The Energy Exchange

On this episode of The Energy Exchange, Host David Hidinger talked with Sarah Hill, Director of Sustainability at Becton Dickinson (BD), one of the largest global medical technology companies in the world and is advancing the world of health by improving medical discovery, diagnostics and the delivery of care. They talked about BD, the importance of ESG, and Hill’s career.Before landing at BD, Hill worked for one of BD’s competitors as a Product Stewardship Manager and Sustainability manager, where she wore many hats and took on many roles. Her duties focused on product compliance, environmental legislation compliance for medical devices, and a small amount of sustainability strategy work. An opportunity opened up at BD, so she made the move.“My role is Director of Sustainability, but I still wear a couple of different hats,” Hill said. “I haven’t moved completely away from the product stewardship work, so I still partner with colleagues on my time and the rest of the business on various stewardship issues.”But, primarily, she focuses on sustainability disclosures, such as sustainability reporting, “an alphabet soup of frameworks we have to follow.” She also engages with stakeholders, such as investors, customers, suppliers, and associates. She is also in charge of setting up their sustainability strategy.“Working with partners around the business to identify what are important environmental and social governance issues, figure out where we need to go in the next ten years, what’s important for our stakeholders, and get a strategy together,” Hill said.

On this episode of The Energy Exchange, Host David Hidinger talked with John Schulz, Director of Sustainability Integrations at AT&T. They talked about Schulz’s career, how he got into his current role, and his role in helping AT&T lead the way in sustainability. “I’ve been really lucky,” Schulz said. “I’ve had the chance to do lots of different jobs within sustainability.”Of the 19 years Schulz has been at AT&T, 14 of them have been in sustainability. He started by looking at the media company’s footprint and how they use electricity. As the first to gauge the companies carbon footprint, he measured the company’s emissions back in 2008. This led him to work on other parts of the business, such as the supply chain and vehicle fleet. As the first person to tackle AT&T’s carbon footprint, it seems like an enormous task. But, the company was ahead of its time when it came to tackling this work. Schulz noted that there were protocols and technical documents available for companies taking on the job, with a lot of intelligent people setting up the guidelines. “We were early in the cycle when our first emission portfolio came out in 2008,” Schulz said. “We were in the early group to do that. It was exciting and challenging.” But, he might be most excited about what he is working on now: customers. He is currently examining how AT&T’s connectivity can enable their customers to reduce their carbon footprint through energy or fuel use and even water and raw materials. Listen to hear more about Schulz’s career with sustainability at AT&T.

How are key stakeholders driving change in energy? Many are forging a path to renewable energy, carbon neutrality, and leveraging data and technology to be more energy efficient. Discussing AT&T’s journey, Energy Exchange host David Hidinger spoke with the company’s Director of Global Environmental Sustainability, Shannon Carroll.Carroll has been with the company for over 22 years, and in the last 10, he’s focused on sustainability. “Our commitment to this is companywide, from the mitigation side to reduce emissions, investment in renewable energy, and being more efficient with the energy we do use.”On the renewable energy bucket, AT&T works as an investor to developers, guaranteeing that they will buy energy produced. “Last year, we had the largest solar deal to date, where we purchased 500 megawatts,” Carroll said. Since 2018, the company contracted to purchase over 1.5 gigawatts of renewable energy, which Carroll noted: “reduces greenhouse gas emissions, provides developers financial security, and boosts the local economy with clean energy job creation.”AT&T also focuses on using energy more efficiently, and since 2010 has created over 100,000 energy-efficient projects. What’s unique is that they go beyond the best practices, leveraging data to make smarter decisions. “We are to the next level of predictive analytics and optimization, through IoT integration. We work with the data office to find opportunities.”Their data process matured beyond streams of data, with sensors working in conjunction to drive meaningful insights. “What we see for the future is more real-time data analysis and knowing in the moment how decisions will save on costs and usage,” Carroll shared.

