The California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF) realised over a decade ago that batteries play a critical role in the energy transition. Since its inception, CalCEF, which evolved into New Energy Nexus in 2016, has been at the forefront of global initiatives to foster a robust and inclusive advanced battery ecosystem.

Reflecting on the end of the CalCharge program that started it all, New Energy Nexus CEO Danny Kennedy shares insights into the role the organization played in connecting the dots between energy storage technology, innovation, and policy.

Batteries are the secret ingredient to unlocking the potential of renewable energy, but it wasn’t always inevitable that this nascent technology would take off as it has this decade. CalCEF – the organization I led back in 2106 and which later became New Energy Nexus – had seen the importance of lithium-ion batteries for electric mobility potential; in fact, it had even invested in a fledgling company called Tesla, that some of you may know, around 2005. Several CalCEF board members and staff, who included long time solar and utility executives, knew that grid storage would become “a thing” as the penetration of variable renewable energy increased on the grids.

Fast forward to 26 January this year, the UN’s first ever International Day of Clean Energy, and I’m at the groundbreaking of California’s first commercial lithium production facility, and the world’s first “fully integrated lithium facility and clean energy campus”. Picture this: John Podesta is leading the groundbreaking with a Congressman, Assembly member, and union heads. Senior officials from Sacramento have trekked down to this side road off Highway 111 near Niland (look it up on Google Maps – we’re not in Kansas nor the California many know) along with former Secretary of Transport, Rod Slater. Rod Colwell, the CEO of Controlled Thermal Resources, the startup commissioning this billion dollar facility, is beaming from head to toe after years of talking about getting this thing going.

Key to the story of Lithium Valley is the buy-in of the traditional custodians of the place, the Torres Martinez tribe of the Cahuilla Bands of Indians, who live throughout this part of desert California and northern Mexico. Councilman Butcher was present at the ceremony and his community are working to host energy projects to power some of the Lithium processing that will ensue from commercial production of the powder. Questions remain about the footprint of all this industrial activity and as Eduardo Garcia, the local representative, said the skeptics have to be given a hearing, which they will. But the prospect of a green Lithium battery supply chain, powered by renewable electricity throughout the manufacturing, which could provide enough batteries for all the cars in America, is tantalizingly close. Even a pundit who has long poo-poo’ed this possibility is changing his tune in the LA Times.

Living the CalCharge dream: 2012-2016

This was always the dream of CalCharge: to engender a soup-to-nuts, next-gen technology based on the brains and clean resources of the Golden State, rich with good, so-called “high road” jobs capable of paying family-supporting wages while ushering in climate solutions.

There was no certainty batteries would even be a big part of the mix, given the hype cycles that ensued about everything from a nuclear renaissance to hydrogen. Solar and wind were far from streaking ahead as they are now. As such, storage on the grid wasn’t perceived to be that important and people thought cars would be “fueled” forever. But CalCEF’s founders had also seen the green shoots of effort by entrepreneurs in California doing creative things with an alphabet soup of chemistries (Li, Zn, Br, Na) and their job was to support these entrepreneurs, which they did systematically.

In particular, in 2012 we formed a new trade association for energy storage companies called CalCharge around a cluster of around 18 startups. The mandate was to create a “center of gravity” for the California energy storage sector that enables diverse stakeholders to collaborate, identify barriers to emerging technology success, and develop solutions that help clear the path to commercialization.

In the early years of Calcharge the main event was literally an event known as the “Bay Area Battery Summit”. This gathering of geeks and scientists and journalists covering new tech was held each year at one of the Bay Area’s three national labs – Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley or SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator. It became the place “to be” if you were in batteries in the United States of America. I remember the first BABS (as it became known) that I attended in 2015. It was thrilling in only the way that a lecture theater behind the high security fence line of one of the US’ national labs can be!

We were discussing information that seemed critical for national and dare I say it, planetary security. Speaker after speaker talked of the potential of breakthroughs in energy density and other improvements in battery storage that would allow renewables to take up more than 100% of power demand by pairing wind and solar with the right storage. That their energy density could also move cars, bikes and all modes of transport quickly and cheaper became clearer as well. But challenges for this fledgling industry were also clear.

Supercharging the work: 2017-2021

This is when the CalCharge board decided to supercharge the information-sharing. We made a proposal to the federal government to develop a national networked manufacturing initiative on advanced batteries called Supercharge. This NNMI was supposed to bring together all of the interests, not only in California but across the country, including the American Jobs Project, many labor unions, some of the automobile industry, and New York’s Battery Energy Storage Technology (BEST). Over the course of 2016 we put together a powerful coalition of state agencies and industry, unions and universities and presented to the Department of Commerce our proposed strategy. In October 2016 we were deemed to be worthy of federal support and approved for a US$70 million grant to build out the vision.

