The Future of Wind Energy

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 guests one question and one question only. What is your age of Climate adoption? Stories A little bit about the Age of Adoption we live in an era where all corporations and enterprises must rapidly adopt climate and sustainability solutions regardless of industry. Companies must transform their businesses to be become more climate

Keith Zakheim 0:32

sensitive and sustainable. My day job is CEO of the marketing and public relations firm Antenna Group. And from that vantage point, I've experienced this 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 accept the Age of Adoption hypothesis, then there's really only

Keith Zakheim 1:02

one salient question to be asked. What is your Age of Adoption story?

Keith Zakheim 1:13

Historians date the first windmill to more than 1,000 years ago, and the first wind turbine to produce electricity was brought online in 1887. So when a company is in the business of redesigning the wind turbine, it behooves you to take notice. Neil Rickner is not your run of the mill, no pun intended, CEO. Prior to running Heirloom Energy, Neil served our country as an F18 pilot with the Marines and then worked at Google X, where he was first introduced to wind turbine innovation at

Keith Zakheim 1:43

Makani. On today's episode of the Age of Adoption podcast, Neil makes a compelling case for why Heirloom's novel wind turbine will revolutionize the industry and make wind energy cheaper and more accessible. Neil, welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast.

Neal Rickner 2:02

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Keith Zakheim 2:04

Pleasure. And Neil, your career is an interesting one. Stops at Google, Google X, Makani Elevation Ventures, and of course now CEO at Heirloom Energy. I guess the common denominator of all these is a commitment and passion for clean energy, climate sustainability as well as I guess, most importantly, which I should have started with is thank you for your service as being a U.S. marine and serving as a pilot in our armed forces. So again, thank you for that.

Keith Zakheim 2:34

But anyway, that is a fascinating background and not a typical one. Would love for you to share your career journey and how you got here.

Neal Rickner 2:42

Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, as you mentioned, I started my career as a pilot. I was an F18 pilot in the Marines, active duty for about 12 years and then transitioned into the private sector in 2009. I continued on in the reserves and actually retired out of the reserves in 2017. But that parallel path sort of split in 2009, I went to business school and the School of International and Public affairs at Columbia. Spent about two and a half years there in New York and then

Neal Rickner 3:12

transitioned to Google. I spent the first few years at Google sort of on the sort of ad side doing sort of policy work and working I sort of like to call as the dark underbelly of the Internet. And then I got the opportunity to join Google X in 2014 and jumped at the chance. You know, I had been deployed as a Marine to the Middle east several times and you can probably imagine those, those wars were mostly about energy, about oil. And so it

Neal Rickner 3:42

was always an interest of mine and I studied and joined some groups at Columbia when I was there, sort of trying to understand sort of my role in the military as it pertained to energy. And so when I had the opportunity to get back to working on energy at X, I was very motivated to do that. And so while I was there I worked.

Keith Zakheim 4:03

And Google X is what that's kind of the R and D super, super innovation part of Google. Is that what that is?

Neal Rickner 4:10

That's right. It's where, I mean it was originally called Chauffeur. The self driving car, which is now Waymo, came out of that Google brain.

Keith Zakheim 4:16

Like the moonshot stuff.

Neal Rickner 4:18

It's. Yeah, it's the moonshot factory. The idea was for, for Google to put dollars and resources and people behind big ideas that weren't 10% better, but you know, 10x better. And you know, interestingly, it wasn't set out to be a climate or energy or clean tech sort of focused, sort of R and D shop, but many of the projects were focused on that because if you want to have impact, if you want to do big things, there's a lot of opportunity in the

Neal Rickner 4:48

energy and clean tech climate space. So many of our projects, not all, but many of the projects that were at Google X were focused on that. So yeah, I worked on a few different projects. Most of my time was at Makani. You mentioned that as well. Makani was an airborne wind turbine, sort of a very different approach to wind energy generation that was actually an acquisition. Most of the projects at Google X were sort of grown organically, but Makani was an acquisition in 2013. I joined the team in

