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Inevitable
From Cars to Grid: Moment Energy Reinvents Energy Storage with Repurposed Batteries
00:52:01
Eddy Chiang is Co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy, a company building commercial-scale energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. By testing, certifying, and remanufacturing second-life battery modules, Moment Energy is creating lower-cost alternatives to new lithium-ion storage while extending battery lifespans by decades. In this episode of Inevitable, Chiang explains how a growing wave of retired EV batteries is reshaping the energy storage market—making recycling alone economically unviable. The conversation covers the technical and regulatory challenges of certifying second-life systems, how Moment Energy became the first company to achieve full UL certification, and why safety, not cost, is the real barrier to adoption. We also explore how distributed battery systems can replace traditional grid upgrades, why hyperscaler demand is accelerating deployment, and how Moment Energy is positioning storage not just as a product, but as long-term infrastru...
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- [00:00]
Cody Sims
Today on Inevitable, our guest is Eddie Chang, co founder and CEO of Moment Energy. Moment Energy is emerging as the leading manufacturer of battery storage systems built from repurposed EV batteries. This week they're announcing their series B round of funding which was co led by Evoque Innovations and the Canadian Growth Fund, with participation from existing investors including Amazon Voyager and our firm mcj. Indeed, we're proud to now be three time investors in Moment Energy. Battery storage is having a moment right now, pardon the pun, as costs have dropped rapidly and batteries have emerged as a viable alternative to traditional grid infrastructure upgrades. At the same time, a growing wave of used EV batteries is hitting the market and the economics of recycling them remain deeply challenged. Moment Energy's innovation is to certify the battery components, repackage them safely, and sell them as new storage at a lower cost than new lithium ion and in a size and form factor that's appropriate for commercial and industrial scale. Eddie and I cover a lot of ground in this conversation. What it actually takes to certify a second life battery system, why the commercial and industrial storage market has been so hard to crack, how hyperscaler demand is reshaping Moment's ambitions, and how Moment is thinking about battery storage not just as a product, but as permanent grid infrastructure built to last a century, not a decade. From mcj, I'm Cody Sims and this is inevitable. Climate change is inevitable. It's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry.
- [02:13]
Eddie, welcome to the show.
- [02:14]
Eddie Chang
Hey, thanks for having me, Cody.
- [02:16]
Cody Sims
I was looking recently. I think you were on the show a little over four years ago. That's like an entire college career. You're in full on grad school mode now as a company, aren't you?
- [02:25]
Eddie Chang
Definitely. Yeah, we're, we're definitely on a growth tear. But four years, time flies for sure.
- [02:30]
Cody Sims
Last time you were on, you were making the case that Second Life batteries were worth taking seriously. I think you could say now that case has been heard.
- [02:40]
Eddie Chang
Yes.
- [02:41]
Cody Sims
Just give us the overview of like, where is Moment Energy today? And maybe what surprised you the most about what you've learned along the way?
- [02:47]
Eddie Chang
Yeah, definitely. First of all, thank you for having me. A lot has changed over the past four years. Four years ago, the sentiment had always been, is there enough battery supply all the way to what is Second Life? What is this concept? Does this technology even work?
- [03:05]
Cody Sims
I certainly asked a lot of those Questions of you 4 years ago about the battery supply. I remember Very clearly. That being my big concern at your seed round.
- [03:13]
Eddie Chang
Yeah, absolutely. And we had some very strong conviction because you can really just see how many vehicles have been sold. You map that to 10 to 15 years into the future and you can already see how many hundreds of gigawatt hours there are. And we're already getting hit by this wave. Now we're seeing a ton of battery supply. We're trying to make sure that these batteries don't end up in landfills because recycling has been super unprofitable and very difficult over the past four years or so. What we really worked on over the past four years is now we scaled from, I think maybe we were a team of 12 people, maybe less, all the way to now we're a team of 72. And largely from then and now is there's a huge plethora of battery supply. We work with most automakers as their end of life battery solution. They need help. A lot of automakers have no clue. Should I repurpose? Should I recycle? Moment Energy is the company that helps us determine that. So we help them with a lot of battery testing and then we say, yep, these batteries are good for repurposing. Let us do that for you. And then, hey, these batteries are not that great with repurposing. Let's go send that to a local recycler. What we found over the past four years is second life has fully been de risked on the technological side. We've shown at Moment Energy that we've deployed many projects over the past five years and they've been cycled even up to five times a day, equivalent of 30 years worth of cycles, and they're still going strong. Degradation is very low from a 65% Nissan Leaf battery deployed to now after five years and 30 years of equivalent cycles, it's only degraded to 58%. So long story short, reusing these high performing EV battery cells is extremely effective in an extremely domestic way to manufacture batteries. But now we're seeing massive growth where even other companies have been deploying batteries in deserts and that still works too. We need to develop many differing solutions to make sure that these batteries don't get prematurely recycled or prematurely landfilled.
- [05:20]
Cody Sims
We'll spend a bunch of time rehashing sort of the rationale behind the company, why repurposing matters, how it compares to virgin lithium ion, etc. But before we do that, you guys have some exciting news that we're certainly excited about here at mcj. Maybe share a little bit about some of the Recent developments that you are sharing with the world.