As you might remember a month later a new government was formed in the United States, which did not seem interested in the energy transition or promoting new technologies with industrial strategies. We were never awarded the actual funds from the grant despite winning the bid, and instead the United States went into a period of uncoordinated effort around these issues.

There was a small grouping inside the federal government known as the Federal Consortium on Advanced Batteries (FCAB) that kept the light on for such thinking and of course many entrepreneurs and scientists and others in nonprofit and for-profit sectors, who pursued better batteries for those four years of the Trump administration. In parallel, the European Union, China and many other nations really stepped up their efforts in the formation of their own industrial strategies for batteries.

Back to the future: 2021-now

By the time Trump lost his second election the United States was behind, and in some ways had had a sort of “Sputnik moment” – bested in its own tech. Lithium-ion chemistries in particular, which American companies and scientists had contributed to more than any, were now being made at scale mostly in China and in a value chain that mostly left America out except as the buyer of these batteries.

On the first day of the Biden administration an executive order was put out to work out the problem of dependency that America had on a number of critical supply chains including pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and batteries. CalCEF, now known as New Energy Nexus, was asked along with the NY BEST and NattBatt, the national battery industry association, to support the government in its quest to solve this problem.

New Energy Nexus was engaged a number of times by LG Energy Solutions, at the time the top battery maker in the world, to find the best and brightest chemists and startups in the battery space. These “Battery Challenges”, which we went on to develop for Kia and Hyundai as well, have helped keep the Korean battery industry abreast of the cutting edge in chemistries.

We also grew our programs in California to support energy storage companies because so much of the state’s climate and energy mandate required more storage on the grid. We developed support for dozens of startups including Cuberg, Coreshell, Sepion and SparkZ. In New York we teamed up with Stan Whittingham’s lab and our old friends at New York BEST and others upstate to pitch to the Department of Commerce again a vision called New Energy New York. And in Australia we built a program to decarbonise the upstream production of raw lithium from spodumene resources through our innovation challenge with our partner, EnergyLab.

Bringing it home

In a little known corner of the country, literally where Arizona and Mexico meet California there is a nationally significant resource of lithium coming out of the geothermal brines that also produce about 5% of California’s electricity. If this resource were turned into reserves and a productive capacity, which has been the focus of many startups since 2010 with a company called Simbal, then America could provision its own batteries with a no-carbon source of lithium. As incredible as that sounds this is the prospect facing California and in particular Imperial County with its Lithium Valley now that CTR has begun building a Li powder and power production facility.

Lithium Valley is the name that has been given to this potential eco-industrial precinct that could grow up around the geothermal power plants already operating by the Salton Sea. Here in the poorest county in California there is an opportunity to produce clean lithium and turn it into precursor chemicals, active cathode materials, battery cells and ultimately battery packs. We published a report “Building Lithium Valley” in 2020, which became the basis for consideration by a Blue Ribbon Commission of the California Legislature and other efforts around the vision of a clean industry hub in the southern Californian inland counties. The local indigenous community have taken a lead in advancing this vision, governed by their values and long-term commitment to the place. Watch this space for more on this concept soon.

New Energy Nexus now stands ready to work with the Torres Martinez and the Cahuilla Indians, on whose land this potential could be achieved. Our aim is to do this right, by which we mean include communities who have historically been taken advantage of by extractive industries at the design phase of the industrial development.

If lithium is recovered from the geothermal sector at scale and gigafactories spring up in and around Imperial County it will be important that the tribal communities as well as farm workers and others who live in the area are at the table. To enable this, we are working with the Torres Martinez on a tribal innovation accelerator proposal, as well as with young people interested in STEM education on a Youth Entrepreneurship Accelerator (YEA!) last year.

Youth Entrepreneurship Accelerator (YEA!)

Just Batteries

Across the globe, New Energy Nexus teams are looking for ways to advance this linchpin technology – batteries – in ways that are just and equitable. Our impact reports have started to track our progress with the cohorts of entrepreneurs who we train and introduce to partners and capitalise each year. We call this updated vision Just Batteries and look forward to keeping you posted on our progress.

