The Golden Moment: Clean Energy Leaders on Raising Capital

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Clean Tech's Growth Curve: Key Insights from Industry Leaders

In a rapidly evolving clean technology landscape, entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers are navigating shifting trends and emerging opportunities. At DealMaker's SXSW Clean Tech Panel, industry leaders shared their experiences, insights, and strategies for driving innovation while overcoming the challenges inherent in the clean tech sector.

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Vision vs. Reality: Lessons from the Front Lines

For founders in clean tech, balancing long-term vision with market realities is a persistent challenge. As Teague Egan, founder of EnergyX, reflected:

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"When you're starting a business, almost nothing turns out the way you think it will. Early on, I believed licensing our lithium extraction technology would be easy given its clear advantages over traditional methods. What I underestimated was the entrenched investment in inefficient infrastructure by established lithium producers."

Teague Egan CEO of EnergyX

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For Thomas Healy, CEO of Hyliion, navigating shifting market trends required a significant pivot. Originally focused on electric vehicle (EV) powertrains, his company ultimately transitioned to power generation after recognizing the slow pace of EV adoption. As Healy explained:

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"We took the company public on a $10 billion valuation—only to realize that EV adoption wasn’t progressing as quickly as predicted. Recognizing this, we shifted to power generation, positioning ourselves to support data centers and AI infrastructure where power demand is surging."

Thomas Healy CEO of Hyliion

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Funding Strategies: Clean Tech's Capital Landscape

Raising capital remains a significant challenge in the clean tech space, particularly for startups with capital-intensive models. As Sean Voigt, founder of the Austin Climate Hub, emphasized:

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"Fundraising is hard in any sector, but clean tech founders need to think strategically—balancing venture capital, grant funding, and government partnerships. The US government is a critical customer for clean tech innovators and should be a key consideration in funding strategies."

Sean Voigt Founder of Austin Climate Hub

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Teague Egan echoed this, underscoring how digital platforms like DealMaker are democratizing capital access:

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The Future of Clean Tech: Innovation and Opportunity

Despite current challenges, panelists agreed that clean tech’s growth trajectory is poised to accelerate. Voigt described the sector’s momentum as a "$6 trillion Internet moment," emphasizing the confluence of supply chain advancements, cost reductions, and rising demand for renewable solutions:

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"Texas alone is consistently hitting 80% renewable energy across its grid. This isn’t driven by subsidies—it’s pure economics. Renewable energy is simply the cheapest and fastest to deploy, and the market is responding."

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As industries shift toward decentralized power solutions, opportunities for innovation are expanding. Healy noted that data centers—a rapidly growing sector—are expected to increase their energy demand by over sixfold in the next five years. This shift creates enormous opportunities for clean tech companies that can deliver scalable, cost-effective solutions.

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Final Thoughts: Investing in Resilient Solutions

For investors, the key takeaway is clear: Clean tech is no longer a niche sector—it’s becoming a core pillar of the global energy landscape. While market volatility may cause hesitation, smart investors are looking beyond short-term trends and focusing on companies with strong fundamentals and scalable technologies.

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As Teague Egan emphasized:

"The lithium industry’s current downturn presents an opportunity for forward-thinking investors. Investing during low cycles can unlock tremendous upside when demand inevitably returns."

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The path to clean tech success is rarely linear—but for founders willing to adapt and innovate, the opportunities are substantial. As DealMaker continues to empower innovative founders through digital capital solutions, the clean tech revolution shows no signs of slowing down.

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Video Transcript

Jon Stidd: Right on. Hey. Welcome, everybody. I'm Jon Stidd. I'm the CMO at DealMaker.

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We're co-hosting this Deal Saloon with the team here at EnergyX. Thanks so much for joining. This is the first of three panels. This is the clean tech panel. It's going to be led by Jennifer here, senior contributor at Forbes, focusing on science, technology, and sustainability.

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Jennifer Kite-Powell: So nobody better to kick us off. Cheers. Hey. Hey. Thank you so much.

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And thank you guys for coming. I'm so excited. Clean energy for the win. Right? Mhmm.

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Yeah. Woo. I love it. Little woo in the air. So we have three clean tech dare I say titans?

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Can I say that? Titans? And I'm really excited because you guys have done so much to move this industry forward. So we are gonna kick this off with them telling your origin story, like Wolverine, your origin story. And just a little bit so we can set this up and move down the line, and we can take this story to the people so we can see how you're changing our world?