- [05:41]
Eddie Chang
We're extremely excited to be announcing that we closed our Series B round. So it's a $40 million round led by amazing players like Evoke, major investors like Liberty Mutual. MCJ has doubled down, tripled down since the beginning over the past four years at every single one of these rounds. And we're really excited to be utilizing this capital to expand into gigafactories like the one out in Texas, Austin, Texas, and continue to manufacture even more and more batteries domestically as well out of our headquarters in Vancouver.
- [06:17]
Cody Sims
First of all, congrats.
- [06:18]
Eddie Chang
Thank you.
- [06:19]
Cody Sims
Thanks for including McJ along in the journey. I think this is our third check into moment Energy, so certainly excited by everything you guys are building. Share a little bit about what you're building both in Austin, Texas and in Vancouver. Really moving up the manufacturing curve and moving into execution mode here over the past four years.
- [06:39]
Eddie Chang
What we had de risked is we became the first and only company in all of North America to have ever achieved UL 1974 in our manufacturing facility in Vancouver. Historically, that facility had been 20,000 square feet in terms of manufacturing, we're the only place that automakers can send their batteries to and we do full testing and manufacturing of these batteries into stationary energy storage in 2025, in July, we became the only company in the entire world with not just that process and manufacturing level certification, but full system level certification of our products. So Moment Energy is the only company in the entire world with full certification. So we're not like others where they say we've tested two and trying to lobby to get certifications change. We're really the only ones that have full certifications. That makes our systems the safest and the only safe systems there.
- [07:30]
Cody Sims
For listeners, including myself, who maybe don't live and breathe all the various safety certifications around manufacturing, battery safety, fire safety, et cetera. Can you describe a little bit about those certifications that you received and why they are relevant and challenging to get?
- [07:46]
Eddie Chang
The one that most battery companies, no matter if you're second life, new lithium, zinc, sodium ion, it doesn't matter. The ones that really matter the most are the product level certifications. So UL 1973 and 9540, which are more testing related. For Second Life, though, to even achieve the product level certifications, you need to still achieve the manufacturing level certification because before you even develop a product, you have to make sure that you're testing these second life EV batteries that have been in the field for 10 or 15 years to make sure that they're safe enough to be put into stationary storage, which is why at first we had to get that facility level certification first. And then once we got it, actually now two to three years ago, and still being the only ones there, we then now move to full product level certification. Why it's so hard is mainly because of the proprietary battery testing methodology that we have at moment Energy. Other people have realized it's been so difficult that they've been lobbying hard to make certification easier. And for us, we say no. Safety is paramount, both for our customer, but also for our employees. Safety events is something that's not acceptable. So now that we've gotten that certification, the product level is still pretty difficult. And it's actually difficult now, not just for Second Life so much so, though other competitors have said it's impossible. So they've been trying to lobby to get 1973 changed and whatnot, but we say no. As it stands, it is very safe, and we have achieved it. We've proven that it's achievable. Let's not try to get this lobbied. But instead, why is this important? It's because when a battery catches fire, you want to make sure that it doesn't catch other things and other assets on fire. And the whole commercial ramifications is if you have, let's say, a $10 billion data center, or even more critical moment Energy has deployed at airports and hospitals already on grid. If you install an uncertified system onto a $10 billion data center, well, that whole data center is now uninsurable. Not only just the battery system, and customers can't have that. So that's why it's super important to make sure you're developing the safest system possible. And that's our focus.
- [10:01]
Cody Sims
Is using Second Life inherently more dangerous than a new lithium ion battery would be? I mean, you guys have achieved a certification, so I would presume then you've been deemed safe. But is there a greater risk in stringing together these batteries into a Second life system than if you were building something natively new?
- [10:22]
Eddie Chang
Great question, and we get that a lot. And the answer is no. Oftentimes, these batteries are manufactured to exceed safety than even stationary storage. Because you can imagine these batteries are manufactured so you can be driving down a highway at 100 miles per hour, and, knock on wood, you'd never get into an accident. But if you were to get an
- [10:42]
Cody Sims
accident, you would be exceeding most federal safety speed limits at 100 miles an hour. Eddie, just to be clear.
- [10:48]
Eddie Chang
Definitely, definitely. But even then. So the Engineers make sure that they're designing a battery pack and a vehicle to withstand that, because we can't control what the consumer does. And again, we are not encouraging people to drive from that case, though, in stationary storage, it's just a box that's sitting there outside of a hospital or an airport. So ideally the safety occurrences are lower, but there is still a lot of remanufacturing that needs to be done to that EV battery pack, EV battery modules so that you can pass all these fire tests. The key is in America, actually, we have the most stringent safety standards ultimately, even compared to most other countries. So much so there are debates on are we too safe? Because now startups have to light seven units on fire, which is millions and millions of dollars, which startups essentially can't afford. So it makes it very prohibitive for any new chemistries or new incumbents to come into this market, which is not great. But regardless, we've been able to prove that we do light all these systems on fire to make sure that doesn't spread to other assets, to other batteries, to other buildings. We're the only company that's proven to be able to do so. Safety is paramount, for sure.
- [12:03]
Cody Sims
How much of that is the containerization that you've created around the batteries and how much of that is the error handling and software that you create in terms of the battery management system that routes loads inside the battery?
