Critically assess the proposition that Muslims have become the main Essay

Fundamentally survey the suggestion that Muslims have become the primary focal point of authentic endeavors to bar Others from the s - Essay Example 5 Muslim people group of the twentieth/21st hundreds of years dependent on three typologies†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 6 Multiculturalism†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 6 Differential avoidance/visitor specialist system†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 7 Assimilation†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 8 Terrorism as for the most part connected with Muslim people†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 8 Social exclusion†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã ¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 10 Conclusion†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 13 Introduction Islam is the religion for in excess of 2 billion individuals on the earth. Just in Western Europe there are around 10 million Muslims, who are viewed as the biggest strict minority in the locale and the third biggest religion generally speaking developing a lot quicker than customarily predominant Catholic and Protestant religions. Accordingly, Islam turned into a critical strict and social power in the Western European nations, including France, Germany, United Kingdom, and others. In Great Britain, for instance, Muslims are the second biggest confidence bunch after Christians. The greater part of them were conceived in the United Kingdom having such ethn ic foundations as Turkish, Arab, Indian, Asian, Kurdish, and Pakistani. Muslims coming to live in France are for the most part from francophone nations, for example, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco (Castles and Miller, 2003). At last, Germany has numerous Muslims with Turkish and Kurdish beginning. Since the quantity of Muslims living in Western Europe and the United States proceed to develop and an ever increasing number of individuals become changed over into Islam religion, against Muslim opinions and developments began developing across Europe when Muslims have become the fundamental focal point of legitimate endeavors to prohibit them as â€Å"others† from the conditions of Europe. The principle purpose behind such activities is the dread of a ‘Muslim invasion’ when European national characters can be undermined by the continuous procedures of European mix and movement from the creating nations (Ferrera, 2005). While in the past movement rules were less confined for specific nations, they became harder as of late because of the expanded number of outsiders living on the joblessness remuneration from the administration, which raises concerns and objections from the residents who try sincerely and make good on charges. Regardless of whether migrants get a new line of work, the businesses pay substantially less compensations and wages for them than for national residents. Along these lines, it shifts inclinations for work toward foreigners. In such a manner, socially rejected â€Å"national† residents rival socially barred ethnic minorities or migrant ‘others’ for constrained national assets of government assistance (Castles and Miller, 2003). Such current circumstance in the Western European nations can be related with a â€Å"social regression† or a â€Å"social crisis† notwithstanding a developing political and social emergency dependent on the set up national characters. In such a manner, as of la te there is a solid inclination to reject Muslim settler â€Å"others† out of the European nations to make it â€Å"nationally pure† once more. Syncretism, which signifies joining, is the endeavor in actuality

The North American and Western Larch

The North American and Western Larch The local scope of the Tamarack, or Larix laricina, possesses the coldest areas of Canada and the northern-most woods of focal and northeastern United States. This conifer was named tamarackâ by local American Algonquians and means wood utilized for snowshoes however has likewise been called eastern tamarack, American tamarack, and hackmatack. Itâ has perhaps the amplest scope of all North American conifers. In spite of the fact that idea to be a chilly lovingâ species, tamarackâ grows under incredibly shifted climatic conditions. It tends to be found in detached pockets in West Virginia and Maryland and in disjunct regions of inside Alaska and the Yukon. It can undoubtedly endure normal January cold temperatures from - 65 degrees F to warm July temperatures that surpass 70 degrees F. This toleration of atmosphere limits clarifies its wide conveyance. The outrageous cold of northernmost strands will influence its size where it will stay a little tree, accomplishing a tallness of around 15 feet. Larix laricina,â in the pine family Pinaceae, is a little to medium-sizeâ borealâ conifer thatâ is uniquelyâ deciduous where needles every year go a lovely yellow shading and drop in fall. Theâ treeâ can develop to 60 feet in stature on specific locales withâ trunkâ growth that can surpass 20 crawls in diameter. Tamarack can endure a wide scope of soil conditions yet becomes most ordinarily, and to its greatest potential, on wet to soggy natural soils ofâ sphagnum and woody peat. Larix laricina is narrow minded of shade yet is an early pioneer tree species that attacks uncovered wet natural soils by seeding. The tree commonly shows up first in quite a while, lowlands, and muskeg where they start the long procedure of backwoods succession.â Agreeing toâ one U.S Forest Service report, the foremost business utilization of tamarack in the United States is for making mash items, particularly the straightforward paper in window envelopes. Due to its decay opposition, tamarack is likewise utilized for posts, shafts, mine woods, and railroad ties. The key attributes utilized for the distinguishing proof of tamarack: This is the main eastern conifer with deciduous needles masterminded in emanating clusters.Needles are developing from gruff spikes in gatherings of 10 to 20.Cones are little and egg-molded with no visibleâ bracts between scales.Foliage turns yellow in fall. The Western Larch or Larix occidentalis Western larch or Larix occidentalis is in the pine family Pinaceaeâ and regularly called western tamarack. Itâ is the biggest of the larches and most significant wood types of the variety Larix. Other normal names includeâ hackmatack, mountain larch, and Montana larch. This conifer, when contrasted with Larix laricina, has a range that is abundantly decreased to only four U.S. states and one Canadian territory Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. Like the tamarack, western larch is a deciduous conifer whose needles turn yellow and drop in harvest time. In contrast to tamarack, western larch is tall, being the biggest of the considerable number of larches and arriving at statures of more than 200 feet on favored soils. The environment for Larix occidentalisâ is on mountain inclines and in valleys and can growâ on damp ground. It is regularly observed developing with Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine. The tree doesn't work out quite as well as tamarack when managing wide changes in climatic factors as an animal groups. The treeâ grows in a moderately clammy cool climatic zone, with low temperature constraining its upper elevational extend and lacking dampness its lower boundaries it is essentially restricted to the Pacific northwest and to the states referenced. Western larch backwoods are appreciated for their different asset esteems including lumber creation and stylish excellence. The occasional change in tint of larchs sensitive foliage from light green in the spring and summer, to gold in the fall, upgrades the excellence of these mountain backwoods. These backwoods give the environmental specialties expected to a wide assortment of winged animals and creatures. Gap settling winged creatures include around one-fourth of the fledgling species in these woodlands. As per a U.S Forest Service report, western larch wood is utilized broadly for blunder, fine facade, long-straight utility posts, railroad ties, mine lumbers, and pulpwood. It is likewise esteemed for itsâ high water-yielding woods territories where the board can impact water yield through gather cuttings and youthful stand culture. The key qualities utilized for the recognizable proof of western larch: A larch trees shading hangs out in woodlands pale grass green in summer, yellow in the fall.Needles develop from obtuse prods in bunches like L. laricinaâ but on smooth twigs.Cones are bigger than L. laricinaâ with noticeable yellowish, pointed bracts between scales.

My Life Essay -- essays research papers

     Every individual in life must experience changes in the course of their life. Some are exceptional changes and some are minor changes, however in any case, an individual must figure out how to adapt to all of sorts of them. Change can remove the best from somebody or it can bring the most exceedingly terrible out in somebody, for instance, setting off to another school, getting another hair style, anything can have any kind of effect in a people life. In my circumstance, the most huge change more likely than not been going to the United States with my family and attempting to acclimate to another way of life.      While experiencing childhood in a group of five individuals including myself, going to another nation was a ghastly encounter. Being ten years of age myself, things got more earnestly while living with 4 others, particularly when they are for the most part relying on you. Like Edite’s life, my initial scarcely any years in the U.S. got hard to manage, taking into account how I was just a multi year old young lady getting things done for my family that an ordinary multi year old kid would not do, for instance, making an interpretation of TV to significant calls, it got overpowering.      Many of the issues, which I managed for the initial hardly any years, were reliable. Regular things, for example, viewing a film or viewing a sitcom turned out to be to a greater degree a cerebral pain than a loosening up second. I would spent the program interpreting what individuals are stating as opposed to watching it for myself and having the option to appreciate it. Since I was the just one in t...

Public Speaking Beneficial to All free essay sample

As a lesser in secondary school, I chose to check out open talking. I participated in a challenge on March 1, 2010 at the neighborhood Rotary Club, titled the â€Å"4-Way Test Speech Contest†. I defeated all comers in the challenge and afterward contended at the Regional level. This experience opened entryways for me. I joined Toastmasters Club in Yreka, California. I have given five addresses in the club up until this point, and have recently started assessing experienced speakers. I will be giving my next discourse in the blink of an eye and will likewise introduce my 2011 Rotary discourse. The club centers around learning significant talking and administration abilities, and I feel that I am absorbing data forever. There is even an honor that I intend to get, called the Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM), which is a high respect that takes over a year to finish. For instance, a discourse assessment tallies towards the administration track, and giving a discourse goes towards the correspondence track. We will compose a custom exposition test on Open Speaking: Beneficial to All or then again any comparative point explicitly for you Don't WasteYour Time Recruit WRITER Just 13.90/page The administration and correspondence tracks are the significant objectives towards accepting the DTM. Furthermore, the club empowers improvisational talking (called Table Topics), and all the club individuals take an interest in this action. With my experience in discourse more than a few zones, I feel like a sure open speaker and realize this will be an extraordinary specialized apparatus for my future. Correspondence will be significant for me, as I am anticipating turning into a writer or potentially proofreader of a paper or magazine. I should have the option to address anybody in the field, just as specialists and different pioneers who I will get data from. My authority in Toastmasters has had any kind of effect in my life, and potentially the lives of others. For myself, I am increasing specific information as I go to every toastmaster meeting. I am figuring out how to sort out data and tune in to individuals in the network with deference. Colleagues have complimented, empowered and posed inquiries about open talking, and I would prescribe Toastmasters without save to anybody. It is without a doubt a club that requests uprightness, essentialness and an eagerness to work. Discourse is an expertise that I accept is vital throughout everyday life. A genuine pioneer realizes that correspondence is the very pinnacle of importanceâ€without it, bargains and arrangements can't be reached. One day I would like to be a solid head, and my abilities learned in Toastmasters will definitely assist me with arriving at that objective.

