Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#99:
$222M for Smarter Clean Hydrogen Production — Raffi Garabedian, CEO of Electric Hydrogen
Chris Wedding:
Raffi Garabedian, welcome to the podcast.
Raffi Garabedian:
Thank you, Chris. It's great to be here with you.
Chris Wedding:
We covered this in our warm up, but let's start with the zinger, let's remind folks why they really need to pay attention to this conversation. So, let's start with this fun press release you had in June or July this year. How about that?
Raffi Garabedian:
Well, thanks, Chris. We raised a bunch of money to do some important work. We raised a couple hundred million dollars to build a company that is dedicated to the production of clean, fossil-free, renewable hydrogen. Why is that important? We use an awful lot of natural gas and fossil fuels all around the world and hydrogen is the next viable alternative to natural gas as both a feedstock and an energy resource that is in a chemical form that can be stored, transported and used at endpoints with a completely clean renewable life cycle without any carbon emissions whatsoever in the process.
04:23
Electric Hydrogen, we're designing and building the machines that will make renewable hydrogen cheaply and at relevant industrial scales. Here today, hydrogen production through electrolysis, that's the technology we use, is relatively small scale. We're looking at infrastructure scale applications that require a lot of technology innovation around that scale up to drive down the cost of production, but also to produce very, very large volumes of the gas.
Chris Wedding:
So, you mentioned this a little bit, but I wonder how many folks know where hydrogen comes from today. I think we were excited that when it's burned, pretty clean, but upstream, not so much as of today. Tell us that story.
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah, so hydrogen today is an industrial gas used as a feedstock or a precursor in a number of applications. The two dominant applications that constitute, I think more than 90% of the use case of the volume are the production of fertilizer through the Haber-Bosch process and as a hydrogenation agent in petrochemical refineries.
So, the second one's pretty obvious. The hydrogen comes from the petrochemicals themselves. Actually, in both applications it comes from natural gas via a process called steam methane reformation. Natural gas is methane, that's a carbon with four hydrogens hanging off of it and through this SMR process, big chemical plant, it breaks that apart. It emits CO2, captures the hydrogen, and the hydrogen is used as a feedstock.
In the case of fertilizer, most of the nitrogen that's fixed to feed plants, to feed us, comes from this so-called Haber-Bosch process which is really a cool process that captures nitrogen from the air and produces ammonia, which is NH3 using hydrogen as the second input.
And so, steam methane reformation, natural gas produces the hydrogen, which goes into the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia, and ammonia is the precursor to all sorts of chemical fertilizers that are used all around the world. We're made of natural gas. Like when you really think about it, majority of the nitrogen that's fixed to produce food comes from natural gas via this Haber-Bosch process.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I can imagine my two teenage boys making other comments around us being made of natural gas, but we'll leave it right there.
Raffi Garabedian:
It's not restricted to boys. My daughter would say the same thing.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, perfect.
Raffi Garabedian:
You asked a leading question though, if I can just elaborate a little more. So, today hydrogen goes into those two processes mostly, but governments around the world have hydrogen plans now, and why do they have hydrogen plans? It's not just about ammonia fertilizer and petrochemical refining. Hydrogen is a clean burning alternative to fossil fuels as an energy resource and that's the big game hunting. So, the chemical uses of hydrogen in the applications I already mentioned, that's the existing market. The future market is actually as vast as the petrochemical market is today. It's a multi-trillion-dollar global market potentially.
07:48
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, for sure exciting and I think some listeners have seen these eye-catching headlines around many billions of dollars dedicated to the hydrogen economy around the world. Let's go to your name. So, Electric Hydrogen, I think folks get that with the electrolysis process. Great. Importantly, it's like the right time given how cheap renewables are to be the input for electrolysis to make clean hydrogen. Just say more about how or why now is the right time to do it.
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah, Chris, that's a great question. There have been at least two peaks in hydrogen hype cycles over the last two decades, three decades. So, it's come and gone, come and gone, never really taken off. So why now, right? You already told the answer. I spent 13 years in the utility scale solar industry. At First Solar, we watched the cost of, well, not just watched, we helped make the cost of solar generation go from a really high-priced green asset down to the level it's at now.