- [12:16]
Eddie Chang
It is both. So we'll look at both. One is we have to test the battery management system and a core differentiator for moment energy and others trying to repurpose and is all the others, they trick the vehicle battery management system. So what they'll do is they'll take the battery pack out of a vehicle, load it up in a desert, typically exposed, and then they will trick the vehicle BMS that's in it, which is a little interesting. It'll say, drive the vehicle at 80 miles per hour discharge, drive it at 20 miles per hour discharge, slower. Oh, now you're at home taking charge. In reality, although maybe from an engineering standpoint, it's interesting because you can go onto Reddit and find these can codes and go do that. The automaker doesn't think it's interesting. The automakers think this as a massive liability because if the system catches on fire, and again, we really hope that it doesn't, a fire inspector can come in and see, oh, hey, a Nissan BMS is still attached. A different automaker BMS is still attached. And that puts a lot of liability on the automaker but at the same time, it's a massive infringement of their ip. And that BMS is not meant for stationary storage applications, which is why for us, we take out the vehicle bms, we put in our own AI driven battery management system as well. And being able to determine if a cell is too hot, if the voltage ranges start drifting too much to turn off the whole system is one major key component to this UL certification. But the second part is also that system, that enclosure. Which is also why we highly discourage putting battery packs exposed to the weather and the elements. Mainly because fire occurrences are completely not acceptable within ul within the United States and also to our customers, but also to Moment Energy. We actually have to test it, which is pretty interesting, where you even turn off your bms, you purposely ignite your batteries within the container and the system, and then you show that your enclosures and your safety systems and your venting systems can all behave properly even in a BMS failure and whatnot as well. So there's a hardware component and a software component.
- [14:29]
Cody Sims
Would the counter argument to that be if you have one single battery pack or a row of them that are exposed, you can visually see if one is on fire and it doesn't naturally spread to the others, whereas if it's containerized, you've essentially created a chain reaction that you may not detect right away?
- [14:47]
Eddie Chang
I think you can try to make that argument, but I think most customers see that as extremely dangerous in the battery industry, be it Chinese new lithium. In a very commercial sense, a battery fire at all is unacceptable. Not when a battery fire happens. And pulling for. Let's just visually see that as much as possible. We can visually see systems catch fire also through telemetry and whatnot as well. But containing that fire is the most important part. I think that's a pretty weak safety excuse to say that we'd want to just visually see it rather than actually just let's prevent fires altogether.
- [15:28]
Cody Sims
Can you share a little bit about the form factor that you're creating? Like what size batteries are you planning to manufacture today and where do you see that evolving as well?
- [15:38]
Eddie Chang
We call our system the Luna system, and we actually have two iterations of it. Again, it's the only system in the entire world with full product level certification as well. So the Half Luna System is a 400 kilowatt hour system and it's a building block. We can chain this into infinity. Again, we drop maybe one for a neighborhood powering 10 or 20 homes, one for an airport, one for a hospital, and also we have A megawatt hour form factor. We call that the full Luna. But regardless, it's the exact same architecture, but just doubled more or less. In terms of the footprint, it is less than a 10 foot containerized system. And what's really important for us was to prove that Second Life batteries can get certification as it stands without any lobbying. But we are co developing systems as well with many different automakers where the footprint is even smaller. Even within a 500 to 700 kilowatt hour system. The hint is much smaller than what I've just named as our current systems, which is super exciting. We historically have been focused on the commercial industrial industry. Our thesis is that the grid is extremely broken. We're really talking about grid infrastructure and power lines and how transmission is a major problem. Well, let nuclear and solar and many other companies focus on the generation side. The main problem is also the distribution. So how do we get the cheapest electrons to consumers and the industrial industry? So our vision is every manufacturing building, every commercial tower, every neighborhood would have its own dedicated battery. You can't take up an entire acre's worth of land with your batteries because you're not energy dense enough. You literally need to be smaller than a parking stall and land that right in the parking lot so that you can deliver the most amount of electrons into that use case. We're starting to see a huge gravitation away from utility scale batteries. Overall, the Chinese have been really great at manufacturing utility scale batteries, and that's something that we keep an eye on. But when you bid on 40 football fields of batteries on the outskirts of Houston, you're typically bidding against 15 Chinese companies.
- [17:54]
Cody Sims
When you define utility scale, roughly what size is that? Starting at what size of battery, we
- [18:00]
Eddie Chang
typically see above a hundred megawatt hours as utility scale. Below 100 megawatt hours, you kind of get into large commercial industrial to then even a 1 or 2 megawatt hours is commercial industrial and distributed energy.
- [18:14]
Cody Sims
Your full Luna is 1 megawatt hour, right, I think you said.
- [18:17]
Eddie Chang
Exactly. So we can just drop one container at the airport to support EV fleet charging from there. Mainly because again, like what we were seeing is when you have utility scale batteries at the outskirts of a city, when Houston was hit by a storm, yes, you had batteries. But if the power lines between a desert worth of batteries to the city, those power lines come down, well, your city still has no power.
- [18:40]
Cody Sims
A conversation you and I had a few years ago now was one of the first that really opened my eyes to how utilities are thinking about battery deployments. As an alternative to fixing distribution and investing in substations and whatnot, where they were actually making that financial trade off and choosing to install a moment energy system somewhere rather than redoing the power line.
