Transcript
INTRO
Jigar Shah: Look at that. Look at that. You are here with your entire husband's side of the family. And then we have a place here in Deep Creek Lake. So it's pretty awesome to be here together.
Jamie Nolan: It's so fun. It worked out well, and I actually really like my in-laws, but there are just many of them, because my husband is one of six boys. That whole generation, all the wives and their kids and the parents and the aunts and uncles, there are 27 of us. It's very peopley over there. I love them. Your house is quiet, so thank you for this break. I appreciate it.
Jigar Shah: So this week was crazy. There's a big New York Times article about how the Department of Energy finally admitted that they just canceled grants in blue states, which seemed obvious to all of us who looked at the list of grants that were canceled. But they finally admitted it.
Jamie Nolan: Absolutely. It's extraordinary that it's now in the public record, that they've admitted in a court of law that they were doing that. Because you'll remember, last year there were lists upon lists floating around. They had leaked from all over the department, and reporters were forwarding me lists saying, take a look at this, what do you think? And I'm rolling my eyes, because it's so brazen. They're brazenly canceling blue states' funding, even though a majority of the money, at least from the Loan Programs Office but certainly from the other offices as well, was flowing into red states. Those investments, by and large, were flowing into red states, which tells you we certainly weren't making decisions that way.
Jigar Shah: For sure not. But the other thing that bothers me so much is that a blue state is not blue. A blue state is a series of voting districts, many of which voted for President Trump. And if the project was in a blue state but in a location that voted for Trump, they canceled those grants too. When you think about how many tens of thousands of extraordinary people there are just trying to get their idea from a piece of paper to a working pilot to a scale-up to eventually maybe a Loan Programs Office loan, all of those people are just interested in solving big problems. They're not there because they live in a blue state or a red state. That's where they were born, where they grew up, where they went to college, where their wife or husband got a job. It was completely arbitrary that they killed these particular grants. And it pains me to no end, because I worry that there are another several thousand people who need that support who are not going to seek it, because they don't trust that the U.S. Department of Energy is there to be their partner.
Jamie Nolan: It's really sad what they're doing to tear down their own credibility. I worked at the Department of Energy for about nine or ten years altogether, including under Trump one, briefly. There's just no place for partisanship like that in these agencies. It's unAmerican. It should be a bare minimum expectation that no matter who is in the White House, the federal agencies operate objectively, without partisanship, and treat all Americans fairly.
Jigar Shah: Especially because our industry is filled with conservatives and liberals and everything in between. One of my favorite people is Nate Adams, the house whisperer who loves heat pumps and now has to call them two-way air conditioners, because he's a big conservative who lives in West Virginia and people don't want to use the word heat pump anymore. It's the dumbest thing ever. And today, which I'm so excited about, we're talking to Nate Walkingshaw from Torus. Nate is an amazing entrepreneur out of Salt Lake City who is crushing it and working closely with the electric utility. It's such a great story, and I would hate for him to be pigeonholed as a Democrat or a Republican in order to scale up his technology and do advanced manufacturing.
Jamie Nolan: I don't know the political leanings of our guests. That's not what we're here to do. We're here to talk about innovative energy technology that is transforming the grid. I had to study up a little bit in advance of this conversation, because this technology was unfamiliar to me. That's one of the best parts about working on this show: learning about all these advancements, and it gives you hope for the future. So I'm really excited to talk to him about a different approach to energy storage. And he has a fascinating personal story. People who start out in one field, Nate in particular started out as an EMT and ended up being the CEO of a transformative energy technology company. How did we get there? I can't wait to dig into that.
Jigar Shah: So many threads with him. He's such a values-based person. He cares deeply about training the workforce and figuring out how to get everybody equal access to a job. He's one of those people who sees problems as opportunities to solve them. And he's worked collaboratively with the electric utility. Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp were two companies we worked closely with when we were in the Loan Programs Office. It's an amazing story, and I'm really happy people get to hear it.
INTERVIEW
Jigar Shah: Nate, you're on the podcast. Welcome.
Nate Walkingshaw: Thank you so much. It's awesome to be here. And from what I understand, Jamie and Jigar, you're in the same location. Is that true?
Jigar Shah: We are. It's exciting. I don't think we've ever done one of these recordings in the same room. Simon brought two suitcases full of equipment just to make sure this went well, and Jamie trucked it into the house. I'm very proud of us.
Nate Walkingshaw: I'm proud of you as well.
Jamie Nolan: We're audio engineers now, Nate.
FROM THE AMBULANCE TO STRYKER
Jigar Shah: Let's jump right into it, because you've had quite a career. You were a paramedic in Salt Lake City. You invented a device that glides patients down staircases because you watched your partners destroy their backs carrying them. Stryker, a company with 56,000 employees, bought your company in 2009, and that descent control technology lives on. People use it to this day. Then you spent six years as Chief Experience Officer at Pluralsight and helped take it public. You helped your family set up a Christmas tree farm. Let's start with your first company. Why did you invent this technology?
Nate Walkingshaw: The premise of this is probably thematic, and it's always easier to connect the dots looking backwards. I started out as an EMT basic. I made $7.14 an hour. I fell in love with patient care. You learn pretty quickly that most of the equipment that was designed was designed for patient outcomes. It was designed for us to find patients at the most critical moment of their life and then help them recover and heal and get to the hospital as quickly as we can. But the flip side was that people forgot about caregivers. So I had this theory that if we could improve the equipment in the field, we could probably improve patient outcomes.