Neal Rickner 5:17

2014 and we worked for the better part of five years to try to take that technology forward. Our sort of crowning technical achievement was to fly a 85 foot wingspan, eight motor, carbon fiber fully autonomous electric airplane off of a floating platform in the North Sea just off the coast of Norway. So it's quite a journey. We had kites that operated out of California, out of Hawaii, and then

Neal Rickner 5:47

ultimately, as I mentioned in Norway. It was an amazing team. We did amazing technical things but ultimately we weren't really reducing the cost of the system. And sort of, if you think about wind energy has to be really really cheap. Any energy really has to be really, really cheap. And we were building an airplane for all intents and purposes it was an electric airplane that had ailerons and rudders and the control systems associated with that. And so we were, I like to say we were either going to build a

Neal Rickner 6:17

way too expensive wind turbine or unreliable low cost airplane, but neither of those are really a good fit for the energy industry. So we shut that project down in 2021. And then I transitioned to venture capital. I spent a couple of years at Elevation Ventures making really early stage sort of thing pre seed less than a million dollar checks into energy companies. Didn't love being a vc. I always joke with my VC buddies that

Neal Rickner 6:47

no offense, but I just wasn't really for me. I was sort of drawn back to the operational side. I found myself spending a lot of time with companies on operational challenges and sort of recognized within a couple of years that that I'd rather be on the operations side. So I transitioned out of that into a battery company. I led a battery company for about a year and then Heirloom came calling and it was just a perfect fit because I'd had all that experience at Makani doing essentially

Neal Rickner 7:17

go to market for a novel wind technology. And so I had a lot of that playbook already sort of thought through and figured out and Heirloom needed a lot of the same sort knowledge and experience. So I jumped from that battery company to the to Heirloom about the middle or sort of fall of 2023.

Keith Zakheim 7:38

Thank you for sharing sharing your background and we get to the part of the podcast that not everybody's ready for, but somebody who's flown F18s. I'm pretty sure this won't strike fear in your heart. The question of the day, what is your age of adoption story?

Neal Rickner 7:56

But it's centered around making wind energy even cheaper and easier to deploy anywhere in the world. So Heirloom, the problem we're trying to solve is that horizontal axis wind turbines, also known as traditional wind turbines or conventional wind turbines, the three bladed wind turbines that you know and love, those turbines have primarily gotten cheaper by getting bigger and that has driven down cost over 25 years until a couple of

Neal Rickner 8:25

years ago when prices sort of leveled off. And then more recently they went up. They went up in part because of supply chain challenges and interest rates, but also it's just been an incredibly low margin business for quite a while as costs came down. But maybe obviously you can't get bigger endlessly that there's an obvious end of that road. And I would argue that given what we've seen in prices, we're sort of pretty much at the end of that road. And so there's got to be another way to generate wind

Neal Rickner 8:55

energy. It's partially price, but it's also deployment options. So you can't really go to or you can't deploy a wind turbine, a horizontal axis wind turbine anywhere. You can't get a big, big crane. And there are many parts of the world where you can't get. It just doesn't have the heavy industry to support the lay down the logistics, the big cranes. There's many parts of the US where that's true. There's many parts of the global south

Neal Rickner 9:25

parts of the world where you just can't get a big crane. So I'll describe it this way. GE will spend about a half a billion dollars making their current wind turbine a little bit bigger. And that's because you've got to start from the tower and then to sell the blades. Everything's got to change. So it's a very expensive process. They'll only ever make a few hundred of that model of turbine. They'll make it out of specialized materials. They'll make some of those parts literally by hand. Some of the blades are actually sanded by hand.

Neal Rickner 9:55

And then they'll ship those big parts on specialized handling equipment, extended trailer, extendable bed trailers. And they'll need large equipment to move those things around. Then they'll put them up, as I mentioned before, with huge cranes and they'll use crews who are trained to work at height, which are also very expensive. So everything's specialized and it's all really.

Keith Zakheim 10:18

For marginal, marginal improvements, right?