How are key stakeholders driving change in energy? Many are forging a path to renewable energy, carbon neutrality, and leveraging data and technology to be more energy efficient. Discussing AT&T’s journey, Energy Exchange host David Hidinger spoke with the company’s Director of Global Environmental Sustainability, Shannon Carroll.Carroll has been with the company for over 22 years, and in the last 10, he’s focused on sustainability. “Our commitment to this is companywide, from the mitigation side to reduce emissions, investment in renewable energy, and being more efficient with the energy we do use.”On the renewable energy bucket, AT&T works as an investor to developers, guaranteeing that they will buy energy produced. “Last year, we had the largest solar deal to date, where we purchased 500 megawatts,” Carroll said. Since 2018, the company contracted to purchase over 1.5 gigawatts of renewable energy, which Carroll noted: “reduces greenhouse gas emissions, provides developers financial security, and boosts the local economy with clean energy job creation.”AT&T also focuses on using energy more efficiently, and since 2010 has created over 100,000 energy-efficient projects. What’s unique is that they go beyond the best practices, leveraging data to make smarter decisions. “We are to the next level of predictive analytics and optimization, through IoT integration. We work with the data office to find opportunities.”Their data process matured beyond streams of data, with sensors working in conjunction to drive meaningful insights. “What we see for the future is more real-time data analysis and knowing in the moment how decisions will save on costs and usage,” Carroll shared.

As the next “season” of The Energy Exchange kicks off, host David Hidinger started things off with a bang, inviting AT&T AVP - Global Environmental Sustainability Charles Herget onto the show to explore a variety of topics related to sustainability and the initiatives of the telco juggernaut.In his role, Herget leads AT&T’s corporate environmental sustainability efforts across the organization, taking stock of end-to-end processes in order to evaluate how the company can achieve its sustainability goals.Perhaps its most prominent current goal is carbon neutrality, which the organization hopes to achieve by 2035. That’s a tall order made taller by the addition of several other considerations, including:Expansion of its Climate Change Analysis ToolAchieving net zero Scope 1 and 2 emissionsA commitment to network resiliency in the face of natural disasters and other disruptionsInfluencing suppliers and partners in an effort to engender widespread impactHerget and Hidinger dove into these goals, identifying specific steps the organization is taking to achieve them, exploring their potential impact on service across the globe, and examining the critical importance of connectivity in a world advancing more rapidly than ever before.

With that in mind, Hidinger took this episode of the show to look back on those episodes and hit the high points, offering a quick tour through the educational and engaging conversations to this point.In episodes one through 11, he and his guests have covered:Improved Battery TechnologiesDisputes over PipelinesThe Shale Revolution & Power GridsExpanding Electric Transmission LinesDesigning Sustainable CitiesSimulating Vertical WindmillsProtecting America’s Cyber InfrastructureHow to Use IoT to Manage the Energy GridWhat Will The Home of The Future Look Like?How to Get Perfect Power in the HomeCould New Technology Pioneer an Entirely New Era of Seawater Mining?That’s quite the tour around the industry. Even so, Hidinger has identified several common trends, including new technology’s mark on the overall landscape and the acceleration of innovation, the role decreasing sensor costs have played in the industry, the impact of increases in computing power, and more.In upcoming episodes, Hidinger and his guests will expand their lens even further, tackling what the world’s largest enterprises are doing in terms of energy and other forward-looking subjects.