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Teague Egan: First, thank you. For those that don't know me, I'm Teague Egan, and I'm the founder and CEO of EnergyX. EnergyX is a lithium technology and production company. We're developing two projects that will hopefully produce enough lithium to power over 1,000,000 electric vehicles a year. I started the company back in 2018.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel: From a backstory though about that company. Yeah. They started it.

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Teague Egan: I don't think your mic's working out, but I do have a backstory. The way that I came up with the idea, I was taking a trip down to South America, and my travels took me through Bolivia, of all places, kind of off the beaten trail.

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And Lithia, Bolivia is actually home to the world's largest lithium reserve. And I was touring this salt flat, and I found out that the country of Bolivia wasn't producing any lithium from the world's largest lithium reserve. And I said, that's a problem that I have to solve. So I started EnergyX, and we developed some technology to more efficiently and cost effectively extract this lithium. We ended up putting a pilot plant down in Bolivia.

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The whole lithium resource is controlled by the government, and there were some geopolitical issues in working with Bolivia. So we're gonna get to geopolitical later. Perfect. So that's my backstory. I'll pass it to Thomas.

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Thomas Healy: Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. So Thomas Healy, founder and CEO of Hylian. To answer your question, I've kinda always known I've wanted to be an entrepreneur, back to when I was a little kid. Kinda different than most kids when my parents would pick my sister and I up from school.

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As opposed to going home, we would actually go back to their office building. They were both founders and CEOs as well. We'd go to their office building. My sister and I had a converted office that was converted into a playpen. And, we'd do our homework there.

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We'd play games and stuff. And then we'd go to dinner, and then we'd go home. So ever since that point, I've known I've wanted to be an entrepreneur. Fast forward to going to college, started a couple of different companies in undergrad. And then when I went into grad school, I had this idea of moving into the green tech space.

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And so Hylian is a company focused on making modular power plant technology. So it's basically this concept of making your own power. So just like facilities have air conditioning units that sit outside, our vision is they're also gonna have a box that sits outside that makes the electricity they need, but makes it cheaper and cleaner than our grid electricity.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel: I love that everybody's always connected to their past. Like, you can't get away from it in a way.

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Like, you went on this journey and you discovered this, and you've been a kid entrepreneur. Sean, what about you?

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Sean Voigt: Hey, everyone. So I'm Sean, founder of the Austin Climate Hub, which is on a mission to accelerate clean energy innovation in Austin and support the broader energy ecosystem here in Texas. I was the director of EarthX Capital.

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For anyone who notices a bit of an accent, I'm from South Africa originally. My family immigrated to The States. I went to high school in Iowa, in '96. And, you know, I somehow got into Stanford. I got into campus on, on in 2001, and, you know, you're there on this, you know, country club of a campus.

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It's sunny, amazing people. The world opens up before you so many opportunities, and, you know, I'm thinking just a few years ago, I was in South Africa, and then for anyone that's been there, you know that you you live you grow up in the context of massive economic disparity. You see quite literally people, you know, living in shanty towns. And I just couldn't square that. Like, how I how am I in the zero point as many zeros as you can think of percent that has this lottery ticket and millions of people back in South Africa and billions around the world, are don't have access to water or energy or even dignity, and that for me created a brilliant almost a crushing existential sense of responsibility, around, like, what I would what I would do with that.

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At the same time, I ended up taking a class at Stanford in engineering by a super famous biologist, which really opened up my eyes to the world of green revolution, the role of technology, and climate change for the first time. And, from there, it was like, okay. Like, there is a role of technology in making human existence on this planet more sustainable, and that's what I'm gonna go and do. And we'll probably talk more about that in a little bit, but that for me was the genesis. Yeah.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel: Thank you, guys. I love passion. Like, it all comes from passion from all three of you. Now we're gonna talk about the hard question. And the hard question is vision and reality.

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Because you guys all have a vision, and now you're on that path to make it a reality. So, like, were there any assumptions in the beginning when you started this journey that have been shattered, or have there been any things that surprised you to get you on the path where you are now?

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Teague Egan: Yeah. I mean, there's always assumptions that are shattered. That's the life of an entrepreneur.

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You know, when you're starting a business or starting a company and trying to grow it, literally almost nothing turns out the way that you think it will. You know, when I was starting in the early days of EnergyX, I had a lot of momentum and started to build this lithium extraction technology. And I thought that it would be pretty easy to license this technology to existing lithium resource owners because it is so much better than what currently exists out there. For those that are unfamiliar, the way that lithium is produced today from brine, which is salty water, is they put it into these huge evaporation ponds that are a hundred football fields for one pond, and then they have a hundred ponds. And it takes eighteen months to go through this pond sequence.

