Bill Derasmo and Nis Benn, the visionary co-founder and chief commercial officer at Hyme Energy, discusses Benn's unique career journey that led him to revolutionize grid-scale thermal energy storage solutions.
In this episode, host Bill Derasmo sits down with Nis Benn, the visionary co-founder and chief commercial officer at Hyme Energy. Benn shares his unique career journey that led him to revolutionize grid-scale thermal energy storage solutions. They delve into the dynamic challenges and opportunities within the energy sector, exploring how policy shapes the adoption of renewables. Tune in to uncover the groundbreaking world of renewable energy stored in molten salt and be inspired by the future of sustainable innovation.
Battery + Storage Podcast — A Thermal Storage Revolution With Nis Benn, Hyme Energy
Host: Bill Derasmo
Guest: Nis Benn
Recorded: February 28, 2025
Aired: March 13, 2025
Bill Derasmo:
Hello, and welcome back to the Troutman Pepper Locke Battery & Storage Podcast. I am your host, Bill DeRasmo, partner here at Troutman Pepper Locke. Today, I am pleased to have with me Nis Benn, the Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Hyme Energy, a maturing grid-scale thermal energy storage solution for industry and utilities. That's hyme.energy. Welcome to the program, Nis.
Nis Benn:
Thanks a lot. Thank you for having me. I've really been looking forward to this chat.
Bill Derasmo:
Well, great to have you on today. As I mentioned, you are the COO at Hyme and have been since November 2021. Before coming to Hyme, you held a variety of what I thought were interesting positions. Take a minute, tell us about your career journey to Hyme and then we can get into discussing Hyme's business and maybe some other policy and other interesting issues.
Nis Benn:
Yeah, thanks for that invitation, Bill. Just very short two sentences on Hyme and then on me. At Hyme, we're developing a new technology to decarbonize the industry and replace natural gas with thermal energy storage where renewable energy is stored in the thermal storage facility, decarbonized process heat, which is where natural gas is used today. Taking natural gas out, putting new renewable energy through a storage plant. That's the short version.
And now me, today, as you say, Chief Commercial Officer of Hyme. Been serving in that role for three years, a bit more, since we found it in the end of 2021, here in Copenhagen, Denmark. Today, I lead a team of around seven or eight people that is working in the breadth of business development, from sales to communication, regulatory work, and basically anything you come up with from financing, fundraising also.
The other day I was just reflecting on my own career and actually dawned on me that my first startup was a high school magazine back when I was 16 in 1997, when I went to a high school that didn't have a magazine and I thought that was a pity. I went out to potential advertisers around town, knocking doors of the driving school and the hairdressers and stuff like that, getting sponsors to start up the magazine. And yeah, of course it came up, started running. We did four editions a year and just had its 25th anniversary. It wasn't something I made anybody out of, it was purely voluntary, but it was a start-up.
Then, yeah, I studied some sociology with statistics on top of that, did another start-up in the zeros, within statistics, a consultancy. We couldn't turn that into a product and we couldn't scale it, so we decided to shut it down. And then I moved around within management consulting and strategy mainly for a number of years before doing a project with the heart, basically, a political start-up. I joined what's called the Alternative Party in Denmark to start up the national organization when the party got into parliament in 2015 and built up a national organization of 98 local committees around our first countrywide elections and stuff like that.
Then when I was worn out basically to be here with my youngest kid and relaxed a bit. And then when I came back, I sort of found out that I wanted to do something to change the world, not from policy, but from business. And started working with startups within the impact space, I think it might have been known then. And then basically now I'm here meeting the right people. We did that finding this company 2021 as a spin-out of a nuclear company. And now we're operating independently within the thermal energy storage space.
Bill Derasmo:
I like to prod myself on my prep for these podcast recordings. But I have to admit, I did not know that you started up a high school newspaper. I love that because I wrote back in the day. I used to do some guest columns for the school paper and stuff like that. That is a great background. It's a different background I think from a lot of other entrepreneurs because you've got the politics in there, you've got other sort of non-energy type ventures before you ended up in the energy space.