One of the first products we went after was the ambulance cot. The ambulance cot back then was essentially a folding ironing board. It was very primitive. So if you could figure out how to reduce back injuries in EMS, how to lift patients, how to transport patients to and from different locations, then you could probably improve patient outcomes.
I started Paramed Systems when I was an EMT basic. I saved $200 a paycheck every two weeks, and I built my very first prototype, which was called the Descent Control System. It was a set of tracks that attached to the bottom of an ambulance cot, and it allowed me and my partner not to have to carry patients downstairs. And that blossomed. We invented a new product every year for five years. One of those products was a hospital evacuation slide called the Para Slide, and that ended up in 70% of hospitals across the United States. In very short order we ended up eating a whole bunch of Stryker's market share for patient transport equipment. And lo and behold, we got acquired by Stryker Medical.
To give you some context, I was 29 years old. At that time I was the youngest medical device CEO to be acquired by a Fortune 100. I moved from Utah to Michigan. I moved into a million square feet, 8,000 employees. It was a massive wake-up call for so many reasons. But that's really where I learned hardware, firmware, and software development. That's where I learned to ship Class II heavily regulated medical devices around the world to 91 different countries. You learn to design products that aren't meant for English speakers, using pictures to describe how things work. There's so much that came along for the ride.
I'm married and have four sons. At that time, when we moved out there, Sarah and I moved into this apartment called Drake's Pond. It was about 800 square feet, mostly college students. Sarah was eight months pregnant with Ryder when we got there. So we were growing a family, selling a business, and trying to grow a business inside of this massive business. A lot of really important lessons learned in that first chapter.
THE TREE FARM
Jamie Nolan: That's fantastic, and I love an unusual origin story, so thank you for sharing all of that. I also love the Torus origin story, so let's jump forward in time. At this point your family is running a tree farm in Utah. It has deep water wells, and you build your own hydro turbine to power them, but then you find out you have no mechanism for storing your excess power. Talk a little bit about that process: why you created that system, how it worked, and for our listeners who aren't familiar with this technology, how it applied in that use case and how it applies today in the way you've commercialized it.
Jigar Shah: And I want to know how many family members work at this farm.
Nate Walkingshaw: So this tree farm is in Sandy, Utah. There are 9,000 conifers, seven different species. The whole ambition here, Torus wasn't Torus yet. This was really a mission, the invention of sustainability. The Russia-Ukraine war hadn't started. The Biden administration was there. We were really concerned about climate change, about a one-degree temperature rise. And this was right at COVID, post-COVID. So you're hyper-focused on how you empower individuals and communities to become their own sustainable energy provider. We thought the demonstration of that was on this tree farm. If we had all the right ingredients, and it was a subtle shift in lifestyle, could you actually figure this out? That was the experiment.
Where I started was an inline high-pressure and low-pressure hydro turbine that was also a vertical and horizontal wind turbine. If you could take this vertical axis wind turbine and lay it on its side in a riverbed, it would create power in either orientation. That was the first big idea, because we had running water on the property. The second was the deep water wells. Could you hook this up to pressurized irrigation, generate enough power, store it, and then use it to offset your water systems? We also installed solar. And sure enough, we were able to offset the majority of our costs. About 85% of this tree farm was running across those three different paradigms, which was a huge indicator that this is possible.
We didn't have any automation. This was 100% manual, gate valves and check valves, and we built all this stuff from scratch to get to that level of reliability. But here was the biggest issue. We could generate enough power. That was not the problem. The tree season is in the spring and the fall, on the shoulders, and it's extremely cold from time to time. So we could generate power, but we could never store it. That's where the invention of the flywheel energy storage device happened, because we started with chemical batteries.
That goes back to my Stryker days. The powered ambulance cot was powered off a lithium iron phosphate battery. So I was hoping that maybe lithium iron phosphate batteries had advanced, and they had not really advanced. So, flywheels have been around forever. People have made multiple attempts at this. Could we make an ambitious endeavor to give this a shot for grid-tied infrastructure or behind-the-meter infrastructure? And sure enough, we built a flywheel. Ninety-five percent recyclable, 48-volt architecture initially, magnetically levitated in a vacuum. And we could generate enough power to push us around this sustainable loop of 85% offsets. That's where the flywheel started, and the inline high-pressure hydro turbine started. I have something cool. Can I reach down and grab this?
Jigar Shah: Yeah, of course.
Nate Walkingshaw: This is really, really heavy. But that is an inline high-pressure hydro turbine.
Jigar Shah: I love it. How heavy is it?
Nate Walkingshaw: I bet that's close to 50 pounds. Maybe more.
Jigar Shah: Damn. You picked it up like it was a feather. All right, you still didn't answer my question, though. How many family members are on this tree farm?
Nate Walkingshaw: We have a family of six. And my mother and father don't live too far away from us, so we'll get sometimes eight or nine people, depending on who all wants to come over and start the harvest.
Jigar Shah: But it's just your nuclear family. It wasn't 37 members.
Nate Walkingshaw: It is not 37 members. But this place was called the Walnut Tree Farm initially, and it's been around since 1963. I actually worked on this tree farm when I was 12. So there's a huge connection to this place.
FOUR GENERATIONS IN ENERGY
Jigar Shah: Speaking of family, your family's been in the energy industry for a long time. You're tied to the Mountain Fuel camp. Your grandfather worked there and died in a plane crash while surveying gas lines. Tell us about your history in energy and what it means to build energy infrastructure three generations later.