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It's really inefficient. They only recover about 30 to 40% of the lithium. And the technology that we developed takes up, one one hundredth the footprint. It recovers over 90%, so a 300% increase and it costs a lot less. So I thought it would be easy to license to the big existing lithium producers.

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That couldn't be further than the truth. What I didn't think about was that they had already invested billions of dollars into that really inefficient infrastructure. And, these are super long sales cycles and that's ultimately why we decided to acquire our own resources and vertically integrate so that we could control our own destiny. That was a big early assumption that was proven wrong.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel: That's a good one because I think, Thomas, you have a similar story.

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Thomas Healy: Yeah. Personally, I've never met a founder that says, oh, this is easy, and it just went exactly how I planned. Like, startups are roller coasters. That's the nature of it. Our roller coaster has been when I founded this company back in 2015, we were actually making powertrains for electric semitrucks.

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So nothing to do with power generation. We were making EV vehicles, and we went public on that premise. We took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020, raised over $700,000,000 of capital. We raised to a valuation of $10,000,000,000. So think about that.

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Like, a dorm room startup company raising to a $10,000,000,000 valuation, and then everything changed. And then everything changed. The EV space became this journey where it was, like, not attractive to be in anymore. Adoption was much slower. Like, people thought that over half the semi trucks by this time would be electric vehicles.

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The reality is it's like 1%. Right? So the adoption didn't happen. So then we said, alright. Well, let's get out of this space.

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We've got this awesome technology and power gen. Let's move over to that. So think about that. Like, a company that once had momentum of being valued at $10,000,000,000, you realize, actually, this isn't a good journey to be on. We need to go do something else.

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Jennifer Kite-Powell: That's scary to make that big of a pivot.

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Thomas Healy: Most definitely. Yeah. It's like, yep. That's scary.

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Jennifer Kite-Powell: Sean, for you, I mean, you've moved a lot of people through this space and supported this industry. What assumptions for you were shattered in your journey?

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Sean Voigt: Yeah. Thanks so much. So, you know, in terms of the entrepreneurial journey, you know, I started a search fund in 2018, specifically to go out and find and acquire business, exactly within these themes.

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That ended up leading me to take over the founder over founder role, at a company called Ridley Biologics, which I built successfully over three years, and I can share many, many war stories on what it's like to have a sort of a hardware capital intensive, also, technologically intensive company, day to day knife fight, and then coming back from from that now in Austin, I'm building the Austin Climate Hub, which is basically, like, simultaneously trying to build a company, an early stage fund, and a nonprofit. And all of those things have their own challenges and assumptions, but the way I wanna actually respond to this question is, you know, continuing that point of that story, I started in the space of being like science is the answer. I literally wanted to be a scientist and engineer. I got into Princeton for my PhD. I was like, okay.

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Like but then I'm like, no. Science by itself isn't gonna cut this. You need the business and the economics to scale. Instead of starting back in Green Tech at one point, I helped to build McKinsey's sustainability practice. And then you're like, okay.

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But, like, one business and one product is only gonna move the needle so much. Like, I mean, we can't you have we had a different policy regime, and it ended up leading me to go all the way through to working in economic development. And, there was this moment I remember where I just kinda, like, broke. I was like, we're not gonna do it. We're not gonna get there.

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And I was actually, like, deep. I was up upriver in Borneo seeing, like, the worst ecological genocide, like, I think I've I've ever seen. And it wasn't logging. It wasn't palm oil. It was just Dayak Indians living in villages, slash and burn agriculture, and they go mining.

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And I was like, dude. Okay. The fault is in our stars. We're like, our DNA is to consume resources, multiply, repeat, and, and that idea of, like, okay. Look.

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We're not gonna get there. That was a difficult thing to to live with for a minute, and I think ultimately, for any of us that are operating in this space as as founders or investors or otherwise, you have to find a way to be able to live between this cognitive dissonance of both being on this incredible growth curve that our industry is on while still being below the growth curve that that we need to get at. And I think the way that you ultimately do that is, first of all, understanding that it's not gonna be any one company, not gonna be any one founder, not gonna be any one investor. We all have to basically be doing this. And for your individual journey, finding the passion and the purpose in what you're doing and whatever it else is, whether it's the people or the competition.

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Right? And I think if we can all do this, then, together, we are then we got a shot.

