:15 Joe Mastrangelo
Be the first person to.
00:05:16 Joe Mastrangelo
2nd to bringing out technology so it's how do you build up the references for your technology and when you look at where we are, you know we've now discharged more than four GW hours of energy out in the field with our technology. So we're starting to get up to that point where you get bankability you have proven proven hours of operation. Now you're up against.
00:05:36 Joe Mastrangelo
Kind of the process of getting things approved and getting onto the grid. That's why when you look at where we've gone, we've gone into markets where it was faster to get on the grid, places like Texas, we've done some stuff in the Southeast United States. That's where you start looking at the developer market versus utility.
00:05:52 Joe Mastrangelo
Market or selling directly into utilities because they will move faster and take that technology risk. So the demand is absolutely there. There's a process of bringing your product online and proving out and proving out that it can work, which holds true for every technology that you have in.
00:06:08 Jeff McAulay
The industry and Joe, you're selling to a system integrator.
00:06:13 Jeff McAulay
Who might be selling to a developer developer. So how closely tied are you to the application of, let's say, Texas merchant battery value stacking? Is that very tightly coupled or are you really providing an asset and then it's up to the customer how they run?
00:06:29 Joe Mastrangelo
No. So so I think, Jeff, you bring up this is a great point. A lot of our sale process of bringing the product to the market is actually sitting down and going through the use case with the customer and understanding how not only our technology meets the use case, but at the same time how the technology can enhance the use case. So showing people.
00:06:51 Joe Mastrangelo
The flexibility and how the technology works, how that creates additional revenue streams for the technology as you move forward. So a lot of the work that we do.
00:07:00 Joe Mastrangelo
Do is we take what the customer wants to do and then we do an analysis of where they want to install it, marry those two things up with one another and then show them the unique operating parameters that we have in our technology, things like I talked earlier, running multiple cycles in a day running what we call mini cycles where you're charging and discharging.
00:07:20 Joe Mastrangelo
Throughout the day, to do peak shaving but not doing it as you think of it as a single use case within the day. And you've got to explain that to people and then at the same time we bring them to our test facility in Edison, NJ and show them the technology.
00:07:33 Joe Mastrangelo
Actually running on those use cases.
00:07:35
Hmm.
00:07:36 Jeff McAulay
And in that, in those examples, let's stick with the grid tide front of the meter application. What are the metrics that matter? Is it round trip efficiency? Is it depth of discharge? Is it cycle life? Is it duration? What what are the things that really matter for that application?
00:07:55 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah. So you you where you wind up as all those things play into a levelized cost of storage?
00:08:01 Joe Mastrangelo
Calculation and and what we try to do with our technology is also show things that aren't in that level of ice cost source. So yes, you know, when we try to show people as round trip, efficiency is important, but net round trip efficiency is what the cost is to the project. So a lot of times when you hear.
00:08:21 Joe Mastrangelo
Round trip efficiency numbers you're talking about round trip efficiency before the losses associated with running the pumping system. If you're doing a flow battery or running the HVAC. If you're running the lithium ion system.
00:08:33 Joe Mastrangelo
So we try to show like we have very low losses. Like if you look at an individual cube or container that we would sell the amount of energy that we consume to keep that running is equivalent to a couple of light bulbs in your home, much less than what everyone else does but not included.
00:08:47 Joe Mastrangelo
In.
00:08:47 Joe Mastrangelo
Today's levelized cost of storage at the same time, but we provide a lower round trip.
00:08:53 Joe Mastrangelo
Efficiency, but a wider operating range of wider discuss that depth of discharge and then also like to show people that our battery can sit at 0 charge and nothing happens to it. So you can leave.
00:09:03 Joe Mastrangelo
The system sitting at 0 for months come back, charge it, and the system will run again. There's value in that depending on the use case that you're being able to use, whereas with other technologies you're going to wind up damaging your system. If you do that.
