Resilient Energy, Anywhere

Keith Zakheim 0:02

Welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast. I am your host, Keith Zakheim. Today, as we do with every podcast, we're going to ask our guest one question and one question only. What is your Age of Climate adoption story? A little bit about the age of Adoption. We live in an era where enterprises.

Rob Creighton 0:22

Of every shape and size, regardless of.

Keith Zakheim 0:24

Industry, must rapidly transform to become more sustainable, climate sensitive. And just my day job is CEO of the marketing public relations firm Antenna Group. Our agency works exclusively with conscious brands. What is a conscious brand? It is a brand that is conscious of its responsibility to be on the right side of history. Like most businesses, our clients are experiencing a transition from an age of innovation, an era in which technologists, entrepreneurs and investors focused on innovating climate and sustainable solutions, to this age of adoption which characterizes the world today. So if you the Age of Adoption hypothesis, then there's really only one salient question to be asked. What is your Age of Adoption story? Rob Creighton's career journey reads like science fiction becoming reality. After studying genetics at the University of.

Rob Creighton 1:23

Wisconsin, Madison and working as a lab technician mapping the human genome, Rob became.

Keith Zakheim 1:29

Fascinated by a concept called peak oil.

Rob Creighton 1:31

The theory that oil extraction would eventually become too expensive to sust sustain. While searching for alternatives, he discovered a.

Keith Zakheim 1:38

1980 paper by miles Lloyd, the grandfather.

Rob Creighton 1:42

Of airborne wind energy, that would change his life.

Keith Zakheim 1:46

The insight of the paper was elegant. Cut off the tip of a wind.

Rob Creighton 1:50

Turbine blade, the part generating most of.

Keith Zakheim 1:52

The power, attach it to a tether and generate the same electricity with 95% less material. No tower, no foundation, no massive infrastructure. Just a small drone flying at the end of a tether. Windlift keeps their systems under 40 foot wingspans, small enough to fit in a shipping container and deploy anywhere in the world today. On the Age of Adoption podcast, Rob explains how a tether and software can replace tons of concrete and steel. Why trying to make an albatross fly.

Rob Creighton 2:24

Like a hummingbird reveals the aerodynamic limits of scale.

Keith Zakheim 2:29

And why he's willing to risk bankruptcy to preserve the Minnesota wilderness areas where his nephew can no longer play pond hockey in the winter. Back with Rob. Faster than his drone can generate electricity from wind 400ft in the air.

Rob Creighton 2:45

Rob, welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast.

Speaker C 2:49

Great to be here. Keith, thanks for inviting me to join you.

Rob Creighton 2:51

It's my pleasure. And Rob, this is going to be one of the more fascinating, I think, podcast episodes I've ever recorded. Mainly because we've done a lot of technology episodes, talked to a lot of entrepreneurs in climate and sustainability and clean Tech and really have been able to engage in some really cool technologies. But this is, I think, different level and almost like kind of sci fi ish. So I'm really excited to dig in, learn more about it, and talk about all the use cases and applications, which I know are many and all of them important before we get there. Rob, you also have a fascinating career journey. I know that's kind of taken you from the human genome all the way into kites and clean energy and wind. So if you can kind of trace that career journey and like with all our guests, what inspired you to ultimately transition from your first industry into climate and sustainability?

Speaker C 3:43

Yeah, so I don't have a traditional aerospace engineering background like a lot of the guys who work with me on this project at Windlift. I actually am a biologist. So I studied genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and then while I was there, I was a lab technician working at advanced microscopy stations mapping genomes. It was an amazing time. Just, it was like I was in the, I'd say, the ivory tower of science, like pursuing this pure scientific research effort that was dedicated to improving medical technologies and mapping the human genome. Just the discovery that was happening was astounding. Then while I was there, I got very interested in energy and very concerned about. At the time, the concern was something called peak oil, which was a theory that had been tossed around. And peak oil basically says that every oil well you drill eventually peaks its production and drops off. And if you add up all the oil wells in the world, sooner or later it starts to get more expensive to pump that oil. You have to expend more energy to get the same amount of oil as before you start getting more water with the oil. And I was even a member of Society of Petroleum Engineers for a while because I was really fascinated by oil production. And I'm still very interested in oil production. But that was when fracking came along. So fracking really kind of changed.

Rob Creighton 5:05

Not to interrupt, but just you mentioned peak oil, and I remember that whole debate. I did, though, read something last week that I think climate scientists now believe that China has hit peak fossil fuels not in terms of their ability to extract them, but their use of them because of their renewable transition revolution, which is super interesting.