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Jennifer Kite-Powell: You had the same, oh my god. They're not in Bolivia. They're not using their resources.

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And I think, in all of the experiences that you guys have had and made your pivots, do you think this is why your companies and the companies that you've worked with and what you formed are on the right path forward.

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Thomas Healy: Yeah. So I can kinda share the facts behind it. So there were fifteen, twenty, roughly somewhere in that ballpark, EV companies that went public during our time as well. I would say more than half of them have actually gone into bankruptcy or are right at that cost rate.

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I mean, you can go down the list. You have, like, companies like Nikola, Haizon, Proterra, Lordstown, Rival, I think now have, if I'm not mistaken. So it's like, you need to be a founder, as the CEO of a company, you need to be watching it, like, where are things going? And, you know, I think one of the things we wanna talk about a little bit is, like, capital raising and what does that look like. And so, if you are in an industry where there is momentum and you have a good idea for clean tech, there's a good opportunity to go get funding.

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If you're in an industry where it's lost momentum, what I've seen is a lot of the VCs, a lot of the investors are then saying, well, I don't wanna be over there anymore. Even if you have a good idea, a good product that you're working on, they wanna be with the momentum. They want a tailwind behind the company.

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They don't wanna be something with something that, you know, is part of the past. Right? Even though, like, electric vehicles, how is that part of the past? Right? I would say it's not, but I guess it is to investors.

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Jennifer Kite-Powell: Done already.

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Thomas Healy: Yeah. Exactly. So, PowerGen, the good thing is that AI uses a crap ton of power, data centers and everything. So that's why we're now in that space.

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Jennifer Kite-Powell: I'm gonna just give him some props because I did a little Google, a little Google trail. And if you Google power generators, the history of generators, it lists, like, the type of generators we've had. And at the bottom, at the end of that list, it said Encarno. So congratulations. You made the list.

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Thomas Healy: We're finally there.

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Jennifer Kite-Powell: You're there. Okay. And, yeah, let's go to funding because I know it's something you all wanna talk about. And Sean posted a very intriguing topic on his LinkedIn page the other day about the intermingling of clean tech, defense tech, energy policy, sustainability.

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How is that going to affect clean tech and all the funding, the future of funding? Is it gonna, you know, pull back or is it gonna move forward? I think this is something everybody wants to hear from them.

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Sean Voigt: Yeah? Well, I'll talk about, future of clean tech in a second, which I am insanely bullish on.

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But to answer this question right now, yeah, I mean, look, I think fundraising sucks in general regardless of where you're at, but it's just it can be particularly hard in climate and clean tech where you have business models that often have more of a capital intensive component. There might be a long applied science technology timeline, or or or other factors. And so I think founders in climate and clean tech need to be more aware of and think about a sort of a portfolio of options between grant funding, venture debt, you know, other sources of capital. And absolutely, government and defense is something that should be on your radar. I don't think people actually appreciate the fact that basically all of defense tech with the possible exception will be sorry.

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With the exception of munitions, it is basically clean tech, and I could go on and on and on from micro grids for resilience to electric tactical vehicles and drones and so forth. And I think one thing we're gonna see in this current environment is folks being a lot more thoughtful about, and by the way, not just as a source of capital, like, also as a really important and strategic go to market. Right? You there are sort of, your gov like, the US government is the biggest customer in the world. You should probably be thinking about selling it.

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And, and and and, yes, finally, I would just say that, grant funding and defense is something where it is, honestly, clean tech confounders are doing a disservice to themselves too, like, not actually, I think, exploring that more and treating that space as a silo.

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Teague Egan: Yeah. There have actually been a few really important executive orders passed, over the past few months, related to critical minerals being produced domestically in The United States. And the US government is thinking about stockpiling some of these critical minerals like lithium, because right now, China produces over, well, they either produce or refine somewhere in the 70 to 85% total of the global critical minerals there. A new member.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel: I think it was closer to getting up to 87. You're right. It's 85 and it's going right up.

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Teague Egan: So we're thinking about and looking at selling to the US government. Like, you're a great customer, of course, of course.

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But in terms of the question you asked earlier too, do we think that we're on the right path? I mean, you're not a very smart entrepreneur if you don't think you're on the right path. It's your job to be able to look into the future almost, kind of like Thomas did and said, and say to himself, hey, I I I might not be on that. I need to transition, like we did with our business model. We didn't completely change businesses, which is I mean, dude, I don't know how you did it.

