Interview with Danielle Fong, Founder and Chief Scientist

For the next installment of our Innovative Companies Series, we’re chatting with company at the forefront of Silicon Valley’s cleantech scene, LightSail Energy.

LightSail Energy has some of the most ambitious goals and incredible technology of any company we’ve come across in quite some time. In short, they seek to be the baseline infrastructure that truly enables a massive global movement towards a renewables powered grid – an ambitious goal indeed.

Chatting with Dani Fong, the Founder and Chief Scientist at LightSail Energy was a highlight of my week for sure and below is our interview.

Give us the elevator pitch on LightSail as a company?

Dani Fong: We are trying to crack this nut. How do you make it so that renewable energy is available on demand and less expensive than fossil fuel based power? For a grid to be powered reliably by intermittent renewables like wind or solar, you need energy storage. Many previous attempts have used batteries. The problem with batteries though is that they degrade too quickly and are very expensive. We have to make it cheaper to store energy from renewables than it is to burn fossil fuels on demand. As such, LightSail is using compressed air to store energy in a way that is significantly more efficient than anything that has come before. The biggest challenge was to keep the thermodynamic efficiency very high throughout our whole system, something air compressors have really struggled with in the past.

We think we’ll be able to double round-trip efficiency for compressed air energy storage of energy from the standard 35% to 70%.

What’s the BIG vision for LightSail?

DF: The big vision is to be the baseline infrastructure for a grid completely powered by renewables.

Tell us how the idea for LightSail came about?

DF: I had read that isothermal compression and expansion was impossible. The fact that air heats as it is compressed creates some pretty staggering thermodynamic challenges.

We found that spraying water in would cool or heat at the same rate as energy was being converted from the air.

Originally though, I was interested in Solar collectors and couldn’t make them work with batteries do to them degrading too quickly. As such, I asked “what else is out there that could be adapted to work better than batteries?”

Interestingly enough, I had read about people over 100 years ago “drying” air by spraying cold water onto compressing air and this was a major inspiration for the idea.

As Chief Scientist, walk us through an average week at LightSail?

DF: It honestly changes every single week. There’s a lot of work just figuring out what you need to be doing. As soon as you figure out the tasks in front of you, it goes quite quickly. The challenge is that you’re often working on something you’re not very good at. As an example, we’ve just raised money and so now we’ve gotten quite good at that. Now that they’ve raised money though, we no longer need to do that. That’s sort of the pattern of behavior in working on building a cleantech startup, or any startup in general. Determine your biggest challenges or hurdles, figure out as best as you can how to tackle them, develop a skill set and then move onto the next challenge.

Over the course of the company I’ve become a decent graphic artist, public speaker, decoder, recruiter, PR whiz, fundraiser and many other roles. My focus is like that of a lighthouse – once a task is illuminated, it gets full focus and attention until it’s time to pivot to another issue or task.

What problems have you encountered in launching LightSail that have just made you laugh at how unexpected they were?

Recently we were unable to track down some of our investors because they were at Burning Man festival. That one definitely made me laugh.

We’re a student focused organization so we’d love to know what your absolute favorite memory of your time in University was

DF: An event called Dramafest comes to mind, as I really loved improv gigs.

I went to Dalhousie University in Halifax and another memory that pops to mind is the time there was so much snow that all buses were shut down with me still stuck on campus. Some friends and I decided walk back across the bridge to Dartmouth in a literal white-out blizzard and we felt like real adventurers.

Finish this sentence “In five years, LightSail Energy will be”

The breakout energy company of the 21st century.

Overall thoughts from Sean:

This interview was incredible. To chat with someone that’s at the forefront of making real, tangible strides towards creating a renewable powered grid was fascinating. There are frequent detractors of a renewable powered grid and often there are valid points relating to load management, efficiency, transmission, storage and more. If LightSail continues on their current path, hopefully every single one of these challenges can be overcome.

Even more than the technical potential of LightSail, I was impressed with Dani’s focus on building the business step by step and learning skills in things as varied as graphic design and public speaking. It’s a great lesson and example for any student looking to pursue their own entrepreneurial venture that you can’t just be good at one thing, you need to dive in and figure out everything that stands in the way of the ultimate success of your vision.

If you know of another innovative company that we should profile, please email me at scollins@studentenergy.org and I’ll set up an interview time.