But one of the things I think that's a commonality is if you're working to start something up, you have to be able to talk to the finance people, right? No matter what it is. There's a lot we could talk about, but maybe we could just start – it just struck me as you were speaking. Maybe we could just start with that. When you have to wear that hat, what's that like when you have to go out to try to fundraise and get some backing for your company?
Nis Benn:
Whether the financing hat or the political hat, which one of those?
Bill Derasmo:
Oh, the financing, I meant. But, yeah.
Nis Benn:
When we go out, we basically try to keep things super simple. Even though we are a deep tech and energy market is complicated, what we want to talk about is how we can change the world through financial contracts to deploy energy assets. And basically what we want to do is sign heat as a service contract with industrial offtakers. When that's signed, construct an asset to deliver heat. That asset is financed pension funds, or banks, or whoever we partner with in that specific market. And then it's constructed, it's operated, and then hopefully it will be transferred, refinanced, and whatever else. From a finance perspective, it's actually pretty simple what we're doing.
Bill Derasmo:
Pivoting from the finance part to through the business case part. I asked you this off-air, but I'll share with the audience. In terms of your focus, in terms of Denmark, the EU, and then North America, maybe you could just talk about that and where your company is focused principally right now, and then where it might be in the future, maybe.
Nis Benn:
Geographically, we're focused almost solely right now on business development within the EU and a home market of Denmark within EU. And the reason is that the heat price that I mentioned, or the heat contract, the willingness to pay for that is simply highest, where the natural gas price, which is today the feedstock for a lot of industrial processes, is highest.
And it is highest in the EU for two reasons. One is that we don't produce a lot ourselves, so we import a lot of natural gas. And the second one is that we've been taxing fossil fuels in different ways and quite intensively for a number of years, with the latest being the shared CO2 tax for all fossil emissions in the EU. The industrial customers of EU or heat users are facing an underlying, upward-going price, basically, on natural gas from the CO2 tax, and a lot of volatility on the import price as well. They're really looking to get away from that. And renewables is the other option that's available. And then we are about providing renewables 24/7 and a stable heat price. So we'd also get the price swings on the renewables. And then we just sell that in the heat contract, basically.
Bill Derasmo:
No, it's really interesting to hear because the contrast to the United States, I think, is somewhat significant. The United States has obviously made a big renewable push itself. Maybe gone about it in different ways, not through taxation, but other policy pushes. And so there has been a significant build-out in solar and wind. That's one of the reasons why we started the podcast five, six years ago is because of the idea like you just talked about of being able to make those renewable resources more dispatchable, more 24/7.
But that being said, the United States, I think has an abundant natural gas. And so the temptation is to fall back on it because of I think what's happening in the United States right now is you've got a situation we haven't had in some time, which is you have load growth. And that's, ironically enough, being driven by some of the environmental policies. You've got electrification of vehicle fleets, you've got electrification, say, of home heating and things. But then, of course, there's this data center AI, tremendous growth. And if you're in the space here in the legal policy side, you hear a lot about how are we going to meet this data center need? And so there are certain parts of the country, I think, that just said, "Hey, we're building gas, gas-fired generation, and we'll try to put the best emissions controls on it we can." But right now, that's what we need.
There are other parts of the country where that's probably not realistic still, like New York State, I think. Who knows? But I think it would be difficult, for instance, to build a new combined cycle natural gas plant in New York. I think in different states, they'll go for different solutions. But what could Hyme do in the United States to sort of fill that need in areas where it might not be realistic to build a new natural gas-fired plant?
Nis Benn:
Well, in a market like the US, I think the right partner for Hyme to develop a case would be an industrial company that is looking to be green because I don't think it's a really good idea because their location allows them to really make use of relatively cheap renewables around the industrial site. And so those two motivations sort of get married into one. If you really want to be green, you want to take renewables and you want to have them all the time. To do that, you have to have storage. That could be one motivation.
