This Clean Energy CEO Reveals How She Took a Google Project Using Old Tech and Turned It Into a Startup That's Raised $87M Malta solves a huge obstacle for wind and solar energy, and creates jobs for communities impacted by the energy transition. But, as the CEO shares, while the mission is clear, the startup's journey has been far from smooth sailing.
By Frances Dodds Edited by Mark Klekas
Ramya Swaminathan has never taken the act of flipping on the light for granted. Growing up between India and the Philippines, her family lived in cities with fragile electric grids, and she often had to plan around energy outages.
"We were in urban areas that still experience electricity insecurity," she said. "I remember being in high school and having six to eight hours of power cuts a day. We had to choose when we studied to make sure we had electricity, and that became an internalized decision every day. So the motivation for me to work on really tough problems with electricity is fundamentally connected to human wellbeing for societies everywhere."
Swaminathan is now the CEO of Malta, a Cambridge, MA-based startup that spun out from Google X, or, the "moonshot factory," in 2018. It has since raised $86.9 million.
X is Alphabet's laboratory for ambitious, futuristic tech solutions to the world's big problems. In Malta's case, however, the project was actually a novel fusion of already-existing technologies. The idea was the brainchild of Robert Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning Stanford physics professor, who theorized that you could store cold energy in antifreeze liquid, and heat in molten salt — hence the name Malta.
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X explored the hypothesis and found that it had real potential. But it also determined that the scale of the venture was outside Alphabet's wheelhouse, since Malta's product is an industrial, grid-scale installation that takes up about 12 acres of land and requires a similar workforce to a traditional coal or natural gas plant. So, the team at X started looking for the right person to shepherd Malta out of the Alphabet ecosystem.
That's where Swaminathan came in. In 2018, Swaminathan was an experienced renewable energy executive. She's also been an ambassador for the U.S. Department of Energy's Clean Energy and Empowerment Initiative since 2020. The team at X approached her to take on the job of CEO.
Malta's technology could be used to store any kind of energy — including fossil fuels — but it offered a particularly promising solution to storing renewables. A persistent problem with wind and solar energy is that the energy goes to waste when there is more sun or wind than the grid needs, and if energy demand spikes when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, utility companies rely on backup "peaker plants" to power the grid. These backup plants typically use fossil fuels and emit even more carbon dioxide than regular plants, which takes a significant bite out of overall sustainability. Malta's ability to store renewable energy could revolutionize reliance on renewable energy sources.
On top of that, because Malta's energy storage installations are a one-to-one replacement for natural gas and coal plants, a core part of their proposal is to hire the workers who were employed at whatever plant existed there before Malta. The worker skill sets transition naturally, so a Malta plant could give new life to communities facing the existential threat of disappearing coal or natural gas jobs.
Here, we spoke with Swaminathan on the complications of developing massive product, selling to huge customers like utilities companies, and how she stays clear-headed while making tough decisions.
The scale of the technology that Malta is developing is quite vast. How do you stay focused when things inevitably go wrong?
When you're working with bulk power electricity — utility or grid-scale — the problems that we're solving for are complex. The problems are large, our installations are large. Every day we find problems that we don't have great solutions to. Sometimes we have to throw out a design and start again. But when you are frustrated because you've done some work that doesn't yield the result that you want, it really helps to be able to widen the lens and say, 'Okay, what's the overall mission?'
On a macro level, it's about enabling renewables in the face of climate change to allow for a more sustainable planet. But also, from our standpoint, it's about incorporating workers who are dislocated by the change from traditional fossil fuels to wind and solar. A lot of people call that the "just transition." We have to make sure that we take people along with us. So as long as we keep those mission statements in mind, we can find different ways to move toward them. And we may end up with solutions that look nothing like what we started with.
What was it like for you to join the team at X, who had already been working on Malta for some time?
At first, there were real challenges for me as an outsider. And there were some unexpected benefits, too. The challenge was that when you come in from the outside, you actually don't know everything the team knows. And yet, as the leader or CEO for the company that was going to be spun out, I had to put a business plan together and convince investors. I think I underestimated how difficult that part would be, because I didn't have the body of knowledge that the team had.