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That's a huge undertaking, and takes, takes some balls, I would say. But yeah. Stressful times to say the least.

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Sean Voigt: Some stressful times to say the least. But yeah.

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Teague Egan: Like, for us, you know, we have a ten year master plan that we created in 2019. So, you know, that's super high level stuff. We have a ten year plan, a five year plan, a three year plan, and then, you know, a plan for the next month and week, of course. But you always want to be looking ahead to try to make sure or or, derisk your path, as much as you can. Like, that's, you know, right now, we're in a lithium winter, I would say.

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The price has nose-dived to the lowest in a really long time. And, you know, similar to what Thomas was talking about, a lot of companies kind of downstream from us, be it in the battery or EV space, have gone bankrupt. Maybe some time ago, three, five years ago, there was a lot of hype around the space and people making investments that were based on that hype. Now, it comes down to having a real business. I would actually argue that AI is the hype now.

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There's a lot of inflated valuations. We're gonna probably see a lot of people lose money on a lot of that. But coming back to EVs, EVs are here to stay, undoubtedly. And, while there are ebbs and flows, ups and downs in any market, as long as that is slightly up into the right, you're going to see increased traction, increased growth, and, there needs to be a supply chain for that. And as long as we have a real business where we're producing a product and generating revenue at good margins, that's what our business should be valued on.

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And that's what I hope investors would value it on as opposed to some hype.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  Yeah. Go ahead, Thomas. Because someone will come back to that.

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Thomas Healy: I just wanna add.

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So I think you touched on something really important that's been a big shift is I think in a lot of ways, Silicon Valley used to just kinda stay away from the defense tech type companies. Now, like, there's a company here in town, Ceramic, who I just thought they just got a $4,000,000,000 valuation for making, small, like, autonomous ships for the military. So we're seeing a lot of momentum shift over there. Us talk you know, talking about the government being a good customer, we're working directly with the navy. We have navy contracts where our power plant is actually selected for future autonomous ship autonomous vessels.

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And so it's like this, you know, hey. Give them the flexibility to use various fuels. It's really quiet. It's got great efficiency, low emissions, all those things. So, now we're seeing that the government's looking for some of this new tech versus in the past, it was pretty tough to get funding unless you're like a Raytheon to go develop new government defense tech.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  So this comes back to your comment. I know you want to close it, but you opened it right up. This golden moment then in climate tech.

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Sean Voigt: Yeah. I can barely contain myself.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  I knew we needed to talk about it.

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Sean Voigt: So, let let let's just kind of like let's just kind of look at this as I think people are gonna we we are truly in the Internet moment for for clean tech, and I think the next couple years are going to just make clear just how utterly dominant this energy and this technology actually is and dispel the lost, you know, hints and vestiges of any thought that this is something that is somehow supported by subsidies or that it's a niche side of sort of thing. I'll just say a couple things here. So number one, like, wind and solar, like, the cheapest forms of energy, like, I'm sorry, you can't compete with zero marginal cost. Battery technology has gone down 10 x in the last ten years.

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We're at $50, like, a kilowatt hour, last year. Can it continue to go down? Like, anyone who tells me that basically having zero like, charging your battery on our grid with zero marginal cost doesn't completely transform the grid and that, like, gas speaker plants can, like, somehow compete, like, you're out of your mind. We've got the intersection of that with digital and data and a whole number of other factors. And just to kinda, like, really put a fine point in this, like, Texas is at the exact charge of this.

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You know, Republican Texas, purely price free market based. Let's just take a look at a couple numbers here. Right? So, the Texas grid is the largest in the US by a factor of two and a half x. We've got a peak load of, like, 85 gigawatts.

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Anyway, normally I'd ask you guys to guess, but, like, we are consistently hitting 80% renewables across the entire like, on probably like right now actually. It's not that windy of a day, but we're probably hitting 80% renewables in the entire state of Texas right now. That's 20% nuclear, 40% solar, and about 20% wind. Average over the entire year, like nighttime, daytime, summer, winter, like we're we're already at 30%. We're number one in solar.

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We're number one in wind. We're number one in battery or at least we're about to be based purely on a market system that is designed only to give price signals. Right? Let's also think about other things. We're about to double our grid.

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We've got about another 50 gigawatts of load that we're gonna put in the next five years. Alright? If you look at our internet interconnection queue, you're gonna see 200,000 megawatts of renewables and maybe 10 to 15,000 megawatts of nonrenewable. That is 95% of what is about to get built is renewables because it is cheaper, it is substantially faster. You can put it anywhere.