Speaker C 5:26

It's just economics. And the Chinese have figured out that solar and wind get cheaper as you start producing more and more of them. Just the learning curve of solar and wind. They're on that curve to the point now where it doesn't make any sense for them to continue extracting their limited coal Resources and or importing oil. They're rapidly transitioning their entire economy to a clean energy economy. Not out of climate issues at all. Just the pure economics are pushing in that direction. I think they actually exported $160 billion worth of soil, solar and wind the.

Rob Creighton 6:01

Last year, whereas we exported Pakistan overnight. Transitioned because of Chinese solar modules and power.

Speaker C 6:07

Yeah, economics wins everything. And that's kind of really was my hope for windlift and that I was kind of looking at that and trying to figure out new technologies that could kind of play a role in that transition. And I discovered this paper written in 1980 by Miles Lloyd, who's kind of the grandfather of airborne power generation. Airborne wind energy.

Rob Creighton 6:31

Just to clarify, Rob, you discovered a 1980 paper, but not in 1980 when you were 7 years old? Although that would be a better story for the podcast.

Speaker C 6:41

No, I'm not the Mozart of energy. I was more interested in baseball at that time than hockey. Baseball and hockey were my two obsessions when I was seven years old. But yeah, no, I was working in laboratories, just really curious about science and thought this technology with crosswind kite power allows you to generate electricity. With a system for wind energy, you don't need a tower or foundation. So the way it adds up is you can generate the same amount of energy with 90 or 95% less material. I thought that was super exciting. You get rid of the tower and the foundation of a wind turbine, replace it with a tether and software. And the tether is very lightweight. And the challenge is, how do you handle all these incredible forces with a machine that weighs 20 times less than a traditional wind turbine?

Rob Creighton 7:36

Yeah, so let's get to that. So, you know, Rob, I'm 50 years old, but I understand science. Like best case, five years old, maybe 15. So can you explain to me windlift, as if I was an elementary school student, and just how does a flying drone generate more power than a 400 foot wind turbine? Obviously using a lot less material. I'm ready to learn.

Speaker C 7:59

Yeah. So, you know, as wind turbines get bigger, they generate more power. And the cool thing about it is it's actually the tip of the blade on that wind turbine that's generating most of the power. So the way airborne power generators work is we just cut off the tip of that blade, which is really a wing. If you think about it, it's a. It's a sail, which is also an airfoil, you could call it. And that that wing gets accelerated by the wind, just like a wind turbine. That the tip of that blade is being Accelerated by the wind. But a wind turbine takes the energy out of that by having a hub that has a big electric generator. And they take all that acceleration happening at the tip of that blade, transfer those forces through those very, very long wing, the turbine blade, and they generate electricity at the hub. And that's how wind turbines operate. Wind turbines, as you get bigger, if you double the length of that, of that turbine blade, you get four times as much power because it's sweeping a much larger area. So it's pretty simple, you know, in terms of that. But if you take off that blade and you fly it on a tether now you're actually able to get all that energy with a system that doesn't have the rest of the turbine blade, that doesn't have a hub, that doesn't have a tower, that doesn't have a massive concrete and steel foundation. So you've just gotten rid of all that mass and all that expense, and now you just have a, a tiny drone flying on the end of a tether generating all this electricity.

Rob Creighton 9:32

Fascinating. And I know that, I mean your technology is proven. It's already, you know, you're generating revenue from it. But there's a history to this kind of technology. And I know Google had their famed project Ani, I think it's pronounced, and they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into it, but they failed, I think, because their drone was too big and it didn't generate enough power at that size to be a net generator. I think you've been able to learn from that open sourced data and focusing on smaller and more agile designs. Agile designs. Can you just kind of talk more about that and almost standing on the shoulders of some of that data that you were able to use?

Speaker C 10:13

Yeah, I knew the Google, the Makani team very well. Corwin Hardam was a friend and colleague. It was really tragic when he, he passed away and. But the, the, you know, the Makani team, brilliant scientists and engineers who pushed the limits of what was possible with computer technology, with controls, with material science. They did really brilliant work I think as people now today model and simulate what they did. And you're right, they tried to build a system that was too big for the current materials, the current state of technology at the time. So they did brilliant work and we have stood on their shoulders, we took their data that they generated and it really informed our work going forward. But mainly what we learned is that going so big is maybe not the best decision in terms of picking your market. And they did it for very good reasons. Because just like wind turbines, when you double the size, they might generate four times power. That's how wind turbines became so economically viable today. As they kept going bigger and bigger and the economics worked out, the bigger you went, the better your returns were on your investment. Airborne power generators are somewhat different in that it's. I like to think of it as like trying to make a albatross fly like a hummingbird. It's just they're not going to perform the same. It's just the simple aerodynamics of scale that start to work against you when you make a system that's too big. So there's a really complicated algorithm that kind of determines the right size for an airborne power generator. And for us, we like to keep our systems under 40 foot wingspan because we can fit it in a shipping container. And that's really going to drive. The economics for us is that we can go anywhere in the world with a shipping container. We can make systems much more economically viable without that expensive logistics. Supply chain.