Solar is actually the cheapest form of electric generation on the planet in many, many places. And if you look at solar and wind as a class of assets, a renewable generation as an asset class, combined they're both the fastest growing and the cheapest generating resources in the world. That cheap electricity has never existed before. Humanity has never had access to electricity that cheap and that plentiful, that easily scaled before. This is what opens the path to electrolysis and the production of -- It’s really not the production of hydrogen, let's call it the conversion of cheap electrons into a chemical form that can be moved around and utilized in applications that are otherwise very, very difficult to decarbonize.
It's logical to say, “Hey, if you can electrify it, electrify it,” and there's a mantra out there, electrify everything. That's nice to say, it's a nice sound bite. I'm an electrical engineer, I like the sound bite, but it's actually not viable. There's, by my calculation, 50% of global CO2 emissions that really cannot be directly electrified because they involve either chemical resources, which are central and necessary for human existence, or they involve the movement of energy over vast distances, typically in ships. So, those are the two use cases that can't be directly electrified. We need different solutions and hydrogen is the clear, ready, and available solution, given that we have this incredibly cheap electric resource to harness. That's what's different now.
The rest of the difference, why now, is largely political. We, I was going to say, as a society, but that's not even a broad enough term, because it's really a planetary. All of humanity is now waking up to the real implications of anthropogenic. I can't believe I can't say that today.
Chris Wedding:
Must be the coffee.
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah. You'll have to edit that out. Of climate change. So, across the globe, we're waking up to the realities of climate change and realizing that we do have to address the challenge. That creates the political will and hence the allocation of capital resources that are necessary to scale these industries to relevant scales. The scales are mind bogglingly big.
11:32
When I look at it from a climate perspective, which is really, we're a mission-driven company, that's why we're doing what we're doing, is to have an impact, it's daunting how big the industry has to get to make an impact. When I turn my hat around, I put my other hat on as an investor or the leader of a business, it's also an incredible opportunity. It's just a huge opportunity. When those two things collide, opportunity and impact, you have the makings of, I think, I hope, a very rapidly growing industry that can change the world.
Chris Wedding:
Well, it's almost like you've already listened to the podcast I recorded yesterday, which is not yet published, obviously impossible. I was talking with Greg Smithies at Fifth Wall, who I believe is also in you-all’s cap table.
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
He was making the comment like you just said that, what a unique time in human history where you can build a business that does great things for the world, in this case tackle climate change. And by the way, build a big business, generate wealth, generate attractive financial returns, et cetera, side by side, which is pretty exciting.
Raffi Garabedian:
It is. It's awesome. Glad to hear Greg said that.
Chris Wedding:
It's almost, Raffi, like you were reading my notes over here as I'm scribbling, which obviously you clearly cannot see. But I wrote down the words electrify everything because that is a common mantra and a good mantra for lots of reasons. Can you give us some use cases, for example, where you-all’s hydrogen will be used, where electricity just can't serve the same need?
Raffi Garabedian:
Sure, the obvious ones are hydrogen as a reductive chemical. As I mentioned, ammonia synthesis is the obvious one on one bookend. Synthetic fuels is another set of applications, so hydrogen is the primary energetic input alongside CO2 to make molecules like methanol, for example, which can be stored in buckets and tanks and combusted in engines.
Turns out ammonia can also be combusted in engines and it's a very, very interesting potential fuel for the maritime industry, which is a large emitter globally. Ships burn this stuff called bunker fuel and I'll watch my adjectives carefully when I talk about bunker fuel, but yeah, ammonia is a clean burning alternative that actually burns in the same kinds of engines quite nicely.
So, all the way to on the other extreme power generation, how do you store months’ worth of energy to facilitate a reliable, robust grid? Months’ worth of energy really can't be stored electrochemically with any known technology today. The only way to do it is in a chemical form. We do it in the US in underground storage facilities using natural gas, and hydrogen can be stored exactly the same way. So, huge range of possibilities for use cases for renewable hydrogen.
14:36
Chris Wedding:
You just mentioned this very long duration storage of power, basically, of energy and a lot of folks would think about, “Well, how does hydrogen compare to long duration energy storage solutions, which they're up and coming, lots of great innovation technologically and investor interest, not too many in the field yet, but coming?” Clearly, I would say there's room for both, but just comparing side by side, hydrogen as a storage mechanism, yeah.
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah, Chris, if you look around the world and even in the United States, today, just look at the power sector today, you don't see one technology broadly dominated. You have coal burning power plants, you have natural gas, both simple cycle and combined cycle power plants. You have some hydro, you have pumped hydro storage systems, you have nuclear, you have a diversity of technologies that are selected for their best economic fit to the location where the energy is being produced and is needed. Globally, it's even more diverse and the future isn't going to be any different than that. So, to think that there's one technology that's going to solve everybody's problem is a bit of a pipe dream.