Neal Rickner 10:21

That's right. And it's hard to make any small change. So if you want to build a wind turbine for a low wind site or a specific kind of site, then everything on the turbines got to change. And in contrast, what Heirloom is doing is we're making a wind turbine that's mass manufacturable parts things, automated manufacturing, so repeatable, low cost parts that are made out of standard materials, steel and aluminum, shipped in standard transportation networks, think containers and put up with

Neal Rickner 10:51

forklifts and not cranes. Now there's a price to pay for that. And the biggest price is that we're lower height. And at lower height, you have wind that doesn't have as much energy in it. But what we're pursuing is a wind turbine that is lower cost and can be deployed many more places despite having that disadvantage in wind energy, meaning, like the lower height, that translates into lower energy in the wind. And our

Neal Rickner 11:20

bet is that we can make the system so low cost that having that lower speed wind on average, we still end up at a lower cost of energy overall because we're making, you know, because we're producing at, you know, mass manufacturing, easy shipping, very simple supply chains that can accelerate deployment and ease the. The way wind turbines are deployed and.

Keith Zakheim 11:46

Installed, you're bending the cost curve on materials production, installation, transportation, and you're making up somewhat for the production. Is it more volume as well because you can deploy more even though they're not as tall?

Neal Rickner 12:04

Yeah, we can deploy more. There's a couple ways to think about that. Deploy more means we can. To go back to the previous example, where if you want to adapt a wind turbine to a new site with a horizontal turbine, you've got to start from the ground and design everything up. For heirloom, we can use the same structure and rail, and much of the system is the same. We can just change the wing shape, which just one small part of the system to adapt to a new site. We can also change the shape of the contour. Right now we're

Neal Rickner 12:34

building everything symmetrically in an oval or a stadium shape. But there's nothing to say we couldn't build that turbine to follow a ridgeline, for example, or to be a different shape that optimized energy production for a particular geography to take advantage of micro train, for example. So the adaptability of the system is super important as well, because it just changes the way you actually think about how to capture energy from the wind as opposed to just imposing a. You know, every time you

Neal Rickner 13:04

build a horizontal turbine, it's like installing a skyscraper. Heirloom can be much less impact on the visual terrain. So people that the viewshed, for example, you won't have nearly the. The sort of visual impact you can fit into the. As I said, the micro train, you can take advantage of the local wind conditions. So all of that is an opportunity. And you can do it. As I said before, you can do it in more places. You really just need a

Neal Rickner 13:34

few tractor trailers with containers on the back, as opposed to the gigantic crews and cranes and other logistics footprint. The second Part of your question was can you do it faster? Yes, you can do it faster. Right now, one of the challenges wind energy developers have is that they've got to plan a few years out because the supply chain to get a big wind turbine built is just complicated. It takes a while to, to actually build a horizontal turbine. And so the planning cycles are long.

Neal Rickner 14:03

Oftentimes they can't get any supply at all. So some projects don't get built because they just can't get the turbines that they need. And with the ease of manufacturing of what Heirloom is building, and that'll get a lot simpler.

Keith Zakheim 14:17

That sounds incredible. It's obviously revolutionary. And I ask you, you know, I saw something about the Air Force Research Laboratory, I guess, selecting you to work on some innovation for fighter jets. And can you talk about that a little bit?

Neal Rickner 14:33

Yeah, absolutely.

Keith Zakheim 14:35

Something I know close to your heart, obviously.

Neal Rickner 14:37

It really is. I mean, as I think about it, there's really two opportunities with the US Department of Defense. One is that they are pursuing resilience on their installations globally. And resilient energy in many cases can be renewable energy. And the military doesn't really have a mind for renewable energy. Many, many of the individuals in the military care about that. But really what they're after is resilience, which is war fighting capacity, which

Neal Rickner 15:07

is force protection, et cetera. And what they're finding is that as the grid has aged, they're reliant on the grid in many cases and don't want to be. And so they're working towards islanding their military bases, that is to say, having the capacity produced to produce their own energy, or at least having a section of the base that is, has the critical infrastructure be islanded. So Miramar Marine Corps Air Station has already done this. They've taken a portion of their

