Episode 37 – Part 2: Applications of Charging Concrete with Mauricio Esguerra from Magment

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally: For part two with Mauricio from MagMent, we’re looking at applications of charging concrete in the built environment. So we’ve covered in part one, how concrete can be used to charge vehicles, and now we’re going to look at applications. I believe if I’m not wrong, there’s three main types.

Warehouse applications, which we touched on roads and docks, I’m guessing from what you said in part one, warehouse warehouses are the big driver at the moment in terms of yeah, number of vehicles that are suited to it in the, in that environment. Are there other, um, yeah, what do you see as the future potentially of application?

Yeah. Okay.

Marcucio Esguerra: Of course I tried to draw a picture so that we see this. And as debatable as it may be, mobility is getting decarbonized and electric more and more. You may find still some exceptions being being still on combustion or on hydrogen, but those are going to be the exception.

So it’s quite clear that the mobility is going into this direction. The applications we see here is because all around our technology, it’s about transmission of energy. We need to think a bit at the lab, or let’s say we need to see a larger picture. It’s not just this wireless charging.

Which would be the, or will become certainly the preferred way to charge vehicles. And our conviction about this is coming from the fact that everything at the end of the day becomes wireless. If you take a normal phone like this one, it’s wireless. Our mobile phones are wireless, our computers are wireless, everything.

It’s a normal trend in industry and in applications to go this way. But because that doesn’t happen overnight, we need to go in steps showing the benefits. Because when you see especially wireless charging in motion, it’s the type of charging where people just don’t notice that they are charging, they’re just driving, they’re just moving goods, they are moving people, whatever, you can think of the bus, for example, it’s a very good case for wireless charging.

And then the charging happens. Either I’m taking the example of the bus while the bus is moving or even when the bus is stopping at the bus stop, just to get on that passengers. And during this time, this half a minute or whatever time it can charge, right? So those are the things that we envision as a way to transmit or even to distribute power through this wireless charge and interesting enough.

And let me mention this as a very new and special type of application we are developing currently, which is also transformers. Because you need to think about when you generate these days, electricity more and more on a renewable way, take wind energy. So you need to bring this wind energy with high voltage transmission lines.

You need to bring them to the urban centers, and you need to transform it down to lower and lower voltages, right? That’s how it’s being done. So you need transformers all that way. And our technology is also fantastic for transformers. In other words, we are not linked exclusively to charging vehicles wirelessly.

We also are part of the infrastructure of the grids to bring the energy to the vehicles or to the homes or to whatever. And I think at the end of the day with this broader picture of applications what we see is our world is becoming more and more electric. Even heating is becoming electric, everything is less and less combustion and more and more electric.

So the function of our magnetic materials is to support this growth of electrification of our world in a sense. So we are happy to be part of this. Given the fact that it’s very affordable materials, very easy to manufacture you can get all these raw materials, all these recycled raw materials all around the world.

There’s no limitations to that. So that we can, with this technology, which is going back to the very easy way of making a concrete. But now with magnetic and electric function. So that’s where we see that our application base will naturally grow into these different directions I just explained.

Matt Nally: Definitely. And from the I read that you’ve obviously done some trials so far. Are there interesting results that have come out of those so far? In terms of because I believe you, you’re doing an Indiana trial, for example, or others, are there better results than you expected in terms of how it’s been implemented in different situations?

Marcucio Esguerra: I’m not sure I got your question here, but it’s it’s within all this transition, we are all experiencing, right? Within this there is a lot of, there is a lot of different ways Also to, for example, generate energy and but still you need to transmit it and distribute it.

So I think that’s of the thought that we need to have. It’s not just thinking about I don’t know what you have in the North Sea as say offshore wind energy generation. You also have photo attack on your roof, on your home. And so everything needs to, at the end of the day, be brought to the devices.

Which are quite different ones, but more and more also the cars themselves or the devices, whatever those are that need to be fed with power. I don’t know if your question was pointing into this direction, but it’s really the basic idea of you need to bring energy to different to different devices.

To be able to fulfill certain functions. And let me stress this charging is not a goal in itself. Charging is a condition. If you cannot charge your phone, you cannot use it, right? If you cannot charge your computer, you cannot use it. So what we are trying to solve is how things are being charged and how the energy gets there in a nutshell.