The reality is each of these technologies has its pros and its cons, its features, and it will be best suited to different use cases and applications. So, whether we're talking about, you broadly said long duration energy storage, whether that's pumped hydro, which is the cheapest thing today that we know of, but very, very hard to replicate, you need certain geologic features. You need a lot of water available to actually build a pumped hydro plant. So, where that can be built, that's the right way to do it and you can store energy via gravity and water with pumped hydro and it's very cost effective. But where that isn't available, which is most places you need other solutions.
Lithium-ion batteries are great for short durations. We're talking about single digit hours of energy storage and that serves potentially a really important niche in the stability of the grid, but it's not sufficient to facilitate the conversion of the grid to renewable energy resources. You need more hours of storage.
There are other storage technologies, electrochemical storage technologies like flow batteries, which can bridge to 10 or maybe low tens of hours. There's new technologies being developed that can go beyond that. Chemical storage, so the storage of a fuel that can be burned to produce electricity is going to be very, very hard to completely eliminate.
So, you're right, Chris, I agree with you. It's going to be all of the above and what we're really discussing and discovering as we develop these solutions is which slice of opportunity and application each technology is going to be the best fit for. Some won't work anyway. Ultimately, this is an economic competition. The cheapest thing that's decarbonized or that facilitates decarbonization is going to win.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. I think folks thinking about the situation with energy in the EU, given the Russian invasion, are really understanding the power of diversification or perhaps those who were excessively concentrated in crypto for their investment funds or their retirement funds are also rethinking diversification.
18:12
Let's go to First Solar. I love how you nonchalantly mentioned while you were at First Solar, I think those who were listening have heard the intro to this podcast so know that you were the CTO at First Solar. What lessons do you feel like you're drawing from that positive experience to shape the growth of an earlier stage in terms of sector, as well as, like a lot of folks give hard tech a hard time, you have been around the block a few times with hard tech? Talk about the lessons learned, I suppose, is the long way of asking, Raffi.
Raffi Garabedian:
No, thanks Chris. I've always been in hard tech. We never called it that. We called it tech because I'm old and then all this information technology stuff came along and co-opted the term tech and so now, we have hard tech. The adjective hard, it's either it's hardware, it goes thump when you drop it, or it can mean it's just really hard to do to get right. Both are true because fundamentally in hard tech, you're working with physics and mother nature. Mother nature, it's got its own rules and you can wish and dream, but that doesn't mean it's going to comply. So, you have to solve problems in a very constrained reality of physics and chemistry and engineering. That's what makes hard tech risky. It's also what makes it fun in my mind.
Yeah, I've been doing this stuff for a long time. I had the privilege of joining First Solar in 2008, I hope this doesn't insult anybody, but when solar was Birkenstocks and tree-huggers is the way I think of it. It made a lot of sense to me. It was super exciting. It was the first time in my life when I could connect my ambition as an engineer and a business person with something really worth doing intrinsically. Now we call it mission or vision driven company.
When I was younger, there really weren't many companies like that. It was really more about building things, about the technology and getting excited about a technology. It was about making money. It's a relatively new phenomenon in my view, to have the luxury of directing one's career towards something you really care about. It's really, really important.
So, that was it, an amazing time in my life. I had the opportunity to join this fledgling, recent IPO company that was selling a lot of products into the German feed-in tariff market and that market at that time was incentive driven. A lot of people were making money doing it. Solar panels were the constraint. They were in short supply. The Chinese industry hadn't yet come of its own, so it was a great, great time of growth.
What I learned from that though is to be careful. So, China saw the opportunity as well and I say China in air quotes, China Inc. The companies in China that were built up around the solar industry to produce solar equipment under a national plan. And so, when I say China, I mean code, shorthand for those companies that started up the industry in China, came in and just started undercutting price very, very quickly into the German feed-in tariff market.
The good news for solar was always very, very cost focused and we were cost focused, not because we anticipated the Chinese entry into the market and decline in prices. We were actually cost focused because our mission was, and the company's mission still is, to make solar electricity competitive with electricity from conventional resources. So, when you look at the problem in that regard, driving down cost is your friend. It's not just about beating the competition, it's actually about the mission of the company to replace those carbon-emitting generating resources.