The other one is simply just – if you think the economy of going solar, for example, is better than natural gas or whatever your feedstock is for your process heat, then you also need to store it if you want to have that done. Whatever your motivation is, in a happy marriage with renewables close to our onsite, that's where it could make a difference. Typically, a bit far from a city at an industrial site that has a relatively large heat load, we think in megawatts when we talk about heat, something in tons of steam per hour, and some gigajoules, and MBTUs or whatever. But 10 megawatt and above, which is a lot of constant heat. We can go even bigger than that as well.
Bill Derasmo:
So it sounds like industrial sites, industrial parks, would probably be the best candidates?
Nis Benn:
Yes, it would. And some of those would have a utility company may be supplying the industrial customers within that park, and then the utility companies probably be the right partner for us to sort of build a strategy on greening and making it also more affordable at the same time. We've seen that in Germany, which is a country that has a lot of industrial parks in Europe, that that's the right partner, and sometimes it's the individual industrial company.
Bill Derasmo:
Well, I think it might be a good segue. Why don't you tell me about the so-called, if you will, that Hyme has as compared to maybe some other types of companies. I think it's a good segue into that discussion.
Nis Benn:
Yeah. So I'm actually not familiar with the term mouth trap.
Bill Derasmo:
This basically means your way of doing things, your technology, the way you're coming at the problem.
Nis Benn:
I'm going to take maybe a bit of a big step back just to do a quick, deep dive on the technical background and then sort of bring that as quick as I can up to what is it that we offer the customers then in the end. So we are using a energy storage technology that is built on a fluid. That fluid is molten salt. Salt is a group of elements that could be many, many, many. You should just think of it as the white powder that you could have at home. You could heat that up. And it looks like water when it melts. Then you can heat that up just as you could with water.
And we're just talking much higher temperatures. The specific salt that we use melts at just under 200 degrees Celsius and then we heat it up to just about 500 degrees Celsius. Storing heat in it and then spent. And we cool it back down. And the salts are good for storage. If you haven't heard about them before, then they're basically really good at taking up heat. And so we can put a lot of heat into the same molecule of salt, basically. It doesn't degrade, doesn't do any harm to it, it doesn't evaporate. It stays where you have it, typically in a big tank. It doesn't give off that heat very easily, so it's a good storage medium, basically.
What we do is we are upgrading this sort of technology with a new salt that has even higher energy density and lasts longer and stuff than what has previously been worked with, and then we're turning it into a product that could serve industry. It's previously been used in concentrated solar power plants, where it's been used to produce power. There's a couple of plants like that in the US as well.
We're using a new sector and electrifying the heating of the salt instead of using concentrated solar. And basically, our plant consists of one tank that has the cold, soft, around 200 Celsius. We heat it up with electricity, pump it into a hot tank, keep it there until we dispatch it, and then we pump it to a steam generator, putting out steam and heat. The salt is cooled and put back in the coal tank. And then basically, the salt runs around from cold to hot, heat it and cool it back down while giving off steam to an industrial process.
And so when we get to the customer level and move that back to the customer side, we bring a product, which is a standardized size with these two tanks, squeeze it into a relatively small amount of space compared to the energy that they contain, and then resell the steam coming out. And what we are trying to do in Europe, especially where we do the business case the best, is to basically use the duck curve as yours and all it from the States. Take cheap storers, move those to a 24/7 baseload, basically. And we just see that that curve is really having arrived in Europe as well with the middle hours of the day in solar countries being basically the price dropping 10% per year in those hours or more and the negative pricing hours and up to 1,000 hours of the year as well. That provides a huge opportunity so that we could turn into a competitive heat price towards the customer.
Bill Derasmo:
Okay. So that's interesting. So you got heat, you got steam. It's a different type of model than we've heard about, I think, previously on our program. It's interesting how you can distinguish yourselves. But just maybe dive in for a second, say, in Denmark and your home market about that duck curve. Because folks here like California, for instance, that's a big issue. And so how can your technology really fit with that duck curve?
