Jason Badeaux

When building a two-sided blockchain marketplace (buyers and sellers, or buyers and miners), which comes first, the chicken (miners) or the egg (buyers)? One solution: pay off the chickens.

The first major [blockchain] breakthrough was bitcoin, which invented digital gold. The second was Ethereum, which introduced general-purpose smart contracts. Helium presents the most ambitious new use case for blockchains we’ve seen since Ethereum.

In terms of its function on the grid, the best way to think of Form’s battery is not as storage, but as the equivalent of a carbon-free natural gas plant. Rather than methane, it runs on renewable energy as fuel, but from the grid’s perspective, it provides basically the same service, which is reliable, dispatchable generation that can run for 100... See more

The cheapest possible carbon-free US grid involves vastly more centralized renewable energy, but it also involves vastly more distributed energy. What’s more, far from being alternatives, they are complements: the more DERs you put in place, the more centralized renewables you can put on the system. DERs are a utility-scale renewable accelerant.The... See more

This Tesla plant provides the equipment, space, and technology needed to manufacture everything the company provides. That includes electric cars, lithium-ion battery cells, solar panels, and much more. The Gigafactory allows for faster production and eliminates extra costs of shipping parts to different locations for assembly. As Tesla’s own... See more

To achieve clean energy targets, many jurisdictions will have to overbuild renewables, increasing curtailment, or wasting of renewable energy. LDES could reduce or eliminate curtailment, allowing renewables to produce at full capacity whenever the weather is aligned.

The convergence of artificial intelligence and battery technologies within the mobility space could disrupt transportation completely, radically reducing costs and benefiting consumers.

There’s no mass market for LDES yet — nothing like the hundreds of gigawatts we may eventually need — but there are several localized markets, adding up to several gigawatts of needed capacity, which is more than enough to keep Form busy from 2025 forward.