22:32
What I learned in that experience, of course, was cost matters and competition in commodities and energy is really the ultimate commodity, competition in commodities is fierce. There's two ways to survive that and thrive in it. One is to just simply drive down cost through your supply chain, through labor costs, and through volume scaling. That's what the Chinese industry has done masterfully, like no one else in the world has been able to do.
The other way to survive it and thrive is through technology and innovation. I like to think that's what we did really well at First Solar over at least my career there, and I think still ongoing. So, to drive performance of the product and thereby reduce costs, not by squeezing the material costs necessarily, but by getting more out of the same material inputs and the same cost inputs. A lot of lessons in there.
I think the other lesson I take from my experience in solar is that, again, scale matters if your mission orientation is decarbonization. There was a lot of debate through the solar learning curve the last decade and a half in solar around the merits or demerits of utility scale solar versus rooftop solar. The debate's ongoing and it's not religion or political, from my point of view.
From my point of view, it's really about, how do we get to scale quickly? How do we move hundreds of gigawatts of solar technology out into the field where it can be productive and take fossil emissions off the grid? It turned out our approach at First Solar focusing on utility scale power plants and if that's not familiar to people, we're talking here about very, very large, hundreds of acres of scale, square miles of scale power plants in very, very sunny locations, often in deserts, connected to the grid and supplying clean energy onto the grid. That turned out to be a very efficient way to scale the industry rapidly. And so, that's another lesson I take into what we're building today, Electric Hydrogen, scale matters.
Chris Wedding:
Well, that's a good transition. One of the other things I wrote down was decentralized versus centralized production of clean hydrogen with renewable power.
Raffi Garabedian:
Very cool.
Chris Wedding:
I can imagine use cases where you're doing this behind the meter, quote unquote, “at some industry” or it's gigantic projects at the scale you're talking about. What's you-all’s sweet spot? Is it both? Why, why not?
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah. Thanks, Chris. That's awesome. So, I'm going to just briefly touch on another solar metaphor. I'm sorry if that's like tiring.
Chris Wedding:
Please.
Raffi Garabedian:
At First Solar, we were building hundred megawatts scale power plants in really sunny places and grid connecting them. We thought that was utility scale centralized solar. Now, from the perspective of a utility, that's distributed generation. So, now we can talk about hydrogen and how we envision that industry evolving and rolling out. The production of hydrogen today is centralized at the chemical plant scale and so you're talking about centralized facilities.
26:14
For example, you can find a steam methane reformer, many of them actually in Texas and Louisiana, feeding hydrogen into either refineries or ammonia synthesis plants. If you were to replace one of those SMR units with electrolyzers, you'd need about a gigawatt of electrolysis running at solar capacity factors. Maybe half a gigawatt running at really high, like 65% capacity factors. So, that's what a centralized facility looks like to me.
Now, the product we're making in Electric Hydrogen, it's a hundred-megawatt unit. So, if you want to buy an electrolyzer from us, the smallest one we will sell you is a hundred megawatts. That's massive relative to electrolysis today. The global installed capacity of electrolysis, people argue about the numbers, but I think it's somewhere between three and 400 megawatts globally installed today. So, one of our machines is like a quarter of the global install base. That hasn't been done before.
The largest scale facilities in Europe being built are, I think on the order of 25 megawatts, something like that. So, really big units, but I think in the world of chemicals, these are small distributed systems. The question in hydrogen is, do you move the electrons or do you move the gas? In other words, do you put the electrolysis with the renewables and build pipes to move gas, or do you put the electrolyzer with the endpoint use and move the electrons?
A lot like the energy storage discussion we were having around the grid, the answer is it depends. It depends on how congested the grid is, the availability of rights of way to build pipelines for hydrogen transport, a whole bunch of factors that all go to how projects are developed and infrastructure gets built. So, I can't give you a crisp answer because I don't think there's a right or wrong answer to that question.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I think you did a good job explaining relative scale. Relative to what's there, you guys are building big old projects. Relative to what's happening in Texas, Louisiana with SMRs, it's relatively small in less or until stacked. You referenced or maybe I heard this idea of levelized cost of hydrogen. If I recall correctly on you-all’s website, you have a tool to allow folks to play with inputs, which I think for those listening is a smart way to attract customers and get them interested and educated about your solution. If I think back to the levelized cost of hydrogen reports that Lazard produces, I forget, but 100 megawatts, is that the upper end of their analysis or is it kind of mid?
