#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Eric Chaves, Founder, Terrament
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Advancing Energy Storage Technology
Terrament's journey began with a commitment to enhancing sustainable energy solutions and a desire to overcome the limitations of traditional energy storage methods. By leveraging shaft-digging technology from the mining industry, Terrament developed an innovative approach to replicate the energy storage capabilities of pumped hydro without needing mountains or water. We chatted with Founder Eric Chaves about how policymakers can support startups in the energy and climate space, the importance of government grant programs, and his vision for the future.
Tell us about your background. What led you to found Terrament?
When I created Terrament about four years ago, I worked as a software developer. In college, I studied engineering until switching my major to architecture. I then worked in architecture and industrial design until 2008 when the market crash pushed me into a career in software. I started Terrament because I wanted to work in the climate industry, but I wasn't sure exactly how. We did a lot of research into the industry, and the first problem that jumped out was the lack of energy storage. At the time, one of the only forms of long term energy storage was pumped hydro, which utilizes two water reservoirs at different elevations to generate power as water moves down from one to the other, passing through a turbine. Returning to my engineering and industrial design roots, I started asking, what if we dig deep underground to solve the energy storage issue? We’ve pushed this idea forward, gotten into accelerator programs, built prototypes, acquired a patent, and arrived at where we are now.
What is the work you all are doing at Terrament?
Terrament is building large-scale energy storage to replicate what pumped hydro does, but without needing mountains or water. We do this by using an already proven technology utilized by the mining industry—shaft digging technology. The form factor is heavy train cars with motor generators and gears inside each car module. The train starts horizontally above ground, about a half mile long. Then, the train will turn and descend a vertical shaft, where on the way down, it produces electricity with regenerative braking. Regenerative braking is similar to when your electric car goes downhill and you put on the brakes, it recharges the car battery. But in our case, there are no chemical batteries. As this weight is lowered, it is spinning gears, which turn a generator, sending power up an electric rail back up to the grid. If there is too much power in the grid, you can use the same motor generator in reverse and lift the train back up above ground.
So again, just like pumped hydro, we are just moving weight up and down, and that can balance the entire grid. Pumped hydro is about 90 percent of the world's energy storage. Instead of the typical chemical battery we think of as energy storage, almost the entire grid is balanced just by lifting water up and down a mountain. But now, these natural sites with water and mountains are a nearly tapped-out resource. The key difference between our design and other gravity storage is that we're maximizing these two ingredients, height and weight in a way that is much more energy-dense than other gravity storage technologies.
What should policymakers know about startup innovation in the climate and energy space?
Recently, I attended the Washington Energy Summit. Even for that largely conservative audience, it seemed the focus for everyone was on a diverse energy mix that included a rapid growth of renewables especially solar and storage. On the fossil fuel front, it seemed the only significant focus was on natural gas, which is cleaner than other fossil fuels while delivering critical energy density. Even if decarbonization was not necessarily everyone’s primary concern, they all seemed aligned that this push towards a cleaner energy mix was simply the best economic choice. They were looking at data centers and the huge constraints of getting new resources online, transmission constraints, and energy security.
Across the board, everyone is eager to push long-duration storage forward as urgently as possible. There are lots of different long-duration storage solutions, and they all have different strengths. Four main categories are mechanical, thermal, electrochemical, and chemical storage. Gravity storage, which is a type of mechanical storage, is super efficient and scalable for grid storage. If you're going to translate electricity to gravitational potential energy then back to electricity, you get about 85 percent efficiency round trip. That’s much higher than using thermal or electrochemical storage which would require converting electricity to hydrogen and back, or electricity to heat and back. While those solutions are going to be great if you need the heat or you need the hydrogen for a dense fuel, it's just not going to be efficient, and doesn't make sense to balance the grid or balance transmission. As I mentioned, pumped hydro is the only dominant solution today for balancing the grid, with compressed air being a distant second, and those are both mechanical storage. Pumped hydro is great, but it’s becoming a tapped-out resource. So Terrament is looking to step in and fill the gap where pumped hydro is not available. While there are so many different technologies that are important, we need a grid storage solution as cheap, efficient, and reliable as pumped hydro’s gravity storage, and Terrament can provide that without geographic constraints.
How have you leveraged grant funding and accelerators to help your business grow?
Accelerator programs have been hugely important for us. I was first accepted into a Stony Brook-based accelerator called Clean Energy Business Innovation Portal (CEBIP), and subsequently joined the New Lab Founder Fellowship, Plug and Play, and CleanTech Open. These programs have acted as a support system as I’ve built out the business. For example, the Plug and Play program has connected us with manufacturing companies in Japan, and the CleanTech Open program has connected us to a deep network of climate companies and pushed us through a bootcamp of lecture material that feels like a mini-MBA. We are also applying for grant funding from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), as well as California State grants. There are so many government programs putting out grants specifically looking at long-duration storage, including the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, and more.
Are there any other startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
Raising money is extremely difficult. For any hardware, large-scale company, the returns that we expect are going to be enormous, but they're not going to happen in five years. We need longer, more patient capital with more runway. The best source of early funding for companies like mine is still angel investors. Early VCs, even the ones who focus on climate, are not typically going to give up the expectation of a 10x return in five years as their most optimistic story that they want you to tell. That's been the hardest thing for a company like mine that began with meager savings and some loans from friends and family. It's been nearly impossible to get this off the ground. While accelerator programs have been very helpful providing amazing pro-bono support, early-stage cash awards have proven tough for climate tech hardware. We’ve seen programs say they want to support big, impactful technologies, but then stick to software investments, because it's just a safer bet. It can feel like a catch-22, where we need cash to build our prototypes, but the programs for early stage startups say we’re a little “too early” until we have more advanced prototypes. Of course I understand why it works this way; hardware is risky. But it poses a steep early barrier to overcome.
What are your goals for Terrament moving forward?
After a year of research, accelerator programs, and bootstrapped prototyping, we’re gearing up for the fall when we’ll raise money and apply for multiple grants for funding to build a pilot project next year. We already have all of the engineering firepower we need with our engineering partners who co-apply to grants with us. Finally, we're looking ahead at customer discovery and keeping our eye on the rapidly growing energy storage market as we plan for the development of our first-of-a-kind and second-of-a-kind projects a few years from now.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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