Matt Nally: Interesting. I suppose from the work you’ve been doing, are there limitations to this technology in terms of when it can be applied? Or is it quite, got quite a wide number of uses?

Marcucio Esguerra: I would say there’s two sorts of limitations, if you wish. And there are some, of course. One kind would be the more technical type of limitations.

I would say currently one could be a certain amount of power, that there is a limitation, but it’s not the principle or principle limitation of principle, it’s a limitation maybe of size or of cost. So that’s the technical side. The other limitations may be much more about the commercial adoption of the solutions.

And this is an interesting question because quite often we are engaged in discussions. Where people are concerned about the first type of limitations and they learn all, but those limitations are very little. For example one classical question we are asked often is how about health concerns?

Are there emissions, radiation, that could be a hazard? To to people, to human beings sorry, to living beings, like animals, whatever. That means the answer is no. It’s a very well controlled type of transmission. There’s even in, in some systems it’s mandatory to have sensors to detect the presence of living objects, as they are called.

That would yield, if they would be too close. To the magnetic field, they would yield a a shut off of the system. Those things are really well under control. So that’s not a limitation. But having said that when it comes then more to the understanding or where does it make sense in in, in commercial or economical terms.

So I would say that the limitation there could be just the building up of the infrastructure. In other words as you can imagine these days you are seeing a lot of cable, plugging, charging stations being deployed all around the world, like here in Germany, you can say it’s two charging stations a day, constantly.

You would say wireless charging is more convenient, wireless charging is is even better in many respects. How could you change this this running deployment of cable charging stations? So that’s a challenge to convince the responsible actors, which can be governments, can be even municipalities, can be industrial companies to change their model to say, no, okay, we’ll stop the, this normal way off of charging and go to the next one.

So the only way to get to this point is, of course, by keep demonstrating, keep showing the benefits Doing the benchmarks, this kind of things, but I would call this limitation a natural market limitation. Markets are not very permeable to innovations. I would regard markets even more permeable.

has quite quite conservative sometimes, but whenever things are getting so clear and so convincing, then the adoption comes possibly all of a sudden, everybody’s

Matt Nally: yeah.

Marcucio Esguerra: 50 years ago, who would think that you would have internet in your pocket? Yeah. Today, everybody has, when did it happen?

Nobody knows. It happens. We’ll see

Matt Nally: at some point we’ll see something

Marcucio Esguerra: similar to that too. Yeah. I think it’s going to be interesting to

Matt Nally: see how things change. Cause you’re right. What you mentioned in part one is the. The adoption or the commercial limitation is how many vehicles, for example, would benefit from it.

So in a warehouse, most vehicles are electric, therefore, great adoption idea. At the moment, cars, obviously not as many, but I can see in the future is that transitions that, potentially supermarket car parks or office car parks all have these in each of the spaces, so cars can charge while they’re sat there.

And one, one will influence the other at the same time, because obviously the benefit, as you say, of having this self charging is that cars don’t need such big batteries. They become cheaper as a result, therefore easier to adopt. So it’s yeah, different factors, hand in hand that will help.

Different areas accelerate at different rates and therefore what becomes commercially interesting or viable for, you For the adoption of it. So it’s really interesting as a material. And you know

Marcucio Esguerra: something, if you think about this the biggest challenge to us is. To find the right places, the right regions in the world where we believe that the let’s say the interest and the access is better, and you could say there are places like maybe the U.

S. or maybe even China or maybe even the Emirates or, and just mentioning like the conventional thinking about possibly less in, in in central Europe or maybe less in the UK or, but our experience is, it’s not like this. So we have learned that it’s a matter of keeping, of course, a high level of communication with different actors, and we often find conditions in in places where you wouldn’t expect this to happen.

Let me tell you two examples which show how that is. We have found, for example, a lot of interest and a lot of eagerness to adopt our technology in Spain. You wouldn’t regard Spain as the first place you would like to go, but it happened there. So that’s why we’re very eager working in that market.

And in another market where things are starting to move for buses, we found a very interesting place in South America, because there is a lot of electric buses in South America. I know that also right now the adoption of electric vehicles. And a lot of, for example, it’s very huge as well, but South America is even larger.