Raffi Garabedian:
No, I think it's even beyond the upper end of their analysis from the grid. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, and that's my point exactly, which is, I think what Lazard does every year with these three levelized cost of fill in the blank reports is amazing. But just to say, their definition of what is expected or normal, you all are at the top end or above, which is I think, if I'm putting pieces together, it's a lesson learned from solar, which is like go big, go home, you need economies of scale to get the cost down to where this stuff makes financial sense. Huh?
Raffi Garabedian:
Thank you, Chris. I'm not sure I can add too much to what you said and also thanks for the plug for our LCOH tool. It is on our website, eh2.com and under I think Tools or Product, there's that thing. I don't know if it's worth it for the uninitiated, but levelized cost of X is just the total production cost of whatever the output is of a plant, inclusive of the operating costs, so for example, the energy inputs, the labor, whatnot, the maintenance and also inclusive of the cost of capital. So, the depreciation, the project level costs of building the thing and carrying that expense over the life of the project.
30:27
So, the way you get to that number is by just accounting. It's by adding and subtracting all of the puts and takes to cost over the life and then doing a net present value calculation against it, and that's how you come to the levelized cost of the production of an infrastructure asset.
Back to lessons learned, because at First Solar we not only built solar panels, but we developed solar power plants and built them and then sold them to others, we had to learn project finance. We had to develop a really strong team that understood project finance and that team taught me and many of us, the executives at First Solar, about levelized costs and why it's so important in infrastructure. That's a hard one lesson that we again carry into Electric Hydrogen.
We think in terms of project performance and in fact the technology is architected to achieve the lowest possible levelized cost of hydrogen production, which is a different thing than making the cheapest electrolyzer. It's different in some really important ways because it contemplates the energy efficiency, the labor efficiency, the operation and maintenance costs. A whole bunch of factors that affect levelized cost of production in unintuitive ways sometimes. So, that's the language we use and we thought putting a tool up that gives other people some eyeballs into that same way of thinking would be useful for the industry, actually.
Chris Wedding:
For sure. Common nomenclature or goals or what you're solving for makes sense. I wrote down this other one here, which is, could electrolyzers or maybe it's when, when would electrolyzers at scale be the cause for new large renewables being built? As in, forget about a large utility or a corporate signing the PPA. No, it's 10-year units stacked together, which is the cause of the PPA being signed. Is that a thing sooner or later or?
Raffi Garabedian:
Chris, you're awesome. You're thinking this through and probably getting to questions that it took me a decade to get to.
Chris Wedding:
I'll still promote your podcast. I promise.
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah. So, my co-founder, Dave Eaglesham and I both come from First Solar, we both came to the idea of Electric Hydrogen and committed ourselves to starting this company for exactly that outcome that you're asking about. We actually came at it the wrong way, backwards, if you will. Our goal initially was, gee, grid congestion, grid integration of renewables is the constraint to renewable adoption. How do we get more renewables in the world to get more carbon out of the economy quicker? Oh, gee, we need to convert that energy into something that's independent of the grid that can be utilized in applications independent of the electric system.
33:36
Yeah, hydrogen is the best answer for that for a bunch of technical reasons. It's the most efficient conversion of electrons to a molecule that's possible. So, that's why we started Electric Hydrogen was actually to facilitate the deployment of more renewables, unconstrained from the grid and integration issues.
Now, when does that actually happen? There's a whole spectrum of people building hydrogen electrolysis projects, and they range from just pulling energy off of the grid, which if you do it right, if you pick a location on the grid that's overbuilt with renewables where there's excess renewable energy, you can tap into that resource at a decent enough capacity factor to run an electrolyzer potentially and make hydrogen out of it without forcing the utility to spin up carbon generating resources. That's the dark side of that equation.
So, if you run an electrolyzer off the grid and you run it at really high-capacity factor in most places in the world, that's a really bad answer from a carbon perspective. But on the other extreme, there are really credible experienced project developers who are in fact building bespoke new renewables for electrolysis and that's what gets me super excited. So, you're going to see those projects energized and making hydrogen in the coming few years, and they're going to be done at very large scale. They're going to be on that many hundreds of megawatts up to gigawatt scale.
Chris Wedding:
That's very exciting. Speaking of transporting hydrogen, there is a talk out there about, well, just blend the hydrogen into, well, existing rather natural gas pipelines. We have quite a few of those. How do you all feel about that as part of where your hydrogen goes? Is that helpful? Is that irrelevant?