- [19:06]
Eddie Chang
Yeah, absolutely. And that's what we work with most of our customers in doing as well. So at airports or hospitals, what we're seeing is at airports and logistics depots, right? We have a lot of relationships, including investors, where they have fleets of EVs. They're trying to install five or 10 EV chargers at each of their thousands of logistics depots that they own. And the problem is when they go to their local utility, they'll say, hey, listen, I want five or 10 charges. The local utility will say, sure, no problem, but that'll be $20 million in power line upgrades as well as transformer upgrades, let alone a three year wait time on transformers as well. So a customer like an airport or these logistics companies, they say why am I the one paying $20 million per site for an upgrade? And this happens the neighborhoods too. Like why would a neighborhood or consumer pay $20 million for this power upgrade and infrastructure upgrade? If I could actually just deploy maybe $1 million or $2 million or $5 million worth of batteries and we can charge at 3am and then discharge during 12pm during these peak EV fleet charging
- [20:14]
Cody Sims
times, for example, that's a battery story writ large. That's not necessarily a moment energy or repurposing battery story. What gives you unique edge in that
- [20:27]
Eddie Chang
place and our focus in cni, commercial and industrial? Historically, typically investors have asked us, well, what's stopping CETL or byd? And again, we see them as our main competitors. We need to make sure that we're manufacturing batteries more affordably than the Chinese. Well, what's stopping them? And in reality, when we see very cheap battery prices, Catl will quote you $180 per kilowatt hour all in, and they'll say yeah, I'll do CNI. Then when you try to make an order, and they'll say, yeah, that's going to be CNI scale, but I also need 2 gigawatt hours of orders. So in the end it's still a volume game because when you do utility scale, you have very low margins. You're in the 5 to 10% in terms of margins. But the Chinese are very good at just high volumes and they don't mind if it's low margins. When they are to manufacture 1 megawatt hour, it's really not worth it and they can't leverage the volume that they're really focused on, which is why at moment energy we can acquire extremely high margins in CNI because one is we're the same price or cheaper in most cases than Chinese batteries already while not being at gigafactory scale today, but we'll be there in the coming months. It's a highly underserved market. No Chinese players are playing within this and distribution is very difficult, which we focus on unlocking as well. How do we deploy CNI projects as scalably as quickly as possible so that we can make sure the consumer or the customer's energy costs are as low as possible?
- [21:59]
Cody Sims
And Tesla did have a product in this space, I think, but now is almost wholly focused on the residential market and the powerwall product. Is that right?
- [22:07]
Eddie Chang
That's right. They typically focus on either residential scale and even then at earlier stages I'll mainly focus on is they weren't making too much money on it. The margins were pretty low there, but it was great marketing. The main projects that Tesla had been focused on are the big utility scale ones. The first one was the one in Australia that everybody likes to typically cite. So the main side is when you deploy utility scale projects, you are competing against again, 15 to 16 Chinese companies. And then Tesla, there's only one really non Chinese player that's there. And when you look at it, we've put out big solar projects out to bid as well through a lot of our experience. And you'll see that everybody's actually the same price because the market has already funneled down to a certain dollar per kilowatt hour for the battery side. There's typically one Chinese company that's $10 million cheaper than everybody else. And you then realize, okay, they're probably going to take a loss leader and that's what we're competing against locally. We're competing against Chinese battery manufacturers that can take losses and just to win market share. So when we think about right now, the United States, we're really trying to onshore battery manufacturing. There's a big problem there.
- [23:23]
Cody Sims
There's a giant graveyard of companies in domestic battery manufacturing both in the US and in Europe. It's been a difficult business to try to pry out of China.
- [23:34]
Eddie Chang
Yeah, exactly. We don't own any of the supply chains right now. There's a whole thing and maybe as a quick summary is we have the Inflation Reduction act largely, unfortunately, solar and wind had been cut, batteries had not been cut. But they added, the current administration added one word, which is fiac, Foreign Entities of concern. While North Korea and Iran don't build batteries, but China does. So it was really targeted towards China. And the key is they're essentially encouraging batteries to not be deployed if it touches China. But when we're manufacturing battery cells in America, it is unclear. And as of right now, it's actually pretty negative. Where even if I decouple from China, I don't buy from catl, and I were to roll battery cells here in America, where do I buy the lithium? Where do I buy the cobalt? Where do I buy the nickel? I still buy them from China because all the refineries after the minerals being mined, they are refined in China.
- [24:34]
Cody Sims
When you say we, you don't mean we. Moment Energy. You mean we, like a domestic battery manufacturer.
- [24:39]
Eddie Chang
Domestic, yeah. The west essentially, like, where do we source our minerals? Which is essentially why currently, within the ira, they won't qualify for the ira. We're seeing aspects where when Ford has struck up deals with CATL to license technology, there is a whole concept of substantial control. Where the current administration doesn't like it when the Chinese have substantial control over technology or over a process. As of today, even if those battery cells were manufactured in America, there's too much substantial control of CATL onto Ford because of that licensing deal. So we're trying to figure it out. And that's just how the laws are written today. I think Ford has a lot of ability to lobby the current government to loosen that up a bit. But that's really the premise of Moment Energy.
- [25:27]
Cody Sims
Do you guys get through the FIAC issue in that you're reusing content that is now considered domestic content? Is that the idea?