00:09:15 Jeff McAulay
That's an interesting point on the on the parasitics as well, I wish levelized cost of storage was an easier concept for me. I feel like I'm, you know spoiled on L Coe in in solar which you just compared to the grid. So you know is that a easy metric to use and and if I could maybe propose another one which is just peak or parity?
00:09:37 Jeff McAulay
Right. At what point can you have a battery system that displaces a natural gas peaker? What do you think of that metric? Are we close to that point? Is there a tipping point here when batteries just literally replace peakers in large sections of the market?
00:09:37
Yeah.
00:09:52 Joe Mastrangelo
I think you're you're seeing that shift in places like California today. And I think the answer is.
00:09:59 Joe Mastrangelo
You know, yes you can get to that point where this, you know, as you call peak or parity where you know when you look at how the about our energy system is designed, right, it's it's all designed to handle peak load, Net margin on your peak load. So you've got way more than you need at the peak, but it's never available at one period of time. So then you wind up with you know the.
00:10:19 Joe Mastrangelo
Peer-to-peer gas plants, you know, offset.
00:10:22 Joe Mastrangelo
Adding that if you're able to take energy and store it when there's curtailing right. So I think you know when you talk about peeker, yeah, talk about the flip side of that, which is the curtailment side, which is huge. When you think about the amount of capacity that's wasted because you can't, there's not demand for it to be produced at a certain point in time. If storage comes in and marries up that peak demand with that.
00:10:42 Joe Mastrangelo
Retirement.
00:10:43 Joe Mastrangelo
Now all of a sudden you're at parity, but a different type of parity, or you got to think about it differently because you got to think about the opportunity cost of what you're capturing on not curtailing the renewals, saving that and using it when you would have used another asset to be able to do that. So we don't have the right metric today to be able to to be able to do that.
00:11:03 Joe Mastrangelo
Capture that and that's, I think part of the reason why you don't see this, you know, you see the you see the pent up demand in the projects but you don't see the projects closing as getting people understand how the actual process works tied into the economics and what the benefits are overall for the system to be able to do that.
00:11:21 Chris Sass
And when I when I think of storage and you talk about that whole ecosystem there, I guess domestic content is something that comes to mind, right? And you you talked about the zinc chemistry batteries. If you listen to the world, everyone's thinking horrible things because everyone else thinks we're so far behind in battery technology to do this.
00:11:31
Yeah.
00:11:41 Chris Sass
Kind of storage. What? What does the supply?
00:11:43 Chris Sass
Chain look like.
00:11:44 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah, it's a great question, Chris, like so.
00:11:48 Joe Mastrangelo
You know, I look at my career where I spent the 1st 26 years of my career in a in a very global business, putting factories around the world in places like China come to EO six years ago, less than 50 people pre revenue and trying to at the time the strategy was to put.
00:12:07 Joe Mastrangelo
A supply chain in China, and it was a hybrid supply chain like building dry batteries bringing into the US, filling them.
00:12:14 Joe Mastrangelo
Shipping the customers.
00:12:15 Joe Mastrangelo
Economically prohibitive and also didn't have the manpower to be able to do that. So we brought everything back to the US and said we're going to do this in a way where, you know, we were kind of forced by the economics of the company to say we're going to do this in a way where you get in your car and drive to your supplier. So we went out and found people with capability in other industries to help us develop the technology and the supply chain.
00:12:37 Joe Mastrangelo
The company, it's what saved the egos during COVID, right? If we hadn't done that pre COVID, there's no way we would have been able to survive through COVID given the way the world shut down, particularly when you look at going in and out of.
00:12:49 Joe Mastrangelo
Of China at that period of time. From there we just started building up capability supplier by supplier to where today you know more than 90% of our supply chain as US based our factory in and of itself is based in Turtle Creek, PA where Westinghouse was started. You know we're moving into the mob valley where where manufacturers been leaving the mob.
00:13:11 Joe Mastrangelo
Late 70s, early 80s, coming back in, we went from 2 employees 2019 to over 300 employees today.