In-depth interview with Terrajoule founder Steve Bisset

In-depth interview with Terrajoule founder Steve Bisset INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at Terrajoule in Redwood City. Steve, who are you and what do you do?Steve: My name is Steve Bisset. Im the chief executive officer at Terrajoule Corporation. Were a relatively new startup, founded in 2009 for the purpose of introducing a very significant new kind of electricity generation equipment into the world market.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Steve: Like a lot of people these days, Ive done a variety of things. My original background was an engineer, I got a degree in electrical engineering from Caltech, but I have had a business passion from the beginning for reasons that no one can ever explain. So, from doing newspaper delivering routes, to cutting lawns, to exporting surfboards from Australia to the United States, I did a number of things. But basically the core of my background is in starting up businesses that design, manufacture and sell capital equipment to customers. So, I very much like things that cost about million dollars each, because if they cost a billion dollars, you have to be a politician and the sales process is a certain kind of thing; if its consumer goods, I have no intuition for that, everything, every product I like, its discontinued because nobody else likes it, so my taste in that is useless. But basically commercial industrial customers, the things cost a million or ten million dollars, youre providing something that is critical and important to them, so they can pay attention to it. The process has a large rational component to it, it is always emotion and relationship, but its basically rational, so if you can understand customers problem in economic and practical terms and you can provide a solution to that customer thats important to them and better than the next best solution, theyll buy it from you and then the customers happy and youre happy and have a relationship and that all make sense. So this is my view of business.Martin: Lets get to some insights on how you started and you did define on find this business idea.Steve: My background, as I said was semi conductor capital equipment making test equipment for companies like Intel, and then I did a number of different things that I wont take up time here, but including anywhere from travel to mathematics education. But for a long time I was really interested in the energy business. Energy is, I really cant explain such a thing. Some people like cars, some people like energy. To me, energy is very big, its really important, its really influential on the world, theres World Bank study that shows this very close correlation between the availability of dependable electric power at low-cost and standard of living. Its a fundamental driver to civilization. And for me, for many years, just the appeal at a hobby level it was very interesting to me. Clearly theres a lot change happening with the technology, theres a lot of opportunity to make a difference, theres a huge amount of growth and de mand, a lot of developing economies that are developing now that werent developing before. And some really unresolved problems, so global warming is certainly one of them. Thats really, I see that, I understand it, its important, its really too big of a problem. To me to really think about something thats sort of more media in the philosophical sense, that if you can put power, if you can distribute power, if you can distribute electrical power, the control of it, the ownership of it, youre also distributing an economic power, youre also distributing political power. And when you do that as oppose to having central control of it, it makes the world safer for democracy and the nice people. And its generally, I think, good for economic growth.So, both of the philosophical level and on practical level, we have growing economies, the supply of electricity within those economies is the fundamental need and then gigantic, gigantic business opportunity, perhaps the biggest. And if you had a good distributed power generation gadget, that would generate electricity in smaller chunks, not hundred megawatts or a gigawatt, but a megawatt or 10 megawatts, its industrial sized, city sized, village sized and you can spread that around, that is potentially more economical way to do things, if you have the right gadget, then building big power stations and trying to control big robust grids, as things are building and changing. Its really not just an economic issue, its not fundamentally one is better than the other, but if you can come up with the right distributed electricity gadget at the right price, then it has some really great advantages and we saw the opportunity to do this with solar power, and perhaps make one of the really significant changes in the way electricity is generated in the world and therefore have a lot of fun to do something thats good and potentially make a multibillion dollar business out of it, which is absolutely our plan and our vision.BUSINESS MOD ELMartin: So, lets talk about the business model, Steve.Steve: Yes.Martin: From my understanding, its a decentralized, energy producing and storage and distribution system that you are planning to do. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this works and also together from a technology point of view?Steve: Yes, Ill be happy to do that. So, what the product were selling is, is a small power plant. It provides electricity in the form that is valuable to people. In other words, whats valuable to people is AC electricity of 50 or 60 hertz, depending on where you are, at a defined voltage, where you have it available on demand, its available to run your school, your factory, your home, your air-conditioning. When you put in or when you turn on your equipment, it adjusts and it provides controlled voltage and frequency so that you can run it. When you have such electricity at reasonable cost, people invest in homes, they invest in factories, they invest in industry, it creates wealth , it creates economic growth. Any other kind of electricity thats uncontrolled its not particularly useful. So having said that, thats what you have to provide, by the way, thats what a lot of power distributive parable comes to big diesel generators, where they do exactly that, they provide excellent power, but you have to keep feeding them with diesel, its very expensive, its polluting, its insecure, its unpredictable and so for. That is really one of the key targets, is diesel generated power, because its already expensive, but it works very well.So, what were providing basically is little power plants that do what a big diesel generator does, but instead of running on diesel they run on sunlight. So, sunlight in, electricity on, 24 hours a day. In order to do that, you have to have a means to take the sunlight and convert it to electricity, but you have to have a buffer, you have to have a fuel tank, with diesel engine doesnt work without a fuel tank. The tanker arrives, it fill s up the fuel tank, then you run for a while. So, in the case of sunlight, its already distributed, its just distributed to your doorstep daily, on most days. Its free, its untaxed, so far, and, but it doesnt come out on a form of a AC voltage, so you have to have a way to capture it, you have to hold on to the energy in it and then convert it to electricity on demand, at a time that you do it.So, technically and thermodynamically, what were doing is taking some very old, well-established technologies that people spent thousands of man year, person years developing, and perfecting and refining, so were not big entrepreneurs whore going to invent some fundamental breakthrough in science. Were too impatient for that. We really need to exploit technologies that have been used and find a way to put them together to solve a problem. So, the technologies that were using is solar power, so the first fundamental element is concentrating solar thermal power. So this has been done by many peo ple before in many scales and forms, where you take a mirror, a set of mirrors, you concentrate sunlight into a much smaller space, so it creates high temperature, you absorb that sunlight into some sort of a fluid, you use that fluid to go through a heat exchange and to generate steam at high pressure. And then that steam is used to go through machine, to turn a shaft to drive an electrical generator to make AC power. Now, I would guess that most people in the audience are going to go Ah, youre talking about a steam turbine. And in fact, steam turbines are coal fired plant and nuclear plant, combined cycle gas plant. I mean a lot of the world runs off electricity generated by steam turbines, the vast majority of it is done this way, but its not what we do, because it doesnt solve the problem that we need.Steam turbines are great at 100 megawatts and up, theyre great at a gigawatt, its a wonderful thing, and it requires you to have an extremely large power plant and a very robust di stribution network. If you want to do it at a megawatt or 5 megawatts or 10 megawatts, steam turbines are not useful at all, for two reasons.Number one is for technical, physical reasons, they become very inefficient in the small scale.But the other reason is that steam turbines provide whats called base load power, which is useful in a big electric grid, but its useless in a distributed sense, because base load power means you turn it on, and it runs on one power outlet. So, if youre running at 10 megawatts into a factory and you turn on or turn off equipment, youre not drawing 10 megawatts, youre drawing a variable amount of power, and this is what a diesel generator provides very well, but turbines dont do that.So, for efficiency reasons and the fact that theyre not a variable power output, theyre quite useless to solve this distributed generation opportunity. But, the thermodynamics is the same, the whole industrial revolution was built on steam piston engines. Not the same ones that go into a steam locomotive, but very much the same thats going to large steam ship. All the steam ship through World War 2 were primarily driven by steam, as was distributed power generation, where coal was delivered to a factory and you burn it and use the steam engine to generate electricity.So, this technology through the 1930s was very highly advanced for your efficient, for your robust, for your reliable, and if you know where to look, the documentation there this wealth of technological know-how exists. It hasn’t entirely stopped in sense that its a piston engine, and much of the world now runs on internal combustion engines, which are piston engines, and the technology and the supply chains, and the factories are designing, and analyzing, and manufacturing those has advanced enormously over the last 80 years, but none on steam, based on combustion.Basically, if you take high pressure steam and you put in the piston, it will move the piston which will turn a crankshaft which will create electricity, and this is an old, old principle.So, the first part of our technology is to use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to generate high pressure steam, that drives the steam into extensor steam engine and causes to turn a shaft, the crankshaft, which drives an electrical generator and creates electricity. Having said that, that by itself is quite useless, because thats exactly what a solar panel with an inverter does, and solar panels with inverters are quite cheap nowadays. Its an amazing progress thats been made in that area, but they have no practical storage. To create electricity as the sun is shining is not matched to the needs, so a distributed power sense that has no value, really. You can solve this problem with a very large pile of batteries. The batteries today and for the perceivable future are simply too expensive to be economically interesting. They have corners of application that make sense, but its a long, it will be ten years or more befor e batteries are cheap enough to provide mainstream power economically.So, the reason why we want steam engines is because it allows us to then use an invention in storage technology, which is much cheaper than battery storage. And the way that we do that is we basically use a steal tank, a large steal tank, 10.000 gallons, and a 40 foot container full of water, with installation around it. And basically what you have, with what I described is you have sunlight and mirrors generating steam under pressure at very high volume, but you dont want to use that while its been generated, you want to park it, you want to hang on to it, and then choose when and how much to convert that through the engine into electricity. The steam has huge volume, so its not practical to store steam under pressure in volume, but steam is made of water, water changes from liquid to gas, every time you take a breath youre doing that, every time a plant grows a little bit, its doing that. And this is what the wh ole steam power turbine thing is based on. So, our thermodynamics is exactly the same as those power stations thermodynamics, but its done with pistons instead of turbines.And basically, if you take steam and you squirt it under pressure into water in the tank, the steam will condense, all the available energy in the steam goes into heating and pressurizing the water, so you can squirt a massive volume of steam into a relatively small tank of water. The steam just disappears, but the tank of water gets hotter and more pressurized. And if you open the valve, the top surface of water will boil, and, to be more specific, the latent heat of condensation and the steam that imparted its energy into heating and pressurizing the water is the same as the reciprocal of evaporation required to boil water and turn it back into steam.So, you have a steel pressure vessel, basically I have a pipe, and massive volume of steam goes into the water, pumps it up, if you will, heats it, pressurizes it, and then at a time of your choosing, you can get back out again a steam and the energy in the steam that comes out is within 95% percent of the energy that went in. And so, this is in means of hanging on to, the energy coming from the sun and then choosing exactly when and how much to convert to power through this efficient steam engine technology that can operate over a very wide range.The reason it works economically is because the characteristic of the steam engine which is very different from the characteristic of a turbine, thats that steam engine can operate efficiently over a very wide range of pressure. Which means you can heat the tank up, you can put a lot of energy into the tank, and then you can get a lot of energy out of the tank. And the question is what did the tank cost and how much energy can you get out of it, by the time you convert to the steam engine. And the answer is, the way that numbers work out is when you combine this 1930 steam engine technology with toda y’s ubiquitous 2500psi tank technology, which is whats used for propane storage and all sorts of