But the somewhat unexpected benefit of being an outsider was that, because I didn't know stuff, I didn't really feel like any particular statement was superior to any other statement, right? I had no preconceived ideas. I didn't think, 'Well, we should do it this way, because that's what we talked about a year ago.' I wasn't bound to the conventional wisdom within the team, so it was an interesting process for me to ask questions, like, "But what if we were to think about it differently?"
Can you think of an example of that happening?
Sure. So I'm not an engineer by training. My background is purely commercial. My core competence is looking at a product and then thinking, where is it going to fit in the market? And what is the strategy to move it towards commercialization? And that worked for Malta because the basic strength of the technology is that pretty much everything in the system already exists at scale in the world. We often say that Malta is not a new technology introduction. We are a product introduction. We're taking existing technologies and putting them together in a new product.
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So when I joined the team, they were considering the best way to get this product into the market and going down the path of design. But I was able to sit down and appreciate all the work that had gone into that, and then suggest that, rather than making the underlying components ourselves, we should partner with leading companies already making that stuff.
So we ended up pursuing that as a business plan, and to X's credit, they were super supportive of that. We brought on Alfa Laval, the world's leading manufacturer of heat exchangers, as an investor. And then over time, Siemens Energy, who we're working with on the turbo machinery. These blue chip names were convinced that Malta's technology was a real solution in the market. And I think all that was enabled by the fact that I was not an engineer and not really wed to the idea of designing everything ourselves.
When you're in the early stages of building a company, there are often difficult, trajectory-defining decisions to be made. Has Malta faced any of those, and what was your strategy in navigating them?
I feel like we've had hundreds of those. But if I had to describe a bigger decision that was quite impactful to the company, it would probably be the size of the product we make.
When we first spun out, we really focused on — and sorry if this sounds very technical — but a 10 megawatt product. A 10 megawatt would primarily focus on the commercial and industrial sector, so it would power a factory or something like that.
And our thinking was that we would build, design and deploy 10 megawatt products and that would become a stepping stone to the 100 megawatt projects, which is what we're doing now. But over time, what we realized is that these were actually two different products serving two different markets. Even technically, there's not a lot of overlap in terms of what we were doing and designing on a day-to-day basis. A 10 megawatt product really involves packaging it in a way to get as much cost out as possible, to build it offsite and drop ship to the site. Whereas a 100 megawatt power plant is built and deployed and designed in a different way. So this became a real question that the company wrestled with. We sought the advice and counsel of our board and stakeholders. And ultimately, we saw the market traction and the pull coming from the larger product in the bulk power market with the utilities as our customers.
Decisions of that magnitude are difficult. They take a lot of conviction and persuasion. We definitely found ourselves deep in the weeds on analysis. And then, even after some of us were convinced that it was right, we still had to bring other people with us, and welcome the devil's advocate position. That is definitely something I do — mine for disagreements. Because you want to make sure that you hear the disagreement before you make the decision.
What's been one of your core selling points when you're pitching Malta to utility companies?
So if you were driving by a Malta plant, it would look very much like a gas or a coal plant without the coal yard. We don't combust anything in our system, but it is a real, heavy electrical project with tanks and rotating equipment, etc. So if you've got a coal plant — and you know, they're shutting down in a lot of places — or even a gas plant, Malta is very much like a one-for-one replacement. We use the same kind of footprint. And if you look at the kinds of services we offer to the electricity grid, they're very similar to a traditional fossil asset.
And then importantly, as I mentioned earlier, because we use these standard power plant equipment components, we also use the same workers. So we can preserve the job base. And if you are reading anything about the energy transition, one of the harder things about it is that when you shut down a coal plant or a gas plant, you're displacing a lot of workers. And those workers kind of end up being the tax base of an entire community. So it's the schools, it's the hospitals, it's the doctors. So by incorporating those incumbent workers, we can essentially take this old asset and give it a new life — kind of in every way.