00:13:18 Joe Mastrangelo
We put in a we put in an automated line which is made in Wisconsin, so we can still build things in the United States. We could still lead on technology. It also simplifies the supply chain and gives you that security of being able to supply the battery, but also that security of what you're putting on the grid has American made.
00:13:39 Joe Mastrangelo
Components.
00:13:40 Jeff McAulay
It's really inspiring, Joe, and it's been a a long journey. You said 16 years since founding. We're going to get into into some of.
00:13:47 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah.
00:13:49 Jeff McAulay
That part of.
00:13:50 Jeff McAulay
That long history and experience is about building confidence in the brand, building confidence in deployments, bankability in the eyes of of project financiers would have been some of the most important lessons in that journey, and in particular, does it just take time? Does it just take being around?
00:14:10 Jeff McAulay
For 16 years or there are ways if you look back that you think that could have been accelerated.
00:14:15 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah. So so like I I always think of the company and and that we've gone through.
00:14:20 Joe Mastrangelo
35 year phases, right? So phase one was proving that you can get the technology to work lab cells phase two was thinking about how you take a lab cell and get a product and then phase three in the last five years. How can you?
00:14:35 Joe Mastrangelo
Scale that for.
00:14:37 Joe Mastrangelo
Costs and economies and economies of scale, each one of those.
00:14:40 Joe Mastrangelo
Are are, are extremely challenging. What I always tell people is you.
00:14:44 Joe Mastrangelo
You know when you get the what you know the clean sheet of paper to build something, there's a lot you got to build around that besides a product. So it does take a while to do this. It does particularly in the battery space when you look at what's happening with other companies out there, there's there's a, there's peaks and valleys to how you get through.
00:15:02 Joe Mastrangelo
This and you.
00:15:03 Joe Mastrangelo
Don't learn until you actually.
00:15:05 Joe Mastrangelo
Get to that point in time. Now what we tried to do early on was we had a couple core philosophies that we went after. So what we say.
00:15:13 Joe Mastrangelo
That was.
00:15:14 Joe Mastrangelo
Every raw material that goes into our system has to be used somewhere else in the world. In another industry at scale. So we weren't out creating supply chain and creating materials for EOS. We were using when other people were using in our battery using our technology. The second piece was we said we're not going to build a.
00:15:34 Joe Mastrangelo
Massive Gigafactory because if we get it wrong, we're going to bankrupt ourselves because if it doesn't work, you're going to wind up that you're not going to have the money to fix it. So what we said was first learn how to do your individual manufacturing processes, then do semi automated line and semi automated meaning that you change your material flow around to figure out how you want to lay your line.
00:15:56 Joe Mastrangelo
Then do a state-of-the-art automated.
00:15:59 Joe Mastrangelo
Guideline doing those two guiding principles kind of allowed us to get through the other side, then the third piece was looked at the energy industry and the experience that a lot of us have in it and said this has got to be something that's simple without a lot of ancillary systems around has to be easy to operate. We took those three things. We wound up with something that.
00:16:19 Joe Mastrangelo
Got us to the point where we're scaling and producing energy out in the field where I think others in the past have had struggles to be able to do this. So this is not easy and I always tell people probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my career was what we're.
00:16:31 Joe Mastrangelo
Doing right now as team videos.
00:16:33 Chris Sass
So I I like the concept that you found other industries and and used readily available materials. I I worked at a startup once where we didn't do that and that was very cost prohibitive to get the economies of scale needed. So that was pretty interesting. But there is a perception that lithium batteries are ruling the world today and we're talking about a different technology.
00:16:54 Chris Sass
There maybe help me understand a bit about the advantages and disadvantages of zinc over lithium.
00:17:00 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah. So, so I think I think we're talking about is, you know there's there's things where lithium is the right application. And I and I always draw parallels of, you know, there's always going to be a mix in the energy.
00:17:14 Joe Mastrangelo
You know, when you look at what we're talking about this.
