Green Giants – Episode 123

Wes Ashworth (02:07)

Yeah, I love it. I love that oftentimes it’s not necessarily people’s like first path that they were necessarily envisioning, but it sort of finds you and that opportunity finds you and you take it. but I like starting there, you know, it and it really helps explain why one, I think this passion, this problem became worth spending so much of your career on. And I know, you know, we talked previously, like you were looking even at professor jobs when an opportunity to start a company showed up and arrived. talk us through that moment, like what made you actually take the leap?

Hunter McDaniel (02:32)

Well, you know, I was in a group at Los Alamos National Laboratory where my peers were becoming professors. and a lot of those, maybe half the folks that I was working together with, have gone on to become professors at various universities. So naturally I felt like that was the next step. I mean, you get a PhD, you do a postdoc at a top tier research institution, get some really high quality publications, and you’re kind of queued up to become a professor or like a career scientist of some kind. Around that time, we were working with a corporate collaborator and developed some patents.

And they had kind of fallen on hard times and decided that they weren’t gonna pursue the commercialization of those patents. I saw an angle there, an opportunity. And the more I started thinking about it felt similar to becoming a professor, which maybe for the first couple of years it was. you know, you have to raise money, build a research group, evangelize the technology, you know, and start sort of from scratch building a research institu your own research institution. And I just kinda took the leap of faith, I guess, back in two thousand fourteen to start the business. And yeah, it was for maybe the first couple of years similar, except you don’t have to teach, to becoming a professor, but it’s definitely evolved to be something completely different since then.

Wes Ashworth (03:36)

And it’s crazy, like those parallels too, of even like a professor, teacher, like so much of it is informing, educating, teaching, instructing. Like I I’m sure that comes into play a lot, you know, in your day to day and especially early

Wes Ashworth (03:49)

on. so I like all that connection, how it came to be. And now you could have gone, you know, somewhere else and taken a more traditional path, but how important was it to sort of wanting to stay in Los Alamos and really building the company there?

Hunter McDaniel (04:02)

Well, I fell in love with Los Alamos when I first moved out here in 2011 for that position at Los Alamos National Laboratory. New Mexico in general is a very special place, relatively low population state, so not much traffic, you know, beautiful scenery, great quality of life, lots of outdoor stuff, great weather. And then Los Alamos is tucked up here in the mountains, and it’s kind of a factory town. It exists because of the Manhattan Project, and almost everyone in this town has some affiliation with the National Laboratory.

And so it’s kind of like i if you’re here, you must be affiliated with the lab. But I wanted to find a carve my own way staying here, if you will, without necessarily you know, that would have been a another career path I could have taken, which is stay at the lab and become a staff scientist there. but yeah, I mean I just really loved it up here. And that was another reason. I can’t say that was maybe the number one reason, but it was a factor in why I wanted to start the business here and why we’ve remained here. You know, there are some drawbacks to being in a such a small town with a small business like ours. but there’s a lot of benefits too. Like I said, quality of life, not much traffic, relatively low cost of living. And then New Mexico has a ton of incentives. you know, the state is doing quite well financially, and they reroute that back into the economy through various incentives to support businesses like ours. They’re trying to diversify the economy, leverage the innovation that’s happening at the national laboratories, and we’re kind of in a sweet spot for the type of business that they want to support. And you know, thankfully they have helped us out along the way.

So it’s turned out to be great for other reasons besides just me wanting to stay in Los Alamos. And now my three kids call it home. my wife has a great career here too, and it’s all worked out in the end, but you know, it was a not so obvious path to take.

Wes Ashworth (05:33)

Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s awesome it all worked out there and so many other of those benefits that also contributed to that as you get going. And it’s a beautiful place. I mean, I think anybody’s been to New Mexico would say the same. I think my first time visiting was like, my gosh, like this is such a cool part of the country. it’s a great, great place to be. So now that we understand a little bit of your your story, your journey, kind of how it all came to be, I want to get into the technology itself a little bit. but I’ll keep it at a level where anybody listening can follow it. And so let’s just make this really simple. You know, I’m sitting next to you on an airplane and ask you like what does UbiQD actually make? Like what do you what do you tell me?

Hunter McDaniel (06:04)

Well, we are the leading US manufacturer and technology developer of quantum dots. So, you know, naturally I should explain what those are and I can do that and you know try to keep it in layman’s terms. You know, these are advanced materials that are useful in a handful of different applications involving light. So quantum dot, it’s two words. Maybe start with the second word, dot. That’s just something very, very small, a little speck of material vanishingly small. I like to give the analogy of a golf ball to the earth is about the same size ratio as a quantum dot to a golf ball. So imagine a golf ball sitting on the earth and how big the earth is, and then imagine now that much smaller a quantum dot. So these are particles on the order of a few nanometers, which is kinda hard to wrap your head around. But when you get to that size regime, you start to squeeze the electron. The electron has a characteristic size, it’s very small, but when you have particles of semiconductor that are small enough you start to squeeze that, which changes the energy levels and changes changes the properties, and that’s a quantum effect. So that’s where the quantum word comes and then dot. And that tunability with size gives you a platform for being able to optimize your color. And that’s the property we tend to care about. As you make the particles a little bit bigger, the color might become more red and deeper red, and then eventually into the infrared. Or you make the particles smaller, might become yellow, green, blue, or even ultraviolet.

