MSU Research Foundation Podcast
The MSU Research Foundation Podcast takes you behind the scenes of research and entrepreneurship within Michigan State University's ecosystem. Discover how ideas create impact, with stories from dedicated researchers, ambitious entrepreneurs, and the innovators shaping Michigan's future. From breakthrough discoveries to startup journeys, explore how the MSU Research Foundation helps fuel innovation and economic growth across the state.
MSU Research Foundation Podcast
Advancing Grid-Scale Storage with Dr. Tom Guarr
In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tom Guarr, founder and CTO of Jolt Energy Storage Technologies, a Michigan-based startup developing organic compounds for redox flow batteries. Tom shares his journey from academia to industry—first leaving a tenured faculty role to join Gentex, where he helped develop dimmable windows for the Boeing 787, then returning to research at the MSU Bioeconomy Institute to pursue electrochemical innovation.
We explore how Jolt pivoted from lithium-ion battery safety to large-scale, sustainable energy storage. Tom explains why flow batteries are well suited for the grid, how organic chemistry can reduce reliance on rare earth elements, and how Michigan’s startup ecosystem has supported the company’s growth. He also discusses partnerships with national labs like Argonne and NREL, and what it will take to bring Jolt’s prototype system online by the end of the year.
Host: David Washburn
Guests: Dr. Tom Guarr (CTO, Jolt Energy Storage Technologies)
Producers: Jenna McNamara and Doug Snitgen
Music: "Devil on Your Shoulder" by Will Harrison, licensed via Epidemic Sound
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Welcome to the MSU Research Foundation podcast. Today, I spoke with Dr. Tom Guarr, who is founder and CTO of Jolt Energy Storage Technologies. Jolt is developing organic compounds for redox flow batteries that enable cost-effective, large-scale energy storage for renewable energy goods. I hope you like the conversation. We had a great time together. Jolt Energy Storage Technologies is a Holland-based, Holland, Michigan-based company founded in 2014. The company's focused on developing organic compounds for redox flow batteries, and my guest today is Tom Guarr, who is the founder of Jolt Energy and currently serves as a CTO.
David Washburn:Welcome, Tom, thank you, it's great to be here. Well, we're very excited to have you here. In full disclosure for the listeners, please know that Jolt Energy is a portfolio company of the MSU Research Foundation. Our venture subsidiary company has made investments in Jolt, and this is designed to be a free-flowing conversation and should not be construed as legal or investment advice. With that disclosure out of the way, Tom, it's great to have you here. Thanks for coming over. There's a lot to get into here, so I wondered if we could just start off with your background. Where are you from, what did you study and how did you arrive to become an entrepreneur commercializing organic compounds for redox flow batteries?
Dr. Tom Guarr:Well, it was a long road. I grew up in Kansas, outside of Kansas City, went to a small college in Kansas, decided to break free and went to graduate school at University of Rochester in upstate New York. Great experience there. My project was basically inorganic photochemistry, did a little bit of work on trying to do solar water splitting and then moved on to do a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology. Wanted to try something a little bit different, so I got into electrochemistry. From there I took an academic position at University of Kentucky and was there for seven or eight years. I'm one of those strange guys that got tenure and then decided to leave this secure, nice, cushy, fun role and go to work at a relatively small company that was pretty risky at the time and that was a company called Gentex here in Michigan. At the time they were developing electrochromic rear view mirrors for cars, and those are the mirrors that automatically dim, uh, when they sense bright lights behind you. Yeah, yeah, and your car may well have one there.
Dr. Tom Guarr:They're in about, uh, I think they're up to almost half of domestic produced vehicles. Uh, millions and millions sold worldwide every year.
David Washburn:That's awesome.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Um, it allowed me to sort of marry my two passions, which were photochemistry and electrochemistry, and I went there to help work on the mirror technology, which has to be both electrochemically stable and photochemically stable. But I also wanted to see if we could make dimmable windows, electrochromic windows. In that case, it was a very difficult challenge to make these organic compounds stable to UV radiation. I mean, if you take your brightly colored T-shirt and you stick it out in the sun for a year, it does not look very good after that. And we needed these things to be stable for 20 years or more and I took it as a very important challenge that can we do it for organic compounds? And when I took the job I wasn't sure, and actually probably five years into the job I wasn't sure. But we had a great team there and we developed. My last project at Gentex was developing the dimmable windows for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
David Washburn:Wow.