Nis Benn:
If we think about the system, it's basically a system that can do two things. It can consume electricity, that's the cold to the hot tank side. And then it can produce steam, that's the hot to the cold side. What we do in practice is that we basically dispatch steam almost all the time to the industrial process that's going on. Some companies shut down over the weekend, but a lot of the customers that we're talking to just have baseload energy needs going slightly up and down.
And then in the energy markets, we basically [inaudible 0:15:09] with an energy trader to operate the plant who lives in the day ahead forecast. And they look for those cheapest hours, which are typically from around 11am to 3, 4, 5pm where the sun is up in the summer especially, and buys the maximum amount of power that we can consume in those hours. Fills up the salt with energy, fills up the hot tank. And then overnight, and until the next day at 11, just dispatches only. It's also dispatching when it's charging. But then at night time, it's only dispatching since there's not enough cheap electricity available.
In Denmark, though, when you ask about that, we do have a solar and wind pattern. We have a lot of wind energy, and then we have solar in the summer. We do have a sort of less predictable duck curve, I would say. In the summer, it looked a lot like the duck dark curve because the sun is there. But in the wintertime, it's wind driving the energy prices up and down. When it's windy, you can have many hours of really cheap prices. And so it doesn't really look like the duck curve, but the principle is the same. Take those cheap hours and smear them out over the day in terms of output.
Bill Derasmo:
And in Denmark, is it offshore wind or is it onshore?
Nis Benn:
During the last five years, it's become offshore wind. It was onshore until then. So now, the offshore is the dominant factor in what happens in the energy prices at the moment.
Bill Derasmo:
That's really interesting. And remind me, are you part of Nord Pool?
Nis Benn:
Yes, we are.
Bill Derasmo:
Okay. Okay. Interesting. And for the US audience, Nord Pool is sort of like PJM or MISO, it's a regional market. So it's interesting. But it's interesting to hear about that, but we haven't gotten into macro policy issues yet, so why don't we do that? And you talked about offshore wind. And we've talked about how Europe has gone about decarbonization a little bit.
The United States, like I said, we've made, I think, tremendous inroads in decarbonization with the growth of renewables and other things, but now we've had the presidential election and we've got this new phenomenon, at least new over the last, I don't know, 20 years of load growth, significant load growth. And like I said, I think I sense in certain parts of the country in the US falling back on the use of natural gas. Just from where you're sitting, if you had any thoughts at a high level about how you continue a decarbonization push while at the same time obviously continuing to keep the lights on, as they say, and continuing to meet customers' needs? And like I said, the United States, I think the new challenge is we've actually had load growth. I'd just love to get your thoughts on that.
Nis Benn:
I'm going to probably be speaking about it from a European perspective since my knowledge of the US sector is probably – but I'll try and make it as relevant as I can. First of all, I just want to mention the key driver of the [inaudible 0:18:02] taxes again that I mentioned initially, basically making it expensive to pollute and thus putting pressure on the prices that industry is seeing and really just the curiosity from CFOs and site operators to get away from that, that bottom price, basically. No matter what the natural gas prices, you're just paying more and more.
Then when we move to other policy, what we have seen is two things that have been driving the build-out of renewable energy, which is driving the duck curve, if we just use that term for the cheap hours and availability of renewable. One is the build-out of the offshore sector. In Denmark, we've been doing that with auctions initially, with guaranteed revenue to asset owners. And then we've been moving to contract for difference models. And then the last option that we carried out, there was actually a payment back to the state. A profitable CFD for the state. And now it remains to be seen how the next ones will evolve.
I think we'll be going back to some that do cost some money for the state. That mechanism is continuing and has become the standard in most European countries at the moment. But it's a competitive mechanism that I think, if it's not being used sufficiently in a specific state in the US, that's really brought us far on offshore.