And we can then tune that in the manufacturing process. It’s kind of amazing, but we can control that size very precisely. And then at the large scale, we’re making billions upon billions of these more or less identical particles that give you this color inherency that you can impart into a handful of different applications. It’s a platform technology for optimizing the color of light.

Wes Ashworth (07:40)

Yeah, it’s super fascinating. And I you know, I think that’s a version people that can actually carry with and sort of stripping it down, makes the rest of this much easier to understand. And, you know, no part of that sort of simple explanation is I’ve heard is you can sort of take that one color light, give it back as another, which you just described there. Like, why is that useful for those that don’t know?

Hunter McDaniel (08:00)

Well the color of light is one of the most important properties of light and it determines what happens when light interacts with materials. Whether that light’s being reflected or maybe absorbed or transmitted, and then how efficiently often just that’s the number one thing is the color of light, also known as the photon energy. Sorry not to get into the jargon too much, but actually Einstein won the Nobel Prize for figuring that out. he figured a lot of things out, but that was the thing that he actually got the Nobel Prize for.

The photon energy, in other words, the color of light is super important. So we shift that color to dial that into a process. And our two main markets are in agriculture and solar, where sunlight is coming down, and then there’s a thing that’s absorbing that light and hopefully converting it with high efficiency, whether that’s a leaf or a solar panel. And then we kind of intercept the light and we shift that color over to make it more sort of received better, more effective when it reaches the thing below.

So make a glowing roof of a greenhouse that shifts the color towards the red, and then we make components or polymers that go into solar panels, depending on the type of solar panel to shift the color into a particular part of the spectrum to make that more efficient too.

Wes Ashworth (09:08)

Yeah, absolutely. Really cool again. And where it starts becoming much more practical, right? Than the word, you know, quantum makes it sound. And I think once you understand the light itself can be changed, you start seeing a lot more possible applications. And you know, part of that, I think the part that starts to feel a little crazy is these particles can behave very differently just because you’re making them slightly bigger or smaller. why should somebody who’s maybe not a scientist care about that?

Hunter McDaniel (09:28)

Well, I mean, everybody needs to eat, everybody needs to power something. And so if we can make those things those those processes more efficient, you’re gonna have better quality and lower cost. So, you know, maybe a sweeter tomato or maybe a cheaper tomato. you know, you’re trying to charge up your car to get to work or to go on a vacation. Well, making those kilowatt hours cheaper, maybe you know, more accessible in general. is gonna be a benefit for everyone. I kinda fundamentally believe that advanced materials unlock these efficiencies and enable us to kind of get to the next you know, technological revolution. We often refer to the different ages of humanity and civilization by the material, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age. Maybe we’re in the semiconductor age. And I think there’s a good reason for that. And advanced materials, particularly nanomaterials, can give you a new vector for being able to just make life more efficient, to make, you know and we’re focused on food and energy, which is very relatable, but yeah, I think it’s relevant for everyone on the planet because we’re all consuming food and energy.

Wes Ashworth (10:26)

Absolutely two two of the most fundamental, you know, important pieces of life as we know it, and affecting those, which is pretty incredible. And so you named the company UbiQD, which is UBI QD, basically ubiquitous quantum dots. what did you see early on that made you believe these things could just eventually show up everywhere? Like what was what was the original belief?

Hunter McDaniel (10:44)

Well, as I was working on my PhD and then during my postdoc, it was really in the weeds on quantum dots and involved in the community and there were so many different applications people had envisioned. The creativity kind of goes wild when you start to think about what’s possible when you can just easily shift the color of light. people had talked about cosmetics and like sunscreen and some medical applications. You know, I was more focused on solar use cases, but there were some exotic kind of high tech ones in televisions and cameras and stuff like that, but there were also really simple ideas that people had. And so, you know, I was thinking about like what’s holding them back? What why aren’t quantum dots actually being used in all these different applications? Like ordinary paint or something, like, let’s make your car glow or a stop sign glow, you know? Why not? Well, as I started to look into it further, I realized there were some fundamental reasons. One, they were expensive to manufacture. And then two, the legacy materials had toxic heavy metals. It just turned out nature has this cruel way of like making the most toxic stuff the easiest. Only material scientists will kinda get that joke, but it’s like the lead and cadmium based stuff, the mercury based stuff. It’s really easy to synthesize, you know, but the really safe stuff is harder. but anyway, and I think it has to do with the reactivity of those elements. But anyway, so that was what was limiting them. The cost and then this toxicity factor. Maybe as a third one, like the durability had to be pretty good to make like a car paint or something. And so with our technology, we were focused on trying to develop a safer compound, a truly non-toxic version. But along the way we achieved much lower cost and got lucky that it was more stable. So I was like, wow, this actually could be widely used and ubiquitous. So when I first started the company, I was just thinking about like, let’s just scale it up, make it available, super low cost, and then we’re gonna unlock all of these really cool applications that people had thought about. I was also looking for a web domain that only had five letters and that was a five letter combination that no one else had thought of buying the web domain for.