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The state of Texas just created a $5,000,000,000 basically, like, cheap loan fund to basically support natural gas. I'm gonna tell you that we're probably gonna build, like, single digit gas plants between now and 2030 because you cannot get a turbine to save your life. NRG is the biggest player here, in the net in natural gas, they had to sign a deal with GE, Vernova, and just to be able to vertically integrate to get their own gas turbines. We are literally talking about how we need renewables to bridge to gas. Alright?

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And again, this is Texas. The issues that we are facing here are at the forefront, and I think this is hopefully gonna I'm hoping to try to, like, tell you, like, no. Like, renewable energy is basically just, like, about to go and, like, beat up on the kids with the fucking glasses. Alright? And I think that's the right thing to do.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  That's the sound right there.

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Sean Voigt: And I think like what if there's one sort of broader message, it's not just that Texas is the future of clean tech, it's that clean tech is the future. $2,000,000,000,000 in basically funding and capital last year. I can promise you for a bit I don't have time to get into it right now, but like that number is gonna be at least $6,000,000,000,000. We are seeing like this is truly the Internet moment.

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We are now the supply chains, the cost structures, everything is mature, and now it is all about basically innovating on financial model innovating on financial model. There's so much opportunity, and I think, the issue is that we are going through the most, like, tectonic shift of the largest industry that, like, human species has ever created. Decentralization, digitization, peer to peer, and people don't see it because when you come home, you turn your light switch on, it turns on. And you don't necessarily understand just how fundamentally massive the change that is going on. And I would finally just suppose to say, like, in this environment, you can like, there are so many exciting business models, because if you're just riding a wave like this, you can innovate on business model, financial model.

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Right? Like, and if and I think every I hope everyone is excited about cleantech and excited about cleantech in Texas as I am.

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Teague Egan: Guys, we are lucky to have Sean. He could be in Hollywood preparing for the mister and missus Smith sequel, but he's here in Austin pushing clean tech forward.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel: I like it.

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I agree. Beautiful. Because if we don't have passion for what we're gonna change in the world, we'll never get anywhere. Do you guys have anything to add on to that?

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Thomas Healy: So hopefully, everyone's convinced the grid is changing.

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We're that, locked in. Yeah. And I just wanted to, like, follow-up with some really key examples. Like, we work with a data center provider, one of the largest, and they have said right now, they consume six gigawatts of electricity. By 2030, just five years from now, they wanna be at 40 gigawatts of electricity.

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That's equivalent to taking all of the energy that London uses, times it by 10, and that's how much one company is going to add onto the grid with their data centers. So this is like, the grid is going to change. It's gonna require a ton of different solutions. Echoing on all that, it's moving to a distributed model. It's no longer just this one massive power plant that's gonna feed out to everything.

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You're gonna have a bunch of different small installments all around that are all feeding in, supplying the locations they're next to with power. So, it's an area that's evolving. It's changing fast, and it's a super exciting space to be in.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  Doubling back around because you had said you hope this will be what you're building is not based on hype. But after what you had said, it's very clear that it shouldn't be.

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So my question is, do you think investors know this?

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Sean Voigt: Yeah. Anybody grab it. No. It's completely night and day when you're talking to folks that are in space and we're just, like, literally, like, losing our minds.

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Like, because like, for instance, me. Right? You heard my story. I've been doing this for twenty five years. And so for so long, it's like, no.

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You really are fighting essentially the direct and indirect subsidies of the ability to sort of pollute the environment for free and a number of other other factors. And now it's I think it's for me, those those structural issues that I just talked about, the the the size of the supply chain, the exponential drivers of demand growth, the economic superiority, the use case superiority, all of those things have kind of hit a confluence, in the last five years. This really is a new paradigm. Like, the types of just, like, you know, thinking fast, thinking slow, like, cognitive failures that you see when you talk to folks that are, like, not in it, if it's really comical. So no.

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I mean, I really I I'm I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is, like, the $6,000,000,000,000 Internet moment for energy. And, yeah, you, it's kind of interesting. You talk to really, really smart investors that have been really, really successful, but again, it goes back to that thing that I wanna turn on the light, nothing changes, so I don't understand how much is changing back there. That you just see these, like, these rationalizations, oh, it must be subsidies. Oh, there's not gonna be enough lithium.

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Or, like, all these things you're just like, dude. Like, I'm I'm like, this is what it must have been like someone, like, shouting about Bitcoin in 2007, you know, whenever it was.