Rob Creighton 12:09

Yeah. Can we dig into that a little bit more in terms of the economics of it? You know, Rob, you and I were talking before we started recording, just. And even now when it came to China. Right. So economics, economics, economics. There's no reason to, when talking about renewables, to have to. I mean, I happen to believe that there is climate change and I happen to believe that it's critical that we engage what I think is a crisis of my lifetime with technology, renewables. But I don't need to go there in order to make the case that what you're doing and renewables in general are critical for today for economic reasons, for geopolitical reasons, et cetera. Can you talk about the economics though, specifically? And then if you can transition from that into geopolitics, defense, national security, which relates to a lot of the work you've done with dod.

Speaker C 12:58

Yeah. So the economics of airborne power generators. It's a new technology. And anytime you have a new technology, it's going to take time and investment to.

Rob Creighton 13:10

You have to get to scale.

Speaker C 13:12

You have to get to scale. And there's the scale of the manufacturing. There's also just figuring out all the technical details that you need to make it work efficiently at scale. So most production engineers will have something called a learning curve. And every time you double the installed capacity of a new technology, it comes down in price a certain amount. So I think wind has been on about a 10% learning curve. Solar is like a 15 to 20% learning curve. So every time they've doubled their installed system. The costs have come down significantly and I think it's surprised everybody how that learning curve continues to hold true. But now to double the amount of solar in the world is, is quite a big lift. Right. But China's still doing it and they're still lowering their cost of solar. And it's been amazing to watch how they do that when there's enough economic incentive. It's pretty remarkable how clever engineers can be and business people can be to kind of work cost out of a system and make it work. We're just beginning that with airborne power generators. We're kind of just making systems that fly and produce power and are reliable. I mean, Makani proved it seven years ago. Really, they proved it 10 years ago. But again, how do you make it reliable enough? One of the reasons Makani failed is because they crashed in the North Sea during a big demonstration for Norway. But so we have the same challenges. How do you handle these incredible forces of the wind and make a system that can elegantly and efficiently handle that, those forces without ripping itself apart, without crashing all these challenges? So we're at the beginning of that journey. So as we start to work our way down that learning curve, we need to have markets that are more valuable. And for us today, the most valuable market is the defense market because.

Rob Creighton 15:00

And markets that are willing to make an investment. Right? Because.

Speaker C 15:05

The defense industry is one of the few industries where the government will pay you to do research and development, to develop a product that they want to buy. And as a small company, that's non dilutive funding that allows us to grow our company without selling all of our equity and diluting our upside potential at the end of all this. So we do the SBIR program, that's been a huge partner of us. We've done almost $25 million of work with Operational energy at the Pentagon and our partners at the Naval Research Laboratory. We work with the electronic warfare division. So they do. They're famous because they made the first drones that were ever used in combat operations at their vehicle research section. So it's amazing to work with the engineers who have 25 years of experience building drones and we've learned everything from them in the last five years that's allowed us to get to the point we are today. So it's, you know, that just deep history of building composite structures of all the motors and generators, all the avionics controls. It's a very technically complicated system that we're building, but it's not any more complicated than a traditional wind Turbine is. If you look at how these large wind turbines operate, they're constantly under electronic control at all times. They're not a passive system. They are flying these wings right at the edge of what they can handle. And handling. We do the same thing. We fly our wings right at the edge of what they can handle to generate the most power possible. But selling electrons is a hard business. I mean, that's like the commodity business. And it's also super political. There's no energy company in the world that isn't subject to lots of political forces. And I like to joke, I'm a small businessman. I can't afford to have political opinions. Maybe if I was the richest man in the world, I could suddenly have a lot of political opinions, but we won't go there.

Rob Creighton 16:55

Yeah, I was going to say, I think Jeff Bezos, if I remember, said the Washington Post can endorse a presidential candidate. So the richest man in the world could not actually have political opinions.

Speaker C 17:04

I think there's somebody richer than Jeff Bezos who has been.

Rob Creighton 17:07

Oh, I guess now he is fair. Fair, fair. He does. That's fair. Okay. The second. Second richest man in the world.