things, that the cost to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity is less than a 100 dollars per the capacity to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity.Martin: That is compared to a conventional ways of storing?Steve: So, just the other day there was announcement in Southern California that the large utility there done a multi megawatt hour project with lithium ion batteries, and the cost per kilowatt hour of storage capacity was 1,600 dollars. If you talk to, if you listen to, there will be progress in this area, for example Tesla are building a giga factory. So they are going to drive to cost down one day. But realistically now its well in a system level, its well above 500 and maybe slowly come down below 500, 400 maybe one day 300 at a system level.Our prototype, not after we build a billion dollar factory, but our prototype, when we build one, was less than a h undred dollars for that same capacity. So its really 10:1 breakthrough in the cost of energy storage, and occasionally, if you run into something like this, that addresses the specific problem that were trying to address, which is distributed electricity generation from a free source. So, the conversion of the sunlight in the useful electricity is now enabled by a steel tank full of water, and a 1930s steam engine, and some mirrors. And its this combination that, and its all about the money, its a question, what does this piece of capital equipment cost and is it able to generate electricity at a rate, over a period of time, thats a long life? So it generates a string of value, which means that you dont have to pay something else for that value, so youre making capital investment upfront thats producing a value string, and the question is what is the rate of return on capital. So, it costs a certain amount, it produces a certain amount of electricity, which eliminates the need to bu y that much electricity from something else, from that you calculate the rate of return. If that rate of return is more than 15 or 20% its enormously attractive in a world full of capital thats thirsting for something to invest in, and it draws all this capital. So you can think of solar energy with storage as really the worlds biggest lending opportunity ever, in history, because it takes a month by month stream of expenses and allows you to invest in capital equipment that offsets the cost of that monthly expense, in economic terms thats what it is.So, in terms of business model, really, from us, we have to have manufactured integrate and sell boxes of equipment in 40 foot containers with mirrors that get installed. These systems will have a capital cost anywhere from a couple million dollars to a raise of them that might cost 50 million. Its very flexible in that regard. The typical arrangement of the world is the world is divided into people who purchase electricity on a monthly basis and people who invest in power plants to sell electricity to those customers. So, there are many variations on this theme, but for the most part, we will be selling our product to the people on power plants, who raise capital from investors, who buy that capital. That operation sells electricity to the people used to buying it, they get paid for it monthly and there is a rate of return for that investment, and providing the cost of our system solves their problem, as you can plug it in and are able to use it and are happy with it. And the rate of return is good, then you have a growth business.COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEMartin: Steve, Terrajoule is very good example of combining different technology that is used, well known and well established and combining it, integrating it and making a new kind of integration, integrated product. But how do you increase your barriers to enter? So, how do you keep your competitive advantage? Because, as you said, everybody could do this because the technologies are well known.Steve: Yes, the technology is well known, and the mirror systems that creates steam, there are multiple suppliers you can purchase them. The pressure vessel, there are hundreds of suppliers in the world, that you could purchase that. Where are you going to buy steam engine?Martin: I guess at Terrajoule, I dont know.Steve: You cant. There are, there really are no companies, theres really no market in the world for steam engines. Theres a German company that makes some for certain specialized application. Steam engine technology like other engines has different technologies through it, so they are good for different purposes. And for what we need, if this was 1930, we couldve purchased engines that could do what we want with some adaptation to the system needs of the solar and the storage, but basically, that technology existed. It has not been manufactured since 1955.So what, so the biggest barrier to entry, apart from the fact that we have a core pate nt on our architecture that allows the storage to accrue which we think will be very robust, thats issued in China, Australia, Mexico. We expect it to issue in the United States really soon, and another places. But patents are form of protection, but theyre not rock solid. You basically have to be the best one at solving your customers problems so they choose to buy from you. And the barrier of entry is the steam engine. Its really the steam engine. So, through investment we spent over 10 million dollars so far prototyping, understanding, filling in the gaps of the knowledge, the experts who knew how to do this, theres a lot of literature and documentation than we are students, we are diligent students of history, of digging out the information other people know. But unfortunately, we cant go and hire 10 people who have years of experience designing and manufacturing steam engines, theyre dead. And so we dig out the literature, some of the key information was trade secrets, it was c ompetitive proprietary information between steam engine companies.So we had to build prototypes full scale, find the gaps in the knowledge, find the things that broke, and go back and reexamine the literature, figure out what they really meant, refine that models and get it to the point within we know how to design a modern piston engine. To do that, we contracted with a company called Roush Industries in Detroit. Detroit is the place, Detroit is the Silicon Valley of piston engines, thats why they know how to do it. There are 3000+ organization firm that does a lot of outsource engine design to go into manufacture. They also low volume manufacture, they do it for car companies and a lot of other businesses and they support three Nascar teams, so they build race car engine. So these are world class guys that know how to do piston engines.So we take our steam engine knowledge and their knowledge of piston engines, and longevity and reliability and maintainability and all their knowle dge of the whole supply chain. They know how to do that, so we put those together and were now at a point where were about to release tools and start building the first production versions of these engines. So we will go into testing next year.So, this is a huge barrier to entry, because to decide to do it, you have to see the opportunity, you have to see that old-fashioned steam engine technology is the key to it; you have to be not doing what everybody else is doing; you have to be not thinking solar panels and batteries; you have to be not thinking steam turbines; you have to be not thinking centralized power; you have to be not thinking attaching something to a grid with net metering that depends on government policy. You have to be looking at this distributed worldwide power generation energy on demand opportunity, and see that theres a way of doing it, and then somehow persuade people to give you money that you need to get that technology recreated and do it. Thats not so easy .ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In Redwood City we talked with entrepreneur Steve Bisset about the business model of Terrajoule and the technology behind. Furthermore, Steve shares his learnings and advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcription of the interview is upload below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at Terrajoule in Redwood City. Steve, who are you and what do you do?Steve: My name is Steve Bisset. Im the chief executive officer at Terrajoule Corporation. Were a relatively new startup, founded in 2009 for the purpose of introducing a very significant new kind of electricity generation equipment into the world market.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Steve: Like a lot of people these days, Ive done a variety of things. My original background was an engineer, I got a degree in electrical engineering from Caltech, but I have had a business passion from the beginning for reasons that no one can ever explain. So, from doing newspaper delivering routes, to cutting lawns, to exportin g surfboards from Australia to the United States, I did a number of things. But basically the core of my background is in starting up businesses that design, manufacture and sell capital equipment to customers. So, I very much like things that cost about million dollars each, because if they cost a billion dollars, you have to be a politician and the sales process is a certain kind of thing; if its consumer goods, I have no intuition for that, everything, every product I like, its discontinued because nobody else likes it, so my taste in that is useless. But basically commercial industrial customers, the things cost a million or ten million dollars, youre providing something that is critical and important to them, so they can pay attention to it. The process has a large rational component to it, it is always emotion and relationship, but its basically rational, so if you can understand customers problem in economic and practical terms and you can provide a solution to that customer thats important to them and better than the next best solution, theyll buy it from you and then the customers happy and youre happy and have a relationship and that all make sense. So this is my view of business.Martin: Lets get to some insights on how you started and you did define on find this business idea.Steve: My background, as I said was semi conductor capital equipment making test equipment for companies like Intel, and then I did a number of different things that I wont take up time here, but including anywhere from travel to mathematics education. But for a long time I was really interested in the energy business. Energy is, I really cant explain such a thing. Some people like cars, some people like energy. To me, energy is very big, its really important, its really influential on the world, theres World Bank study that shows this very close correlation between the availability of dependable electric power at low-cost and standard of living. Its a fundamental driver to civ ilization. And for me, for many years, just the appeal at a hobby level it was very interesting to me. Clearly theres a lot change happening with the technology, theres a lot of opportunity to make a difference, theres a huge amount of growth and demand, a lot of developing economies that are developing now that werent developing before. And some really unresolved problems, so global warming is certainly one of them. Thats really, I see that, I understand it, its important, its really too big of a problem. To me to really think about something thats sort of more media in the philosophical sense, that if you can put power, if you can distribute power, if you can distribute electrical power, the control of it, the ownership of it, youre also distributing an economic power, youre also distributing political power. And when you do that as oppose to having central control of it, it makes the world safer for democracy and the nice people. And its generally, I think, good for economic grow th.So, both of the philosophical level and on practical level, we have growing economies, the supply of electricity within those economies is the fundamental need and then gigantic, gigantic business opportunity, perhaps the biggest. And if you had a good distributed power generation gadget, that would generate electricity in smaller chunks, not hundred megawatts or a gigawatt, but a megawatt or 10 megawatts, its industrial sized, city sized, village sized and you can spread that around, that is potentially more economical way to do things, if you have the right gadget, then building big power stations and trying to control big robust grids, as things are building and changing. Its really not just an economic issue, its not fundamentally one is better than the other, but if you can come up with the right distributed electricity gadget at the right price, then it has some really great advantages and we saw the opportunity to do this with solar power, and perhaps make one of the reall y significant changes in the way electricity is generated in the world and therefore have a lot of fun to do something thats good and potentially make a multibillion dollar business out of it, which is absolutely our plan and our vision.BUSINESS MODELMartin: So, lets talk about the business model, Steve.Steve: Yes.Martin: From my understanding, its a decentralized, energy producing and storage and distribution system that you are planning to do. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this works and also together from a technology point of view?Steve: Yes, Ill be happy to do that. So, what the product were selling is, is a small power plant. It provides electricity in the form that is valuable to people. In other words, whats valuable to people is AC electricity of 50 or 60 hertz, depending on where you are, at a defined voltage, where you have it available on demand, its available to run your school, your factory, your home, your air-conditioning. When you put in or when you tu rn on your equipment, it adjusts and it provides controlled voltage and frequency so that you can run it. When you have such electricity at reasonable cost, people invest in homes, they invest in factories, they invest in industry, it creates wealth, it creates economic growth. Any other kind of electricity thats uncontrolled its not particularly useful. So having said that, thats what you have to provide, by the way, thats what a lot of power distributive parable comes to big diesel generators, where they do exactly that, they provide excellent power, but you have to keep feeding them with diesel, its very expensive, its polluting, its insecure, its unpredictable and so for. That is really one of the key targets, is diesel generated power, because its already expensive, but it works very well.So, what were providing basically is little power plants that do what a big diesel generator does, but instead of running on diesel they run on sunlight. So, sunlight in, electricity on, 24 ho urs a day. In order to do that, you have to have a means to take the sunlight and convert it to electricity, but you have to have a buffer, you have to have a fuel tank, with diesel engine doesnt work without a fuel tank. The tanker arrives, it fills up the fuel tank, then you run for a while. So, in the case of sunlight, its already distributed, its just distributed to your doorstep daily, on most days. Its free, its untaxed, so far, and, but it doesnt come out on a form of a AC voltage, so you have to have a way to capture it, you have to hold on to the energy in it and then convert it to electricity on demand, at a time that you do it.So, technically and thermodynamically, what were doing is taking some very old, well-established technologies that people spent thousands of man year, person years developing, and perfecting and refining, so were not big entrepreneurs whore going to invent some fundamental breakthrough in science. Were too impatient for that. We really need to explo it technologies that have been used and find a way to put them together to solve a problem. So, the technologies that were using is solar power, so the first fundamental element is concentrating solar thermal power. So this has been done by many people before in many scales and forms, where you take a mirror, a set of mirrors, you concentrate sunlight into a much smaller space, so it creates high temperature, you absorb that sunlight into some sort of a fluid, you use that fluid to go through a heat exchange and to generate steam at high pressure. And then that steam is used to go through machine, to turn a shaft to drive an electrical generator to make AC power. Now, I would guess that most people in the audience are going to go Ah, youre talking about a steam turbine. And in fact, steam turbines are coal fired plant and nuclear plant, combined cycle gas plant. I mean a lot of the world runs off electricity generated by steam turbines, the vast majority of it is done this way, but its not what we do, because it doesnt solve the problem that we need.Steam turbines are great at 100 megawatts and up, theyre great at a gigawatt, its a wonderful thing, and it requires you to have an extremely large power plant and a very robust distribution network. If you want to do it at a megawatt or 5 megawatts or 10 megawatts, steam turbines are not useful at all, for two reasons.Number one is for technical, physical reasons, they become very inefficient in the small scale.But the other reason is that steam turbines provide whats called base load power, which is useful in a big electric grid, but its useless in a distributed sense, because base load power means you turn it on, and it runs on one power outlet. So, if youre running at 10 megawatts into a factory and you turn on or turn off equipment, youre not drawing 10 megawatts, youre drawing a variable amount of power, and this is what a diesel generator provides very well, but turbines dont do that.So, for efficiency reaso ns and the fact that theyre not a variable power output, theyre quite useless to solve this distributed generation opportunity. But, the thermodynamics is the same, the whole industrial revolution was built on steam piston engines. Not the same ones that go into a steam locomotive, but very much the same thats going to large steam ship. All the steam ship through World War 2 were primarily driven by steam, as was distributed power generation, where coal was delivered to a factory and you burn it and use the steam engine to generate electricity.So, this technology through the 1930s was very highly advanced for your efficient, for your robust, for your reliable, and if you know where to look, the documentation there this wealth of technological know-how exists. It hasn’t entirely stopped in sense that its a piston engine, and much of the world now runs on internal combustion engines, which are piston engines, and the technology and the supply chains, and the factories are designing, and analyzing, and manufacturing those has advanced enormously over the last 80 years, but none on steam, based on combustion.Basically, if you take high pressure steam and you put in the piston, it will move the piston which will turn a crankshaft which will create electricity, and this is an old, old principle.So, the first part of our technology is to use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to generate high pressure steam, that drives the steam into extensor steam engine and causes to turn a shaft, the crankshaft, which drives an electrical generator and creates electricity. Having said that, that by itself is quite useless, because thats exactly what a solar panel with an inverter does, and solar panels with inverters are quite cheap nowadays. Its an amazing progress thats been made in that area, but they have no practical storage. To create electricity as the sun is shining is not matched to the needs, so a distributed power sense that has no value, really. You can solve this prob lem with a very large pile of batteries. The batteries today and for the perceivable future are simply too expensive to be economically interesting. They have corners of application that make sense, but its a long, it will be ten years or more before batteries are cheap enough to provide mainstream power economically.So, the reason why we want steam engines is because it allows us to then use an invention in storage technology, which is much cheaper than battery storage. And the way that we do that is we basically use a steal tank, a large steal tank, 10.000 gallons, and a 40 foot container full of water, with installation around it. And basically what you have, with what I described is you have sunlight and mirrors generating steam under pressure at very high volume, but you dont want to use that while its been generated, you want to park it, you want to hang on to it, and then choose when and how much to convert that through the engine into electricity. The steam has huge volume, so its not practical to store steam under pressure in volume, but steam is made of water, water changes from liquid to gas, every time you take a breath youre doing that, every time a plant grows a little bit, its doing that. And this is what the whole steam power turbine thing is based on. So, our thermodynamics is exactly the same as those power stations thermodynamics, but its done with pistons instead of turbines.And basically, if you take steam and you squirt it under pressure into water in the tank, the steam will condense, all the available energy in the steam goes into heating and pressurizing the water, so you can squirt a massive volume of steam into a relatively small tank of water. The steam just disappears, but the tank of water gets hotter and more pressurized. And if you open the valve, the top surface of water will boil, and, to be more specific, the latent heat of condensation and the steam that imparted its energy into heating and pressurizing the water is the same as the reciprocal of evaporation required to boil water and turn it back into steam.So, you have a steel pressure vessel, basically I have a pipe, and massive volume of steam goes into the water, pumps it up, if you will, heats it, pressurizes it, and then at a time of your choosing, you can get back out again a steam and the energy in the steam that comes out is within 95% percent of the energy that went in. And so, this is in means of hanging on to, the energy coming from the sun and then choosing exactly when and how much to convert to power through this efficient steam engine technology that can operate over a very wide range.The reason it works economically is because the characteristic of the steam engine which is very different from the characteristic of a turbine, thats that steam engine can operate efficiently over a very wide range of pressure. Which means you can heat the tank up, you can put a lot of energy into the tank, and then you can get a lot of energy out of the tank. And the question is what did the tank cost and how much energy can you get out of it, by the time you convert to the steam engine. And the answer is, the way that numbers work out is when you combine this 1930 steam engine technology with today’s ubiquitous 2500psi tank technology, which is whats used for propane storage and all sorts of things, that the cost to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity is less than a 100 dollars per the capacity to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity.Martin: That is compared to a conventional ways of storing?Steve: So, just the other day there was announcement in Southern California that the large utility there done a multi megawatt hour project with lithium ion batteries, and the cost per kilowatt hour of storage capacity was 1,600 dollars. If you talk to, if you listen to, there will be progress in this area, for example Tesla are building a giga factory. So they are going to drive to cost down one day. But realistic ally now its well in a system level, its well above 500 and maybe slowly come down below 500, 400 maybe one day 300 at a system level.Our prototype, not after we build a billion dollar factory, but our prototype, when we build one, was less than a hundred dollars for that same capacity. So its really 10:1 breakthrough in the cost of energy storage, and occasionally, if you run into something like this, that addresses the specific problem that were trying to address, which is distributed electricity generation from a free source. So, the conversion of the sunlight in the useful electricity is now enabled by a steel tank full of water, and a 1930s steam engine, and some mirrors. And its this combination that, and its all about the money, its a question, what does this piece of capital equipment cost and is it able to generate electricity at a rate, over a period of time, thats a long life? So it generates a string of value, which means that you dont have to pay something else for that value, so youre making capital investment upfront thats producing a value string, and the question is what is the rate of return on capital. So, it costs a certain amount, it produces a certain amount of electricity, which eliminates the need to buy that much electricity from something else, from that you calculate the rate of return. If that rate of return is more than 15 or 20% its enormously attractive in a world full of capital thats thirsting for something to invest in, and it draws all this capital. So you can think of solar energy with storage as really the worlds biggest lending opportunity ever, in history, because it takes a month by month stream of expenses and allows you to invest in capital equipment that offsets the cost of that monthly expense, in economic terms thats what it is.So, in terms of business model, really, from us, we have to have manufactured integrate and sell boxes of equipment in 40 foot containers with mirrors that get installed. These systems will h ave a capital cost anywhere from a couple million dollars to a raise of them that might cost 50 million. Its very flexible in that regard. The typical arrangement of the world is the world is divided into people who purchase electricity on a monthly basis and people who invest in power plants to sell electricity to those customers. So, there are many variations on this theme, but for the most part, we will be selling our product to the people on power plants, who raise capital from investors, who buy that capital. That operation sells electricity to the people used to buying it, they get paid for it monthly and there is a rate of return for that investment, and providing the cost of our system solves their problem, as you can plug it in and are able to use it and are happy with it. And the rate of return is good, then you have a growth business.COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEMartin: Steve, Terrajoule is very good example of combining different technology that is used, well known and well esta blished and combining it, integrating it and making a new kind of integration, integrated product. But how do you increase your barriers to enter? So, how do you keep your competitive advantage? Because, as you said, everybody could do this because the technologies are well known.Steve: Yes, the technology is well known, and the mirror systems that creates steam, there are multiple suppliers you can purchase them. The pressure vessel, there are hundreds of suppliers in the world, that you could purchase that. Where are you going to buy steam engine?Martin: I guess at Terrajoule, I dont know.Steve: You cant. There are, there really are no companies, theres really no market in the world for steam engines. Theres a German company that makes some for certain specialized application. Steam engine technology like other engines has different technologies through it, so they are good for different purposes. And for what we need, if this was 1930, we couldve purchased engines that could do w hat we want with some adaptation to the system needs of the solar and the storage, but basically, that technology existed. It has not been manufactured since 1955.So what, so the biggest barrier to entry, apart from the fact that we have a core patent on our architecture that allows the storage to accrue which we think will be very robust, thats issued in China, Australia, Mexico. We expect it to issue in the United States really soon, and another places. But patents are form of protection, but theyre not rock solid. You basically have to be the best one at solving your customers problems so they choose to buy from you. And the barrier of entry is the steam engine. Its really the steam engine. So, through investment we spent over 10 million dollars so far prototyping, understanding, filling in the gaps of the knowledge, the experts who knew how to do this, theres a lot of literature and documentation than we are students, we are diligent students of history, of digging out the infor mation other people know. But unfortunately, we cant go and hire 10 people who have years of experience designing and manufacturing steam engines, theyre dead. And so we dig out the literature, some of the key information was trade secrets, it was competitive proprietary information between steam engine companies.So we had to build prototypes full scale, find the gaps in the knowledge, find the things that broke, and go back and reexamine the literature, figure out what they really meant, refine that models and get it to the point within we know how to design a modern piston engine. To do that, we contracted with a company called Roush Industries in Detroit. Detroit is the place, Detroit is the Silicon Valley of piston engines, thats why they know how to do it. There are 3000+ organization firm that does a lot of outsource engine design to go into manufacture. They also low volume manufacture, they do it for car companies and a lot of other businesses and they support three Nascar t eams, so they build race car engine. So these are world class guys that know how to do piston engines.So we take our steam engine knowledge and their knowledge of piston engines, and longevity and reliability and maintainability and all their knowledge of the whole supply chain. They know how to do that, so we put those together and were now at a point where were about to release tools and start building the first production versions of these engines. So we will go into testing next year.So, this is a huge barrier to entry, because to decide to do it, you have to see the opportunity, you have to see that old-fashioned steam engine technology is the key to it; you have to be not doing what everybody else is doing; you have to be not thinking solar panels and batteries; you have to be not thinking steam turbines; you have to be not thinking centralized power; you have to be not thinking attaching something to a grid with net metering that depends on government policy. You have to be l ooking at this distributed worldwide power generation energy on demand opportunity, and see that theres a way of doing it, and then somehow persuade people to give you money that you need to get that technology recreated and do it. Thats not so easy.