Bill Derasmo:
That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, and we have some offshore wind that's been developed in the United States, particularly on the East Coast, but now we've got an executive order where that's sort of under a pause, I guess you would say. But we've got significant onshore wind as well in the states, especially like in the Midwest or Great Plains.
I think what you're going to see if I had to predict in the United States is the so-called all of the above. I think you'll continue to see the renewables get built out. Like I said, I think you're going to see probably a little bit of an uptick in natural gas-fired generation. And there's a lot of interest in nuclear again. There were two reactors cited in Georgia, the Vogel 3 and 4 came online in the last couple of years. Other than that, there hasn't been much in the way of new nuclear, but I think there's a tremendous interest going forward because it's carbon-free obviously and it's baseload, dispatchable and all that stuff. I don't know if what the outlook in Europe is for nuclear. It might not be as rosy. But I'd be curious if you had any thoughts on that front as well.
Nis Benn:
I think there's a slow renaissance in Europe on nuclear. But actually, we grew out of a nuclear company as a spin-out originally. We do have quite a lot of knowledge about that. That's a small modular reactor company. We've also been looking into how nuclear and thermal storage deploy together. It's not within our current market focus. But basically, we are talking to a lot of nuclear developers because the base load gives them problems as well when renewables aren't basically. Then you can't sell the price that you are expecting or hoping to. What do you do with that energy? You can't really shut down your plant. It's difficult.
But nuclear energy is also heat. So it's coming from heat to turn into electricity. And then so we're talking to a lot of companies actually about redirecting the heat outside of the turbines stored in thermal energy storage, which could then put it back in at a later time into the nuclear turbine as steam again, and then pick up the production. You don't have to stop your nuclear plant when you can't sell heat or electricity, you just put heat into this buffer, basically.
Bill Derasmo:
Boy, if you could perfect that, I think you'd really have something special. And I think you'd have some interest in the United States because small SMR, small modular reactors in the United States, there's definitely an uptick in interest there. And I think you'll see some of that get developed. I really do. Because what else are you going to – I mean, if you have a decarbonization push that notwithstanding maybe some policy changes here in the short term, I think the trend is still going to continue. I think what else are you going to do? I mean, you're going to add – nuclear is a logical thing to do. In any event, I think there'll be an uptick in interest in SMRs in particular, I think. We'll have to see how that unfolds.
Any other applications that you want to mention for Hyme?
Nis Benn:
Yeah. Well, I mean, apart from the nuclear one, which I think – and I hope we will have that post-2030. But until 2030, when we're bringing our tech to the market and what we right now see is the most meaningful fashion, we're focused on that processed heat. But that processed heat can be sort of divided into a couple of niches, you could say. There's a big, normal industry sites that could be using steam for food ingredients, for example, for the food distillation, or for other distillation processes, or for plastics. Basically, heat goes into almost everything and refit to a certain temperature range of existing industry.
Then we do see niches in industries that are coming up and that are part of the green transition as well. When new plastics are being built, biogas, for example, biogas has a CO2 purging mechanism built in. They separate the methane that's been produced from the CO2 that's also in there. You have combustible methane of natural gas quality, but now CO2-free. You get the CO2 out and that costs you some energy.
Today, they either burn their own biogas to do it or they burn natural gas to provide that heat. These are typically in relatively wrong locations with ease to deploy renewables just next door. And you can make your operations completely green instead of just half green providing methane that's bio, but using natural gas to purge CO2.
And there's a lot of biogas coming in Europe and in a lot of other countries as a CO2-free source. We really see a potential market there. It's the same thing that we do on our side, but that segment is really growing and relatively focused on green and also having a bit of a margin against natural gas that they can live off to finance maybe a slightly higher heat price as well. So a slightly higher willingness to pay.
And then we see methanol plants with green methanol and that entire green plastics, whatever, that people are trying to do in different ways. Mixing hydrogen, CO2 and other bio things that are green. They often also need heat in their replication of a traditional industry, but now a green version. And I think we also fit really well there.
Bill Derasmo:
And you mentioned 2030. What's the significance there?