Speaker C 17:13

Yeah. And I'm not. Even if I make payroll some months, I'm happy.

Rob Creighton 17:16

So I'm not a small business owner.

Speaker C 17:19

Also world as them. But yeah. So I'm just here to support. At this point, I want to support our war fighters with a way for them to get electricity in remote places that does not require a liquid fuel supply chain. Because if you've been paying attention to this country in Asia, Europe, actually, they're a European country who is being attacked by Euro, Asian country, Ukraine. They've been dealing with this energy. It's an energy war, if you want to look at it that way. They cannot move liquid fuel anywhere within 100 miles of the front line. Because fuel trucks are basically very energetic bombs and a tiny drone is a really great detonator. That's really what stopped the Russian war machine in Ukraine, before they were able to get to Kiev. They. They attacked the fuel trucks. And then the tanks were just sitting ducks. And they were able to hold off the Russian army much longer than anybody ever thought possible. Mainly because the Russian army cannot move liquid fuel within Ukraine. That is now, you know, that's. If you look at the US Current military strategy is we have operated under the assumption that we've got air superiority and we can move liquid fuel with impunity behind front lines. And that's no longer true. Drones will sneak through that defense and take out fuel trucks and our incredible military technology, our Abrams tanks, all of that suddenly becomes just as vulnerable as the Russian tanks were. And in fact, the Marine Corps is completely divested of all their tanks because they recognize that tanks on the battlefield of the 21st century are not effective as they used to be. So that's really what our technology is about, is how do you get electricity to forward positions? And we use the wind to generate that electricity, but we do it on a tethered drone that's super mobile and can be deployed in minutes, versus building a steel tower. Building a 100 meter steel tower and putting a turbine in the pot requires roads, requires cranes, requires hundreds of cement trucks and all this mass. Whereas we do the same thing with 95% less mass.

Rob Creighton 19:31

Yeah, Rob, I'm going to end with something that I saw you said, which I think articulates the level of commitment and passion you have for this, you know, for the climate and sustainability industry. And you said that if you go bankrupt trying to solve climate change, at least you can tell your grandkids you tried. As somebody who has four children, hopefully one day grandchildren, that resonates with me. What drives that level of commitment? I think that's a great way to end the episode.

Speaker C 20:00

So I was trained as a biologist, and I love wilderness areas. I've spent a lot of time up in northern Minnesota in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. And, you know, that's an area that's very subject to changing climate. You know, I look at that world and I, I don't want to see it change dramatically. I don't want to. I mean, if you track extinction level events that are happening, you know, we're having more extinction now than we did when the comet hit during the dinosaurs in terms of how quickly the world is changing. So, you know, as I said, I can't afford to have political opinions. But, you know, if you, if you're really close to nature and you spend a lot of time fishing and spend a lot of time playing hockey, you know, we play pond hockey in Minnesota, and two years ago, my, my nephew couldn't even play pond hockey because there was no ice. You know, that's just things that are happening and we can slow that down a bit, maybe reverse those trends, I think we'll be in good shape. And I see airborne wind energy as a piece of that because, you know, it takes energy to make energy. And these systems that we have require a lot less concrete, a lot less steel, a lot less infrastructure, and could potentially have a big impact and slow or reverse climate change. We're also raising money on We Funder and we'd love to point your listeners to windlift We Funder and they can invest in winlift today through our crowdfunding effort there.

Rob Creighton 21:19

Love it. Rob, thank you so much for joining us on the Age of Adoption podcast and Godspeed and God bless with winlift.

Speaker C 21:26

Yeah, thanks Keith. It's been a real honor and privilege to be on your podcast and I look forward to hearing more of your work in the future.

Keith Zakheim 21:33

The Age of adoption podcast features CEOs, investors, entrepreneurs and policymakers sharing their climate and sustainability business transformation stories. Episodes can be found on your favorite podcast apps, including itunes and Spotify. The Age of Adoption Podcast is brought to you Dubai Antenna Group Antenna is the home of conscious brands. We partner with companies that don't wait for change to happen. These brands shape the future, are awake and already moving. Unsure if you are a conscious brand or even if you are one, whether you are positioned as one, Please visit our website at www.antennagroup.com and take the Conscious Compass Assessment, a groundbreaking tool that enables enterprises to assess their brand against the eight traits of brand consciousness. At Antenna, we partner with companies big and small, from Growth Stage to Fortune 100, to tell their climate and sustainability stories. So once again, if you're interested in joining the conscious brand movement and learning more about Antenna Group, please check out our website at www.antennagroup.com. ping us on LinkedIn and make sure to visit the Conscious Compass.

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