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: Steve, what have been your major learnings and what advice can you give the young entrepreneurs?Steve: I dont think theres really a lot of magic advice and Im not going to, I have nothing really brilliant to say that hasnt been said by other people. The difference between an entrepreneur and somebody whos not an entrepreneur is not thinking of the ideas, its that you actually do it.But, the particular thing and the thing thats governed my own pathway through different entrepreneurship is you have to understand that theres a problem worth solving.Then you have to, from my perspective, Im not in the government grant 10 years of science research, thats sort of thing, I want to get a product that you can sell. So, you have to be, you have to go find the customer, find who would pay for it and why, what are the limitations, whats your solution, whats in that, what do you have to do to get to the point where you can sell something to somebody.In our case, we started out with a narrow example. I was looking for a vision as to something I wanted to see in solar power generation. I made a decision in 2008, Im going to find a way into that, because its the biggest, most exciting, most worthwhile thing there is and Ive been thinking about it for years and I wanted to do it. So, this is Silicon Valley, theres lots of opportunity for people to meet people, a hundred around, I met an Australian engineer by the name of Robert Mierisch, whos coming from one of those very large turbine based centralized power companies, where that model actually technically was working but financially and business wise wasnt working. And hed been pushing for steam engines because they are at the right scale that you c an distribute. Now, most people would look at him and go This is a wacky engineer, hes a crazy guy, old fashioned steam engine, this is ridiculous. Who would think that this is a game changer, something thats going to change the modern world? Were done with that. And so I, there was an event, and he got up where there were 20 people in the room and the first thing that interested me is that he was talking about something that nobody else was talking about. So, when youre thinking about starting a company and you look at panel of venture capitalists or stuff like that, whatever theyre talking about their technology is too late, forget about it. Theyre ahead of you, they are smart people, they are funded, the odds of you catching up and doing anything actually useful are almost zero. Nobody was talking about steam engines and solar, wow this is interesting. And then he was talking about an opportunity to replace the function of diesel engines driving irrigation pumps in California.So, to cut the story short. We met, actually we were both born in the same town, Im also Australian, you may have not realized it, its because Im not speaking Australian at this moment. But we started collaborating, we found that there were many diesel powered irrigation pumps in California. I looked for a company that was selling power systems to those customers that had their trust, we worked through them, we talked to lots of farmers running these irrigation. We understood technically what their needs are and we evolved this technology so that we could at least define a product that you sell to a customer through a channel who would write a check for that, for economic reasons that are well understood and theyre already doing something similar related to it, so that you could see that they would do it. So, its closing that loop and finding out you have a customer, this is actually a tiny, tiny sliver of the worldwide market, as our understanding of this develop, you get to start wit h one customer. Having a million customers who might almost buy your product is no use. You have to find one customer who actually would. And what are all the reasons why they would and why they wouldnt and what their alternatives are, and then how you get from here to there.So, this is my way of thinking is, and I think this is true for a lot of businesses, even in internet business, you have to understand who is sitting down and doing what that will cause them to want your product, and what are the reasons why they would or wouldnt buy it, or yours or somebody else’s, and in the case of capital equipment business its very, fortunately its very concrete. That its economically driven, the customers have spreadsheets, they understand rate of return, theyre keenly aware of it and they understand risk and barriers and also its a lot of things that you cant hunt through, what are all the things that you have to before you can deliver product. And then you start to put together a plan, thinking about the resources, the engineering, how you can get it done, all those sorts of things. But its sort of, you have to have a big picture, and then you have to find a representative customers, a very little picture within the big picture, and then kind of work back from that.Our big picture is theres a 50 billion dollar a year market for this, for next 30 years. And it will change the world, it will decentralize economic power, it will eliminate an awful lot of carbon pollution, and diesel pollution, it will make the energy supply chain for a lot of parts much more secure, Theres a lot to like about it, in terms of sense that if we do this, were going to be making the world, were going to be dong more good than harm to the world, by a long shot. But that is also a practical business. There are distribution channels, theres a manufacturing supply chain, it doesnt take a billion dollars of government money to do this, its the term foundry, silicon foundry, started with iron foundries, we get iron castings made to make engines from iron foundries. So we can solve the worlds CAD models to, and drawings the specifications, its mechanical manufacturing task, with existing distributed energy companies, as channels by which we get to the market.So, its, I dont think, I think if this were my first startup, it would be pretty difficult to do. Obviously, its not, and the fact that its similar to, semi conducted capital equipment is not power generation equipment, but its selling complicated electro mechanical products to customers who really care about them, and sort of deep industrial food chain thing. To me, it has a lot of the same essential elements to it, and so you learn how to think about that and how to trough the process of doing that.Martin: Steve, thank you very much for your time and your insights.Steve: Youre welcome.Martin: And, lets make this world a better place with decentralized energy storage and distribution and production. Thank you very mu ch.

In-depth interview with Terrajoule founder Steve Bisset

In-depth interview with Terrajoule founder Steve Bisset INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at Terrajoule in Redwood City. Steve, who are you and what do you do?Steve: My name is Steve Bisset. Im the chief executive officer at Terrajoule Corporation. Were a relatively new startup, founded in 2009 for the purpose of introducing a very significant new kind of electricity generation equipment into the world market.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Steve: Like a lot of people these days, Ive done a variety of things. My original background was an engineer, I got a degree in electrical engineering from Caltech, but I have had a business passion from the beginning for reasons that no one can ever explain. So, from doing newspaper delivering routes, to cutting lawns, to exporting surfboards from Australia to the United States, I did a number of things. But basically the core of my background is in starting up businesses that design, manufacture and sell capital equipment to customers. So, I very much like things that cost about million dollars each, because if they cost a billion dollars, you have to be a politician and the sales process is a certain kind of thing; if its consumer goods, I have no intuition for that, everything, every product I like, its discontinued because nobody else likes it, so my taste in that is useless. But basically commercial industrial customers, the things cost a million or ten million dollars, youre providing something that is critical and important to them, so they can pay attention to it. The process has a large rational component to it, it is always emotion and relationship, but its basically rational, so if you can understand customers problem in economic and practical terms and you can provide a solution to that customer thats important to them and better than the next best solution, theyll buy it from you and then the customers happy and youre happy and have a relationship and that all make sense. So this is my view of business.Martin: Lets get to some insights on how you started and you did define on find this business idea.Steve: My background, as I said was semi conductor capital equipment making test equipment for companies like Intel, and then I did a number of different things that I wont take up time here, but including anywhere from travel to mathematics education. But for a long time I was really interested in the energy business. Energy is, I really cant explain such a thing. Some people like cars, some people like energy. To me, energy is very big, its really important, its really influential on the world, theres World Bank study that shows this very close correlation between the availability of dependable electric power at low-cost and standard of living. Its a fundamental driver to civilization. And for me, for many years, just the appeal at a hobby level it was very interesting to me. Clearly theres a lot change happening with the technology, theres a lot of opportunity to make a difference, theres a huge amount of growth and de mand, a lot of developing economies that are developing now that werent developing before. And some really unresolved problems, so global warming is certainly one of them. Thats really, I see that, I understand it, its important, its really too big of a problem. To me to really think about something thats sort of more media in the philosophical sense, that if you can put power, if you can distribute power, if you can distribute electrical power, the control of it, the ownership of it, youre also distributing an economic power, youre also distributing political power. And when you do that as oppose to having central control of it, it makes the world safer for democracy and the nice people. And its generally, I think, good for economic growth.So, both of the philosophical level and on practical level, we have growing economies, the supply of electricity within those economies is the fundamental need and then gigantic, gigantic business opportunity, perhaps the biggest. And if you had a good distributed power generation gadget, that would generate electricity in smaller chunks, not hundred megawatts or a gigawatt, but a megawatt or 10 megawatts, its industrial sized, city sized, village sized and you can spread that around, that is potentially more economical way to do things, if you have the right gadget, then building big power stations and trying to control big robust grids, as things are building and changing. Its really not just an economic issue, its not fundamentally one is better than the other, but if you can come up with the right distributed electricity gadget at the right price, then it has some really great advantages and we saw the opportunity to do this with solar power, and perhaps make one of the really significant changes in the way electricity is generated in the world and therefore have a lot of fun to do something thats good and potentially make a multibillion dollar business out of it, which is absolutely our plan and our vision.BUSINESS MOD ELMartin: So, lets talk about the business model, Steve.Steve: Yes.Martin: From my understanding, its a decentralized, energy producing and storage and distribution system that you are planning to do. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this works and also together from a technology point of view?Steve: Yes, Ill be happy to do that. So, what the product were selling is, is a small power plant. It provides electricity in the form that is valuable to people. In other words, whats valuable to people is AC electricity of 50 or 60 hertz, depending on where you are, at a defined voltage, where you have it available on demand, its available to run your school, your factory, your home, your air-conditioning. When you put in or when you turn on your equipment, it adjusts and it provides controlled voltage and frequency so that you can run it. When you have such electricity at reasonable cost, people invest in homes, they invest in factories, they invest in industry, it creates wealth , it creates economic growth. Any other kind of electricity thats uncontrolled its not particularly useful. So having said that, thats what you have to provide, by the way, thats what a lot of power distributive parable comes to big diesel generators, where they do exactly that, they provide excellent power, but you have to keep feeding them with diesel, its very expensive, its polluting, its insecure, its unpredictable and so for. That is really one of the key targets, is diesel generated power, because its already expensive, but it works very well.So, what were providing basically is little power plants that do what a big diesel generator does, but instead of running on diesel they run on sunlight. So, sunlight in, electricity on, 24 hours a day. In order to do that, you have to have a means to take the sunlight and convert it to electricity, but you have to have a buffer, you have to have a fuel tank, with diesel engine doesnt work without a fuel tank. The tanker arrives, it fill s up the fuel tank, then you run for a while. So, in the case of sunlight, its already distributed, its just distributed to your doorstep daily, on most days. Its free, its untaxed, so far, and, but it doesnt come out on a form of a AC voltage, so you have to have a way to capture it, you have to hold on to the energy in it and then convert it to electricity on demand, at a time that you do it.So, technically and thermodynamically, what were doing is taking some very old, well-established