Nis Benn:
We expect to go through our first scaling towards 2030, the products that we're right now developing of different sizes to fit industry. Then we have built our revenue capability, brought down on costs. We'll be able to broaden out into more geographic markets, and into more niches, and potentially also into completely different business models collaborating with nuclear or utility companies to retrofit old coal power plants, which you could also do without technology if you wanted. We want to just have a focus on execution of these first products. Make sure that we return some value to our current investors, build some future value, and then see who wants to drive basically for the next part of that journey into different markets.
Bill Derasmo:
That's interesting when you mentioned coal. And we still have some significant coal resources that are running the United States, especially in certain regions. But then there was a push, I think, over the last few years just to try to repurpose some of those sites in the United States. You had the Inflation Reduction Act where there are some advantages, tax advantages. You could take advantage if you repurposed some of those sites.
What sites in Europe are sort of ripe for that? Is it Germany that relied a lot on coal, fire generation? Because I understand France was heavy on nuclear. If you could just give us a quick – give the Americans a quick tutorial on that.
Nis Benn:
Sure. You're correct on France. Germany is still really big on coal, especially after they decommissioned their nuclear the plants and then the coal plants came back online. But the big coal countries in Europe apart from that is definitely Poland. And then we have a lot of old Eastern Europe, which now is core Europe, but they are still living in the age of coal, I would say. But that also means that they're really curious about this retrofit because a lot of them are filling out their grids as they are industrializing and becoming modern society still. Some of them are still not consuming as much energy per capita as the Western European countries are. They have a really broad build-out on load growth and renewables and still need to get rid of coal. There's some really interesting things going on there where I do think that we should seek to play a role again post-2030 when we're there, but we should be there.
Bill Derasmo:
Very interesting. This has been a great discussion and I've learned a lot. It's good to get somebody from a different part of the world on here to talk about some of these issues?
Nis Benn:
Yeah. I think the interesting thing of talking to an American is just keeping that perspective in mind of that huge market and keep thinking about how can we fit in. I think that's a really important to remember for us. But I also want to say that we're talking to a lot of American companies on the European operations. And I see all of these American industrial corporations really understand this, even though they're coming from the main – majority of the business being in the US where the trade-offs are not falling out in the same way as they are in Europe, they really want to drive that in Europe as well. And I'm really pursuing it.
And I think the business acumen of these companies is sometimes even bigger than the European ones because they are really focused on bottom line. And that's what this is about. This is about undercutting the price of natural gas for the green alternative. And I think that frank conversation, we have actually more directly with a lot of American companies, whereas the European ones tend to have maybe a bit of green ideology as well still left in how they conduct business.
But yeah, thanks for inviting me, Bill. It's really been a pleasure to talk to you. And thinking about the American perspective is also really good to keep me on my toes and keep me curious about the world.
Bill Derasmo:
Well, it's been great having you on the program today, Nis. Is there anything else that you want to talk about before we wrap up?
Nis Benn:
I think one thing that I really want to say about where this technology is going, what Hyme is doing, is it's pretty – saying for me at least that, at the moment, in the maturation phase of a project, which is the biggest announced thermal and storage project for industry in the world, we announced it just before Christmas. Right now we're wrapping up the project financing for that plant. It's invested in Denmark. It's 200 megawatt hours. It's got to be huge. And it's also hopefully got to be a lighthouse for the sector that this could be done profitably at the same time.
Bill Derasmo:
Well, thanks for mentioning that. Can the audience go to your website, hyme.energy to learn more about that project? Or is there some press on that?
Nis Benn:
There is a press release on it. There definitely is. And we hope to update our website further within the coming months, but more details as to that project is really from me now.
Bill Derasmo:
Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Thanks for walking through that. And again, thanks for being on our program today. Thank you to the audience, by the way, because without you, there wouldn't be much point in doing this. So we appreciate our listeners continuing to tune into our program when we release these episodes. And we'll leave it there for now. Thanks, everyone. Bye.
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