The exciting prospect is that we imagine a world just a few decades hence wherein sufficient lithium and other battery metals have been recovered from the earth’s crust or its brines and need never be extracted again as virgin raw material. Instead, by the ‘40s we could be in a fully circular economy, recovering sufficient material for our energy storage needs from an urban mining process which will be much more economic than new mines or geothermal recovery of lithium. If this is to be realized it is important that those communities this decade and next, from whose land lithium and other battery metals will be recovered, are involved in the full cradle-to-cradle value chain of better batteries.

As for CalCharge, we have wound it up (as of late January 2024, I am resigning as President and we have mothballed the entity and its CRADAs with the national labs). Entrepreneurs looking for support from New Energy Nexus in California for battery-related technologies can apply to our CalSEED and CalTestBed programs. These offerings have all of the advantages and many more than Calcharge provided. Moreover we think we have come to a time that requires global collaboration – not just national – in order to both advance advanced batteries and ensure that they do not become the plaything of geopolitics. Charge on!

After eight years leading New Energy Nexus’ incredible global team, I have decided to transition away from my role as CEO in 2024 (see press release).

I’m bristling with pride and excitement about the work in the world that NEX is doing. If you didn’t see how we helped shine a light on startups as key drivers of solution at the COP28 then check out our news here, here and here.

All over the world, our team is doing fantastic work from food service decarbonization to continuing to upskill electricians in the Philippines, Thailand and elsewhere to sell solar and storage. Thousands of entrepreneurs trace their success to the support they received from our awesome network (check out our impact to date!).

There’s no organization in the world like New Energy Nexus. Our laser focus on the things that are turning the dial – solar, wind and batteries with which the world needs to electrify everything – combined with our commitment to justice and equity in the energy transition are profound. I feel honored to have worked with such a dedicated crew, on such a mighty mission for all these years.

We did that!

There are many things as listed in the press release announcing my transition and on our website that make me smile and think – wow, we did that. And there are many more not listed there nor getting the kind of credit I think we deserve – whether it’s building South East Asia’s first dedicated early stage venture fund for climate solutions, or the climate diplomacy we have long supported between China and California to keep hope alive that these great powers on either side of the Pacific will collaborate to defeat our common enemy of climate change. For all the extra effort by our team, Board and donors I am grateful.

I know from our team doing the work in the field that our programs will entail ever more inclusive and just forms of support. One of the things that warms my heart the most as I look back on our last eight years is the work we’ve done back in California around the advanced battery supply chain. From being a very technologically driven startup cluster, to now being a fully blown program bringing together tribes, labor groups, student and community leaders, our work in the Salton Sea is a profound model for more Just Batteries.

There are plenty of other examples from Vietnam to Uganda I could regale you with (and may yet). Suffice to say, I am confident that with the great executive team and managing directors in the markets that matter – as well as the new partners and places we hope to take our brand of can-do curriculum and capital connections – NEX will replicate these and many more good efforts in years to come.

I feel a huge responsibility to do a thorough job handing over the wheel of this good ship to someone great to take it on its next adventures.

The depth and character of our work has changed as we’ve moved from a California-centric sense of the entrepreneurship needed, to the reality of what will answer the call in this critical decade on climate change. As many have noted, it’s a “time to build” – or deploy, deploy, deploy –  especially in the growing energy demand markets of South East Asia, India, and the 54 countries of Africa. I’m a startup guy from the Bay Area and I hope we can add depth to our team with someone more versed in the work needed now.

In many ways, I feel like a ship pilot who has taken what was the California Clean Energy Fund through some easy sailing (plus a couple of tricky runs) down a river towards the sea to which we’re all headed. There is a big blue ocean of good work in the energy transition that our team of 150 can do for the 100,000 entrepreneurs in the coming years, especially in the economies of Asia and Africa. And it is going to be someone hopefully from there, steering the ship towards maximum positive impact we can create for stakeholders there.

I plan to support NEX in many ways in the future and as well as the entrepreneurs I have had the good fortune to meet while on deck for this go around. Shine on, me hearties, shine on!

What happens when you bring three South Asian ecosystem builders together for the first time,  to design an event in India on energy and equity? Systems change!

Clean energy innovation in South Asia – a region that contains over a quarter of the world’s population – will be critical to addressing climate change and powering economic development. That’s why we brought together the first ever group of entrepreneur support organizations in the region – over 50 participants from Indian powerhouse “She Leads Bharat”,  through to local think tanks and NGOs.

The first ever ”Accelerate Energy & Equity Summit 2023 (AEES)” in South Asia, in collaboration with Climate Collective, and Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), India  was designed to foster collaboration and drive meaningful change, and bring together  thought leaders, accelerators, incubators, policymakers, and stakeholders from the clean energy sector in the region.