technologies that people spent thousands of man year, person years developing, and perfecting and refining, so were not big entrepreneurs whore going to invent some fundamental breakthrough in science. Were too impatient for that. We really need to exploit technologies that have been used and find a way to put them together to solve a problem. So, the technologies that were using is solar power, so the first fundamental element is concentrating solar thermal power. So this has been done by many peo ple before in many scales and forms, where you take a mirror, a set of mirrors, you concentrate sunlight into a much smaller space, so it creates high temperature, you absorb that sunlight into some sort of a fluid, you use that fluid to go through a heat exchange and to generate steam at high pressure. And then that steam is used to go through machine, to turn a shaft to drive an electrical generator to make AC power. Now, I would guess that most people in the audience are going to go Ah, youre talking about a steam turbine. And in fact, steam turbines are coal fired plant and nuclear plant, combined cycle gas plant. I mean a lot of the world runs off electricity generated by steam turbines, the vast majority of it is done this way, but its not what we do, because it doesnt solve the problem that we need.Steam turbines are great at 100 megawatts and up, theyre great at a gigawatt, its a wonderful thing, and it requires you to have an extremely large power plant and a very robust di stribution network. If you want to do it at a megawatt or 5 megawatts or 10 megawatts, steam turbines are not useful at all, for two reasons.Number one is for technical, physical reasons, they become very inefficient in the small scale.But the other reason is that steam turbines provide whats called base load power, which is useful in a big electric grid, but its useless in a distributed sense, because base load power means you turn it on, and it runs on one power outlet. So, if youre running at 10 megawatts into a factory and you turn on or turn off equipment, youre not drawing 10 megawatts, youre drawing a variable amount of power, and this is what a diesel generator provides very well, but turbines dont do that.So, for efficiency reasons and the fact that theyre not a variable power output, theyre quite useless to solve this distributed generation opportunity. But, the thermodynamics is the same, the whole industrial revolution was built on steam piston engines. Not the same ones that go into a steam locomotive, but very much the same thats going to large steam ship. All the steam ship through World War 2 were primarily driven by steam, as was distributed power generation, where coal was delivered to a factory and you burn it and use the steam engine to generate electricity.So, this technology through the 1930s was very highly advanced for your efficient, for your robust, for your reliable, and if you know where to look, the documentation there this wealth of technological know-how exists. It hasn’t entirely stopped in sense that its a piston engine, and much of the world now runs on internal combustion engines, which are piston engines, and the technology and the supply chains, and the factories are designing, and analyzing, and manufacturing those has advanced enormously over the last 80 years, but none on steam, based on combustion.Basically, if you take high pressure steam and you put in the piston, it will move the piston which will turn a crankshaft which will create electricity, and this is an old, old principle.So, the first part of our technology is to use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to generate high pressure steam, that drives the steam into extensor steam engine and causes to turn a shaft, the crankshaft, which drives an electrical generator and creates electricity. Having said that, that by itself is quite useless, because thats exactly what a solar panel with an inverter does, and solar panels with inverters are quite cheap nowadays. Its an amazing progress thats been made in that area, but they have no practical storage. To create electricity as the sun is shining is not matched to the needs, so a distributed power sense that has no value, really. You can solve this problem with a very large pile of batteries. The batteries today and for the perceivable future are simply too expensive to be economically interesting. They have corners of application that make sense, but its a long, it will be ten years or more befor e batteries are cheap enough to provide mainstream power economically.So, the reason why we want steam engines is because it allows us to then use an invention in storage technology, which is much cheaper than battery storage. And the way that we do that is we basically use a steal tank, a large steal tank, 10.000 gallons, and a 40 foot container full of water, with installation around it. And basically what you have, with what I described is you have sunlight and mirrors generating steam under pressure at very high volume, but you dont want to use that while its been generated, you want to park it, you want to hang on to it, and then choose when and how much to convert that through the engine into electricity. The steam has huge volume, so its not practical to store steam under pressure in volume, but steam is made of water, water changes from liquid to gas, every time you take a breath youre doing that, every time a plant grows a little bit, its doing that. And this is what the wh ole steam power turbine thing is based on. So, our thermodynamics is exactly the same as those power stations thermodynamics, but its done with pistons instead of turbines.And basically, if you take steam and you squirt it under pressure into water in the tank, the steam will condense, all the available energy in the steam goes into heating and pressurizing the water, so you can squirt a massive volume of steam into a relatively small tank of water. The steam just disappears, but the tank of water gets hotter and more pressurized. And if you open the valve, the top surface of water will boil, and, to be more specific, the latent heat of condensation and the steam that imparted its energy into heating and pressurizing the water is the same as the reciprocal of evaporation required to boil water and turn it back into steam.So, you have a steel pressure vessel, basically I have a pipe, and massive volume of steam goes into the water, pumps it up, if you will, heats it, pressurizes it, and then at a time of your choosing, you can get back out again a steam and the energy in the steam that comes out is within 95% percent of the energy that went in. And so, this is in means of hanging on to, the energy coming from the sun and then choosing exactly when and how much to convert to power through this efficient steam engine technology that can operate over a very wide range.The reason it works economically is because the characteristic of the steam engine which is very different from the characteristic of a turbine, thats that steam engine can operate efficiently over a very wide range of pressure. Which means you can heat the tank up, you can put a lot of energy into the tank, and then you can get a lot of energy out of the tank. And the question is what did the tank cost and how much energy can you get out of it, by the time you convert to the steam engine. And the answer is, the way that numbers work out is when you combine this 1930 steam engine technology with toda y’s ubiquitous 2500psi tank technology, which is whats used for propane storage and all sorts of things, that the cost to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity is less than a 100 dollars per the capacity to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity.Martin: That is compared to a conventional ways of storing?Steve: So, just the other day there was announcement in Southern California that the large utility there done a multi megawatt hour project with lithium ion batteries, and the cost per kilowatt hour of storage capacity was 1,600 dollars. If you talk to, if you listen to, there will be progress in this area, for example Tesla are building a giga factory. So they are going to drive to cost down one day. But realistically now its well in a system level, its well above 500 and maybe slowly come down below 500, 400 maybe one day 300 at a system level.Our prototype, not after we build a billion dollar factory, but our prototype, when we build one, was less than a h undred dollars for that same capacity. So its really 10:1 breakthrough in the cost of energy storage, and occasionally, if you run into something like this, that addresses the specific problem that were trying to address, which is distributed electricity generation from a free source. So, the conversion of the sunlight in the useful electricity is now enabled by a steel tank full of water, and a 1930s steam engine, and some mirrors. And its this combination that, and its all about the money, its a question, what does this piece of capital equipment cost and is it able to generate electricity at a rate, over a period of time, thats a long life? So it generates a string of value, which means that you dont have to pay something else for that value, so youre making capital investment upfront thats producing a value string, and the question is what is the rate of return on capital. So, it costs a certain amount, it produces a certain amount of electricity, which eliminates the need to bu y that much electricity from something else, from that you calculate the rate of return. If that rate of return is more than 15 or 20% its enormously attractive in a world full of capital thats thirsting for something to invest in, and it draws all this capital. So you can think of solar energy with storage as really the worlds biggest lending opportunity ever, in history, because it takes a month by month stream of expenses and allows you to invest in capital equipment that offsets the cost of that monthly expense, in economic terms thats what it is.So, in terms of business model, really, from us, we have to have manufactured integrate and sell boxes of equipment in 40 foot containers with mirrors that get installed. These systems will have a capital cost anywhere from a couple million dollars to a raise of them that might cost 50 million. Its very flexible in that regard. The typical arrangement of the world is the world is divided into people who purchase electricity on a monthly basis and people who invest in power plants to sell electricity to those customers. So, there are many variations on this theme, but for the most part, we will be selling our product to the people on power plants, who raise capital from investors, who buy that capital. That operation sells electricity to the people used to buying it, they get paid for it monthly and there is a rate of return for that investment, and providing the cost of our system solves their problem, as you can plug it in and are able to use it and are happy with it. And the rate of return is good, then you have a growth business.COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEMartin: Steve, Terrajoule is very good example of combining different technology that is used, well known and well established and combining it, integrating it and making a new kind of integration, integrated product. But how do you increase your barriers to enter? So, how do you keep your competitive advantage? Because, as you said, everybody could do this because the technologies are well known.Steve: Yes, the technology is well known, and the mirror systems that creates steam, there are multiple suppliers you can purchase them. The pressure vessel, there are hundreds of suppliers in the world, that you could purchase that. Where are you going to buy steam engine?Martin: I guess at Terrajoule, I dont know.Steve: You cant. There are, there really are no companies, theres really no market in the world for steam engines. Theres a German company that makes some for certain specialized application. Steam engine technology like other engines has different technologies through it, so they are good for different purposes. And for what we need, if this was 1930, we couldve purchased engines that could do what we want with some adaptation to the system needs of the solar and the storage, but basically, that technology existed. It has not been manufactured since 1955.So what, so the biggest barrier to entry, apart from the fact that we have a core pate nt on our architecture that allows the storage to accrue which we think will be very robust, thats issued in China, Australia, Mexico. We expect it to issue in the United States really soon, and another places. But patents are form of protection, but theyre not rock solid. You basically have to be the best one at solving your customers problems so they choose to buy from you. And the barrier of entry is the steam engine. Its really the steam engine. So, through investment we spent over 10 million dollars so far prototyping, understanding, filling in the gaps of the knowledge, the experts who knew how to do this, theres a lot of literature and documentation than we are students, we are diligent students of history, of digging out the information other people know. But unfortunately, we cant go and hire 10 people who have years of experience designing and manufacturing steam engines, theyre dead. And so we dig out the literature, some of the key information was trade secrets, it was c ompetitive proprietary information between steam engine companies.So we had to build prototypes full scale, find the gaps in the knowledge, find the things that broke, and go back and reexamine the literature, figure out what they really meant, refine that models and get it to the point within we know how to design a modern piston engine. To do that, we contracted with a company called Roush Industries in Detroit. Detroit is the place, Detroit is the Silicon Valley of piston engines, thats why they know how to do it. There are 3000+ organization firm that does a lot of outsource engine design to go into manufacture. They also low volume manufacture, they do it for car companies and a lot of other businesses and they support three Nascar teams, so they build race car engine. So these are world class guys that know how to do piston engines.So we take our steam engine knowledge and their knowledge of piston engines, and longevity and reliability and maintainability and all their knowle dge of the whole supply chain. They know how to do that, so we put those together and were now at a point where were about to release tools and start building the first production versions of these engines. So we will go into testing next year.So, this is a huge barrier to entry, because to decide to do it, you have to see the opportunity, you have to see that old-fashioned steam engine technology is the key to it; you have to be not doing what everybody else is doing; you have to be not thinking solar panels and batteries; you have to be not thinking steam turbines; you have to be not thinking centralized power; you have to be not thinking attaching something to a grid with net metering that depends on government policy. You have to be looking at this distributed worldwide power generation energy on demand opportunity, and see that theres a way of doing it, and then somehow persuade people to give you money that you need to get that technology recreated and do it. Thats not so easy .ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In Redwood City we talked with entrepreneur Steve Bisset about the business model of Terrajoule and the technology behind. Furthermore, Steve shares his learnings and advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcription of the interview is upload below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at Terrajoule in Redwood City. Steve, who are you and what do you do?Steve: My name is Steve Bisset. Im the chief executive officer at Terrajoule Corporation. Were a relatively new startup, founded in 2009 for the purpose of introducing a very significant new kind of electricity generation equipment into the world market.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Steve: Like a lot of people these days, Ive done a variety of things. My original background was an engineer, I got a degree in electrical engineering from Caltech, but I have had a business passion from the beginning for reasons that no one can ever explain. So, from doing newspaper delivering routes, to cutting lawns, to exportin g surfboards from Australia to the United States, I did a number of things. But basically the core of my background is in starting up businesses that design, manufacture and sell capital equipment to customers. So, I very much like things that cost about million dollars each, because if they cost a billion dollars, you have to be a politician and the sales process is a certain kind of thing; if its consumer goods, I have no intuition for that, everything, every product I like, its discontinued because nobody else likes it, so my taste in that is useless. But basically commercial industrial customers, the things cost a million or ten million dollars, youre providing something that is critical and important to them, so they can pay attention to it. The process has a large rational component to it, it is always emotion and relationship, but its basically rational, so if you can understand customers problem in economic and practical terms and you can provide a solution to that customer thats important to them and better than the next best solution, theyll buy it from you and then the customers happy and youre happy and have a relationship and that all make sense. So this is my view of business.Martin: Lets get to some insights on how you started and you did define on find this business idea.Steve: My background, as I said was semi conductor capital equipment making test equipment for companies like Intel, and then I did a number of different things that I wont take up time here, but including anywhere from travel to mathematics education. But for a long time I was really interested in the energy business. Energy is, I really cant explain such a thing. Some people like cars, some people like energy. To me, energy is very big, its really important, its really influential on the world, theres World Bank study that shows this very close correlation between the availability of dependable electric power at low-cost and standard of living. Its a fundamental driver to civ ilization. And for me, for many years, just the appeal at a hobby level it was very interesting to me. Clearly theres a lot change happening with the technology, theres a lot of opportunity to make a difference, theres a huge amount of growth and demand, a lot of developing economies that are developing now that werent developing before. And some really unresolved problems, so global warming is certainly one of them. Thats really, I see that, I understand it, its important, its really too big of a problem. To me to really think about something thats sort of more media in the philosophical sense, that if you can put power, if you can distribute power, if you can distribute electrical power, the control of it, the ownership of it, youre also distributing an economic power, youre also distributing political power. And when you do that as oppose to having central control of it, it makes the world safer for democracy and the nice people. And its generally, I think, good for economic grow th.So, both of the philosophical level and on practical level, we have growing economies, the supply of electricity within those economies is the fundamental need and then gigantic, gigantic business opportunity, perhaps the biggest. And if you had a good distributed power generation gadget, that would generate electricity in smaller chunks, not hundred megawatts or a gigawatt, but a megawatt or 10 megawatts, its industrial sized, city sized, village sized and you can spread that around, that is potentially more economical way to do things, if you have the right gadget, then building big power stations and trying to control big robust grids, as things are building and changing. Its really not just an economic issue, its not fundamentally one is better than the other, but if you can come up with the right distributed electricity gadget at the right price, then it has some really great advantages and we saw the opportunity to do this with solar power, and perhaps make one of the reall y significant changes in the way electricity is generated in the world and therefore have a lot of fun to do something thats good and potentially make a multibillion dollar business out of it, which is absolutely our plan and our vision.BUSINESS MODELMartin: So, lets talk about the business model, Steve.Steve: Yes.Martin: From my understanding, its a decentralized, energy producing and storage and distribution system that you are planning to do. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this works and also together from a technology point of view?Steve: Yes, Ill be happy to do that. So, what the product were selling is, is a small power plant. It provides electricity in the form that is valuable to people. In other words, whats valuable to people is AC electricity of 50 or 60 hertz, depending on where you are, at a defined voltage, where you have it available on demand, its available to run your school, your factory, your home, your air-conditioning. When you put in or when you tu rn on your equipment, it adjusts and it provides controlled voltage and frequency so that you can run it. When you have such electricity at reasonable cost, people invest in homes, they invest in factories, they invest in industry, it creates wealth, it creates economic growth. Any other kind of electricity thats uncontrolled its not particularly useful. So having said that, thats what you have to provide, by the way, thats what a lot of power distributive parable comes to big diesel generators, where they do exactly that, they provide excellent power, but you have to keep feeding them with diesel, its very expensive, its polluting, its insecure, its unpredictable and so for. That is really one of the key targets, is diesel generated power, because its already expensive, but it works very well.So, what were providing basically is little power plants that do what a big diesel generator does, but instead of running on diesel they run on sunlight. So, sunlight in, electricity on, 24 ho urs a day. In order to do that, you have to have a means to take the sunlight and convert it to electricity, but you have to have a buffer, you have to have a fuel tank, with diesel engine doesnt work without a fuel tank. The tanker arrives, it fills up the fuel tank, then you run for a while. So, in the case of sunlight, its already distributed, its just distributed to your doorstep daily, on most days. Its free, its untaxed, so far, and, but it doesnt come out on a form of a AC voltage, so you have to have a way to capture it, you have to hold on to the energy in it and then convert it to electricity on demand, at a time that you do it.So, technically and thermodynamically, what were doing is taking some very old, well-established technologies that people spent thousands of man year, person years developing, and perfecting and refining, so were not big entrepreneurs whore going to invent some fundamental breakthrough in science. Were too impatient for that. We really need to explo it technologies that have been used and find a way to put them together to solve a problem. So, the technologies that were using is solar power, so the first fundamental element is concentrating solar thermal power. So this has been done by many people before in many scales and forms, where you take a mirror, a set of mirrors, you concentrate sunlight into a much smaller space, so it creates high temperature, you absorb that sunlight into some sort of a fluid, you use that fluid to go through a heat exchange and to generate steam at high pressure. And then that steam is used to go through machine, to turn a shaft to drive an electrical generator to make AC power. Now, I would guess that most people in the audience are going to go Ah, youre talking about a steam turbine. And in fact, steam turbines are coal fired plant and nuclear plant, combined cycle gas plant. I mean a lot of the world runs off electricity generated by steam turbines, the vast majority of it is done this way, but its not what we do, because it doesnt solve the problem that we need.Steam turbines are great at 100 megawatts and up, theyre great at a gigawatt, its a wonderful thing, and it requires you to have an extremely large power plant and a very robust distribution network. If you want to do it at a megawatt or 5 megawatts or 10 megawatts, steam turbines are not useful at all, for two reasons.Number one is for technical, physical reasons, they become very inefficient in the small scale.But the other reason is that steam turbines provide whats called base load power, which is useful in a big electric grid, but its useless in a distributed sense, because base load power means you turn it on, and it runs on one power outlet. So, if youre running at 10 megawatts into a factory and you turn on or turn off equipment, youre not drawing 10 megawatts, youre drawing a variable amount of power, and this is what a diesel generator provides very well, but turbines dont do that.So, for efficiency reaso ns and the fact that theyre not a variable power output, theyre quite useless to solve this distributed generation opportunity. But, the thermodynamics is the same, the whole industrial revolution was built on steam piston engines. Not the same ones that go into a steam locomotive, but very much the same thats going to large steam ship. All the steam ship through World War 2 were primarily driven by steam, as was distributed power generation, where coal was delivered to a factory and you burn it and use the steam engine to generate electricity.So, this technology through the 1930s was very highly advanced for your efficient, for your robust, for your reliable, and if you know where to look, the documentation there this wealth of technological know-how exists. It hasn’t entirely stopped in sense that its a piston engine, and much of the world now runs on internal combustion engines, which are piston engines, and the technology and the supply chains, and the factories are designing, and analyzing, and manufacturing those has advanced enormously over the last 80 years, but none on steam, based on combustion.Basically, if you take high pressure steam and you put in the piston, it will move the piston which will turn a crankshaft which will create electricity, and this is an old, old principle.So, the first part of our technology is to use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to generate high pressure steam, that drives the steam into extensor steam engine and causes to turn a shaft, the crankshaft, which drives an electrical generator and creates electricity. Having said that, that by itself is quite useless, because thats exactly what a solar panel with an inverter does, and solar panels with inverters are quite cheap nowadays. Its an amazing progress thats been made in that area, but they have no practical storage. To create electricity as the sun is shining is not matched to the needs, so a distributed power sense that has no value, really. You can solve this prob lem with a very large pile of batteries. The batteries today and for the perceivable future are simply too expensive to be economically interesting. They have corners of application that make sense, but its a long, it will be ten years or more before batteries are cheap enough to provide mainstream power economically.So, the reason why we want steam engines is because it allows us to then use an invention in storage technology, which is much cheaper than battery storage. And the way that we do that is we basically use a steal tank, a large steal tank, 10.000 gallons, and a 40 foot container full of water, with installation around it. And basically what you have, with what I described is you have sunlight and mirrors generating steam under pressure at very high volume, but you dont want to use that while its been generated, you want to park it, you want to hang on to it, and then choose when and how much to convert that through the engine into electricity. The steam has huge volume, so its not practical to store steam under pressure in volume, but steam is made of water, water changes from liquid to gas, every time you take a breath youre doing that, every time a plant grows a little bit, its doing that. And this is what the whole steam power turbine thing is based on. So, our thermodynamics is exactly the same as those power stations thermodynamics, but its done with pistons instead of turbines.And basically, if you take steam and you squirt it under pressure into water in the tank, the steam will condense, all the available energy in the steam goes into heating and pressurizing the water, so you can squirt a massive volume of steam into a relatively small tank of water. The steam just disappears, but the tank of water gets hotter and more pressurized. And if you open the valve, the top surface of water will boil, and, to be more specific, the latent heat of condensation and the steam that imparted its energy into heating and pressurizing the water is the same as the reciprocal of evaporation required to boil water and turn it back into steam.So, you have a steel pressure vessel, basically I have a pipe, and massive volume of steam goes into the water, pumps it up, if you will, heats it, pressurizes it, and then at a time of your choosing, you can get back out again a steam and the energy in the steam that comes out is within 95% percent of the energy that went in. And so, this is in means of hanging on to, the energy coming from the sun and then choosing exactly when and how much to convert to power through this efficient steam engine technology that can operate over a very wide range.The reason it works economically is because the characteristic of the steam engine which is very different from the characteristic of a turbine, thats that steam engine can operate