Raffi Garabedian:
It's super helpful because we need multiple markets to facilitate the industry's expansion, to facilitate us going down the learning curve so that we can produce hydrogen and get it to where it's needed in a cost-effective way that's competitive with natural gas. And that pipeline network is built, it's operating, it provides conceptually a demand sync to get the product to where it's needed and offset the consumption of natural gas.
Now, this is a political lightning rod. There are people who look at this and think to themselves or think publicly and advocate, “Look, you're just perpetuating the business model of the natural gas industry by greenwashing, by pretending that by putting a little bit of hydrogen into these pipes, you're all of a sudden doing the right thing, making the world a better place, but really what you're doing is selling natural gas.” Peace, that’s true, but on the other hand, look, I'm an engineer.
As an engineer, you have to look at the numbers and you have to be realistic and pragmatic. There is no scenario in which in the United States, we stop burning natural gas for the next 20 years. It is not possible. So, I encourage the people who want to shut down the natural gas industry to actually propose solutions rather than just throwing stones.
36:55
We're at the point now where we're past galvanizing political action. We’re past that, we're decades past that. That was important. It was important to throw stones a decade ago when we didn't have the political will for change. Now that we have the political will for change, I think we have to focus on pragmatic, real solutions that can make meaningful incremental differences and move us forward and that's a different solution set than just saying, “Oh, the gas industry is the boogeyman and we should squash them.” Because if you squash them, wow, there's a huge human cost to that.
Chris Wedding:
And maybe to put the cherry on top or to reframe a takeaway, I think just in general, a solutions mindset versus a problem mindset is such a more productive fun way to live life or to be part of a team. It’s not to come in with problems, but to come in with maybe problems and three possible solutions. Hey, team, please shoot down two of these.
Raffi Garabedian:
And it's important to be critical of your own solutions, because all of us live in an echo chamber of one form or another, so we fall in love with our idea and it's sometimes hard to be critical of our own ideas. So, that's part of bringing real solutions into markets, is actually being critical enough that you actually solve the problem at hand. That's how you create a successful company.
Chris Wedding:
It's so true. In fact, when I finish this podcast, I go to teach my ESG investing course at Duke University and to these 50 very excited undergrads and grad students, I say, “Look, you need to be your first critic. Plenty of controversy, plenty of problems with the ESG investing. It's not going away, maybe change names, whatever, but you got to be the first critic. So, let's take off our green or rose, some color glasses and take the other side for a second.”
Raffi Garabedian:
Feynman has an amazing quote and it's not coming to mind verbatim, but it's about being your own strongest critic in science, you're the easiest person to fool, something like that.
Chris Wedding:
Right. Okay, we can talk about Electric Hydrogen, your company, I think all day long, but we're going to switch. We're going to switch over to Raffi the person. So, Raffi, if you could hang out over a beer with your younger self, what advice might you give him to be happier, more effective, et cetera, on this journey? I know one great answer is and Greg tried to give this from Fifth Wall, “I wouldn't change anything. They're all important.” Very true, but that is not an option. What else?
Raffi Garabedian:
I won't give that answer, Chris. In the lead up to starting to record, in the warmup, we were talking about my cultural heritage. I'm the only child of an immigrant family from the Middle East, we’re Armenian descent, it’s a diaspora culture. I grew up with really the clear imperative of making enough money to have security because culturally we come from an environment where like just Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the bottom of that hierarchy shall not be taken for granted. That works in environments where it's necessary, but I grew up in affluent Boston suburb and it wasn't necessary. And so, the early part of my career, I was very focused on making good in the world, like for me, for my family, for my kids when I had them.
40:41
What I know now is that that level of paranoia was not necessary and actually, the idea of focusing on values and allowing your values to drive the choices and decisions you make in your career, that's an amazing luxury. It's an amazing thing that at least there are many of us in the position, and I think your audience probably mostly are in a position economically, socioeconomically, to have that luxury, don't give it up. Cherish that thing. That's the best advice I could give my younger self.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I like that. How about on a daily or weekly basis, Raffi, what are some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane, and focused?