Nate Walkingshaw: I promised DJ I'd try not to cry in this podcast, but you might tip the scale here. My mom, all her siblings, and their father lived up in Scofield, Utah, in the Mountain Fuel camps. There were six kids up there, and the coal industry, and at the time the natural gas industry, was in its boom. And he was the chief engineer for Mountain Fuel. Long story short, they were surveying gas lines and the plane ended up having a malfunction, and they crashed pretty close to where the Mountain Fuel camps were. The unfortunate part about that event is that the kids and my grandmother were there. Castle View Hospital was within driving distance. That whole thing went the way that it went, and after that situation ended, they left the Mountain Fuel camps almost four months after. It was riveting for the community. Most of that experience lives within my mom and her siblings.
So you learn a ton about my grandpa and what they did and where they built it. And when you get to travel up there and see the starting pieces of energy infrastructure, you have a very closely knit, tied emotional connection to community, and also to what people working in that community do. Maybe a good thing for the listeners here: that's like fourth-generation line workers. If you talk to a fourth-generation line worker and then go through all of their kids, you get to understand the connection of why reliable, scalable, secure power and infrastructure is such an important part of the story. That's the same feeling you get when you sit with my mom and her siblings. Energy in this country is deeply rooted in who they are. And that was transposed over to me. It's a huge part of our ambitions.
In fact, there's a little thing behind me here, the first flywheel energy storage equation. That right there, that was my oldest and Miles, my middle child. They calculated the first flywheel energy storage equation for rotor mass. So this became a huge family affair. That was the first article prototype that we built, off of that energy storage equation, and we've always left it there.
HOW A FLYWHEEL WORKS
Jamie Nolan: That's a hell of a legacy. I love it. And this is a safe space, you can cry if you want to. Let's get into Torus's technology now. Most of our listeners are very familiar with batteries. I don't think we can get through an episode without talking about them. But not as many are familiar with flywheels, including myself. I've learned a lot in prepping for this episode. So you spin a multi-ton steel rotor in a vacuum and pull the energy back out when the grid needs it. I understand it's great for backing up intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Give us the layman's version about how your technology works, and why it doesn't just spin down and stop.
Nate Walkingshaw: You did a pretty good job. The theory is that you want to have this giant spinning mass in an enclosure spin for as long as it possibly can without losses. That's the punch line. The ambition was to directly compete against chemical batteries, to make a long duration flywheel, and that had never been done. Flywheels in their history have been mostly used for uninterruptible power supplies. Super high speeds, very quick dispatch, to cover a voltage sag. This flywheel's intention was to be long duration, and that's exactly what we proved.
The composite structure is a clamshell enclosure. It's magnetically levitated, and there's a vacuum pump that takes out the atmosphere. Flywheels only suffer from two losses: windage, or friction bearings. So if you can reduce the friction of the bearings and remove all of the wind, it's called coasting loss, you can get a flywheel to store energy for a very long period of time. Not until today had the technology been enabled to do that. And really, the industry that forged our ability to do that was electric vehicles. Electric vehicles invented a control architecture, they invented brand new motors, this entire ecosystem of synchronous reluctance motors. Think about AC motors and DC motors. Synchronous reluctance motors are 98% round-trip efficient. Crazy efficient. And their magnet structure is totally different from other types of motors.
The last thing I'll say is, on DC architecture versus AC architecture, I wish DC would have won, for a lot of reasons.
Jigar Shah: It still might, Nate. It still might. We're working on that.
Nate Walkingshaw: I think so too. DC architecture is just barely showing up to the party. It should have shown up a long time ago, but we are cautiously optimistic that it's going to have a lot of tailwinds. For the listener, the most important thing is that when you build energy storage, it's a savings deposit box. The electron, which is the most important part, the efficiency by which you store it, matters. If you can store it most efficiently and then hire it to do the most intelligent jobs, you get to win something really special, which is creating flexibility on the grid.
WHY HYBRID STORAGE
Jigar Shah: One of the things I thought about when I read about your technology is that you're still using the chemical battery. You have a very large chemical battery and then you've got a flywheel attached to it. As I understand it, what you're really trying to do is reduce the number of cycles on the battery. When you apply a high C rate, which means current going in hard or out hard, you reduce the life of the battery. You absorb all of that within the flywheel. The flywheel basically takes the hardest, most corrosive actions, because it can handle it and still have 25,000 cycles. And then you extend the life of the battery as a result.
Nate Walkingshaw: That's exactly right. If you get the invention to do the job that you just talked about, then you have to move over to the job it gets hired to do. And the grid cares about two big acts. One is fast frequency response, short-term jobs, and I'm talking millisecond jobs. And then you have firm power, which we talk about all day. Can you get a flywheel to do fast frequency response, and can you get it to do firm power? If you can hire it to do both jobs and it does both jobs, that is truly a breakthrough technology.
But we didn't know, Jigar, if we could do both of those. We were early in the flywheel days, so we chose a firm power strategy through chemical batteries, lithium iron phosphate technology, not knowing where flywheels would end up, to give you the longer duration firm power. The other finding is that the grid actually suffers from 90-minute problems. That's very different than firm power problems. Most of the time, subtransmission or distribution tips over from load because of short duration events. And guess what? Flywheels are amazing at that. So if you can get flywheels to perform all these jobs for 90 minutes, you really don't ever need firm power, especially if you get enough of them on the grid.
Jigar Shah: Don't say that too loudly. People are going to cancel you.