efficiently over a very wide range of pressure. Which means you can heat the tank up, you can put a lot of energy into the tank, and then you can get a lot of energy out of the tank. And the question is what did the tank cost and how much energy can you get out of it, by the time you convert to the steam engine. And the answer is, the way that numbers work out is when you combine this 1930 steam engine technology with today’s ubiquitous 2500psi tank technology, which is whats used for propane storage and all sorts of things, that the cost to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity is less than a 100 dollars per the capacity to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity.Martin: That is compared to a conventional ways of storing?Steve: So, just the other day there was announcement in Southern California that the large utility there done a multi megawatt hour project with lithium ion batteries, and the cost per kilowatt hour of storage capacity was 1,600 dollars. If you talk to, if you listen to, there will be progress in this area, for example Tesla are building a giga factory. So they are going to drive to cost down one day. But realistic ally now its well in a system level, its well above 500 and maybe slowly come down below 500, 400 maybe one day 300 at a system level.Our prototype, not after we build a billion dollar factory, but our prototype, when we build one, was less than a hundred dollars for that same capacity. So its really 10:1 breakthrough in the cost of energy storage, and occasionally, if you run into something like this, that addresses the specific problem that were trying to address, which is distributed electricity generation from a free source. So, the conversion of the sunlight in the useful electricity is now enabled by a steel tank full of water, and a 1930s steam engine, and some mirrors. And its this combination that, and its all about the money, its a question, what does this piece of capital equipment cost and is it able to generate electricity at a rate, over a period of time, thats a long life? So it generates a string of value, which means that you dont have to pay something else for that value, so youre making capital investment upfront thats producing a value string, and the question is what is the rate of return on capital. So, it costs a certain amount, it produces a certain amount of electricity, which eliminates the need to buy that much electricity from something else, from that you calculate the rate of return. If that rate of return is more than 15 or 20% its enormously attractive in a world full of capital thats thirsting for something to invest in, and it draws all this capital. So you can think of solar energy with storage as really the worlds biggest lending opportunity ever, in history, because it takes a month by month stream of expenses and allows you to invest in capital equipment that offsets the cost of that monthly expense, in economic terms thats what it is.So, in terms of business model, really, from us, we have to have manufactured integrate and sell boxes of equipment in 40 foot containers with mirrors that get installed. These systems will h ave a capital cost anywhere from a couple million dollars to a raise of them that might cost 50 million. Its very flexible in that regard. The typical arrangement of the world is the world is divided into people who purchase electricity on a monthly basis and people who invest in power plants to sell electricity to those customers. So, there are many variations on this theme, but for the most part, we will be selling our product to the people on power plants, who raise capital from investors, who buy that capital. That operation sells electricity to the people used to buying it, they get paid for it monthly and there is a rate of return for that investment, and providing the cost of our system solves their problem, as you can plug it in and are able to use it and are happy with it. And the rate of return is good, then you have a growth business.COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEMartin: Steve, Terrajoule is very good example of combining different technology that is used, well known and well esta blished and combining it, integrating it and making a new kind of integration, integrated product. But how do you increase your barriers to enter? So, how do you keep your competitive advantage? Because, as you said, everybody could do this because the technologies are well known.Steve: Yes, the technology is well known, and the mirror systems that creates steam, there are multiple suppliers you can purchase them. The pressure vessel, there are hundreds of suppliers in the world, that you could purchase that. Where are you going to buy steam engine?Martin: I guess at Terrajoule, I dont know.Steve: You cant. There are, there really are no companies, theres really no market in the world for steam engines. Theres a German company that makes some for certain specialized application. Steam engine technology like other engines has different technologies through it, so they are good for different purposes. And for what we need, if this was 1930, we couldve purchased engines that could do w hat we want with some adaptation to the system needs of the solar and the storage, but basically, that technology existed. It has not been manufactured since 1955.So what, so the biggest barrier to entry, apart from the fact that we have a core patent on our architecture that allows the storage to accrue which we think will be very robust, thats issued in China, Australia, Mexico. We expect it to issue in the United States really soon, and another places. But patents are form of protection, but theyre not rock solid. You basically have to be the best one at solving your customers problems so they choose to buy from you. And the barrier of entry is the steam engine. Its really the steam engine. So, through investment we spent over 10 million dollars so far prototyping, understanding, filling in the gaps of the knowledge, the experts who knew how to do this, theres a lot of literature and documentation than we are students, we are diligent students of history, of digging out the infor mation other people know. But unfortunately, we cant go and hire 10 people who have years of experience designing and manufacturing steam engines, theyre dead. And so we dig out the literature, some of the key information was trade secrets, it was competitive proprietary information between steam engine companies.So we had to build prototypes full scale, find the gaps in the knowledge, find the things that broke, and go back and reexamine the literature, figure out what they really meant, refine that models and get it to the point within we know how to design a modern piston engine. To do that, we contracted with a company called Roush Industries in Detroit. Detroit is the place, Detroit is the Silicon Valley of piston engines, thats why they know how to do it. There are 3000+ organization firm that does a lot of outsource engine design to go into manufacture. They also low volume manufacture, they do it for car companies and a lot of other businesses and they support three Nascar t eams, so they build race car engine. So these are world class guys that know how to do piston engines.So we take our steam engine knowledge and their knowledge of piston engines, and longevity and reliability and maintainability and all their knowledge of the whole supply chain. They know how to do that, so we put those together and were now at a point where were about to release tools and start building the first production versions of these engines. So we will go into testing next year.So, this is a huge barrier to entry, because to decide to do it, you have to see the opportunity, you have to see that old-fashioned steam engine technology is the key to it; you have to be not doing what everybody else is doing; you have to be not thinking solar panels and batteries; you have to be not thinking steam turbines; you have to be not thinking centralized power; you have to be not thinking attaching something to a grid with net metering that depends on government policy. You have to be l ooking at this distributed worldwide power generation energy on demand opportunity, and see that theres a way of doing it, and then somehow persuade people to give you money that you need to get that technology recreated and do it. Thats not so easy.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: Steve, what have been your major learnings and what advice can you give the young entrepreneurs?Steve: I dont think theres really a lot of magic advice and Im not going to, I have nothing really brilliant to say that hasnt been said by other people. The difference between an entrepreneur and somebody whos not an entrepreneur is not thinking of the ideas, its that you actually do it.But, the particular thing and the thing thats governed my own pathway through different entrepreneurship is you have to understand that theres a problem worth solving.Then you have to, from my perspective, Im not in the government grant 10 years of science research, thats sort of thing, I want to get a product that you can sell. So, you have to be, you have to go find the customer, find who would pay for it and why, what are the limitations, whats your solution, whats in that, what do you have to do to get to the point where you can sell something to somebody.In our case, we started out with a narrow example. I was looking for a vision as to something I wanted to see in solar power generation. I made a decision in 2008, Im going to find a way into that, because its the biggest, most exciting, most worthwhile thing there is and Ive been thinking about it for years and I wanted to do it. So, this is Silicon Valley, theres lots of opportunity for people to meet people, a hundred around, I met an Australian engineer by the name of Robert Mierisch, whos coming from one of those very large turbine based centralized power companies, where that model actually technically was working but financially and business wise wasnt working. And hed been pushing for steam engines because they are at the right scale that you c an distribute. Now, most people would look at him and go This is a wacky engineer, hes a crazy guy, old fashioned steam engine, this is ridiculous. Who would think that this is a game changer, something thats going to change the modern world? Were done with that. And so I, there was an event, and he got up where there were 20 people in the room and the first thing that interested me is that he was talking about something that nobody else was talking about. So, when youre thinking about starting a company and you look at panel of venture capitalists or stuff like that, whatever theyre talking about their technology is too late, forget about it. Theyre ahead of you, they are smart people, they are funded, the odds of you catching up and doing anything actually useful are almost zero. Nobody was talking about steam engines and solar, wow this is interesting. And then he was talking about an opportunity to replace the function of diesel engines driving irrigation pumps in California.So, to cut the story short. We met, actually we were both born in the same town, Im also Australian, you may have not realized it, its because Im not speaking Australian at this moment. But we started collaborating, we found that there were many diesel powered irrigation pumps in California. I looked for a company that was selling power systems to those customers that had their trust, we worked through them, we talked to lots of farmers running these irrigation. We understood technically what their needs are and we evolved this technology so that we could at least define a product that you sell to a customer through a channel who would write a check for that, for economic reasons that are well understood and theyre already doing something similar related to it, so that you could see that they would do it. So, its closing that loop and finding out you have a customer, this is actually a tiny, tiny sliver of the worldwide market, as our understanding of this develop, you get to start wit h one customer. Having a million customers who might almost buy your product is no use. You have to find one customer who actually would. And what are all the reasons why they would and why they wouldnt and what their alternatives are, and then how you get from here to there.So, this is my way of thinking is, and I think this is true for a lot of businesses, even in internet business, you have to understand who is sitting down and doing what that will cause them to want your product, and what are the reasons why they would or wouldnt buy it, or yours or somebody else’s, and in the case of capital equipment business its very, fortunately its very concrete. That its economically driven, the customers have spreadsheets, they understand rate of return, theyre keenly aware of it and they understand risk and barriers and also its a lot of things that you cant hunt through, what are all the things that you have to before you can deliver product. And then you start to put together a plan, thinking about the resources, the engineering, how you can get it done, all those sorts of things. But its sort of, you have to have a big picture, and then you have to find a representative customers, a very little picture within the big picture, and then kind of work back from that.Our big picture is theres a 50 billion dollar a year market for this, for next 30 years. And it will change the world, it will decentralize economic power, it will eliminate an awful lot of carbon pollution, and diesel pollution, it will make the energy supply chain for a lot of parts much more secure, Theres a lot to like about it, in terms of sense that if we do this, were going to be making the world, were going to be dong more good than harm to the world, by a long shot. But that is also a practical business. There are distribution channels, theres a manufacturing supply chain, it doesnt take a billion dollars of government money to do this, its the term foundry, silicon foundry, started with iron foundries, we get iron castings made to make engines from iron foundries. So we can solve the worlds CAD models to, and drawings the specifications, its mechanical manufacturing task, with existing distributed energy companies, as channels by which we get to the market.So, its, I dont think, I think if this were my first startup, it would be pretty difficult to do. Obviously, its not, and the fact that its similar to, semi conducted capital equipment is not power generation equipment, but its selling complicated electro mechanical products to customers who really care about them, and sort of deep industrial food chain thing. To me, it has a lot of the same essential elements to it, and so you learn how to think about that and how to trough the process of doing that.Martin: Steve, thank you very much for your time and your insights.Steve: Youre welcome.Martin: And, lets make this world a better place with decentralized energy storage and distribution and production. Thank you very mu ch.