In America today, it can be faster to build a factory than to get enough electricity to run it. Time to power has become a major bottleneck for factories, data centers, EV charging depots, and other infrastructure being built across the country. After more than a decade at SpaceX—including serving as launch chief engineer for Demo-2 and Director of Flight Safety—Bala Ramamurthy turned his attention to the electricity grid. His company, Critical Loop, combines batteries, software, controls, automation, and generation to help customers get power faster. It’s indicative of a trend we often see on Supercool: building the low-carbon future is as much about breakthrough business model innovation as new hardware or software. Critical Loop has already powered an 80,000-square-foot factory for nine months, operates a microgrid at San Diego Airport, and is helping customers unlock more power from the grid we already have—while enabling more renewable energy along the way. For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

When It’s Time to Power: Critical Loop Gets Electricity Where It’s Needed

Supercool

Welcome to Supercool, a show about climate innovation, business and how the future is being built. I'm your host Josh Dorfman. In 2020, Bala Ramamurthy was sitting in the control room at Cape Canaveral preparing to send two American astronauts into space. He was the launch chief engineer for SpaceX Demo-2, carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard the Crew Dragon Endeavour.

The first launch attempt had been scrubbed. Now the astronauts sat atop a Falcon 9 rocket, attempting to return Americans to space for the first time in a decade. Right before launch, the launch director looked at Bala, who signaled, good to go. Then the countdown came. 3, 2, 1, 0, ignition, liftoff, go NASA, go SpaceX, Godspeed, Bob and Doug. Bala eventually became director of flight safety at SpaceX. He'd come from NASA, joined the private space company,

spent over a decade there, and in some sense it was mission accomplished for him, helping to transform space flight. Now he was ready to work on the next problem, and for him that meant energy, and more specifically, the electricity grid. Somehow, we've arrived at a moment in America when it could be faster to build a factory than to run power to it, to even just turn on the lights.

We can send humans off planet, but you can build a factory, or an EV charging depot, or a data center, and wait years for a grid connection just to run the power. Bala started Critical Loop to solve this time-to-power crisis. That means, if a factory needs 20 megawatts of power, and the utility can only provide 7, Critical Loop jumps in and figures out how to close the gap, using batteries, software, controls, and when necessary, additional generation.

When It’s Time to Power: Critical Loop Gets Electricity Where It’s Needed

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

When It’s Time to Power: Critical Loop Gets Electricity Where It’s Needed

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.