Nate Walkingshaw: Yeah, probably. Tell me more.
Jigar Shah: We're all supposed to be in love with firm power right now.
Jamie Nolan: Well, you don't have a utility exec ready to jump in and tell us why you're wrong.
Jigar Shah: Although the utility execs all love your product. Even though you started off with residential, you're really selling to commercial and industrial and utility scale.
Nate Walkingshaw: Honestly, it was utilities who taught us this. That was the big aha for us. It started with Gary Hoogeveen, who was the CEO of Rocky Mountain Power, who talked about inertial-based energy storage, who talked to me about fast frequency response, short-term problems. We didn't know that was the issue. PacifiCorp specifically, and Rocky Mountain Power, they were really good on firm power. They're unbelievably good at firm power. But there's old hardware out there too, where you need to cover the fast frequency response bits. That's where we started. We got to cover all of those areas for them for demand response, which was super cool.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN POWER
Jamie Nolan: Since you just mentioned Rocky Mountain Power, let's jump into that project. In January 2025 you announced a 70 megawatt demand response partnership with Rocky Mountain Power, and that filled in six months. By September, PacifiCorp expanded it to up to 500 megawatts across six states. You're one of only two storage providers certified for their Wattsmart battery program, and of note, the only one serving commercial and industrial customers. As we were alluding to, utilities tend to treat startups like yours like science projects. So how did you convince them to work with you on such a significant scale, on a relatively unproven technology?
Nate Walkingshaw: There wasn't a moment for us to align our technology when we invented it. I always bring this up, but Jensen had not walked across the stage and launched an H100 chip. So when we integrated the technology with the utility, it was truly a science experiment. We only got dispatched that first year 33 times. We did not know if it was going to be viable. The second year went from 33 to 66. And that was maybe six months after Nvidia had launched the H100 chip. Once they launched the H100 chip, load forecasts started to move hockey stick up and to the right. Then we started really taking a look at infrastructure.
What's interesting is the trend. It started out at 33 dispatches, then 66, year three we were at 127 dispatches, and then the year after that was 359. And I bet we break 500 dispatches this year. What's nice about the dispatches from the last two years is they used to be five-minute dispatches. Then we moved into ten-minute dispatches, twenty-minute dispatches. And then at our thermal peak this year, we did our long dispatches back to back to back. So I would say we went from nice-to-have to have-to-have.
Jamie Nolan: Is this inside of PacifiCorp's territory where you're doing these dispatches? And these are commercial and industrial customers?
Nate Walkingshaw: Yes. The way the program works, it's kind of like a three-legged stool. We install energy storage behind the meter. The customer gets the benefit of that. It could be demand cost savings, it could be emergency backup, it could be power quality, all these other benefits. What the utility gets is that they can hit these batteries for a multitude of solutions, whether it's fast frequency response, demand response, voltage sags. They can hit the batteries whenever they want, 24/7, 365. And what we get is a triple-A credit-rated payment for every time they dispatch, based on the performance. That's how the three-legged stool works. And it's across the entire Western Interconnection of their network. Just imagine their service territories up in the upper Northwest all the way down to Utah. Our batteries are spread across thousands of miles of that subtransmission distribution network, attached to commercial and industrial buildings.
Jigar Shah: Now you're doing utility scale projects too. So tell me how small you go and how big you go.
Nate Walkingshaw: You can buy our Lego bricks in one megawatt chunks, and you can do hundreds of megawatts in that configuration. Our sweet spot is really subtransmission distribution. We always say 19.99, but 29 and below. So we can do as many 20 megawatt projects as you'd have us do. And our turn times are quick. Our time to install right now is three and a half months. Within 90 days, if you give us a location, we can have it installed in subtransmission distribution. That's the whole value chain: site selection, permits, going through interconnection, that's the whole enchilada, constructed.
Jigar Shah: It's crazy.
Jamie Nolan: Crazy fast. What does the physical footprint look like for a project like that? What am I looking at?
Nate Walkingshaw: If you think about a 1.2 megawatt-hour Torus pod right now, and a single flywheel, that's roughly about 18 feet long, call it 74 inches tall and 110 inches deep. So it's a small space. It's a parking lot stall, a little bit bigger than a parking lot stall, was the ambition.
Jigar Shah: So is it 20 parking spots for your 20 megawatt version?
Nate Walkingshaw: Yeah.
THE ARGUMENT ABOUT INERTIA
Jigar Shah: That's crazy small. I think that's amazing. The other thing you did was that you were insistent on figuring out how to solve these problems for the utility. You didn't have a product that you were going out to market with and just selling to the utility. You were listening intently to what they were telling you, and they were saying they needed support on the grid edge, around the ramp rate and all of that. Why don't you go through that more deeply: the conversations you had, how they shaped you, how it affected the products you created.
Nate Walkingshaw: This changed my life. To begin with, when we went into the utility, it was youth against establishment. I want to be totally transparent. It was, old stodgy utility, you have no idea what you're doing, we're modernists, we can come out and show you how to do this. And that's when Gary said, okay, let's pull on this thread a little bit. So I sat down in his office and we went through the entire product strategy and showed him the results. Being an engineer, you want to show, hey, this is the evidence that proves my case. And he appreciated that. And then he quickly said, I really wish you would have installed that on this side of the meter. Meaning in front of the meter. And I said, why?
Jigar Shah: Right. They get to rate base the front-of-the-meter stuff.
Nate Walkingshaw: Yeah. And again, you have to understand, I was a novice. I had no idea. Wholesale, retail markets.