- [25:35]
Eddie Chang
That's exactly the idea. Because we're sourcing domestically. These vehicles were driven in America, in Germany, in any allied country. We source those batteries. And then these batteries were not initially meant for stationary storage. There's a lot of manufacturing and repurposing that's involved to even make it usable. Again, we're not just tricking a battery management system. We're actually doing a lot of manufacturing to make them into stationary storage and safety to make them into stationary storage. It is akin to if you were to buy a Chinese steel beam and then you were to melt it down in the United States and you build a new steel beam. Is that a Chinese steel beam anymore? No, that is actually an American steel beam. That is so much engineering that we have to put in to make sure that these batteries are repurposable. Which is why, again, why are we sourcing from China if we have tens of millions of vehicles on American roads today that we can domestically source battery supplies. And that's kind of where we're at and where we then went on Economics. Is this the reason why China has been banned from the ira more or less, is because American made batteries, if they can get over that fioxide and the sourcing those minerals, is currently about 30% more expensive than Chinese batteries. So if American companies then qualified for the ira, at least they would be the same price. And it gives American made batteries a winning chance. But at moment energy and in second life in general, we're actually slightly cheaper than Chinese batteries without any tax credits. And now that we qualify for tax credits, we're 30, 40, 50% cheaper than Chinese batteries. And our goal is to deploy, deploy, deploy. That's why we're spooling up multiple mega and gigafactories right now. And the more we deploy, the more scale we hit. And then even without any tax credits, in two to three years, we're 50% plus cheaper than the Chinese.
- [27:29]
Cody Sims
The price of LFP is famously dropping dramatically right now for new lfp. If I buy a car today at today's price and drive it for five years, that car is eventually end of life and that battery goes into a second life instance, that moment energy gets. Is that battery cheaper than what LFP is going to be as a new battery five years from now?
- [27:53]
Eddie Chang
Most definitely, yes. Unless we can find a way to manufacture and mine and refine lithium and nickel for free, the economics of new lithium can never get down to the price of second life, which essentially is we are able to get batteries either for free or, or when we pay. The average known price is about $10 per kilowatt hour for a battery module. To put in perspective, a Chinese battery module new is about $90 per kilowatt hour module. Again, you'll see papers that say 30 to 40, but that's typically for the cell and then you have to make it into a module. That's actually the whole premise of Moment Energy as well. Moment Energy is the only commercial company that's deployed the most amount of differing automaker batteries. And you can imagine why is that important? Because Mercedes and Nissan, if they have lfp, the lfmp, the recipe is different, nmc, the recipe is different, different automakers. So lfp, nmc, nca, we've done it all commercially and as well as different state of health. So Even CATL and BYD, when they deploy stationary storage, their new LFP batteries, 100% state of health, well, we're able to deploy 100, 90, 80, 70, 60. All across that spectrum. And we are the company that collects the most amount of battery degradation data. And the vision is, especially with our battery match system, it's really life extension. How do we extend lifetime of not just second life batteries, but also first life batteries and also new chemistries like sodium ion, zinc, solid state, whatever new chemistry comes out, that's great. You're not underwriting to a single chemistry, but you're underwriting to all chemistries. And we're constantly looking at the economics of new lithium versus second life. But as of today, we have extremely high conviction because we're in the market that second life is significantly cheaper than even new.
- [29:48]
Cody Sims
How does a battery get into the second life realm? Like, what is the typical process today when a battery is deemed no longer appropriate to continue to live in the vehicle that it was born into?
- [30:02]
Eddie Chang
So we typically say it's a single cell failure. How I typically like to summarize it is our kids won't understand this, but back when we were younger, how Christmas lights used to work is if one light bulb burnt out, the whole string burns out. Now we have LEDs. And that's not exactly how that works anymore. From the engineering perspective, it's most of the times there are massive strings in series, usually maybe two series strings in parallel. What will happen is not what a lot of people expected. Even four years ago. They would say, hey, well, I start at 400 miles in terms of range, then next year I'm going to see 390, then 380, then 350. And that's really not how it works in terms of degradation because Tesla and many other automakers will just throw actually more capacity than they're telling you in that battery pack. It will degrade over time, but as a consumer you just consistently will see 400 miles of range. But what will actually happen is a single cell failure. So within a battery pack there is, it depends on the automaker, but let's say eight beautiful battery modules. Each of them are three feet long. Within each battery module, there's maybe 148 battery cells. And what's really happening is that there's one cell within one of the modules that's died and then that kills the whole pack. Due to the Christmas light analogy. That's why at moment we repurpose at the pack level, at the module level. We go and find that one bad battery module that has the bad cell in it. And then we are committed to recycling. Which is also why over the past five years we knew recyclers weren't really telling the truth in terms of profitability because I have five invoices from all the recyclers to say, listen, we publicly said we'll pay for these batteries and these are NMC batteries or NCA batteries. But actually we're going to charge you a couple thousand dollars to recycle. But then after that, what we found is out of that Battery pack of eight, the one module is now recycled. The remaining seven, they actually have closer to 90 to 95% life left, which is incredible. So again we're constantly saying why are we sending these premature the entire battery pack to a recycler if we can repurpose them for another 20 plus years. And that's kind of where we come from. But you need that testing methodology. And we had to vertically integrate. So we now do things from pack receiving. We are their unified site. Maybe in America. It goes from a dealership where they swapped out a battery pack and now they will send their battery packs to our site. We will then do battery testing, validation, the whole certification process for the automaker and then we deploy the systems at the end product.
