Startup Series: Antora Energy

Today's guest is Andrew Ponec, Co-Founder & CEO of Antora Energy. Antora Energy's technology stores electricity as heat in extremely inexpensive raw materials and uses a novel thermophotovoltaic heat engine to convert that heat back to electricity when consumers need it, hours, days, or weeks later. The startup's technological breakthrough opens up numerous other applications ranging from industrial waste heat recovery to flexible carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Andrew co-founded Antora in 2018 and has been CEO since then. Before Antora, Andrew was a vising scholar at Stanford University. He was co-founder & CEO at Dragonfly Systems and an Engineer at SunPower Corporation after SunPower acquired DragonFly Systems. He holds a BS in Energy Systems Engineering from Stanford Energy. He also was named Forbes 30 under 30 in 2014. In this episode, Andrew walks me through Antora Energy's approach and vision for long-duration storage, how thermal energy storage works, and scaling the startup's solution. We also discuss bringing a solution from the lab to the private sector, how Antora is bridging the intermittency gap, and how far into a clean future we can get without long-duration storage. This is a great episode if you're interested in understanding how we successfully move towards clean and sustainable energy sources. Enjoy the show! You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at [email protected], where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests. Episode recorded November 12th, 2021