Jigar Shah: I mean, I get it. All you had done was create a company that you sold to a Fortune 100 company.
Jamie Nolan: In a completely different field.
Nate Walkingshaw: Public utility commissions, interconnection, I didn't understand all that. But Gary very quickly said, let me tell you the reason why I think this is special. You have an inertial-based energy storage device. And I literally said to him, what is inertial-based energy storage? And he's like, oh my gosh, you have no idea what you have, man.
Jamie Nolan: You don't even know all the ways that you're brilliant.
Nate Walkingshaw: Exactly. And so he went on this kindergarten-through-12th-grade education of, here's a coal plant, here's a natural gas plant, here's how electrons get on the grid, here's inertia. He explained the whole thing. I won't bore the listeners with that story.
Jigar Shah: Bore them. They love it. I totally agree, because this is part of the thing. We have DC power that gets converted by inverters into AC power. But the grid currently, all spinning mass in the entire grid spins at the exact same frequency. It's 60 hertz, and they're in perfect sync across the entire AC network. So when something goes wrong, it flexes up or flexes down based on what happened. And that's inertial mass. We've come to live off of that for a lot of what goes wrong with the utility. When you have a lot of inverter-based systems, then you need what you call grid-forming inverters to provide some of that. But utilities have a strong preference for spinning mass, which is inertia.
Nate Walkingshaw: And to double down here, we were nerds on the DC bus, because we wanted to store a DC electron once, not convert it. Everyone else was grabbing an electron off a solar panel, converting it to AC, storing it as DC, converting it back to AC. That's 74% round-trip efficient. So we obsessed with the one-line diagram on the DC bus. Solar, wind, hydro, you want all the options, store them as efficiently as you can, only convert them once. Then you convert them into this amazing AC grid-type power and you can load shape and load form with this really efficient electron. It's like, this is magic. We are creating magic from all of these abundant resources that are firm or not firm, and we get to create them back to the grid. We were stoked, so excited about being able to show this.
And then we had the authentic conversation with Gary's team of, let me tell you a little bit about distribution substations. Let me tell you about large load growth. Let me tell you about how we're trying to send electrons 300 miles to a city, and it needs to load form in five milliseconds. And they said, this inertial-based technology, as a non-wires alternative or a grid-enhancing technology, is actually a transmission asset. And I said, no way. And they said, so can we try and get this close to load? That's when, I'm sure most of our listeners are talking about generation, we became obsessed with load shaping and load forming. That was really brought to us by Gary and his team, to say, this is going to be a big deal. Electrification of vehicles, electrification of appliances, advanced manufacturing equipment, and then the invention of this GPU chip put it right on the ropes of being able to truly load shape at the point of origin. That's really where Torus is crushing it, load shaping in real time.
BRAINS AT THE EDGE
Jigar Shah: That's amazing. The other thing we talked about before was that there really isn't a priority by the utility to have brains on the edge. They generate power in a central way, and then they transmit it via long transmission lines and then into distribution lines. Talk to us a little bit about your technology stack, because it's not just the hardware. There's also a software piece, a communication piece. How are you giving the utility brains on the edge?
Nate Walkingshaw: I always want to start by honoring the people who started the narrative here. If you think about General Electric, way back in the late 1800s, they invented all of these products, and they invented load. But what was cool about them is that they invented the load, these new products, and then they invented the products that deliver the load shape for the products they invented. They ran that inventive loop for 60 years. They still run it today.
So if you think about us, and those four products I mentioned: renewables, which I'd consider non-firm assets; electrification of vehicles and appliances; manufacturing equipment; and then GPUs. Those are brand new invented load shapes that our grid was not really invented to load shape for. So we built a hardware, firmware, and software solution that clamps to the line side and the load side of the grid. Then we're looking at this load shape in real time coming in from the grid, and we're watching the products on the other side of the meter take that load shape and shape it into something we've never seen before. If you ever get to see a GPU load shape, you look at ten nodes in a single rack using cognition like a human brain. That is a load shape. It's crazy.
Jigar Shah: It's like an EKG. It just keeps going up and down.
Nate Walkingshaw: That's exactly right.
33 GIGAWATTS
Jigar Shah: It's totally nuts. The other thing I was trying to understand: when you invented a health care product, it very quickly became used in 70% of hospitals around the country. Here, you've got one utility in Rocky Mountain Power who likes you a lot, and PacifiCorp. And now you have a situation that needs your solution nationwide. AI data centers are going nationwide. You raised a big round recently. How is that going for you in terms of propagating from utilities who took you under their wing and said, let's help you get this product right for us and scale it 20 megawatts at a time, deploying in three and a half month chunks, to now a nationwide, skeptical utility base that is not necessarily predisposed to deploying new stuff?
Nate Walkingshaw: There's a lot to unpack there. The early days here is that Torus decided to take a different bite out of this apple, which is vertically integrate and partner with utilities. Usually people go compete against them. We did not want to compete against them. We wanted to partner with them. That was the first big Lego brick we had to get right.
The other thing is the command and control side of this. Sure, we can schedule and dispatch, or do signal-based dispatching, unplanned or planned. But every utility has their own flavor of the way they want to integrate with the last mile of their system. And they have different components of their systems that don't work well. What I think is accelerating the deployment so quickly is that hands-on controls piece. When they look at the energy management system where they're managing all these bulk and transmission assets, they just install Torus and then deploy it as if it was another generation or transmission-based asset, and they load shape just like they would. That's because we had to follow all of the certification patterns and pass all these tests.