From countless discussions and ideas, here are four takeaways we’re taking with us.

💡Equity is more than a template and checking the box.

As Entrepreneur Support Organizations (ESOs), we should use our platform to change the system to make entrepreneurship more inclusive. 

Today’s climate solutions are still not reaching rural India as quickly as they should and this is a missed opportunity. Women are disproportionately affected by climate change but they are also uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between market and community. In many ways, rural women in India are at the nexus of climate change – as household decision makers, as buyers of (climate) solutions, as farmers, and as entrepreneurs.

Ajaita Shah, social activist and founder of Frontier Markets and She Leads Bharat, gave an inspiring keynote on what it really takes to create an unapologetic gender agenda for clean energy in India. Her platform has introduced tailor-made solutions that have trained and enabled over 35,000 women in rural India to become digitally savvy entrepreneurs who bring quality clean energy products and services to their communities. Through Frontier Market’s platform, over 50 million products and services – related to homecare, health, agriculture, banking, and clean energy – were channeled to 1 million rural households since they launched in 2011.

‘’There is an appetite for organizations to come together and learn from each other and try to build better… to think deeper on how we can contribute to the ESG/SDG goals… and thinking about local, gender, inclusivity and equity as an opportunity to really be able to make change more effectively’’ –  Ajaita S., Founder of Frontier Markets

💡How do we insert the climate agenda across social impact entrepreneurship programs across the region?

The most exciting part of the summit was our ‘Unconference’ format session where attendees chose small engaging groups to discuss the challenges faced today in the energy sector in South Asia and the various limitations of existing templates, and possible solutions.

In line with this year’s theme we identified a few topics that attendees got to choose, from monetizing climate impact metrics, to how livelihood ESOs can weave clean energy into existing programming to support an equitable transition.

Most of the entrepreneur support organizations are trying to integrate aspects of climate action into the kind of entrepreneurs they are working with, and also looking to integrate more equity and diversity into the work they are doing. When as asked about action items that ESO’s should be focussing on, Surabhi Rajagopal, Senior Manager, SELCO Foundation said:

‘’We’re all talking about justice, equity and inclusion… but we’ve not been able to crack the best ways of doing this. We need to capture the learnings from different approaches and see what works… and bring the conversation to government agencies, philanthropic institutions, CSR entities and impact investors’’

Surabhi Rajagopal, Senior Manager, SELCO Foundation

💡Equity should come from our work because we believe in it, not because a funder asks for it.

We heard from Nivisha Shah, Global Impact Manager at New Energy Nexus, about how to bring justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion into our ecosystem work in a truly meaningful way.

‘’It is important to acknowledge who has contributed to climate change and who is experiencing the greatest threat from the changing climate. Expecting the adaptation of low carbon technologies by frontline communities just because it is the right thing to do is unfair. It is on us (the Entrepreneur Support Organizations) to hold our entrepreneurs accountable to develop technologies that are not just low carbon intensive but are truly meeting the needs of the communities and are accessible and affordable by them.’’  – Nivisha Shah, Global Impact Manager, New Energy Nexus.

Nivisha Shah, Global Impact Manager, New Energy Nexus

”That three intermediaries can come together for an event like AEES to place justice and equity at the centre of discussions and action around the energy transition is proof of the power of collaboration. An initial step on a pathway to collaborative solutioning requiring organizations to step out of their silos to build an inclusive ecosystem.” – Sucharita Kamath, Head, South Asia, Aspen Network of Development

💡South Asia is already a massive market in itself. Why go global when going deeper could deliver enormous impact?

The clean energy transition in India has been accelerating in the past decade. India is also beginning to see an EV revolution in the two-wheeler industry. This transition demonstrates untapped market potential, but also the risk of leaving some communities and regions behind. This could be mitigated in part  by entrepreneur support organizations if we collectively  focus on key areas that also solve for an equitable transition.

‘’There are challenges as it’s being led by a lot of market forces… what about the rural areas and equity in general? Are women participating in this clean energy transition?… These are the areas where I think there needs to be a lot more attention’’ – Pratap Raju, Founding Partner at Climate Collective.

Pratap Raju, Founder of Climate Collective during the ‘Unconference’ session at the summit.

Entrepreneur Support Organizations such as New Energy Nexus, Climate Collective and ANDE, are working to solve social, economic and climate challenges in completely new ways, from directly working with clean energy entrepreneurs to helping enable an inclusive and equitable ecosystem. We see entrepreneurs as the agent of change in this critical decade…

AEES India 2024? Let’s go!