Unlocking the renewable energy revolution with Ramya Swaminathan of Malta Inc.

Hello, and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Roz. This, of course, is the show where we talk with people working on big world-changing innovations. So every time you flip on the lights or power the microwave, that energy comes from a power station nearby. Most power in the US is still generated by fossil fuels. They get burnt, that heat creates steam, that steam turns a giant wheel or generator, and that produces electricity. But an increasing amount of our power, at least in the US, is coming from renewables like wind and solar. The problem is that you can't easily store that power. If there's wind, for example, A turbine turns and energy is generated, but a lot of that energy goes to waste unless it's used immediately.

So some people are looking to solve that problem by building massive battery storage facilities. Essentially, you charge up lithium batteries and then save that power for when you need it. But those facilities are expensive and lithium requires elements that are scarce. So enter a potentially groundbreaking solution. Salt. You can literally store heat from energy sources

in molten salt. And a company called Malta is working on building that system right now. Ramya Swaminathan is Malta's CEO, and previously she led two companies that worked with hydroelectricity. free flow power and ride development. But before Ramya got into renewable energy, she worked at the investment bank UBS during the financial crisis of 2008.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.