Raffi Garabedian:
It’s funny, I'm going to be redundant here, but I'm just going to say much more simply, for me personally, it's work on shit that matters. I am happy and sane even under the worst high-pressure conditions when the shit's hitting the fan and things aren't going right, which always happens, that's the life of a startup. But I'm happy and I'm sane because I know I'm working on something I care about that matters to me. That's what gets me up in the morning. That's the best tool I have. I could talk about like meditation practice or exercise or a whole bunch of stuff, and those are all maybe true, but they're minor points in a grander picture.
Chris Wedding:
So, what I want to ask is, do you have merchandise with that phrase for sale? Work on shit that matters, that's a good one. A shirt, bumper sticker, who knows.
Raffi Garabedian:
No, but again, it's a luxury that we have in the developed world to think this way. And please, beseech your listeners not to take that for granted, like I said before, because the majority of people on this planet maybe want to do the right thing, but they don't have the luxury of actually doing it. They want to work on things that matter, but they're worried about their families.
By the way, full circle, this is why cost is so important in energy because when energy is expensive, economies are weak, economies don't grow and that means people suffer. Like on a real human level, food is expensive and scarce if energy is expensive. Driving down the cost of energy and making it clean, that's the future I want to live in because a lot of people will be a lot happier in that future.
Chris Wedding:
True. How do you keep the work on shit that matters front of mind?
Raffi Garabedian:
It’s unavoidable in the work I do. It's the whole reason this company exists and we're unabashed about it. We're always talking about it at the company. We're always talking about why we're doing what we're doing. I don't know. It's not an issue. It's always [inaudible – 00:43:48].
Chris Wedding:
It permeates everything.
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah.
43:50
Chris Wedding:
Excellent. How about, if listeners are like, “Oh, okay, I like this Raffi guy. How else might I learn from him?” what are some books, podcasts, tools, et cetera, that you think listeners may find value in as entrepreneurs and investors in this space?
Raffi Garabedian:
Well, your podcast is obviously awesome.
Chris Wedding:
I mean, clearly. Yeah.
Raffi Garabedian:
Everybody needs to listen to it. I've done a number of podcasts. You can look me up and I listen to a bunch of them and I move around. I move my attention this way and that, depending on what's interesting. Books, almost required reading at Electric Hydrogen is a book called The Alchemy of Air, which is about the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which is this process to synthetically produce ammonia.
It's a fascinating read because it actually walks you through the somewhat random walk of technology development. It's a very, very non-obvious story of how we got to this thing that allowed mankind, humankind, to expand to the scale we're at today. So, strongly recommend that one.
I like science fiction, but I like old science fiction so like I'd throw Stanisław Lem into the list. I don't know if you know the book, The Cyberiad, that's a super fun one.
Chris Wedding:
I know, but now I'm selfishly asking a question for my 16-year-old son who loves to read science fiction.
Raffi Garabedian:
Well, if he has any recommendations for me that you want to give, I'd love to hear him.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I'm sure I'll get it wrong, is it The Three-Body Problem, something like that?
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah, that's a great book.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. He's finishing I guess the three parts series.
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah. We were just talking about that, friends of mine and I, the other day, super good.
Chris Wedding:
I want to say that while I'm not a science fiction reader, I'm one of those boring types who's like, “Wait, fiction. What? No, nonfiction is all that exists.” I think science fiction has this amazing way to make the future seem real and for a lot of our climate work, boy, what a powerful tool to make the stuff in the future feel real to motivate us today, huh?
Raffi Garabedian:
Chris, 100%. Telling stories about the future we want is an amazing way to galvanize our vision and channel our productivity in ways that might be hard to imagine otherwise. I totally agree with you.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, so what message do you want to leave listeners with, maybe the kinds of emerging professionals perhaps that should come seek you all out for job and careers of impact?
46:32
Raffi Garabedian:
Yeah, do shit that matters. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably have the luxury of doing that, so don't take it for granted. And if you're interested in this emerging potentially massive and world changing industry of clean, green, renewable hydrogen production, give us a holler. We're looking for all sorts of people from electrochemists and engineers and technologists all the way to business development and policy.
Chris Wedding:
And on your website, Raffi, will they find like a Jobs tab perhaps?
Raffi Garabedian:
Oh yeah, of course.
Chris Wedding:
Of course, on the website, on LinkedIn, wherever they can find you. Raffi, this was awesome. We're rooting for the success of you and the team at Electric Hydrogen.
Raffi Garabedian:
Thank you, Chris. It's great talking to you and I appreciate the really interesting questions.
Chris Wedding:
Hear, hear.
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