Lithium and other resources naturally found in our planet have become cornerstones of modern society. For example, consider how many devices you use on a daily basis might become useless hunks of metal or plastic without lithium batteries to power them.However, that also means we’re putting increased strain on our shared environment in our attempt to meet the demand for these key resources.Still, there’s hope – and Zhiping Lai and Zhen Li of KAUST University are opening doors to a potential new era of seawater mining.That’s because seawater contains trace amounts of valuable minerals, which we otherwise have to mine out of the Earth. Now, Lai and Li are repurposing a material that has been known to the battery industry for a long time – Lithium lanthanum Titanium Dioxide, or LLTO – to facilitate the extraction of lithium out of seawater."From the very beginning, we knew this was a challenging task," Lai said. "In seawater, the concentration of lithium is very, very low. ... We needed a very, very selective membrane that could separate the lithium out of other items."This technology has the obvious advantage of having access to a far greater quantity, albeit more distributed, of lithium in the water than found on land. It carries the obvious benefit of not needing to mine the Earth, but also the added benefit of taking waste streams from chloro-alkali facilities and water desalination plants and separating out lithium to be resold to the hungry battery manufacturing market.What makes this membrane unique is its selectivity to lithium, which allows it to separate it at a much higher rate than other materials. It allows for high-quality, high-purity lithium to be created (99.94% precipitated lithium phosphate), which makes it an extremely exciting innovation – and one that could reshape the way the world views seawater.

On this episode of The Energy Exchange, Host David Hidinger talked with Joe Piccirilli, CEO of Rosewater Energy, which creates innovative and intelligent energy management systems for governments, utilities, industries, and residential consumers. Focused on the mission to develop the next generation of renewable smart grid systems leveraging the best battery storage technologies, RoseWater works with their clients to design, build, integrate and manage power system assets specific to their needs.Piccirilli spent nearly 50 years in the consumer electronics world. Through his travels in the industry, he noticed how much automation they were putting into people’s homes. Some of this automation includes the shades, the lights, and the doors. With this much automation being put into homes, they load up these homes with microprocessors. “In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was finding there were so many people who were incredibly dissatisfied with this product because it didn’t work,” Piccirilli said. “It always had to be rebooted. It was glitchy.”When he examined the product, he realized the product wasn’t wrong, and the installation was sound. So he wondered why these weren’t working, so he started to examine the problem. It turned out that power issues caused all the annoyances. Electric sags, surges, and micro outages from the grid were causing problems for the products. This led him to examine the electrical grid. Here he found out that a generator can predict the electrical load, which means it will sag and surge. Before automation, nobody noticed these ups and downs. “The worst thing that happened, if you can remember the days of VCRs, is the little clock blinked on and off,” Piccirilli said. “Now, those sags and surges can prevent your air conditioning from running. They can prevent you from turning on your lights.”In 2012, he started working on a product that would provide perfect power at the residential level. Listen to hear more about Piccirilli’s and Rosewater’s power solution.

When Host David Hidinger talked to his grandfather, born in 1939, he relayed a story about how he was raised in a one-room home out west. But, contemporary homes have certainly advanced beyond a one-room shack. So, it leaves the question: what will the home of the future look like?Joining Hidinger on The Energy Exchange to give insights on the future abode is Troy Morgan, President of Pantech Design, the developer of ADAPT, the leading software framework for programming Crestron automation software. Pantech launched in 2005, building the software and engineering of automation systems that go in homes, yachts, and other types of buildings. They grew into the energy side of things as they worked to fully automate homes by tying most aspects of a house together.With a lot of automation going into homes, the home of the future will most likely adjust based on certain circumstances. One of the main things will be energy. A house could automatically adjust its power based on the energy on the grid. If a home were to lose full power from a grid, a home could pivot to use solar panels or generators to keep the house running until power returns.But, future homes will likely control more than the power. One example would be a home tracking the location of the sun. It would determine how much light is coming in a window and adjust the lumen value so that lights are minimally used during daylight.“A user would be able to set a lumen or light value for the room, and say ‘I want this room to always remain at 800 lumens,’” Morgan said. “It will have a system that manages that with the shades and the interior lighting of the room. The room is self-aware now that it knows how much light is in a room. If we use a first or primary control mechanism to adjust the shades to control the lighting. If there’s no light coming in from the window, we now use the interior lights.”