00:17:17 Joe Mastrangelo
Wanting to have a system that can handle variation that has multiple ways to operate that gives you the flexibility on use cases is not flammable. Made in the USA, you know when we talk to people you always wind up with two types.
00:17:31 Joe Mastrangelo
Of discussions, right?
00:17:32 Joe Mastrangelo
Everybody looks at what you're trying to do and says, wow, that's a really steep ramp. You're trying to get through that's going.
00:17:38 Joe Mastrangelo
To be hard.
00:17:39 Joe Mastrangelo
And there's other people that look at it and say, yeah, but you're going.
00:17:42 Joe Mastrangelo
To do all that and still only.
00:17:43 Joe Mastrangelo
Have 3% of the market. I thought this was a great technology, but that 3% of a market is a couple of billion dollar company, right? So I think like as I've thought about this is there's plenty of use cases out there. We don't feel like we compete directly against lithium ion. We're complementary to one another.
00:18:03 Joe Mastrangelo
To what we need to do, and we we don't look at this and say, hey, if you want to do 2 hour discharge every day, use EOS. That's not we're not the right technology for them. But when somebody comes and says some days I'm going to want to charge for two hours, I'm going to want to charge for seven. I'm going to discharge for seven. I want to discharge for two. We've got that technology that needs.
00:18:22 Joe Mastrangelo
That need, you know, if you're going into an area where where where non flammability is important, we meet that need. If you're going into an area where you need it to be quiet because we don't have any ancillary systems, you know our systems sound, you know they make the same amount of noise that we're making, talking to one another today. So between the safety of the silence and the flexibility, you've got something that.
00:18:43 Joe Mastrangelo
Other people can't do and there.
00:18:44 Joe Mastrangelo
Are use cases for that.
00:18:46 Chris Sass
And how does it economically stack up against alternative choices?
00:18:50 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah. Well, so, Chris, if you go back to this concept of take what's already being used in other industries, your cost curve comes down. You know relatively rapidly as you scale the company. And when you look at from a material cost standpoint, we feel like we're very competitive against any other technology out there. What we need to do right now.
00:19:10 Joe Mastrangelo
Is scale into the overhead of our facility to take the total cost down and make the company profitable and that's what we've been working on here for the last year as we bring.
00:19:19 Joe Mastrangelo
On the state-of-the-art line.
00:19:21 Jeff McAulay
Joe, you've you've got a tremendous amount of perspective coming in here. So we got to talk about how you arrived at this perspective because it seems obvious when you say it, but yet there's a lot of companies out there who are not necessarily heading these, these lessons, the staged growth approach, the supply chain management really going hard on onshore.
00:19:41 Jeff McAulay
That's those are all I think stories that we don't hear nearly enough. Tell us about your personal professional journey and how you arrived at some of those insights.
00:19:51 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah, so so.
00:19:53 Joe Mastrangelo
I started at General Electric, you know, now it's 30 two years ago. Hard to believe and started off in the in, in the energy business and the power business in Schenectady, NY. I'm a finance person by, by background. I went to work in the oil and gas. I I spent seven years working in finance across G.
00:20:13 Joe Mastrangelo
Went to Europe to work for G's oil and gas business, so it was involved in the ramp up of LNG, offshore oil and gas, you know, started when oil prices.
00:20:23 Joe Mastrangelo
Were in the.
00:20:23 Joe Mastrangelo
Teens and went through to where everybody was talking about $200 a barrel of oil, then led the integration of electrical systems business. In my last job was.
00:20:32 Joe Mastrangelo
Creating the gas power systems business for GE. So when I when I came into the job, I had this tremendous amount of experience, was blessed with being able to work across the world with large teams.
00:20:45 Joe Mastrangelo
And really saw things from going after challenges and opportunities with a lot of scale behind you and had to come in and say I've got to think about everything in in reverse and what we're doing in yields and really think about what if you don't have the resources to do things, what if you don't have the funding to be able to do this, you know like like?