- [32:35]
Cody Sims
And why would they send to you before they would just send it to a recycler in the first place?
- [32:39]
Eddie Chang
Because the recyclers are typically charging them a couple thousand dollars to recycle. The whole battery pack is one. But also it is because now we're seeing more and more automakers be more open to expanding their businesses. We've seen gm, they're starting a new lithium type manufacturing arm. Same with Ford, they're starting new lithium manufacturing arm. Volvo has been doing it for a while now. A lot of automakers are interested in this. But also a lot of automakers have realized they're really good at building cars and finding customers and manufacturing battery systems and is something that is pretty difficult. So why don't we just work with multiple partners as well? And that's kind of where Moment Energy comes in. We're not an expert at car manufacturing, but we're an expert at battery manufacturing and safety. So that's why they work with Moment Energy.
- [33:28]
Cody Sims
The most common EVs that are getting recycled today, reused today. I would guess there's probably a Nissan Leaf or a Chevy bolt battery, is that right? Or a Tesla, I don't know.
- [33:38]
Eddie Chang
It's all across the board. But Tesla, Nissan Leafs, I would hesitate on the Chevy Bolt side, we've seen players try to repurpose batteries like that. But of course there was a reason why These batteries were fire recalled in the vehicle. So that's kind of where our difference within other Second Life companies as well. We don't try to just repurpose everything. We're very honest with the automakers to say, listen, these are safe because ultimately the customer matters a lot. And if something goes wrong like a battery fire, well that also ruins the reputation of the automaker. We really focus on repurposing the batteries that should be repurposed. And there are certain battery packs out there that we typically won't. We'll be picky depending on the make and model. And we'll also work with the automakers to test. We do a lot of fire testing, a lot of on cycler testing. We utilize a lot of AI as well to make sure that these batteries are repurposable. And then we work with automakers in partnership to co develop.
- [34:37]
Cody Sims
So these cars come back through someone's trading in their car, they're buying a new one. Now you've got the used car, there's a wreck, I would guess. So the car goes through a full scrapping process. Whatever the reason is, now you've got this used battery today they would pay someone thousands of dollars to take it off of their hands. They're starting to realize, hey, maybe we should get involved in this side of the value chain. They start to work with you, either giving them to you rather than paying someone, or maybe you're even buying them for a small amount of money and then you turn that into this new storage system that you say has you set up to 20 years of new life to it, Is that right?
- [35:20]
Eddie Chang
Yeah, that's right. And what we're seeing is 15 to 20 years without any advanced battery management system whatsoever. But of course at moment energy, what we've been able to develop is an advanced DC swapping technology as well. And it's all connected to our battery management system where we can swap. Our vision is this. When you see these utility scale projects or even commercial industrial, it really doesn't matter. These battery projects, everybody's hyper focused on the dollar per kilowatt hour of the battery. When you actually start deploying and you're out of R and D, you realize actually the battery cost is only about 40% of the cost. 60% is actually projecting. So this is laying down concrete pads. This is brain in interconnection right now with CATL. What they're doing is every 20 years you have to scrap that battery system, scrap the concrete, lay down more concrete, lay down a new system. But our vision is why don't we create a 30 year system? Why don't we create and 100 year system where in reality you leave the concrete pad out there, you'll leave the interconnection out there, you even see the container. It's been there for a hundred years. But all we're doing now is just swapping the chemical portion. So the battery module, the battery packs, and that's really how then our customers on the data center side, they don't see any downtime. Hospitals work critically as well. You can't have any outages, they'll never see any downtime.
- [36:48]
Cody Sims
It's almost like a very long term diesel generator in that you're ultimately thinking of the battery chemistries as the OPEX that you're swapping into these 100 year packs.
- [37:01]
Eddie Chang
That's what drives our view in terms of design overall, because in the end we're extremely customer focused. Capacity of energy per acre matters a lot. You can't just have huge acreages of non dense batteries out there because there's land costs, property costs, construction costs that are again 60% majority of the cost there. So it doesn't matter how cheap you get the battery. So that is why we designed this really compact, energy dense system. That's typically how we beat all of our other competitors.
- [37:33]
Cody Sims
From there, you've taken a few sideswipes to redwood. Do you just want to name it there, Eddie?
- [37:40]
Eddie Chang
There are a couple other players I would say, within the Second Life space that just entered. And we're actually very happy. What we think is it takes a village to all make sure these batteries don't end up in landfills. Unfortunately, what we found is over the past couple years, although the recyclers have been said we're super profitable and they constantly said Second Life doesn't really make any sense. Unfortunately, most of those recyclers have gone under. And I want the recycling side to be profitable because I've written in my Dubai laws that I will never ever, ever landfill a battery and I will always recycle. What we're focused on is making sure that there are new generations of recycling companies that come up. And also we're more than happy to welcome new incumbents in the Second Life space. What we ask is to make sure that we're making sure everybody is safe. It's not just customers being safe, but it's also employees being safe. And at the same time, we hope that in 20 years, in a hundred years, when we extend these life of these batteries for many decades, that there are Going to be awesome new recycling companies because there is a massive market here. In the next two to three years, there's going to be 950 gigawatt hours of end of life batteries. And if Moment energy is only repurposing 2, 5, 10 GWh per year, that is still such a small dent where we need many other players in this space Overall.
