☀️ June Update

by David Cohen-Tanugi on June 5, 2024

Happy June!

A big thanks to those of you who participated in Monday's advisory board meeting.

In this month's advisory newsletter, we'll highlight opportunities to fix the electric grid. I'll also share a summary of what's new this month.

Happy reading,

David and the Proto Ventures team

By the numbers

Since April 2023:

• ☕ 497 ecosystem interactions
• ​🧪 78 technologies assessed
• 💡 89 venture ideas
• 🏫 6 team projects created
• 🧑 43 customer discovery activities
• 🤝 8 cross-campus conversations initiated

May highlights

🚀 Proto Ventures fellow Theodore Mouratidis was awarded the prestigious Activate fellowship to work on Hyperion Transport Systems, one of our five PV team projects. Theo is currently a postdoc at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The two-year Activate Fellowship will provide Theo with funding, technical resources, and unparalleled support from a network of scientists, engineers, investors, commercial partners, and fellow entrepreneurs.

🔋 PV team project Vertical Horizons was invited to participate in the delta v startup accelerator at the MIT Trust Center for Entrepreneurship. PV fellows Cynthia Liao and Hee Yau Phoon will spend the summer refining the target market for this venture, conducting primary market research and building knowledge about their customers.

🫧 We continued to refine the best commercial applications for the anti-fouling coating developed in Mike Short's group, with the aim of helping MIT's Tech Licensing Office to transfer this technology to a power plant equipment OEM or a coating company.

🏗️ Proto Ventures secured a funding commitment for an upcoming geothermal venture builder, in partnership with Project Innerspace, a geothermal energy nonprofit.

👥 Our Q2 advisory board meeting moved Hyperion Transport Systems and Vertical Horizons to the Build stage of the PV process and formalized our electric grid interconnection team project. We also put our exploration of direct-current microgrids on hold and officially abandoned our exploration around mineral ore processing.

⚡️ I performed a deep dive into electric grid interconnection in the search of opportunities to speed up the deployment of clean energy projects with MIT tech. Crucial introductions by our very own Badar Khan unlocked dozens of customer discovery meetings with utility planners, grid operator engineers, project developers, and investors. See below for a short summary of what I learned.

🔵 I acted as a mentor and judge for The Engine's Blueprint, a non-resident program for graduate students, postdocs, research scientists, and their teams, to explore the commercial opportunities of their breakthroughs and startup projects.

👀 We’ve continued publishing our research notes on our internal website (password: mit venture studio).

⚡️ Fixing the Power Grid

In case you missed it, the power grid has become a huge bottleneck to the deployment of clean energy in the United States: a staggering 2 million megawatts of clean power generation and storage projects are currently in the queue to get interconnected to the grid, with typical queue times now exceeding 5 years.

If that wasn't bad enough, the meteoric rise of data centers for artificial intelligence is disrupting a power system that had grown accustomed to flat demand growth for the last few decades but is now seeing forecasts for tens of thousands of megawatts of new demand from data centers by 2030.

Over the past few months, we have studied this field from a market perspective and a technology perspective in order to identify potential solution areas.

From dozens of conversations with stakeholders in the industry, we've identified some clear customer needs:

• Clean energy developers need to get their projects through the interconnection queue and to commercial operation much faster. They also want a smarter way to site, size, and design upcoming projects in order to minimize the time & cost to get these projects hooked up to the grid. Too many projects get abandoned partway through because of prohibitive interconnection costs.
• Network engineers at regional grid operators (such as ISO New England) want a more streamlined study workflow that makes it easier to juggle multiple simulations and multiple scenarios for a given study, and reduces the need to deal with model errors and bad data.
• Executives at distribution utilities want to plan future upgrade needs in a more probabilistically way, given tremendous uncertainty in the pace of EV and heat pump adoption and other factors. Utility planners are especially eager for a better way to account for new spot loads (such as EV fast charging stations), which can wreak havoc to all their careful deterministic planning.
• Interconnection engineers at distribution utilities want a way to avoid triggering a transmission-level study, which require involving the regional grid operator and often set a project back by 6-12 months.
• Data center developers need access to reliable power (and water) as fast as possible. It's hard to usher in a revolution in computing when the minimum lead time to get data center power in most major US markets is 3 years.

In the face of these challenges, many solution elements could help (some of which are technological, but many of which are regulatory, financial, or political). One specific technology that we are especially excited about is the Reference Network Model developed by researchers at Comillas University in partnership with MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This large-scale planning software can generate a proposed electricity network to connect a given set of energy producers and energy users. We think we could leverage this technology to build a platform that could solve the needs of project developers, ISO network engineers, or distribution utility planners by rapidly estimating the upgrades required to accommodate a new proposed project on the grid.

👀 June: Sneak peek

🏆 Vertical Horizons begins the delta v startup accelerator.

🫰🏼 Hyperion Transport Systems goes through the final stage of the Deshpande Center grant application process. Securing funding from Deshpande would help Theo and his co-founder Sam further de-risk their technology ahead of spinning out a company.

🎤 I'll record an interview for the Insider's Guide to Energy podcast about our recent report on enabling commercial fusion energy.

🎯 We'll refine the top opportunity in the power grid through further customer discovery and technology exploration, with an eye towards selecting a direction with strong market potential, low commercial risk, and a differentiated approach for maximum impact.

What’s on our mind

🐝 Urban swarms for clean energy. The Media Lab has a project on leveraging swarms of autonomous robots to perform decentralized trash collection in a city. I personally find this incredibly cool. What's a good way to apply this approach to the clean energy sector?

🧘🏼 Digital therapeutics for demand-side management of electricity. In the life sciences, "digital therapeutics" refers to mobile app-based interventions that have the same clinical efficacy as pharmaceutical drugs (for example, cognitive-behavioral therapy apps for addiction or depression) and can therefore gain FDA approval and payer reimbursement. What if we could build a digital intervention based on meditation training that makes consumers more mindful of their energy use, thereby demonstrably lowering energy demand and competing with power plants on the electricity market?

One final thing... can you think of any conferences, events, or podcasts that might be interested in featuring us as a speakers or panelists? We'd love to keep spreading the word about Proto Ventures!

Confidential | Do not distribute without permission