We’re building an Energy Storage ?? Venture – let’s dig into the domain together

The Venture we’re building live on LinkedIn, is off to the races. You voted for Climate Tech as a vertical, then chose the Energy Storage domain. This week we took step 3: diving into the domain’s challenges. But it feels like step one. Because now, the work starts with my Venture team: Matthieu Bodin , Steve McCarthy , and Shift AI.?

In the next few weeks, we're going to find out who has the biggest pain, how big of an opportunity Energy Storage is, and how can we make money while also having planetary impact. Of course, it’s critical we also figure out how to get to market and how to gain traction with our venture. Yet – we don’t yet know what to build!

This week, we kicked the venture off narrowing down what the impact needs to be at least. Because Energy storage is way too broad. We typically get started with a venture by ironing out a challenge statement. This gives us a specific starting point and direction that we can all get behind, and start answering essentially as a question.

Our tools We’re using a Miro Board and the Mach49 Method library, where there's a ton of different ways to approach a venture. We want to understand the domain a little bit better, map and understand the current dynamics of the energy storage market. Shift AI has this really cool feature which allows us to add the knowledge that we gather over the next few days, and drop it into a database. We can then query that directly within Shift AI GPT, allowing us to use all that knowledge from PDFs, documents, links, etc. This expands our knowledge of a domain using very specific sources (as well as the rest of the Internet).

Shift GPT also has a number of prompts in the prompt library around domain research. We ran it real time during our meetings..

Here’s what we already knew:?

• May 2022 was the first time that the whole of the EU ran more on renewables, than fossil fuels. Now, while that’s a great thing, what happens with the energy you cannot store? You're using wind at night, which you cannot consume. You produce too much solar power during the day, which you cannot store. That’s a big problem. How can we build a system, whatever it may be, to store all that capacity (and make it viable financially).?
• Grid balancing. The grid can't just take loads of energy suddenly, just because the sun is shining.
• You can store energy in many different ways. This can be as simple as having water that moves from one place to the other,?
• For some businesses, it’s critical to think about energy storage and they already have their own solutions (probably fossil-fuel based). For example hospitals, where people are plugged into critical machines.?
• People living on islands or in remote places need to store energy for the simple reason that they’re off the grid. This might sound like an edge case, but this is heavily influenced by climate changes. Things can become critical, very quickly.?
• How can you use central power systems with so many buildings using solar panels? They still need the connection to the big utility companies, right? Or can you do something decentralized?
• Policy and financing instruments that can be built around energy storage are interesting. That’s all very new and unknown.

We ran the following prompt in Shift GPT:?

Given the following space: {{USER_INPUT_DOMAIN_SPACE_DESCRIPTION}} Fill in the following. You do not need to follow these word-for-word, but can adapt them based on the space and the insight you have. [DOMAIN_SPACE] has its roots in [HISTORICAL_EVENT/DEVELOPMENT], which led to [KEY_DEVELOPMENT] and ultimately the current state of the market today.

And we got a history lesson. We received lots of info on advancements using lithium-ion batteries.?

We grabbed what we thought was relevant:?

• There’s a great deal of media around the geopolitical aspects of lithium batteries.
• Main challenges to energy storage fall into the scalability and affordability bucket, due to the high cost of materials. (The investment to start new initiatives to start mining for those materials was an interesting point)
• Supply chain constraints, are ever-present
• Current “new” solutions. Whilst we're doing domain exploration, it's important to consider who's already doing stuff. We noted energy storage by gravity (whereby you lift a big block on a crane from the turning of a turbine's turning, and when the power is needed, the block is lowered.?

Shift GPT also asked us to consider increased demand for renewable energy, with no widespread storage solutions. Everybody's now doing research, looking into it from a technical perspective, but not that much from a business perspective. Which is interesting for us. According to Shift GPT, the current trends and future trends didn’t differ much: the current trend is somehow the future trend.

We pushed Shift GPT further, with the prompt:?

I want you to expand on this and think really boldly about what could the future look like when there's no technical limitations.?

ShiftGPT dove into all the flaws of the grid, but also suggested quantum battery technology for instantaneous charging capabilities; as well as the use of nanomaterials to imagine increased storage capacity.?

Together, we also determined our next steps. Continue to populate our Miro Board according to the Method library, digest what we’d heard from discussions and ShiftGPT, and then come back together to ask ourselves, which energy storage area do we really care about?

To be continued!