So the issues there is the cost of the battery and the weight of the battery is a huge problem because in some cases the weight could be so high if you need to charge those vehicles like overnight. And those weights could become an issue for the load bearing capacity of the roads, so that they would not be even allowed to be used passing a certain value because it could just destroy the roads, right?

So that’s where wireless charging is being considered in many cities. That are starting to look into not only adoption of electric buses, but adoption of electric buses with certain characteristics. And so we have found there a nice access for our technology.

Matt Nally: Yeah. I suppose the other key thing is because it’s not the vehicle has to constantly, it’s not like a Skellectrics car where it has to be constantly in contact with it, with electricity.

You don’t have to have the entire network fully covered. You only need sort of key areas where it’s installed. So the. Absolutely. That’s enough

Marcucio Esguerra: in the most. Or the areas of the warehouse where most of the traffic is it’s like the hot areas where all the vehicles go back and forth, and only a few go into aisles or into, remote areas within the whole, within the warehouse.

So that’s an easy task to find those areas and you want to have that infrastructure only there. Because that reduces the cost of installation.

Matt Nally: Perfect. My, my final question, I think, then before, before we finish is around that cost part. What does it currently look like to, in terms of cost?

I don’t know, maybe per meter, but I don’t know what’s a good way of measuring it, but yeah. I’m happy to answer that because, Quite often people don’t have any idea. How much could that be right? So we have figured out a warehouse, with With the right amount of power. So for example, such a vehicle needs to recharge at around 10 kilowatts to have a number.

Marcucio Esguerra: So if you would install here we would do this for around two and a half thousand euros per day. Per installed meter. So that’s the cost of the full installation. If it’s of course a greenfield building, it’s cheaper than that. If it’s a, an existing building where you need to have also the cutting out of the floor as part of the installation, then that’s the value I just gave.

So that means with that in mind, if you take for example, 20, 000 square meter building, And you say we need to do 200 meters, which is about 1%. The cost of this would be about 500, 000 euros, but then you can in order to make the return on investment, you can say you are saving about a quarter of the fleet.

So you don’t need any more hundred vehicles. You need only 75 vehicles because they are not standing around charging. And then you take off half of the batteries. And then you eliminate also all the manpower, the manual handling of charging. So doing all this, we’ve done it in a very detailed way, that’s I’m just trying to explain it.

Yeah, gotcha. With savings. that justify the investment. And we see return on investment for the, for that CAPEX that could go all the way into about two and a half to three years. Okay. However given the way that our world works these days, we are also looking into leasing renting models.

We have other ways of offering this. So that, some operations would like to have this more as an OPEX rather than a CAPEX. Those are the things that we’re working right now, but we are already in the middle of commercialization, justification, return on investment productivity, that’s where the technology allows you to go this far.

Matt Nally: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s fascinating. I think it’s Yeah. An interesting one, particularly for surveyors to watch in terms of how that’s going to change the built environment, how that affects valuations of properties and yeah, use cases and all that type of stuff. But but in terms of, yeah, you stay today by firms, it’s that you’re very interested to see how how that gets adopted as you say, more and more warehouses of robots now and as well as for this and so on, so yeah, big opportunity.

Thank you very much for coming on today. Yeah, if anyone wants to get in touch to learn more about your products or your service how do they get in touch?

Marcucio Esguerra: Yes. Thanks very much for that. So the best would be whoever is interested, just email us at info at markman. co. That’s our email address.

Happy to receiving all inquiries, all questions, even, and I just want to mention that if somebody feels like you would like to invest in our company. More than happy to discuss that. We have we have a lot of investment ways we have doing crowd funding, we have doing equity funding. We are doing also business angels funding, different things because people feel very attracted to this technology and often are interested to participate, but also customers, of course interested users.

Even developers of product of projects, construction companies. So everybody welcome to contact me. Last but not least, we’re in munich And if somebody happens to be here in a month from now, which is october fest, yes Don’t hesitate and pay us a visit here. We’re very close downtown munich.

So if somebody wants to come here and look at what we do Everybody welcome to, to pass by and looking at how we do things, how things work. So our pleasure hosting you.

Matt Nally: That’d be a fantastic invite. Awesome. Thank you again for coming on and I look forward to catching up soon. My pleasure.

Thank you.