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Select Quotes From This Episode:
“We are reinventing the proven sodium metal chloride battery for grid storage. It’s literally food grade table salt and iron powder.” –Antonio
“Those active ingredients cost a dollar per kilowatt hour. Our lifetime is better than lithium ion... theoretically it could last forever.” –Antonio
“The grid is big and heavy. It doesn’t care if the battery is heavy. It cares about cost, safety, and lifetime.” –Antonio
“We didn’t have to invent a new chemistry. We are taking a chemistry that was already proven in vehicles and optimizing it for the grid.” –Antonio
“If you look at the periodic table, you can’t get cheaper than sodium and iron.” –Antonio
Why the Grid Needs “Dumb” Ingredients
For the last decade, the battery world has been obsessed with making things lighter and denser for electric vehicles. In that race, Lithium-Ion became king.
But the power grid doesn’t move. It doesn’t care about weight. It cares about cost per kilowatt-hour and safety.
Antonio Baclig, CEO of Inlyte Energy, believes the winner for grid storage isn’t a new sci-fi discovery, but a “loser” from the EV wars of the 90s: the Sodium Metal Chloride battery.
Originally developed in the 1980s (and used in thousands of Mercedes and Smart cars), this technology is robust, safe, and made of dirt-cheap materials: table salt and iron. While it was too heavy for modern cars, its active materials cost just $1/kWh — a price point Lithium can only dream of.
In this episode, Antonio explains how Inlyte is resurrecting this forgotten tech, why active material cost dictates your destiny, and how they secured a manufacturing line in the UK to scale up fast.
We also discuss the unique challenge of bankability in hardware startups and why using proven chemistry gives Inlyte a massive head start over other deep-tech battery companies.
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📝 Show Notes:
Topics
Here are some key timestamps from the episode:
00:00 – Intro: Recording in-person at 9Zero in San Francisco.
02:45 – Antonio’s Background: From Stanford PhD to Flow Batteries.
06:00 – The History: What is the “Zebra Battery” and why did it fail in EVs?
10:15 – The Chemistry: How Sodium, Iron, and Salt work together.
12:30 – The Economics: Why $1/kWh material cost changes everything.
17:00 – Safety First: No thermal runaway and safer than Lithium-Ion.
22:00 – Manufacturing Strategy: Leveraging existing UK talent and factories.
28:00 – The “Bankability” Challenge: Proving a “new” old technology.
34:00 – Commercialization: Who buys these batteries? (Utilities vs Developers).
41:00 – The Grid Reality: Why “Non-Wires Alternatives” are the immediate market.
46:00 – Founder Advice: How to hire A-players for a hardware startup.
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