Neal Rickner 15:37

load or their, what their energy needs and put it on an island. And if the grid goes down around the base, they can still operate that critical infrastructure. And so we've been awarded this contract to explore that, because with military bases, horizontal axis wind turbines oftentimes can't be installed because they're near airports. And horizontal turbines are so tall, doesn't fit well with airports. It also, if you think about how a base is

Neal Rickner 16:07

defended, sometimes those tall structures don't fit well in that environment. They also have a big radar cross section which interferes with defense radars. There's a number of reasons why the US Military has not generally been able to improve those horizontal turbines. And they want to build microgrids that are Wind, solar storage, geothermal, all these resilient sources of energy. And wind has been sort of left out of that because of the height restrictions. And Heirloom

Neal Rickner 16:37

presents the opportunity that you could bring wind back into the mix. Because we're lower height, we won't have those same limitations on radar cross section. I forgot to mention sort of military training also can be impacted. And so you have Heirloom presents the opportunity for additional resilient energy that the military is really interested in. So that's on the installation side or the military base side. In addition to that,

Neal Rickner 17:07

there is an architecture of Heirloom, and we're very early in this, but an architecture of Heirloom that is more expeditionary or what the military refers to as operational. And I put it this way, in Iraq, which is the war I was involved in, many of the casualties were suffered by IEDs. Those IEDs were attacking convoys. And most people don't know this, but a lot of those convoys were carrying diesel fuel forward to operate the generators to power the forward operating bases that we

Neal Rickner 17:36

relied upon. And look, you know, wind and solar isn't going to get rid of all of that requirement. But even if we can cut down on the need for diesel fuel by 10 or 15, 20%, that's a huge benefit to the military. If you think about all of our sort of forward operating capabilities, there's a huge logistics footprint that requires getting that fuel brought forward to those places. And so again, the military sees that as a force protection potential. And so between those two

Neal Rickner 18:06

sort of potentialities, we're exploring both of them with the military at present, and as it happens simultaneously, this is on the commercial side, not your question, but it relates very closely to it. There's also tremendous load growth predicted due to data centers and the expansion of AI requirements for data centers and compute capacity. And there's a growing trend for sort of energy infrastructure

Neal Rickner 18:36

needs that are potentially look very similar to a micro grid on a military base. So instead of just relying on the grid for additional power capacity, there are developers now that are building behind the meter generation capacity that would be very similar. Wind, solar storage, geothermal, if it's there, small, nuclear, potentially all of that. And then maybe with the grid as a backup, or maybe, you know, building their own, their own baseload capacity.

Neal Rickner 19:06

But Heirloom could participate in those behind the meter scenarios as well. And it's, it's really from an heirloom perspective, the exact same turbine or very similar turbine that is built on these sort of modular scalable principles that we discussed before. So you could imagine, you know, building a an heirloom turbine in West Texas that's a part of a behind the meter project that powers data centers or, you know, is a part of it. We're, we're excited about the

Neal Rickner 19:36

potential for those hybrid projects again, wind, solar and storage altogether to address some of this capacity requirement.

Keith Zakheim 19:44

Neil, that's perfect. Great way to put a bow on the episode. Really appreciate it. Although the breaking news yesterday, of course with Deep Seq AI is maybe we'll need less capacity for AI, but we'll see that tbd. But anyway, it was a pleasure having you on and look forward to staying in touch.

Neal Rickner 20:00

Okay, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Keith Zakheim 20:03

The Age of Adoption podcast is where CEOs, investors, entrepreneurs and policymakers share their climate and sustainability business transformation stories. You can find Age of Adoption Podcast episodes on your favorite podcast apps, including itunes and Spotify. The Age of Adoption Podcast is brought to you by Antenna Group. If you have a great Age of Adoption story and want to share it with the world, then Antenna Group is the integrated marketing and public relations

Keith Zakheim 20:33

agency for you. We partner with companies big and small, from Growth Stage to Fortune 100, to tell their climate and sustainability stories to key audiences and stakeholders, helping companies build brands and sales funnels. Antenna group is the OG of climate and sustainability PR, having worked in the space since 2005. If you're interested in learning more about Antenna Group, please visit our website at www.antennagroup.com. shoot us an email at antennagroup.com or ping us on LinkedIn.

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