Wes Ashworth (12:37)

love that. I love the simplicity of that. That’s awesome. but it’s such a cool name and it like works perfectly. And you know that again, that five letter sort of easy to remember, easy to type in as well too. So that’s awesome. so I know you have this big belief that we’re surrounded by an almost like unbelievable amount of solar energy already. And so I want to talk about that a little bit. So give people a sense of just how much energy is hitting us every day.

Hunter McDaniel (12:57)

It’s hard to imagine, but an area you know, I’m in New Mexico, so I like to think about, you know, areas nearby. There’s different ways to size it up. But if you took Santa Fe County, which is n next door, and then tiles county, those two areas, it’s actually pretty small, a little square on the map with then a smaller square on the map, you know, in New Mexico, has enough solar energy hitting it to power all of everything that the human race does. Transportation, buildings, all of it.

If we just could use that energy more efficiently. Now we can’t convert 100% of sunlight into electricity. The best solar panels are maybe twenty, twenty-five percent. So you could maybe multiply that by a factor of four and just say, well, let’s cover that with solar. Okay, you know, that area I’m taking it as a twenty-four hours and it the sun only shines for maybe eight hours. So you can make it a little bit bigger, but you could power humanity with solar panels. it’s not that unreasonable, actually. Unfortunately, when you start to think about well, if that’s all that we need, like there’s kind of a lot extra. Like there’s quite a bit of energy raining down on the planet.

Hunter McDaniel (13:58)

And unfortunately that’s creating this, you know, existential concern that we have around climate change. We’ve got to not only figure out how to utilize that energy, you know, for ourselves, but also mitigate the consequences of energy being used in not an efficient way. And so yeah, I think, you know, myself and a lot of the folks at the company and our stakeholders are passionate about addressing that climate issue.

Quantum dots can be used in all sorts of really cool applications and we’re exploring a number of those, but where we want to focus is in sunlight.

Wes Ashworth (14:25)

Yeah, yeah, I like that a lot. And just thinking about just kind of the enormity of that and just that, you know, that one small section could in theory power kind of everything. But I think it’s easy to lose sight because we’re always talking about energy scarcity, which there is, but it’s then it’s the challenge to selling less like finding energy, more like figuring out how to use what is already there and use it more efficiently and all of that as well, too, which we’ll get into. But we’ll start here with agriculture first. I think one of the easiest places to actually see this idea in action is agriculture. And so I want to make this technology real. you put these quantum dots into a greenhouse roof, you started to touch on that a little bit. Like talk us through that. Like what changes for the plant underneath? How does that work?

Hunter McDaniel (14:59)

Well, plants have chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is what drives photosynthesis. There’s chlorophyll A and B and the ratio of those can be different depending on the type of crop, and there can be other molecules, but keeping it simple, chlorophyll absorbs sunlight, and then that drives photosynthesis. That’s basically the power supply for plants to grow biomass, to create biomass, basically reconstructing the carbon within the plant. now chlorophyll has an absorption spectrum.

And you can isolate that molecule and look at it and it actually absorbs primarily in the red and the blue, not in the green. Chlorophyll A and B are slightly different, but if you take those together, it gives you a peak of absorption that’s in the red, and then a second peak that’s in the blue. Okay, so first right there you might just assume that plants only want red and blue light. And that’s somewhat true. Actually when the first horticulture lighting came out, they were just combining red LEDs and blue LEDs that have this magenta color. You may have seen that before if you’ve ever been to a grow operation. It kind of hurts your eyes a little bit because you your eyes really crave that green light where the peak of sunlight is. And a lot of people will say that plants don’t absorb green light. That’s partially true. So there’s other biomolecules in plants that can absorb some green light. They do it a lot less efficiently. So green light can be helpful for penetrating deeper in the canopy. deeper into the leaves. long story short though, that red light is the most potent. And plants have evolved to respond to that red light because that’s sort of signaling that you’re later in the season. As the sun sits lower in the sky, you know, think of the sunset. You get these more red and orange colors because the sunlight has to pass through more of the atmosphere. And as you go, you know, through the summer, it’s more of a perpendicular crossing over. But as you go later in the year, it’s more horizontal. So you spend more and more time lower in the atmosphere, the days get shorter.

And that red light triggers the plant into thinking that winter is coming. It’s a signaling. And plants grow fruit and flowers, create seeds as a mechanism to survive winter. So long story short, we’re causing a couple different effects on the plants by giving it more red light. It’s absorbing that light more efficiently because of chlorophyll. It’s triggering the plant into wanting to put on fruit and flowers because that’s a evolutionary response to the seasons.

And then there can be a kind of a morphology effect. The plant is responding to that, you know, thinking I need to sort of stretch out. We’ve seen like larger leaves, which can create a follow-on kind of knock-on effect of more photosynthesis. So you get bushier, bigger plants, and then those become more productive. So ultimately it boosts crop yield. The type of crop can be affected differently. some are not fruiting, like lettuce, leafy greens. so depending on what you’re trying to do or even like cut flowers, potted plants, can have some slightly different targets economically and also the way the plant responds. But it’s really using light to dial in plant responses and particular red light or more on the red side of the spectrum.