00:21:04 Joe Mastrangelo
What I always say is.
00:21:06 Joe Mastrangelo
What I learned at EOS. It's like if you if you're faced with a challenge at GE, you look at that and you say, well, let's let's look at the three alternatives and move those forward and give each a little bit of money to one emerges as as what we're going to work on.
00:21:20 Joe Mastrangelo
And EOS you had to pick the one because that's all you could do. So you became much better at capital allocation than you would be in a big company. But then also if you go back to like Jeff, you brought up in your comment around bringing back the manufacturing from China and and bringing it to the United.
00:21:35 Joe Mastrangelo
States.
00:21:36 Joe Mastrangelo
I knew it. I knew what it took to set a factory up, you know, internationally I.
00:21:40 Joe Mastrangelo
I do the amount of work I do, the support, you know, these things don't happen overnight. You don't just turn it over and somebody manufactures a new product for you without you being involved in doing this. And you have to know how.
00:21:52 Joe Mastrangelo
That is, and really what we what you know like when I looked at it as is is, you know, you know realistically what it came down to was like we couldn't afford the plane tickets to send people to China to to watch the partner work on this. So it was like, what are you going to spend your money on it? And that's ultimately how we started doing it and it's turned into a into a strategic advantage.
00:22:12 Joe Mastrangelo
For the company, but all that kind of catalog of experiences and seeing things grow like I've been through, I always say like I've been through three nuclear renaissances in my career. I've seen, you know, I've seen that come and go. I've seen a lot of things that we're talking about today come and go. So you you kind of have to.
00:22:30 Joe Mastrangelo
Look at it. Think about like, what's going to make.
00:22:33 Joe Mastrangelo
Something successful is you have a demand for it. It's easy to use as a competitive cost, and it meets A use case that customers want and that's how we kind of tried to focus EOS over the last six years.
00:22:45 Jeff McAulay
You highlighted some of the benefits and drawbacks of the capitalization of the company. So in GE, you don't have to worry about raising external money, but maybe the fact that you do it makes you scrappy and really thoughtful in in how you make those.
00:22:53
Right.
00:23:00 Jeff McAulay
Decisions. Can you talk about how the capitalization of EOS has progressed and how you've been able to raise money cause honestly for for companies in this space just surviving is is a big part of the battle.
00:23:14 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah, I mean we, we.
00:23:17 Joe Mastrangelo
You know, we went public four years ago and the NASDAQ was back, you know, it's been a it's been a journey to be able to, to kind.
00:23:28 Joe Mastrangelo
Work our way through that. Like when you look at when you look, I talked about the challenges in COVID, right? Then what came out of COVID was high inflation, right? So so there was a period of time where our entire plan for the company became challenged just because, you know, what was a very cheap item in our bill of material.
00:23:47 Joe Mastrangelo
Became very expensive. And how do you offset that and how do you bring that make?
00:23:51 Joe Mastrangelo
It.
00:23:51 Joe Mastrangelo
Domestic, you know raising capital, going through and kind of doing it of progress and move the ball forward like what I always.
00:23:59 Joe Mastrangelo
That was when you know the mindset shift I had to have as a leader here was less about deliver your target to more right given given the capital that we have, what progress can we make, you know that kind of changed for us back in January where you know Cerberus came in with a large investment in the company with through their strategic.
00:24:20 Joe Mastrangelo
Fight chain fund. We're now you have the backing and the network to be able to position the company strategically to grow where up until that time we're in a fight for survival. To prove that we can actually build this product and really why?
00:24:36 Joe Mastrangelo
Got people through. This was understanding the talent of the team that we have and also being able to come here in Turtle Creek and see US manufacturing batteries and saying OK, I get it, this is they're right, it's simple. It can be done.
00:24:50 Jeff McAulay
So Joe, take a.
00:24:52 Jeff McAulay
Take a ride in a time machine with us five years in the future. You mentioned those kind of three, five year chunks were chatting again over coffee or beer five years from now and you're like Jeff, this was the 4th 5 year chunk.