On this episode of The Energy Exchange, Host David Hidinger is joined by Andy Bennett, CEO of mPrest, a company revolutionizing orchestration and optimization software for industrial IoT, using AI and data-driven technology to provide real-time, end-to-end visibility and control over mission-critical systems, enabling digital IT/OT integration with a focus on Renewable Energy, while also working with Smart Cities, Cyber, Homeland Security, and Defense. Hidinger and Bennett talk about mPrest's mDERMS Intelligent Grid Management System.mPrest got its start developing a software system for the Iron Dome, the missile defense system in Israel, which has recently been in the news.  mPrest developed a complex computational set of algorithms that can solve problems quickly. When they had this success on the defense side, they started thinking about the next logical place to apply their work. As they started their research, they realized that many of the same problems exist in the energy market.With this knowledge, they turned their attention to building a new company that focused on the energy market and then turned to Bennett, who was recently named the CEO at mPrest. As the world shifts to renewable and distributed energy coming onto the grid, mPrest birthed this position of the company. These new distributed energy resources, or DERS, will more effectively manage utilities and energy deployment, and DERMS, a distributed energy resource management system, will oversee the entire system.“The concept of DERMS is ‘how do I really start to orchestrate all those resources so that I can really make sound decisions,’” Bennett said. “If I am an operator of a grid, it’s one thing to have all those things out there, but if I can’t deal with them in a fairly coordinate way, and I can’t know what my demand load is going to be, when I need to go buy more power, when I need to produce more power, what that DERMS does is start to plan out at least 24 hours in advance.”Their solution is mDERMS, a distributed energy resource management system with a less rigid architecture. Listen to hear more about their solution.

On this episode of The Energy Exchange, Host David Hidinger talked with Dr. Ondrej Krehel, CEO and Founder of LIFARS, a global leader in Incident Response, Digital Forensics, Penetration Testing, Ransomware Mitigation, and Cyber Resiliency Services. They talked about Krehel's career, his work at LIFARS, and critical cyber infrastructure.Known for his experience in digital forensics and ethical hacking, Krehel has over two decades of experience in the industry. He started in this field when he was 19 years old in Czechoslovakia, with his primary role in the U.S. to stop the threats of nation-state hackers. Specifically, his team worked on oil tech and pharma hacker intrusions. He is also certified as an ethical hacker and instructor."It means that you are capable of performing ethical hacking into clients' environments," Krehel said. While some hackers do it maliciously, ethical hackers attack a company's systems to find weak spots and help find vulnerabilities to make a more robust network.Throughout his career, he noticed that work started on the government level but shifted to the private sector. Initially, it was in financial services where there were lots of private transactions related to economic activities. Other industries are still catching up in cyberspace."So, I would say financial industries had an upper edge with cybersecurity and took it more seriously because they've seen the first commercial accounts being breached," Krehel said. "They saw the monetary losses."Listen to hear more about Krehel's career, cybersecurity, the Colonial Pipeline Hack, and protecting America's critical cyber infrastructure.

As energy demands shift from fossil fuels, the world will turn to other energy sources. One of those is wind energy. Energy Exchange Host David Hidinger came across Joachim Toftegaard Hansen’s work when he published a few papers on wind farms of the future. On this episode of Energy Exchange, Hidinger talked with Hansen, a Fluid Mechanics Engineer at Aerotek and Master’s Student at the Technical University of Denmark, about his research and writing on wind farms. Hansen’s undergrad thesis dissertation focused on wind turbines. He studied at Oxford Brookes University, where they have an advanced research computing facility central to his work. With a long-time interest in structural mechanics, he set out on understanding wind turbines. While on holiday back in Denmark, he started reaching out to wind turbine companies and asking about working on a project. They didn’t do projects with undergrad students, but he found some information on YouTube about an American professor.He found CalTech Professor John Dabiri and his unique vertical-axis wind turbines. Inspired, he thought about ‘what if you ran a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) test on these turbines?’ Dabiri had run a lot of tests, but Hansen understood the future of these turbines lay in CFD. He pitched the idea, and his thesis was approved. “A numerical way to solve these famous Navier stokes equations,” Hansen said. These types of partial-differential equations can solve the most challenging problems in fluid dynamics. This is why the computers at Brookes were so central to Hansen’s work. He literally had to run thousands of mathematical simulations on supercomputers. “If I had to do those [the simulations] on a normal computer, it would take about 40 years,” Hansen said. The results took time, but not as long.Listen to learn more about the fascinating future of wind turbines and hear Hansen’s results.