Wes Ashworth (17:45)

Yeah, it’s really cool and an easy example to visualize and get behind. And you know, I know as you started to say there, you know, Grower probably doesn’t care much about quantum physics. They care about the yield, quality, cost. tell us a bit more about that. Like where have you seen this actually move the needle? Like what actually has happened when it when it is implemented.

Hunter McDaniel (18:00)

Yeah, and you’re right about the sort of marketing of it. We created a separate brand, Ubigrow, which you can see the connection UbiQD, Ubigrow, we have a similar logo. because growers don’t care about quantum dots or nano or even the materials. They just want to basically see the results on their crop. And actually it is helpful that the product itself is very visual. I mean, your roof is glowing. That resonates with them depending on the type of farmer, maybe talking about the late summer sun.

Or if they’re more kind of technological, they’re using lighting or something, you could say it’s mimicking certain kinds of lighting, but without the electricity, that sort of thing. but we’ve been doing trials, initially it was very academic, small scale things. Some of those we were doing ourselves, some of those with research institutions. And we were seeing like twenty to thirty percent yield improvement in the best cases. Then we started kind of scaling that up, doing more commercial trials.

Going to certain regions or you know where we knew thought leaders were, the Netherlands is known as kind of an epicenter of greenhouse technology. So we did a handful of trials there. they helped us understand some of the other benefits. nutritional value, we reduced waste like six percent in one study. so it it’s not necessarily always about yield improvement. last year we did a study at UC Davis funded by the USDA where they saw 40% yield improvement with lettuce. we did a trial in Hawaii. it was a partnership with CUNIA Farms, one of the largest producers of lettuce and leafy greens in Oahu. and they saw a 30%, I think maybe 27% or so yield improvement. so with some solid data to back up the efficacy of the product. if you go to the website, ubigrow.com, you can find some case studies. we always try to you know create a representative situation. Not every grower, you know. falls in nicely into those boxes but targeting particular crops in particular regions. we’re doing trials on berries in Mexico right now. We’re doing some cherry tomatoes in Morocco. we’ve done work in Spain, South Korea, Japan. it’s really a global market and you know we’re approaching it that way.

Wes Ashworth (19:57)

Yeah, it’s super cool. And you know, I think it it’s always where any technology really has to land eventually is like what actually changed for the customer, what are what are the improvements is really what they care most about. and you talked about this a little bit, sort of this like recipe of sunlight, which is it’s a very intriguing idea, but are we heading towards a world where like, you know, lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, flowers, they kind of get their their own recipe of sunlight and what works best for them, or is or is it a little different than that?

Hunter McDaniel (20:21)

Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean we talk about light recipes. I don’t think we necessarily came up with that, but the lighting guys are trying to create a spectrum from the ground up. Like imagine you’re in a warehouse, it’s dark until you turn the lights on. So they’re creating every photon by design, and that’s where the light recipe really sort of comes into play. Different crops will respond to spectrum differently. and there are lighting products that are made for particular crops. Like Phillips will have a lighting product that’s specific to roses. It looks a little bit more pinkish. It’s so it’s got some white in there, more white and green than you’d normally have. And that seems to promote I think the stem length of the rose, which is where it’s highly valued. And other crops, whether it’s peppers or tomatoes, like there has been a lot of research that’s gone into how do you optimize those particular cultivars when you create a light recipe from the bottom up. Our approach is a little bit different. We kind of we want to avoid electricity.

We want to leverage sunlight as much as possible. So we’re then tailoring sunlight to be more you know, we’re trying to meet in the middle, I guess. The lighting guys are coming from the bottom up, and we’re sort of from the top down. And then, you know, we’re trying to beat them kind of on efficiency, but also mimic the type of spectra that they’re able to create. And so we lean on the research that those guys have done in terms of the ratios of red to blue or whatever, and then try to recreate that from sunlight, because sunlight, for whatever reason, I mean kind of gets into biology. is not the optimal spectrum. It’s somewhat fixed in terms of, you know, it’s a black body spectrum. Plants have a different response and kind of depending on what kind of sort of cycle that you’re in or phase of the crop growth or cultivar, you might want to evolve that spectrum too over time. so yeah, we lean in the research that’s being done in light on light recipes, but from a top down approach.

Wes Ashworth (22:04)

Yeah, it’s again super fascinating to just learn more about and I’ll link both company websites too in the show notes. Encourage everybody to go there, check it out, just look more into it and dig more into it ’cause obviously you think about the impact that can mean on agriculture and you know what affects our daily lives every day and using that sunlight as well too and leveraging that is incredible. so you know, that agriculture application makes the idea really easy to see. And so solar will transition into that, it takes the same concept and moves it into just a much bigger energy market. So when did you realize like if we can make sunlight work better for a plant, maybe we can work we can make it work better for a solar panel too.

Hunter McDaniel (22:41)

Well, it was always kind of a possibility. And there’s different ways you can use quantum dots for solar.

So I won’t get into all of those different use cases. You can actually make a solar cell itself with quantum dots. they can be more of the active electronic layer. This light shifting aspect, you know, looked interesting at first, but it was kind of like, you know, we’re not sure how big the impact could be. it was only until we kind of got approached by several companies in the solar industry about specific problems that they had.