- [39:03]
Cody Sims
On the safety note, a fun story. I was following your LinkedIn posts about the former NASA chief fire safety engineer that you hired who worked, I think, on Artemis 2.
- [39:14]
Is that right?
- [39:15]
Eddie Chang
Yeah, that's right.
- [39:16]
Cody Sims
Share a little bit about that. That's incredible.
- [39:19]
Eddie Chang
So we have John Walker and we have many amazing stories as well throughout the entire organization. Again, we're a team of 72 now, which is great and we're on a growth tear. We're hiring a couple hundred over the coming months. But John Walker's amazing. I love his story where he's an extremely seasoned fire safety engineer. And this is why fire safety is so important. Because in the end, critical members like some of our hero, American and Canadian heroes that go up there, we need to make sure that everything's safe from there. So he's tested 100,000, 200,000 differing batteries. You literally have to drive nails through these batteries to purposely light them on fire to see how they combust and then actually see which ones are the safest ones to make sure that we can send up to the moon. So he had done all that. He led a lot of NASA's fire safety team and then once he did that, he wanted to help out with an incredible mission in terms of making sure that everybody has access to clean, affordable energy. And how do we make sure that these batteries that oftentimes are seen as used, but in reality are equally, if not more safe than even stationary storage cells that you'd buy from China. Are passing all the certifications required. And we're designing to go above and beyond any standard rather than trying to change standards to meet our goals.
- [40:41]
Cody Sims
Had to be fun watching the launch over the last few weeks with your team member.
- [40:46]
Eddie Chang
I got emotional. I am currently a Canadian Forces member. I've taught 17 pilots to get their pilot's license. Some of them are way cooler than me. Now I'm mainly there just to help them get to kind of their private pilots license type stage. And then after that, now there are Canada pilots to Cathay pilots even. Some of them are fighter jet pilots and I look up to them. But it's definitely like a proud dad moment when you see A lot of your young pilots outgrow you. And this news has been amazing because we see a lot of negative news and we're constantly talking about budgeting the US budget on how to solve this problem or solve that problem. But not oftentimes do we actually get to budget for amazing hope building projects like this one. So this drives us, we think about how do we build an organization to create as much impact as this. And we really believe that by lowering cost and creating more cost of energy and creating a more reliable energy across the world is the key point. Everybody's really been talking about AI data centers lately, which is great. I think AI is very transformational. We utilize a lot of AI throughout the company. But what's typically forgotten is just the layman and woman who is trying to go to work, build awesome products at a manufacturing facility and they come back home and all of a sudden they see that their energy price is 3x or 4x because they have a loud diesel generator powered data center right outside that just landed. And our goal is to make sure that not only are we proliferating awesome technology like AI, but also making sure that energy costs are cheaper. And that's why we take this distributed energy storage view on the market.
- [42:31]
Cody Sims
On that note, we've talked a bit about some of the current market focus you have and building for this commercial and industrial markets at the single megawatt scale, Building a product at the single megawatt scale, obviously you can solve a problem larger than that. How do you see the data center world directly intersecting with Moment Energy?
- [42:53]
Eddie Chang
Of course we've been highly engaged and they've reached out to us on a lot of projects overall.
- [42:59]
Cody Sims
They meaning big hyperscalers.
- [43:01]
Eddie Chang
Big hyperscalers, yeah. And the reasoning is, because historically we're talking about nuclear and we're talking about gas turbines to stand up data centers as we take time to upgrade the infrastructure grid. So the problem is actually kind of all the same. Historically what we found is they're actually now trying to utilize the archaic grid that we have today and use it as much as possible and stand even small amounts of data centers and smaller data centers before they hop right into the gigawatt data centers. Because in AI training time is a major key. The more time that you have to train your models then the better it is. Rather than going from zero over the next couple years and you just jump straight to a gigawatt data center, what batteries really help do is you're able to then install, let's say it's a 30 megawatt power line. But then there are one to six hour inferencing loads. In other words, peak demand loads. Right? Your loads actually peak for one to six hours. Well, batteries again are perfect for that because you can now discharge your batteries to meet that and you can then install more CPU chips. But the key aspect is this again, which is they've reached out to us mainly because they've told us, hey, we can't have uncertified systems because then my entire data center is uninsurable, which is not great. Secondly is energy density matters a lot. For example, moment is 5x more energy dense than any other project that's been deployed as well with Second Life with the data center, land is important. The more land you take, the more your construction cost it is as well, let alone trying to deploy data centers in neighborhoods. Like right now we're seeing data centers more in urban locations than just in the middle of nowhere desert. So with all that in mind, the third aspect and the key aspect for Second Life in general as a market, is that we're not in Chinese. The current administration has largely not allowed Chinese batteries to come in constantly hyperscale. They're trying to just install as many data centers as possible, but with the constraint of not buying foreign. So that's kind of the three pronged reasons why we've been reached out to and why we're developing multiple projects as well.