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Teague Egan: Yeah. I think that there's, you know, investing is a lot about momentum. The Bitcoin example is a good one.

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Right? Like, when the price is low and there's low adoption, there's less people that are willing to take that risk to invest. As you get more momentum and a lot more people are investing and piling in, then it's easy to get investment. For the lithium industry, when the prices are low, there's less people that want to invest. But in reality, that's actually the best time to invest, unless you don't think it's gonna go back up.

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Right? But like I said, there's ebbs and flows, highs and lows, and everything. Lithium is a critical component to not only the EV revolution, but also a lot of these data centers. And, you know, like, I just was at a summit talking about data and powering data centers and AI. And there's gonna be a huge mix to power this, much of which is renewable.

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Right? Solar, wind, but also nuclear and products like Michael is building or sorry, that Thomas is building. And, there needs to be batteries too because that balances the grid unless you have this self sustained power generation. So, you know, I think that we've been super fortunate, raising capital. We've used companies like DealMaker, and that is democratizing, decentralizing, and digitizing capital raise where you don't have to go to, you know, a big VC or or or you're taking the power out of the hands of few and putting it into the hands of many.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  It's time for that model to change in a way anyway for this because if they can't get their heads around it, then we can't move it forward. Do you have something you wanna add? And then we're gonna go to questions.

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Thomas Healy: Yeah. I was gonna say this concept of, like, we haven't experienced the power issue yet.

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Like, all the lights are on here. Right? I mean, it works. That time is coming. And, actually, one area that I'm even more concerned about is who's going to be willing to pay the most for electricity.

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My guess is it's not the person in their household that wants to turn their lights on. If you're competing to get the same power that a data center is trying to get, that they're making a lot of money off of being able to run that equipment, I think you as a consumer are gonna see pretty substantial price increases unless we move into getting a lot more power generation.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  That's a really good point. Do we have any questions? Because I think I have the mic here that I can pass around if you have a question.

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Attendee: So, you know, it was said that, China produces something or produces refined something like, 70% of the world's Can you hold the mic a little bit closer here? Alright. So China also produces, you know, around 70% of the world's steel, 70% of the world's aluminum, and 70% of the world's solar panels. All of these are critical inputs into all the renewable energy projects, right, that are being built today. But the last few months, I mean, it's been a bit of a shock.

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So if you're doing, like, an NPV calculation for a power project, you probably need to redo some of those calculations. So I was just wondering, given this moment, right, when pretty much every project that is being built or being planned has to recalculate, their NPVs and their returns, how do you think that is gonna shake out over the next year or so, or is it too early to tell?

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Sean Voigt: So I think a couple things. One is, yes, 70%, we do have, so a couple things with the supply chain. Right?

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Like, our supply chains for these technologies and resources are critical. I think The US is belatedly realizing that both not only technology, but actually supply chains are of national security. That's why it started with the IRA and now will continue here. We're seeing onshoring of battery manufacturing, onshoring of solar. We're gonna see those industries develop domestically here.

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In the short term, I mean, do we get it from Korea and Japan? I think so. It's 70% of this, so 30% out there. And I would just say that, like, I think we are missing the fact that at least that is sort of a national discourse level that this is national security, but in the broadest geopolitical sense of the word. If anyone has read like Chip Wars, and I think you understand this idea that technology drives military superiority, drives economic growth, drives geopolitical influence.

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China figured this out twenty years ago now, and we are very, very much at risk of losing this race. And I can tell you that owning domestic, clean energy supply chains and staying in the race when it comes to clean tech is truly going to be a driver of who is the global superpower in the next twenty years. It's basically AI and clean energy. If you don't stay in the game on that, your country is done. Yeah.

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Teague Egan: I think that global supply chains are a little bit up in the air right now. A crazy stat for you. So like you said, China produces 70% of the world's steel. They obviously have to get their iron ore. They produce some iron ore domestically.

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They get a lot of iron ore from Australia with BHP and Rio Tinto. They produce about 1,100,000,000 tons of steel. The next closest producer in the world is India at about 30,000,000. So they produce a billion more tons of steel than the next closest. You know, I think that we have right here in Austin, one of the most impressive manufacturing facilities in the world in the Tesla Gigafactory.

