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Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

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Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#4
Congrats to DaniFong and the rest of the LightSail team.

Large scale energy storage is an unappreciated problem. Our current grid has to quickly scale up and down with demand, because there is no way store excess capacity when demand is down (and therefore, no way to reuse previous excess capacity when demand is up).

When this problem is actually solved (crossing fingers until LightSail actually ships ...), the grid is going to undergo a serious transformation for the first time - from a just-in-time economy to an inventory management economy.

Re: Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

#9
post #4

Congrats to DaniFong and the rest of the LightSail team. Large scale energy storage is an unappreciated problem. Our current grid has to quickly scale up and down with demand, because there is no way store excess capacity when demand is down (and therefore, no way to reuse previous excess capacity when demand is up). When this problem is actually solved (crossing fingers until LightSail actually ships ...), the grid…

I think there are many more players than you hear about, in this space. The company I work for builds distributed, large-scale energy storage (I work on the management and monitoring system that controls the "distributed" part), though we're relatively unknown right now. There are several other companies that we're aware of, all shipping products today and beginning to carve out parts of the market with relatively little fanfare. I chalk it up to their / our technology not being as "sexy" as something like LightSail, but nevertheless many are beginning to deliver results right now.

Hopefully I don't sound like I'm disparaging LightSail or any of the other possible avenues - I think we need continued investment in new methods as we should always be pursuing improvement, and the LightSail approach sounds very promising. I hope Thiel and Gates' involvement in this industry will bring even more visibility to it. However, I do want to make the point that there are people doing this today, in consumer and commercial applications, and having real effects.

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