00:25:09 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah, I mean, now, now it's really about.
00:25:13 Joe Mastrangelo
Getting, you know, becoming, you know, operational operational excellence. So like the, the, the, the place where you know we've struggled as a company has been you know hitting our targets, right. So I think this next phase of our development is going to be delivering on expectations.
00:25:32 Joe Mastrangelo
Not just delivering on expectations to shareholders, but also to customers, right? So. So I think there's a huge.
00:25:39 Joe Mastrangelo
Need in the industry, so like everybody thinks. Like when you say energy storage batteries, right, we all think it's easy. We think it's like clipping that battery into your remote control and away we go. It's pretty complex when you think about what you're trying to do and the integration of software integration, electrical system integration and how it operates. So like we want to be world class in that area.
00:26:00 Joe Mastrangelo
And how we do and how we do that and then be the become the company of choice to be the partner, to have the best uptime and availability product out in the marketplace and then we'll see where that goes from there, where you can build out around that. But like the strategy of the company, it's always been a differentiated battery technology at its core.
00:26:20 Joe Mastrangelo
Very simple system design, proprietary battery management system and now getting into total energy, energy, storage systems excellence. Like when I first came in.
00:26:31 Joe Mastrangelo
Where where I was wrong was I thought look, we just have to build a DC system and plug that into whatever the end user wants to use. Like we're too small to dictate what somebody's going to use as their as their energy management system or their or their inverter or transformer. But many customers are asking for that, that design and execution.
00:26:53 Joe Mastrangelo
We've got to build that capability and become.
00:26:54 Joe Mastrangelo
World class around them.
00:26:56 Chris Sass
So I think you helped what was coming to my mind is.
00:27:00 Chris Sass
You know, you talked about the financing, you talked about the vision of where you need to go, but scaling's hard, right? That that that is the hard thing you talked about, you know manufacturing onshore offshore and all the economic trade-offs. So with funding and that excellence.
00:27:05 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah, yeah.
00:27:14 Chris Sass
Talk a little bit more about the scaling. I mean, you built a plant, but you have to have pipeline to get the cost down per unit cost needs to drop down.
00:27:22 Chris Sass
How do you go to a market that doesn't usually have early movers that aren't excited to be first? Or maybe it's, you know, developers that are OK being first, but then they're looking at bankability and is this really a credible solution that has the the availability to put funds in?
00:27:36 Chris Sass
Yeah. Are you scaling this up?
00:27:38 Joe Mastrangelo
So so when you look at so Chris that like, let's put aside, I've talked a lot about the operational scaling of this on the commercial.
00:27:48 Joe Mastrangelo
You know, we're building up, you know, being able to provide insurance because there's always the question around, you know, the question that's gone away with the Cerberus investment is, is CEO's going to be here? Right. So I think everybody now understands EOS will be here. We're talking to customers, we, we, we. We explained to them now.
00:28:07 Joe Mastrangelo
Backing that we have and the investment and the investment that.
00:28:10 Joe Mastrangelo
Yeah. Then it's really coming in and saying what do you need from a warranty standpoint or insurance standpoint to prove out the technology? And then again it it goes back to like you got to work each project individually to get through that bankability question and it's different for every. It's different for every customer. It's different for every application, it's different.
00:28:30 Joe Mastrangelo
And a lot of times, like we're in the midst of.
00:28:33 Joe Mastrangelo
Getting ready to execute on what some of our customers are calling pilot projects, but these pilot projects are 50 MW hour projects. So these are not small projects, right. That then proves that you can do something at scale and once you do something at scale, you know you got to earn that right to grow and that's where we are right now in that continuum. And I think part of why.
00:28:54 Joe Mastrangelo
Going back to.
00:28:55 Joe Mastrangelo
Jeff's earlier question about around demand and when do we see this with all this demand, where's the growth? I think that's the process that everybody has to work through to get to that point where people come and see and say, OK, I know like what I always tell my team is when a customer places a purchase order with us, they're kind of betting their career a little bit on our ability to deliver.
