Electricity Economy Expert Jesse Berst Weighs In on EnerG2 Startup
I pinged energy expert Jesse Berst, the managing director of Redmond, WA-based GlobalSmartEnergy, to get his take on EnerG2, the venture-backed energy-storage startup we profiled earlier today. EnerG2 has developed a nanotech approach to building better batteries and “ultracapacitors” for storing electricity. Berst, an Xconomist, replied with some insights into the startup’s prospects for becoming a major player in the electricity economy (you can read more about this here and here), and the main challenge it faces.
Berst first emphasized the importance of EnerG2’s core market. “Energy storage is the choke point of the electricity economy,” he writes. “Whether you want electric vehicles, a smarter, more reliable grid, or simply a laptop that lasts all day on a single charge, it is the lack of cost-efficient storage that stands in your way.”
He then gave a bit of context to the problem EnerG2 is solving. “Although we’re making progress, it is largely incremental—squeezing out more efficiency from approaches that have been known for decades. If EnerG2 has found a new way to store energy, and a way that can achieve industrial scale, the world will beat a path to its door.”
“That said, it should be prepared for skepticism,” Berst writes. “Every few years a new startup appears claiming radical improvements in storage. So far none of them have been able to move to real-world applications in quantity.”