There is a lot that goes into sustainable cities. Low carbon innovation, energy, climate change, society, immobility, and economics all play a role. The innovation interface is one of the things, and it can significantly shape a city.On this episode of The Energy Exchange, Host David Hidinger talked with Dr. Stephen Hall, the Program Leader for MSc Sustainable Cities at Leeds University. The duo chatted about sustainable cities and Hall’s work, which focuses on sustainable living in cities. One of his main areas of focus is the role of cities in a low-carbon future.Hall works out of the School of Earth and Environment, and the goal of the school is to address some of the challenges facing society over the next 25 years or so. Hall put out the Innovation Interface to give cities and companies the tools to manage their energy needs down the line. These needs could vary from a traffic problem to an energy issue.There are many ways to address these issues, such as public policy and individual business plans. Hall thinks that one isn’t necessarily more effective than the other. It’s taking a look at a business model and understanding why it made sense in the scenario it was created and why it doesn’t make sense any longer.“What is the system in front of us we’re trying to change,” Hall said. “Not what is the ideal future, and that means looking at the current business models and why they’re unsustainable.”Listen to hear more about Hall’s work on building a more sustainable future.

For the past decade or so, electric transmission companies have built up their own power systems, largely working in vertical siloes with local distribution.But, to thrive, the clean-power sector needs federal subsidies and regional plans. President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan would support the expansion of high-voltage transmission lines with greater capacity for more reliable wind and solar generation, while extended tax credits would help keep renewable energy costs down.Rob Gramlich, Founder and President of Grid Strategies LLC, a consulting firm focused on transmission and power market issues in pursuit of low-cost decarbonization, and Executive Director of ACDG (Americans for a Clean Energy Grid), has had a front row seat on the concerns and solutions needed.“They’re relevant in the context of the infrastructure policy conversation here in Washington, If you put all that together, you get a leveraging effect, and you get extra good energy output from transmission lines.” -Rob GramlichDavid Hidinger of The Energy Exchange spoke to Gramlich about a shovel-ready report that Grid Strategies recently released in partnership with the Macro Grid Initiative and the ACDG, which centered around 22 large-scale transmission projects that are ready to launch.“They’re relevant in the context of the infrastructure policy conversation here in Washington,” Gramlich said. The incentive to push them over the finish line, he added, is that they would increase renewable energy in the country by 50%. “If you put all that together, you get a leveraging effect, and you get extra good energy output from transmission lines.”As it currently stands, stakeholders have the same basic problem – “they’re passing the hat around, trying to get customers to sign up.”Once deployed, Biden’s infrastructure plan will put people to work in the near term. And, in the long term, Gramlich said, more lines will be needed in regions to ensure that more utilities and regulated grid operators connected.