That's very similar, Jigar, to your first question, which is, in medical devices we had to become a Class II 510(k) registered device. We went down a different path. IEEE 2030.5, IEEE 1547. That was table stakes. You had to do grid-side battery management for three years, unplanned dispatch, and ramp in under 30 seconds across thousands of miles of transmission. That is a different approach than what other people are taking.
Cool little fun fact: if we put Torus Stations across the country right now, in the way that you and I are talking about it today, we'd free up 33 gigawatts of congested capacity tomorrow. Just think about how cool it would be to free up 33 gigawatts right now.
Jigar Shah: Nate, you're going to get canceled, I'm telling you. We keep throwing out these kinds of numbers on this podcast, and people are like, these guys don't know what they're talking about, the only way to do this is through new natural gas turbines. And I'm not against natural gas turbines, but I am against 7% rate increases every year to ratepayers. When you think about what you're doing, you're getting more out of the grid that we've already paid for.
Nate Walkingshaw: One cool part about that is that it's more about keeping energy costs where they are, or even being able to lower them. The reason I say that is that clean busbar power actually never gets to load because of congestion. So I always say, we're the Sudafed of the grid.
Jamie Nolan: You remove the congestion of the grid.
Nate Walkingshaw: Once you generate a clean electron from cleaner natural gas, it needs to get all the way to load, out of congestion. So, losses, congestion, and the managed cost of energy. Once you create the electron, let's get it to where it needs to go. And then you keep the cost low. I could get canceled, sure. But it's an "and." Yes, we need more generation. But why not first-principles engineer it? Why not fix the problem that's right in front of us with this technology now, free up this excess capacity, get all of these new complicated loads that we want right now, and also build new generation with it? In fact, if you sequence those things, we could have our cake and eat it too. If they both went down the field programmatically and we were really thoughtful, people can have what they want, keep the costs low, and also build net new. It would be so much better affordability-wise, because by the time we got to those rates, we collectively as a society would have evolved.
Jigar Shah: Making too much sense out in Salt Lake City.
THE FACTORY
Jamie Nolan: Let's talk about your factory. You moved it to Salt Lake City partly because your old site couldn't get enough power delivered to it. And even the new one took two years of waiting to stand up before you got everything you needed to make it work. An energy storage company that couldn't get enough energy. Is the grid connection queue now a bigger obstacle to American manufacturing than capital or labor?
Nate Walkingshaw: We were shocked. We moved from Springville to South Salt Lake, but we had to choose a smaller building because it had 4,000 amp service, which was hard, because we needed a lot more. We needed a lot more manufacturing space. If you were there, we literally had a single roll-up door to get product out, so you'd have to load tube stock in the same day, produce it all, then haul it out, and then load in the next day. So it was extremely constraining. We moved into GigaOne, that's 540,000 square feet. We have like 40 doors a side now. But still, we only had eight megawatts of power, which isn't a ton considering what we need to do. It's like a small distribution sub for the type of production and energy we need to produce our product. So yes, it's a big constraint. And I will say, for advanced manufacturing and the type of equipment that we have, and we will for sure put GPUs in advanced manufacturing equipment, you are going to need a ton more power.
WORKFORCE
Jigar Shah: This is the thing that concerns me. I was talking to DHL the other day. They need 36 megawatts of power for their new campus, because they have automated robots moving stuff around, and they want to move to all-electric trucking, so now they need recharging capacity at their campus. Everyone's focused on these thousand megawatt data centers, which we have all talked about how absurd they are. But just accommodating 36 megawatt loads is important to making sure we manufacture here, that we're electrifying everything here. That's why I think your technology is super important.
But I wanted to dig more deeply into workforce for you. You've got an extraordinary factory now. You've got 300 people there. Your production is up 76%. But the bigger thing is that you've partnered with Salt Lake Community College. We saw this when we were running the Loan Programs Office, every single group was tying up with the local technical college. Tell me how you came to that conclusion and how it's going.
Nate Walkingshaw: This is something that was built into the design of the business from day one. We have a huge opportunity in the country right now to bring back U.S. manufactured products, end to end. When you take a new cut on that, you get to rethink everything. And the hardest part of this narrative, as always, is workforce development. So how do you build the strategy into the production floor that you want to build and scale? And ultimately, what products are you going to build strategically to go disrupt this whole marketplace?
The answer first: we believe from the distribution sub to behind the meter, we want to invent a whole series of products that does that job for distribution services and operations. That's the first Lego group. The second one is, how do you build a production floor and a workforce to take down that objective? I think you have to start at the lowest common denominator. And this will be very akin to my origin story. I was not a super smart kid. I really struggled in school, and I wondered how well I would do. Honestly, the EMT basic thing for me was the most digestible skill set that had core values and guiding principles and honor, to be able to go do something that was meaningful to society.
So, can you invent a business that provides a meaningful impact for sons who don't have to worry about energy security? And then can we build workforce development upon that, that they and we would be proud of, which is what this country was built on, what it was fortified on? That means you would have to take somebody who has experienced homelessness, and you can skill somebody with homelessness all the way to being an advanced manufacturer of really complex products.