Actually in different parts of the spectrum, one is more on the UV side. UV can degrade a solar panel and we can take that UV light and shift it over to where the panel works effectively. So it’s sort of protecting, but then also boosting at the same time. Another application is in kind of for more on the near infrared side of the spectrum, when you flip the solar panels upside down, they can have some inefficiencies around the spectrum of light that they collect because light kind of goes backwards through the device.

And there you want to kind of shift it away from those bad parts of the spectrum into the infrared. So, you know, it was it was kind of that pull from the industry. I think you know, we didn’t pursue that one like we have been pursuing the agriculture angle. The agriculture application was kind of our I would say our idea, and we sort of reduced it to practice, and then we’ve been leading that push with our own brand. But with the solar one, you know, it’s such an entrenched industry, it’s such a big industry, you need some validation. from those industry leaders to get excited about it and we started seeing that a couple of years ago.

Wes Ashworth (24:04)

Yeah, it’s cool. I love the connection because they’re very different markets, but really built around the same basic idea. And so many successful company stories start with that of like the technology and its original applications and then kind of hearing like the market and then you know, the desire for different applications or different things that’ll work and how they can apply it and then you know, you listen to those and take seriously, especially when that validation’s there and what that becomes. So help me kind of just picture this overall, like with thinking about solar without getting too technical, but what are we sort of changing about the sunlight before the solar panel sees it? Like what’s happening on the solar panel and how does this work?

Hunter McDaniel (24:39)

Well, like I was saying before in terms of the way we approach it, it’s light in, light out. You can use quantum dots to do more exotic interesting things, but we’re just intercepting sunlight, and in some cases on it’s on the backside. So that’s the light that got reflected off the ground in a so-called bifacial. In other cases it’s just directly on the top. You gotta be really careful on the top, because the solar panel is pretty efficient already, and you don’t want to mess with any of the photons that are already being effectively converted. So you’re going into parts of the spectrum where the solar panel is like kind of throwing those away anyway. It’s like, well we’re, you know, our very low efficiency. We want to very efficiently hop in there, absorb light, and then we re-emit it. Okay, so we can’t control the direction of light that we re-emit, but there’s some interesting waveguiding in physics that we had been working on already that we understood pretty well, sort of get lucky with it. But basically the photon that our material emits, it could go up or down. if it goes down, good, right back into the device, right? But if it goes up there’s actually a very high probability that it just gets reflected off the glass surface where this where the air glass interface is. There are a small fraction of photons that still can escape if it’s too vertical, but most of the photons just get reflected and then it comes right back down into the device. That’s true on the backside as well. That physics or material science optics of that reflection helps those photons stay in the device. And then they can bounce around a little bit, but eventually they find the substrate and get converted. So you’re just shifting over the photons and depending on you know, what the specifics of the problem is, whether it’s a silicon device or a thin film solar panel, you’re taking that those underutilized portions of the spectrum and just shifting them over. And most of those photons get converted ultimately.

Wes Ashworth (26:19)

Yeah, it’s really cool again. And as you mentioned too, as we all know, like solar being deployed at enormous scale. from your perspective, like why can even just a small improvement matter so much once you spread it across across millions of panels?

Hunter McDaniel (26:31)

Well it adds up, yeah, because the area is so huge. And this technology is somewhat mature. Solar has been around for a while and it’s become commoditized. So every single, you know, tiny bit of efficiency is highly valued and projects are sold now with pretty small margins. So every little bit seems like a little bit, but it can move the needle on a percentage basis for the margin. There’s other reasons, you know, that’s very competitive.

So if one solar panel manufacturer has a an edge, a slight improvement on durability or on performance, that can give them you know, market share, can give them pricing power. you know, and then there’s there’s i you know, in some cases the backlog, there’s a huge amount of material that’s already been sold. can be multiple years in some cases because of all the AI center data center demand that’s going on right now. There’s big backlogs.

So if you can drop right into existing manufacturing processes and then ultimately when that product gets delivered to the customer, you’re delivering a higher efficiency than when you first sold it, then you can get an upsell. a lot of the contracts are written that way that there’s a few extra cents per kilowatt hour, which ends up being can be hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases in terms of that backlog, by delivering more efficiency than you kind of promised at the beginning or that you had when you sold it a year or two later.

So there’s some economics there that work in our favor and then the growth of the industry has been, you know, a good tailwind there too.

Wes Ashworth (27:53)

Absolutely. And you know, it’s a reminder, like scale can make a small percentage start to look really big once it’s rolled out and those incremental improvements just can become enormous. so you went from sort of early development work with a major solar manufacturer to really a long term supply agreement, you know, of course without getting in anything confidential, like what had to become true before a company that large would really start to trust your material?

Hunter McDaniel (28:15)

Well, it was a process, right? We started off with kind of proof of concept. you know, they actually reached out asking if we had materials that emitted light in this part of the spectrum, which was pretty interesting to us because we had already done a lot of development work in that part of the spectrum for another application. And then when we just dropped it right into their devices, it worked pretty well right out the gate. And it was kinda like, well, if it works this well from the start, you know, we should be able to make it work a lot better.

