EET&D: How would you describe your role at Blue Current?

SS: Like most CEOs of startup companies, my role is to do whatever is needed. As a startup executive, every day is different. Sometimes, that means putting out fires all day, and sometimes, it means being locked away in a room to work on business goals or put together a presentation. If I step back, the main thing that inspires me about working in technology – particularly in early-stage technology – is the opportunity to bring something new to life.

Kevin Wujcik, the co-founder and CTO of Blue Current, and I work closely together on our overall strategy and how it maps to the manufacturing organizations. I'm not an inventor, but Kevin is one. He also takes primary responsibility for most of the technology, which allows me to focus more on the strategy and business side of the house.

EET&D: What excites you about Blue Current and your work?

SS: The opportunity to help bring something new to the market and make an impact are the things that drive me. Right now, we’re a company of only 50 people, so we have to be scrappy, but I find that exciting, too. To get to lead a small band of renegades here, combined with our mission to change the world with our batteries – especially as a small team – and to be involved in the early stages of the company, is just so fun and inspirational for me.

I love organization building, which is also one of the reasons that I saw Blue Current as such a great fit. We're at an inflection point, where we're moving this organization from R&D to true commercialization. To do this, we're scaling up the size of our team and also the scope of our team's responsibilities, so I’m also excited about the opportunity to work with Kevin and the rest of the team to build out processes we can scale.

EET&D: How did you end up at Blue Current?

SS: I found my way to Blue Current through conversations in my professional network. I happened to be available at exactly the same time that Blue Current’s board was looking for new leadership. In that sense, it was very opportunistic, but it was also the result of maintaining professional relationships.

EET&D: What about Blue Current’s technology excites you the most?

SS: I want to live in a world with safe batteries, which is also part of Blue Current’s mission, and its goal when the company launched 10 years ago. We’ve gotten to this point by not following the rest of the industry's North Star – which is energy density. Instead, we follow the North Star of safety by producing a battery that is as good as or better than state-of-the-art, but with safety as a first principle. That means that the team had to discard materials at the chemistry level that were reactive or unsafe. What we’ve ended up with is a safe, fully dry, solid-state battery.

EET&D: Would you elaborate on this?

SS: When you think about existing lithium-ion batteries, they have a flammable liquid electrolyte, which is a part of the battery design. Unfortunately, it can't be replaced and can't be substituted. Now, think about batteries and how we cram so much energy there. When batteries are electrified, that energy has to be released, and if there is fuel present when that energy is released, you have a fire.

Our team’s approach is to remove that liquid and make a solid-state battery that is fully dry. Most manufacturers working on a fully dry, solid-state battery are using an anode material called lithium metal, which is an amazing material. There are several great reasons that folks are using it, but it's also hard to work with because it’s reactive and tough to scale.

So, about six years ago, Kevin and his team started to focus on using silicon in our anode. (Kevin and I like to tease that silicon is a pretty magical material. It's earth-abundant, non-toxic and can store substantially more energy than graphite.) That means we have developed a battery that we're just about to bring out of R&D that is as good as state-of-the-art lithium-ion across performance metrics. When you think about energy density and rate capability (e.g. how fast you can charge its cycle life and how many times it can cycle, etc.), we're able to meet the current industry standard, but we're able to do that in a way that eliminates lithium metal and eliminates a liquid electrolyte, which is much safer than batteries that contain those materials.

EET&D: How do you see Blue Current’s technology fitting into the electric energy space?

SS: The first applications for technology like ours are going to be in some aspect of transportation. The EV industry and the auto industry overall have been eager for this technology. They all have programs in place, and we are already seeing folks bringing technologies that are similar to ours to market. I think that's where we will start as well, but the beautiful thing about the progress of bringing batteries to market is that you start where we are today, which is that we make R&D cells.

This year, we will be bringing up our pilot line, which allows us to make larger cells more repeatedly on manufacturing equipment. We have developed our process to be the same as – or as close as possible to – existing lithium-ion processes, which will allow us to produce more cells that we can sample with other customers and build into other plant configurations.

Brandon Tinianov is our vice president of strategy and business development. We knew each other before I joined Blue Current. One thing that he and I are both passionate about is distributed storage, particularly home storage. I'm a proud owner of two Tesla power walls that have powered my home many times. When I think about ways that our technology could be deployed outside of mobility, the idea of home storage keeps scratching at the back of my brain because residential is a place where we can't tolerate fires and where energy density and being able to fit a lot of energy into a small space is appealing.

While I don't think anyone would bother to use silicon solid state or solid state at all for a big utility scale, there are certainly pockets where safety is paramount. Those are the areas where we're looking to specialize and find applications. We do a lot of work with mobility and transportation. That's probably a no-brainer, given the features of our battery. But we love to find those other segments where safety is so important.

EET&D: What advice would you give to anyone interested in pursuing a career in the electric energy sector?

SS: I think it's essential that we talk about more than STEM, not just for women but across the board. A lot of people got into technology accidentally, and the technology side of energy has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. It’s just this natural evolution. So, I think it is good to remind people that there is an entry point. You don't have to have done it in high school or college, or even have to be an engineer. You could be a marketer, a finance person, or an accountant. We need all of those people, so I think that communication and relationship building and maintaining is huge. The career opportunities that electric energy presents are so obvious to those of us who are professional communicators or with more outgoing personalities, but you get a lot of really introverted people, who are also interested in careers in energy. It's just a matter of being aware of it and knowing there are opportunities for a variety of skill sets.

EET&D: Now that there is a new administration in the White House, do you see the conversation around the energy transition changing?

SS: The energy transition is happening, and it's happening around the world. It is in motion, and I think advances in energy storage unlock energy transition, and batteries are fuel-agnostic. The energy transition is not going to stop. In some ways, that insulates us a little bit from the political climate. I also think that it relates to safe batteries and electrification, whether it's in the U.S. or globally. The things I've seen that have driven real change have been sustainable businesses that provide real value to customers.

Something for us all to remember is that if we're building businesses that provide value to our customers and are sustainable in the long term, we shouldn't be as exposed to the political climate or even sentiment. One of the things I think about EVs overall is when EVs started to take off – especially when Tesla introduced a vehicle that was best in class and delighted customers because it had enough range to feel like an internal combustion vehicle. Many people who bought those vehicles in the early days of EVs bought them because they were awesome. They didn't buy them because they were green. That's how we approach our technology at Blue Current. Rather than just providing next-gen batteries, we provide great value to our end customers and supply chain partners. Just by virtue of energy being energy, the energy transition is going to move forward.