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I was over at the Boeing facility a few weeks ago. The US still has really impressive manufacturing, but not for some of the supply chain like steel, like aluminum, like the critical materials or minerals that China has. Korea, you know, we're trying to keep some of our allies close, like Australia, like Korea, but we're almost seeing an unprecedented time with some of these trade wars that are just starting to pop up, with tariffs that the new administration is putting in place. And that creates an uncertain future. If there's retaliation from those other countries, throwing tariffs back on us, and then the tariffs just keep going up and it just becomes, you know, a trade war that could escalate into more, that's that that creates uncertainty.

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It creates harder economic situations. Like, you know, we got a piece of machinery that we ordered a few years ago from China, and we just had to pay, like, a 30% tariff on this multimillion dollar piece of machinery that we weren't accounting for at all. That's that's that's hard. That's hard. So, you know, I think there needs to be a balance between foreign relations and diplomacy, but also, on shoring some of these critical materials and supply chains that go into you know, also right here in Texas, Samsung is building a $17,000,000,000 semiconductor plant.

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So we talked about the importance of AI and the importance of building the power that can support these types of big manufacturing facilities or data facilities. Having that type of thing in The US is really important, and I think that's what this current administration is trying to do too.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel: We have time for one more question, then I want famous short last words. Does anyone have a question? Raise your hand.

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Nobody? Okay. Down the front.

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Attendee: Hey, guys. Awesome stuff so far.

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Thanks for putting this on. A kinda hop hypothetical popped into my head while you guys were chatting, and I thought you gentlemen could be good at answering it here. You hear this hypothetical of, like, if everyone bought an EV tomorrow, the power grid would never be able to handle that. We'd fry the grid. The demand wouldn't be able to be met.

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What are your guys' thoughts on that hypothetical? And, you know, with states like California, you've got a they're putting stuff in that's like every vehicle has to be an EV by I forget the year, but it's coming. So what are your guys' thoughts on that hypothetical?

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Sean Voigt: Yeah. Categorically false, but with the car under the car.

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So if everyone basically plugs in the EV at the same time and it's a hot summer day, yes, obviously that's gonna crash the grid. One thing we didn't really talk about on this one is essentially what we touched on is this idea of decentralization. So we are moving very rapidly to a place where everything, like, voluntarily or potentially sort of mandated, the time when you charge your e when your EV charges, the time when basically your thermostat goes on, it is managed. And actually what that does is it creates incredible stability toward the grid. It actually makes things cheaper, and I don't know if I'll definitely need to. I'll go into the details of how demand response works and load shifting.

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But at a hundred percent EV penetration with vehicle to grid, so long as we have a model where essentially that charging time is managed, it's actually incredibly stabilizing to the grid, and actually makes the grid a lot more cheaper as well.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  Famous last short words?

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Sean Voigt: Oh, I would just say and you guys, you know, if you wanna say the climate, stop talking about the climate. I think that's the headline going forward. Hopefully, I made clear that basically it's an economic and a value and a value situation now.

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If you wanna save the climate, stop talking about the climate.

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Thomas Healy: Say it's a gold rush time right now. Right? It's a gold rush for power generation, for sustainability, and being on this journey is great. Also, domestic manufacturing.

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I'm actually testifying to Congress on Tuesday of next week on domestic manufacturing. So that's what this administration wants, and I think we're gonna shift to that.

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Teague Egan: Yeah. I'd say it's a white gold rush, actually, with lithium. I love it.

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No. But, I think that, you know, we're seeing an incredible transformation. Everything that supports an energy transition and a digital revolution into AI are the supply chains. You know, when I got into this business, a lot of people didn't think about the underbelly, you know, where the material that is in your battery that powers your phone or your laptop or your EV comes from. And, you know, I think that these are really tremendous investment opportunities, because it's it's it's moving up into the right.

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Albeit, maybe at a fast pace, maybe at a slow pace, but, you know, this is a transformative time. We can call it a gold rush. We can call it, what did you call it? Yeah. Just an explosive moment, for the world and humanity.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  Just called it a gold golden

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Teague Egan: Yeah. Golden moment. Yeah. Yeah. Our Internet moment.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel:  I love it. You guys were great. Thank you. Let's thank these guys who are trying to change our world. Thank you.

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Sean Voigt: If I make one quick plug, I'm actually doing a full day summit on energy in Texas tomorrow. So, if anyone is interested in, like, learning a little bit more about this and getting us pumped about this, just check out my LinkedIn. It's gonna be a good one. Where is it?

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What time? There. It's 12:30 to six to 6PM at Saragunda Hall. Yeah. Just yeah.

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Jennifer Kite-Powel: There's gonna be another session after this, a startup showcase. And then now it's time for some networking. Thank you all for coming.