00:29:17 Joe Mastrangelo
And we need to be able to deliver when somebody wants to bet their career, it's going to take a while to get through and get everybody comfortable with what we want to do. But every day we have people coming to the facility that come and see.
00:29:28 Joe Mastrangelo
The the product coming off the line, we talk walk them to another building and show them product that's operating as we're doing factory acceptance testing and they see that it works and that helps us overcome those hurts.
00:29:42 Jeff McAulay
Joe, for the listeners who might be early in their career, they're they're graduating. They're excited about energy and sustainability. They want to do something. They maybe coming from a tech sector and have a set of skills and and want to apply it. They're coming apply that. They're coming from the finance. What advice would you have given that we have a wide range of listeners?
00:30:03 Jeff McAulay
For people who want to be more active in this space.
00:30:06 Joe Mastrangelo
Look, I I think you know it's it's an exciting time to be in the space and like and if and if you know like when I look back when my career started, you know, I wasn't sitting in you in college saying, you know, I really want, I really want a career in energy. Like that wasn't what I was thinking. Like I I got a job with a big company that said, yeah, well.
00:30:26 Joe Mastrangelo
We're going to move you around. You have all these opportunities and I.
00:30:28 Joe Mastrangelo
Went to Schenectady and then what? I what I learned is how fascinating this industry really is. Right. So, Jeff, you've touched on every project has this element of strategy behind it, where you're mixing this technology to use case with financing and putting pieces of the puzzle together than having to deliver it and get it operating, you know like.
00:30:48 Joe Mastrangelo
So so so.
00:30:49 Joe Mastrangelo
It's exciting around that. And then at the same time.
00:30:53 Joe Mastrangelo
The the fundamental secular shift that's happening, we're we are at this period of time going to change the way the world powers its future. So if you're sitting there and your example of you're a software person like we're scratching the surface of what software artificial intelligence can do in this industry, machine learning.
00:31:13 Joe Mastrangelo
To make assets better, I mean, it's pretty exciting to be able to do this, right? So like, you know, like when when I when I think about where I started, I was so naive and thinking about like, yeah, how much power do you put on?
00:31:25 Joe Mastrangelo
You know this 32 years ago, how many gas turbines are you building every year? Little did I know how much it was and how exciting it is and how you have to put all these pieces together. So it's pretty exciting to be able to to do this. I think if I if early in my career what I would always say is you know, come in and learn and you're going to find an industry that is, you know if you want to.
00:31:46 Joe Mastrangelo
Change the future of the world and the way the world powers itself, and help the environment. You get that here. If you want to come in and prove out that you know, like when you look in the US right now, that we can still manufacture in the US and.
00:31:59 Joe Mastrangelo
Get that in the industry right now and if you want to look and and say like, hey, I'm, I'm giving people and creating an opportunity for careers for people. That's also part of what you're doing. I mean, that's kind of the three pronged value proposition that I think about as you as you look at a job at EOS of doing those three things and I add on top of it.
00:32:19 Joe Mastrangelo
Doing something that's very.
00:32:20 Joe Mastrangelo
Difficult to be done, so if you if you're, if you're that type of person who has belief in themselves, they can do things that no one's ever done before. This is a great industry to come.
00:32:30 Joe Mastrangelo
In and show how good you are.
00:32:31 Jeff McAulay
That's an inspiring vision, Joe. Thank you for being a guide through so many different topics. The technology, the financing, the market, the career development. This is a really fantastic conversation. Really appreciate you. Thank you.
00:32:44 Joe Mastrangelo
Thank you. Thanks for the.
00:32:46 Chris Sass
What a fun episode this has been finding about manufacturing on shore zinc batteries. It it's great if you like this content. Don't forget to comment. Don't forget to subscribe to us and invite your friends to share the comments. We enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for being our guest and we'll see you again next time on the insiders guide to energy. Bye for now.