- [45:10]
Cody Sims
Would you have to build a larger or different form factor? You're talking hundreds of megawatt scale potentially that you might need to solve for in some of these multi gigawatt data centers, I'm assuming, or I guess if they're looking at you as maybe a diesel gen set backup replacement, in the near term it might not need to be quite that big. But is this a different product that you'd ultimately build?
- [45:32]
Eddie Chang
We're able to use our current product mainly because we're the Most energy dense second life product there is on the market. Again by 5x, which is pretty amazing. And we don't need to spread out batteries because we've actually passed certifications. So we can actually get these batteries pretty close side by side together as well. So it wouldn't actually be a new product, but it is just manufacturing as fast as possible. We currently have tens and tens of gigawatt hours of battery supply, tens and tens of gigawatt hours of demand between hyperscalers, but also not just hyperscalers, but critical infrastructure projects. And now it's just scaling up manufacturing to meet it. So already we're in the hundreds of megawatt hour scale in terms of manufacturing, of course, again, that's why we're building out that Texas gigafactory as well to scale into multi gigawatt hours. And we're excited to be doing that all domestically.
- [46:22]
Cody Sims
How are you building that capability as a team?
- [46:26]
Eddie Chang
It's really new problems. The benefit is that we don't use fresh water, unlike maybe new cell manufacturing or recycling, like we don't use fresh water. And there's a lot less chemical manufacturing that's involved. But we need a lot of power to test, which is really fun. And in terms of the constraints there, and a lot of it is assembly and then of course attaching our proprietary technology there. And what we've really been able to do is attract the best in the world to join our company, such as members from Rocket Labs. You can imagine building rockets is pretty hard alone. And that is the scale that we need to be operating at to capture this massive demand. We're constantly innovating in terms of how do we assemble batteries, manufacture batteries manufactured domestically, and even just the enclosures which are typically historically outsourced out to the Asian countries. Right. How do we create better and better designs to lower the cost of the battery systems, but also make them more deployable and easier to be deployed, which is a really hard problem that nobody has ever really innovated on. But again, that 60% cost, if we can reduce that 60% of deployment and construction cost, well then that's a game changer.
- [47:44]
Cody Sims
A question that we haven't really hit on. You know, we talked about the hyperscalers, but you have a major hyperscaler who's been quite involved with Moment Energy very publicly. Maybe share a little bit about your relationship with Amazon.
- [47:56]
Eddie Chang
So Amazon touches everything, of course, from data centers and being the largest data center, all the way to logistics and getting our awesome Amazon packages in. And they're great champions all across the line on the commercial industrial front as well. And what we're really working on from that front is to make sure that batteries are being repurposed and that the customers like Amazon are not incurring these massive $20 million costs when we're trying to install and electrify more fleets, all the way to install more equipment that draw a lot of power, such as H Vacs or robotics or any industrial equipment which a customer like an Amazon really touches upon, versus more software based companies where they don't typically work in the hard world. So we are big fans of our partners and investors at Amazon, mainly Because they actually understand how hard it is to manufacture, how hard is it to distribute. And having a partner that is the best at distribution is very helpful when we continue to scale Moment Energy.
- [49:05]
Cody Sims
Burying the lead a little bit there. But they are an investor in the company.
- [49:08]
Eddie Chang
Yes, exactly.
- [49:09]
Cody Sims
Well, Eddie, you know, this has been a great conversation and gosh, just the amount of progress you guys have made is astounding. We're so proud to be involved in what you're doing.
- [49:18]
Eddie Chang
Where do you need help at moment? We're really trying to build a massive vision here and we're really trying to re industrialize the entire grid. To do so, we think about Moment Energy as and the grid 100 years from now, not just today and a hundred years from now. The goal is to really make sure that power outages are something of a myth. Nobody has ever experienced that ever again. No matter how much power you need, installing ACs at home, installing EV charging at home, even maybe installing a data center at home, you can do that. We want abundant power. And that's why we see prosperity across the world. It's very heartbreaking to us that there are places, not just in America, but all across the world where power is not even available at night, which we see is a fundamental human right for Moment Energy. And it is crazy that in 2026, a young kid can't study in the middle of the night because of power outages. And that affects their life and their career in the future, let alone food and water filtration. That's critical. So to build that, we really believe that we need to reinvent the entire utility grid. And how we're doing it at Moment Energy is we're distributing batteries at every neighborhood block, every manufacturing building, every commercial tower to make sure that power outages and power availability is never, ever a problem. So we're very excited to be doing that here. And we are really looking for the best and brightest to join us on this mission and be able to be proud of their work and say to their kids, yeah, I actually helped re industrialize and re energize the entire nation and entire world. So if you are interested and you're a listener in joining us on this mission, we're on a massive growth tear. We're hiring hundreds of employees right now as we speak, between both Vancouver and Austin and many other satellite offices as well. And we'd love to have you guys join our mission.
- [51:15]
Cody Sims
Well, Eddie, congrats on all that you've built. Congrats on the Series B and I'm excited to continue to see where you go next.
- [51:22]
Eddie Chang
Thanks Cody. Thanks for being one of our very first supporters. We really appreciate it.
- [51:27]
Cody Sims
Amazing. Thanks Eddie.
- [51:28]
Eddie Chang
Thank you.
- [51:29]
Cody Sims
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At MCJ we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about mcj, visit us at MCJ VC and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Newsletter mcj. Thanks and see you next episode.