And so they kind of guided us in terms of like their modeling and what they thought would be the most optimal material and then we made progress and they set out milestones for us along the way where we continued to show progress and improvement. Then you have to kind of prove it at a larger scale. So drop into their high volume manufacturing. You know, they’re not gonna change their tooling for this. They’re you know, they’re not gonna reshuffle their supply chain or something. So we’re gonna have to work together with their existing supply chain, their existing tooling. It needs to work on high volume in the large scale. We actually surprised that as we made the devices bigger, there were some performance benefits. So normally when you scale up, you kind of have compromises. in this case, you know, because of the way that light diffuses in the panel, the bigger you make it, you get kind of a more even, efficient distribution of that light, which is a new idea in solar.

So we kind of we figured some stuff out. we actually taught the initial partner something about how to characterize these devices because it is a different mechanism optically. so they got excited about that. You know, we checked a lot of boxes along the way. And you know, they have they have a big backlog, they have a growing capacity of their own, and they needed us to kind skate to where the puck was gonna be. So they gave us kind of a commitment, if you will, that if we build it they will come. And so we did.

Wes Ashworth (29:57)

Yeah, i love that. is it a Field of Dreams reference there?

Hunter McDaniel (30:00)

Yeah, I think so. Kevin Costner

Wes Ashworth (30:01)

Yeah, I like it. I like it. Uh-huh. Absolutely. no, it’s cool. It’s I appreciate you going through that example. I think it’s always a very different bar, you know, from proving something works in a lab to really taking it up to that level and you know, scaling it up with an industrial customer. So it’s always interesting to see. and you know, the other thing, kinda thinking about durability, like solar panels have to sit outside for decades. You know, how do you how do you prove sort of brand new material will still work, you know, twenty or thirty years from now?

Hunter McDaniel (30:26)

Yeah, I mean that’s a challenge with a handful of our markets where, you know, we’re not that old of a company, and then convincing folks that our materials will survive kind of longer than our company has existed, tough to show data, you know, that really proves it. So we spend a lot of time kind of looking at accelerated aging. We have a lab downstairs that has something like thirty different channels. As you get things to be more stable, you need to wait longer. It runs twenty four seven, so that’s one acceleration. You’re hitting the sample with high intensity light. mostly ultraviolet. That ultraviolet light kind of accelerates the degradation. We’ve studied certain parts of the spectrum can speed things up. And then temperature also just speeds things up. We don’t want to heat it up too much or accelerate it too fast, but so we have this sort of modeling that shows that that’s representative of real world testing, but it’s accelerated. Meanwhile, the customer’s always going to do their own testing and they have their own accelerated aging approaches.

The good news about solar panels compared to say the greenhouse product is it’s typically glass glass. And glass blocks you know all of the elements, if you will. So oxygen and moisture, whatever you know chemistry might be happening gets halted by glass. And they’re having to protect their semiconductor as well. So there’s edge sealing, and we’re just in there right next to their semiconductor. So, you know, fortunately we were able to pass through those tests relatively quickly.

I think the greenhouse film product has been more challenging or just any time you have a polymer, ’cause that’s pretty permeable to oxygen and moisture and that’s usually what you’re battling is you want the light to come in and we’re stable against the light, but when you combine the light with oxygen or moisture, that can drive chemistry oxidation processes or catalysis of some other chemistry. And that’s what you’re that’s what you’re fighting against. And we had to really prove that for the customer as well to be able to advance the relationship.

Wes Ashworth (32:14)

Yeah, absolutely. Cool to see that happen. And yeah, I love I love the problem because yeah, you know, obviously can’t just wait 30 years and come back. There’s a lot of testing and acceleration you have to do and proving that out. so thinking about this technology, obviously it’s incredible, you know, makes so much sense and you could see just the impact that it can create. what’s the biggest reason like this technology isn’t already in every solar panel out there?

Hunter McDaniel (32:34)

Well, it’s a process. it’s not just about performance and it’s not just about durability, it’s also about cost. It’s also about validating at the larger scale. the scale is incredible. So one solar factory can be producing a couple gigawatts a year, you know, which is getting into the hundreds of millions of square feet. And you’ve got to be able to deliver enough material to do all of that.

So the factory one factory isn’t gonna be like, we’re gonna we’re gonna partially flip into the new technology. It’s gonna have to be all in per sort of pixel, if you will, manufacturing pixel. So getting through that qualification is one thing, but the scale required is another. And so we’ve been building a new manufacturing facility here in New Mexico and expanding at our kind of existing facilities to try to meet that demand.

But as you scale and you’re it’s new equipment, it’s new pro at least the terms of the scale of the processes, you’ve got to revalidate things as you go. And that and typically there is still, you know, even though it’s accelerated aging, you do have to do you have to do some waiting. You know, even as fast as you wanna go. So there’s a time scale there and there’s there’s a scale there.