And the coolest part about the moment that we're in is artificial intelligence. All of these frontier models have empowered individuals to become these things. We have an employee who walks in the door who has experienced homelessness, and you put them on a manual tube laser or a manual panel bender. As soon as they learn the basics of manual bending, you can move them to the next step of something that's ergonomically automated. Once they're on that machine for six months, you can move them into something that's partially or almost fully automated, and then you can turn them into a full seven-axis machine operator, and they become programmers. And how you think about the wage gap there is, you start them out at 22 to 28 bucks an hour, and they will end up between 110 and 170,000. That, to me, is what we're embarking on for advanced manufacturing right now. You're able to do that by coupling advanced manufacturing practices, using artificial intelligence, using training and enablement, and then getting your local universities and community colleges involved.
The community college story is super cool. We grabbed our battery sled, we gave them that battery sled, and we had them do a standard operating procedure for assembly. That was the whole entire unit, cradle to grave. And they built a training program around that. That's the crawl version I talked about. They are just learning assembly procedures. They're not learning how to use automated production equipment yet, but it does give them the context and the familiarity of how this thing gets built and constructed. They go through the program, they get certified, and then we hire them as interns, then hire them as full-time employees. And it has been unbelievably effective. So now it's just partnering with universities. Our cohort this year of interns was probably 80 or 90 interns.
Jigar Shah: That's a lot compared to the employees in the factory.
Nate Walkingshaw: And different walks of life. That is the coolest thing. You could have a senior engineer, and then you could have someone who literally had experienced homelessness. And those people will work together every single day on a production floor. The transfer of knowledge and the skills that are happening is just so amazing to watch. And I believe that is the spirit by which we intended to build in this country.
LEADERSHIP
Jamie Nolan: I love hearing the emotion in your voice and how moved you are by it, because that's your legacy. You could be lifting up generations of families through this training. So I thank you for making that investment. It's good for your company, it's good for the community, it's good for the country. That sounds like a great program.
This is evident: you're not only an inventor, you're also an incredible leader that people have followed across three companies. And you have a line that I love, which is, building products is candidly easy, while building people and teams is the hardest thing to do. As someone who is building a couple of companies right now, I am learning that that is the work of it. Another line of yours that I love is, when you really think you've said something too much, that's when people start to listen. I absolutely say that. Jigar knows, he's heard it. I want you to get sick of hearing yourself say it over and over again. Three companies in, what are some of your biggest takeaways about leading teams?
Nate Walkingshaw: Beautiful products, beautiful people. The product that you create is directly indicative of the people and the team that built it. Period. If you've got a messy product that's unbundled, that isn't nicely tied together, that doesn't give a beautiful customer experience, there's probably a lot for you as a leader to internally investigate. Your product is very indicative of the culture that you build.
We have a lot of core values and guiding principles. I'll give you some nice tension that we have. One of our core values is, we value speed and quality equally. That is always the argument between sales and go-to-market and engineering and production. Is this quality? And, hey, you have a ship date to hit. So constantly having that tension brings people together to talk about really hard things.
One big lesson for me is that how we work together and how you show up deserve two different attention criteria. How we work together is about the guiding principles we're choosing to operate against. But how you show up, I'll give you a good core value here, which is being eternally optimistic, or cautiously optimistic.
Jigar Shah: Forget the cautious thing. Optimism. That's where it's at.
Nate Walkingshaw: That's where it's at. Our core value is focused on the A, not the F. I've received a tremendous amount of criticism, like, that's too eternally optimistic. And I say, you don't understand. Trying to build a company to fit in a market is trying to kill this company and this product every single day. Our ability to take down something that the last 1% of society didn't want to go do, which is building a flexible grid for new and emerging load, everything every day sucks. It's just a whole list of really, really hard problems. So it really is about your willingness to learn. And a high pain tolerance and a short memory. That's a big ambition for us. I have a very high pain tolerance and I don't really remember how painful that was 20 minutes later.
How we work and how we show up is essential, something you have to constantly talk about day in and day out, and then you have to reinforce those principles day in and day out. Leaders in your teams have to want to own each one of those attributes and then hold people accountable to them. And you're never going to be 100% right. But this is what I've found to be the tipping point: if you get 80% of your employee base to honor a lot of these core values and guiding principles, you are winning all day.
HIS SONS
Jigar Shah: A couple of final questions for me. One of the things you talked about was the 33 gigawatts of capacity that you could unlock. In some ways, part of the challenge with our entire industry in the electric sector is that they're not actually dreaming big enough. Most people think, well, how do I make sure that rates don't go up as fast as they otherwise would? And I think what you and I are thinking is, if we deploy all this fantastic American innovation, rates could go down as a percentage of people's budgets. Energy could actually get cheaper. Energy burdens could go down. How inspiring is it for you and your employees to be a part of that?
Nate Walkingshaw: That is why we wake up every single day. Being the Sudafed of the grid, if we just started there, every Torus Station that gets deployed, every single dispatch that happens on that Torus Station, and now they're three times a day, we know that congestion is getting removed from that grid and clean busbar power is keeping costs low. Also, if you care about sustainability or CO2 emission reduction, that was a big deal back in the day. It's not even about that. It's literally, do you want to get an electron from this location to this location? Was that your intention? If it was, then scientifically we've got a job to do. Once you handle that job, then we can move on to the next problem. That's what we get excited about. That's why we also get frustrated with, why do you want to build another natural gas plant when we have a problem that's super solvable right here?
Jigar Shah: When you think about these solutions at scale, climate change usually isn't the reason that they scale, but it is the why for a lot of us. When you think about your four sons and their next 30 to 40 years, talk a little bit about why this is so important to you, and if that first 500 megawatts becomes 5,000 megawatts, what future do your sons get to realize instead?