The energy grid in the United States faced a daunting year, as California and Texas faced blackouts due to weather and other extreme situations. Energy professionals now must examine how to improve the grid systems.On this episode of The Energy Exchange, Host David Hidinger talks with Dr. Joshua Rhodes of The Webber Energy Group University of Texas at Austin. The duo talked about the energy grid and the role fracking has played in the United States shifting to a major exporter. Rhodes’ research at The Webber Group, which “is a research group in the Mechanical Engineering Department at UT Austin that addresses critical energy and environmental issues at the intersection of engineering, policy, and commercialization,” focuses on smart grids and bulk electricity systems.Rhodes’s interest in grids started when he worked in construction in Colorado. He connected the dots that all our energy systems are symbiotic, and an issue with the water supply can impact the electric grid. A simple conversation with an electrician about a water issue caused a problem with wind turbines.“It was the first time a constraint in one sector led to a constraint in another that was kinda brought to my attention,” he said. “I can’t believe a water issue is becoming an electricity issue.”This thought made him connect the dots between the infrastructure system. With this information in tow, he headed back south to Texas and landed at The Webber Energy Group in Austin.The duo also talked about fracking, which saw a boom in 2011. This led to the United States becoming a net exporter of petroleum for the first time.“Fracking has really opened up American energy,” Rhodes said. He elaborated that we now export as much as we import. Being “on-net” allows the U.S. to participate more in petroleum policy on the world scene.

Energy Exchange explores the complex and critical intersection of energy, money, and technology. Experts will use their insights and forecasts to outline what energy is available to us, the costs associated with that energy production and its use, and the technological innovations changing the way we utilize Earth’s resources to power our way of life.Oil and petroleum are an essential part of the world economy. They fuel both automobiles and the economy. Recently, Enbridge Line 5 was ordered shut down by Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer. This is causing a variety of issues, including hampering relations between the United States and Canada.Energy Exchange host David Hindinger welcomed an expert on the topic, Kait Bolognaro, to discuss the pipeline. Bolognaro is a reporter for Bloomberg.Enbridge is a prominent Canadian oil company located in Calgary-Alberta, which is in Canada’s oil heartland. They are at the center of the oil industry in that country. They also do a significant amount of business in the United States. They move about 25 percent of the crude oil produced in North America, according to Bolognaro. They transport nearly 20 percent of the natural gas consumed in the U.S.One of the big projects they’ve been working on is Line 5, which is a dual pipeline that travels under the streets of Mackinac in Michigan and Ontario.“They [the lines] start underground, and they go underwater and across the straits for about 4.5 miles,” Bolognaro said. “They move 540,000 barrels of oil a day.” She elaborated that it is a huge source of energy for that region.The pipeline has been in the news cycle, as the company would like to build a tunnel around the pipeline. Whitmer has been in opposition, causing quite a bit of headache for Enbridge and the Canadian Government. In November 2020, Whitmer revoked an easement that would’ve permitted the pipeline to cross the lakebed, which could force the whole project to shut down by May.“Governor Whitmer is saying she’s concerned about the environmental impact of the project,” Bolognaro said.

Lithium batteries fuel electric vehicles and consumer electronics, but they have issues because they contain liquid electrolytes. Solid-state batteries are revolutionizing the lithium battery industry. The Energy Exchange host David Hindinger welcomed an expert on the topic, Dr. Sumin Zhu, to discuss these innovations. Dr. Zhu is the CEO of Ampcera, a developer of solid-state electrolyte materials.Dr. Zhu first explained what solid-state batteries are. “They use a solid electrolyte, so there is no liquid in the battery.”The loss of liquid delivers key benefits, per Dr. Zhu. “Conventional batteries have a flammable liquid, so they can catch fire, like what happened with the Samsung phones. So, it’s much safer.”Along with more stability, solid-state batteries also have better energy density. “They can be 50 to 100 percent longer battery life,” Dr. Zhu added.Third, solid-state batteries charge much faster. “You can’t charge current batteries quickly because the battery heats up as it charges. It’s risky, so it’s slower.”These new batteries are also moving from the world of R&D to production, with manufacturers like Volkswagen and Toyota including them in new product roadmaps for their electric vehicles (EV). “It takes years of effort, but they are moving toward pilot production and then to high-volume manufacturing,” Dr. Zhu shared.Once they are ready for mass production, it will push the EV industry to new horizons and lower barriers of adoption by consumers.“The solid-state battery addresses pain points faced today with EVs. At high volume, manufacturing costs will fall. You’ll also be able to charge faster, possibly in 15 minutes or less,” Dr. Zhu said.