Wes Ashworth (33:42)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And as you said, like, you know, it’s a process, right? You gotta trust the process. It’s cool that demand is there. It’s cool you’re also ramping up, building more manufacturing capability and things like that too. So it’s gonna be exciting to see where it goes. so I’ll transition a little bit. So there’s a another piece of the technology story that to me kind of like even sounds even maybe more promising. It’s like you picked up another technology through Blue Dot where it’s simp in simple terms, like one high energy photon can potentially become almost two useful photons. it sounds a little made up, but tell us about that. Like what what’s actually happening?

Hunter McDaniel (34:12)

Yeah, it’s kind of like magic and at least in various metrics the efficiency goes above a hundred percent. It’s not supposed to be possible. You can’t go above a hundred percent efficiency. This has been a holy grail in material science for a long time in different ways. So there are different words to describe it. In quantum dots, we typically would call it carrier multiplication or multiple exciton generation. It’s basically the simple idea of taking a high energy photon that comes in and then converting it to two. el excited electrons. So normally you can’t get more than one excited state, one excited electron per photon. So if you could do two, then you can sort of double, you know, if you will, at least in terms of the number counting. Energy wise, don’t worry. We’re not going above a hundred percent energy efficiency. But in terms of one to one, you start to get, you know, one to two. So you can get up to two hundred percent. In some of these applications it can go above two hundred percent in terms of that, the way you’re counting.

In this case, this technology was developed at University of Washington, and they’re referring to it as quantum cutting. Quantum cutting is similar. They’re all kind of similar, these different buzzwords, but quantum cutting is where you’re taking one high energy photon, you’re converting it to two lower energy photons. And then that fits really well with what I was talking about before. We’re taking photons and we’re converting them into photons.

If you’re gonna go down in energy anyway, you might as well take that excess energy and convert it to another photon. And so they had demonstrated quantum yields, as we call it, which is photon to photon ratio, of up to about 190% with this new class of materials. Still nanocrystals, different semiconductors from what we’re doing, but they had demonstrated this in the lab and then they had spun it out into a company. The company had pursued they kind of pivoted it into glass coatings. and not nanocrystals. And I think they had some challenges in the industry with being able to accept this coating on the glass. you know, they’re very fixated on their existing tooling processes, and I think that was kind of a challenge. So when we got involved, we said let’s pivot it back to the nanocrystal version, because we’ve already developed ways to put this into polymers and we’ve done we have figured out some physics in terms of those optics I was talking about before, where we can really harvest a lot of those photons. If we keep it photon into photon out, then I think we could really you know sort of turn it back around to being what the industry needs. So we’re excited about that. I think it gives us an opportunity, particularly in certain kinds of solar cells, to double the efficiency benefit we can bring to those solar panels. So, you know, that obviously makes it roughly twice as useful for the customer. And yeah, a lot of a lot of excitement around the blue dot technology from University of Washington.

Wes Ashworth (36:44)

Absolutely very exciting. And obviously you can you know see the real world sort of impact on solar and beyond, you know, upside extremely fascinating. and I think you know this kind of brings us to the part of the story. I the person I find like maybe most interesting, at you know, at some point this fascinating science has to become something you can manufacture repeatedly and affordably. at what point did you realize like I’m not just running an R&D company anymore, I’m building a manufacturing company. Like what was that moment?

Hunter McDaniel (37:10)

That was probably earlier this year. I mean, just the logistics of actually, you know, building something that large. you know, was a couple of months ago the team was talking about how we had a hundred and fifty ton crane on site to be able to lift some equipment off of a truck. I was like, Hundred and fifty tons? Like I can’t wrap my head around how much weight that is. they’re like, that’s nothing. We’ve got a three hundred ton crane coming in a couple of months for this other piece of equipment. And so the problems really change. Like the, you know, safety, compliance, the types of people that you need to recruit to your company, the workforce evolves. and it yeah, I mean running an R&D thing business is one thing. managing PhDs and, you know, following a research program. but you know, scaling it up and manufacturing and safety compliance, import export, supply chain, you know, very different set of problems. you know, so we’ve been working at that I think it really hit home earlier this year as we were like well underway building the facility.

Wes Ashworth (38:01)

Yeah, it’s such a huge identity shift for a business, but it’s so cool to see it happen. And, you know, that the company needed at that stage looks very different from the company that you started, I’m sure. but so it’s fun to watch that growth. what’s harder, you know, about going from, you know, making a great batch in the lab to making the same thing over and over at industrial scale.

Hunter McDaniel (38:19)

Yeah, I mean it’s the scale of it, just how do you handle those large volumes of solvents and precursors you know, and purchase those kind of quantities. You know, when you’re a small scale, you’re buying from kind of research grade suppliers, small little, you know, containers, and you know, as you try to scale up you’re buying more and more of those containers, or maybe they’ve got a larger container, but eventually you need to get barrels and you need a consistent supply. You’ve got to store those safely on site.

You know, all of that the logistics becomes a lot harder. Certain aspects of the scale up, you know, that are specific to our process would include things like the heating rate, the cooling rate. You know, when you’re doing a very small scale, it’s a glass, little glass reactor, and you’re just heating it with like a little heating mantle. when you get to a larger scale, the glass has risk. If it cracks, it could catastrophically fail. You can’t efficiently heat by just like wrapping, you know, d warmth around. You have to actually have like heat transfer fluids that are coming from a actual heating cooling system. And then the cooling, we used to just r like lower the mantle and maybe even blow some air on it and it would cool down. But that doesn’t work anymore. It’s way too slow. So now you’ve got to actively cool, circulate that. This the mixing, you know, and just the scale of it creates new hazards. So you’ve got to be very careful around all your engineering controls to make sure that you do it safely.