Nate Walkingshaw: We invented solar, wind, and hydro, and a lot of those we've had for a long time. We didn't have the modern technology. We didn't have a lot of the ingredients in the cake that let you take what I would consider non-firm power assets and turn them into firm power assets, load shaping assets. I am the most optimistic that I have ever been in our ability to forge a new generative energy platform that the country really has not leaned into yet. And I feel like we're really getting traction. It took an invention. It took GPUs. People can hate or love GPUs, but just like GE invented air conditioning, air conditioning created a peak, and we invented peaker plants. That was the first shapers. GPUs created the next invention that creates the next evolution of a flexible grid at a lower layer. And we're here for it.
When you think about my sons, part of the reason we did this flywheel energy storage equation was that they were worried about energy security. They were worried about, when I get married, should I have kids? What type of environment are they going to be in? What type of culture are they going to be entering into? And I never had to worry about that in the 70s and 80s, ever. What I worried about was getting on a BMX bike, heading to 7-Eleven, and getting a Coke Slurpee, and backyard barbecues. Kick the can. I was just worried about being a kid. And I want the ambition of our children to be able to create anything they want in life. I want them to be children and still live through their innocence, and go out and create something that's naturally good for the world. For some reason that's an unpopular thing to say these days. But we have to get back to it.
Jigar Shah: No, I agree. It's all about eating Cap'n Crunch and being a kid.
Nate Walkingshaw: And Froot Loops.
Jamie Nolan: You two are cut from the same cloth. You're also an eternal optimist, and you're not a climate defeatist. You very much believe that we will win this fight. So, Nate, it's nice to hear pounds of that same optimism.
Jigar Shah: Fifty pounds, in that one flywheel. Nate, I love the fact that you went from kindergarten to what I'm hearing is post-doctoral expertise in this one company. It's such a pleasure to have you on today, because this is such an uplifting story, and one that gives all of us hope that we can bring on board all of this AI and advanced manufacturing and EV load and all this other stuff, and reduce bills for everybody.
Nate Walkingshaw: Absolutely. And by the way, kudos back to you too. Thank you for creating a platform for this. There aren't very many people who get this collection of folks together to talk about this stuff. You asked me, how do you further the word outside of what we're doing? This is how you do it. The whole reason why I'm here talking to you is because this is two people who fundamentally understand the core of the problem and what to propagate. So I'm grateful for you, and for all the heavy water that you're carrying on this. It's crazy exciting times right now to be building.
Jigar Shah: Well, Nate, thank you so much for the kind words, and it's great to have you on.
DEBRIEF
Jigar Shah: Jamie, I don't even know where to start. He invented a company making $7.14 an hour and saving $200 a paycheck to be able to build his prototype, and moved to Michigan when his first son was being born, and learned about the software stack and the hardware stack and all the other pieces, which he then used in the Torus story. It's a fascinating story, and one that happens hundreds of times. The electric utility sector has done an extraordinary job of uplifting these kinds of companies. But at the same time, he is unlocking the grid we've already paid for, which you and I have been talking about for a long time. So many threads.
Jamie Nolan: He's living the American dream. Nate's story, this is what makes America great. There's nothing I love more than meeting people like him. That was the work we were doing at the Department of Energy, at the Loan Programs Office. It was just these types of people all day. The most incredible people you've ever met.
Jigar Shah: So inspiring.
Jamie Nolan: Incredibly brilliant. He was the first to admit he wasn't necessarily the best student, but he's gone on to radically transform multiple industries. It's incredible. I was very moved by his investments in human capital and workforce training. I know we share the same ethos around that. That's some of the most important work behind the growth in advanced manufacturing in the United States. I want to hear more about the personal stories of those folks. We didn't even have time to pull all the threads that we wanted to. I love that his facility is in Salt Lake City.
Jigar Shah: It took two years. He knew a guy. He knew the CEO of the electric utility, and it still took two years to get his factory up and running. And you're like, what does it take to get the utilities to really unlock all this economic growth?
Jamie Nolan: Absolutely. Well, who could maybe do something about that? The Trump administration. They should do something about the interconnection queue. Just saying.
Jigar Shah: And now we've got this great solution, and he's deploying it in 20 megawatt increments everywhere he can get them out the door. Now it seems like he has more demand than he can handle, which is amazing.
Jamie Nolan: I could not believe it. The size, the speed to power, the fact that he already has commercial relationships with the utility companies. Which, again, is something else I could have dug into more. How the hell did he even do that? It is so hard to get in the door with a utility company, let alone get to a 500 megawatt project starting out. It's really incredible. And then to go in and meet with the utility company and have them explain to you the ways in which the technology you have invented is extraordinary and will solve their problems.
Jigar Shah: That is a superpower, I have to say. I've used that a lot, where you get the customer to school you about their challenges and what your solution needs to be to meet their challenge. That is the ultimate flex.
Jamie Nolan: This is another company, we had a very similar company on recently, where maybe they're little known, and then he's going to go viral. There's no way that people aren't listening to this episode and being like, what? Let me go Google this right now. Is this real? These types of innovations, they're available. They're going to unlock so much capacity on the grid. They're ready and waiting. And the utilities just need to come calling. These innovators and entrepreneurs, they're there and they're ready.
Jigar Shah: I was very impressed by all of it, especially his ability to raise a 50 pound flywheel like it was a book. My God, I need to work out more.
Jamie Nolan: When he popped on screen with his hoodie and his guitars behind him, I was just like, I like this dude.