Wes Ashworth (39:35)

Yeah, no easy feat, you know, so much complexity that goes into that. And it’s incredible that you’ve gone down that path. I’m always amazed at anybody that gets to that level. you know, we’ll kind of wrap up with a couple questions here. And I know this whole journey, as we talked about, started started with science coming out of a national lab. Like, where do great technologies still get lost between the lab and the factory?

Hunter McDaniel (39:54)

Well, you know, the priorities are different for an academic researcher or even at a national laboratory. they’re thinking about publications and trying to go for the next exciting idea. There’s a big gap there between proof of concept, you know, actually having this idea and showing that it’s possible to make something, and then really reducing it to practice in a practical way, something that could be productized, hits the right price points, or drops into an existing supply chain.

That industrialization, commercialization, engineering, maybe if you want to call it that, is somewhat incremental. So from an academic, like a researcher’s perspective, they’re not as excited about that part. They want to focus on like that proof of concept where they can get the nature of science paper. You’re getting lower impact publications, and those grant agencies might be less excited. So there’s less incentives in place to do that kind of reducing to practice work, and I think that’s where a lot of technologies get lost.

You know, depending on the on the type of institution, maybe they don’t even care about publications. It can be very programmatic work. At like at Los Alamos National Laboratory, you know, there’s a lot of nuclear science that’s happening and very classified, you know, national security type stuff. They’re not allowed to go publish what they’re doing.

And in and kind of it gets you know, some of the innovations just never make it out. Like we never even know that happened because of just the nature of the type of research that was going on.

There may have been some civilian applications along the way for some of the classified research that was happening. And that’s just something that we’re more familiar with being from Los Alamos. But yeah, I think it’s really more in the kind of industrialization part. That’s where the companies come in, but there’s a lot of R&D that still needs to happen. So there can be a funding gap there. Investors don’t like to take technology risk. They’ll take market risk. They’ll take execution risk. And so there can be a funding gap to fill in that, you know, the development that has to happen.

Wes Ashworth (41:38)

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, obviously we produce so much extraordinary science in this country, but turning enough of it into companies and truly kind of getting it to industrialization, whole different whole different story, whole different ball of wax there. But so I wanna finish where the company name itself started with this idea that the technology eventually becomes common enough that we stop thinking about how unusual it once was. So you name the company around the idea that quantum dots could become ubiquitous, we talked about that, but let’s fast forward a little bit, you know, ten years from now or beyond, like what would ubiquitous actually look like and what would what makes you believe that we’ll get there?

Hunter McDaniel (42:14)

Well, you know, in these applications we’ve been talking about today, those are huge scale. And as we’ve scaled the manufacturing, costs have come down. They’re also somewhat aggressive in terms of the performance and the durability. Solving those issues, bringing costs more down and making things more durable unlocks many other applications. You know, I was only half joking when I talked about car paint or, you know, fluorescent road signs, road markings, cosmetics, there are many, many applications where being able to tune light, make a unique optical feature, you know, just making colors that you can’t access otherwise can be widely used. So I don’t I think we’ll take it for granted. we won’t necessarily be talking about like the fact that there’s quantum dots, you know, in your whatever, credit card, like on your the bumper to your car, on your golf ball, whatever it might be. We won’t necessarily I mean, maybe there’d be some marketing gurus that really latch onto that.

But it’ll be there hidden, maybe visible, making things, you know, more colorful, maybe more safe, more visible, more secure in some cases. And that’ll be enabled by the scale that we’re bringing with these, you know, beachhead markets, these very large, particularly agriculture application. You know, in some places greenhouses are somewhat ubiquitous, like the Netherlands, but depending on where you live, you might not have seen one today. but there are these other use cases, you know, that may be in your nail posh. you know.

It may be in your pocket. And, you know, maybe not too far away. We’re actually working with a handful of companies on these some of these applications I just mentioned. and it drops right in, but becomes uniquely enabled by the scale that we’re bringing from these sunlight optimization applications.

Wes Ashworth (43:48)

Yeah, absolutely. It’s incredible stuff and it you know, I think a hopeful place to end because it’s we’re still very early in figuring out what people can do with this. So it’ll be exciting really to see the future and how that unfolds. But Hunter, this was just a ton of fun. I think what I love about the story is that something that starts with, you know, incredibly sophisticated science becomes pretty simple when you get to the outcome. You make sunlight more useful. whether that’s helping a plant use light better, helping a solar panel use it better.

We’re finding an application nobody has thought of yet. There’s still a lot here that feels like it’s just getting started. For everybody listening, you can learn more about Hunter and the team at UbiQD by checking the show notes. I’ll include some important links there. Thank you for tuning into the show as always. Please be sure to subscribe, leave us a rating, and follow us on socials. And with that, we will see you next time.