Dr. Tom Guarr:And if you've flown on a Dreamliner, maybe you've played with those windows that dim from fully transparent down to 0.01% or less white light transmission. They're really cool and there's a lot of technology in those simple windows. Oh, that's so cool.
David Washburn:How long was your tenure at Gentex?
Dr. Tom Guarr:I was there, I think a little over 18 years. Oh, wow, Okay.
David Washburn:And they're still thriving and doing well in West Michigan.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, more than $2 billion in annual sales now. What a great story, yeah. And then I made another unusual decision to leave you know an executive level position. I was vice president at Gentex and I left that to go to Michigan State.
David Washburn:Okay, back to the academy.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, but specifically at a site in Holland, Michigan, the MSU Bioeconomy Institute, and I took that role. They offered me that role even though they knew I wasn't going to do anything biological, but they gave me the freedom to work on whatever we wanted. Started working on organic chemistry with an eye to electric chemistry. Developed a series of compounds molecular compounds, that looked like they could be used to stabilize lithium ion batteries and keep them from blowing up in your pocket, which is a good thing. That's important.
David Washburn:Yeah.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Highly desirable.
Dr. Tom Guarr:And that's when we formed Jolt and we were going to commercialize these materials, sometimes called redox shuttles, to prevent overcharging in lithium ion batteries. And it was technically successful. We could do it, but commercially it looked like it was not going to be very successful, with the reason being that the competition was really a software-based battery management system which was getting better and cheaper. At the same time, people were looking to go to faster charge rates, which meant they needed more of our compound, which made our solution more expensive. So we saw that market running away from us. But I also realized that because of the development work we had done on that chemistry, we were halfway to an all-organic battery okay, and I happen to have another project in the lab working on the other half and we married those together. Uh pulled a couple of different twists to make ours cheaper and better and uh did the pivot at jolt to an all organic flow battery got it got it.
David Washburn:Uh, so the company's created in 2014. The pivot is probably what? 2016-ish, 2017? Probably 2017.
Dr. Tom Guarr:2017. Yeah.
David Washburn:Okay, Very good. And then somehow, along the way, you started looking at the power grid and specifically thinking about the work that you had done, how, how it could apply to to grid storage Is that is?
Dr. Tom Guarr:that fair. Yes, yes, uh. Flow batteries become more practical when they're big, yeah, um, and they they allow the opportunity to separate power and energy, uh, which makes them very scalable.
David Washburn:Is that market in your mind, still a sort of vibrant and opportunistic market, from where you view it today, versus maybe how you viewed it five years ago? Do all the signals seem to be pointing in the same direction as they were?
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, if anything more strongly. You know, with the growth in AI and data centers and electric vehicles and the demand for electrical power is increasing. Also there's a push for renewables and because renewables aren't an on-demand source, they're intermittent, you need storage and the Department of Energy has realized that and they've funded it pretty strongly.
David Washburn:Good, so you've done some of that work, and then some of the work happened at MSU, and so you took a license to some of the technology that was related to your work at MSU and put that into the company. What are you building today specifically? Are you building batteries, or is it mostly just the compounds, or what is the sort of desired, sort of outcome? You know from the work that's going on today?
Dr. Tom Guarr:and where will it?
David Washburn:live, I guess.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Um, that's, uh that, that's a lot to answer right there. Um, but we're focused on the chemistry. Okay, um, for, uh, the utility industry, they need things that last a long time.
David Washburn:Got it.
Dr. Tom Guarr:And so we have to make sure that we have very stable chemistry. We have to make sure, uh, that it's very inexpensive. Uh-huh, we have to make sure that it's very inexpensive and we have to make sure that it's safe, environmentally friendly. All those things, and to check all those boxes and, more importantly, to test and make sure that you can verify that you've met all these goals takes a while. We are building batteries, but we're building small batteries, uh, lab level batteries. Uh, we are scaling up and hope to have a larger system available by the end of the year.
David Washburn:Fantastic, fantastic and. And are you you building the larger sales uh system or is it uh uh? You know some partners that you're working with along the way.
Dr. Tom Guarr:So we looked into designing our own system, but we decided to adapt a current vanadium ion flow battery which is commercially available Okay, is commercially available. Okay, um, and we're able to, um, uh, adapt that system to use our chemistry, which we want to demonstrate, uh, both just as an easy, cheap route to scale up our chemistry, but also as a good, uh, beachhead market for us if we can go go to existing vanadium ion flow battery installations and say you know, we can double your power density, double your energy density, just try this. We think that might be a good beachhead market, oh, that sounds fantastic.
David Washburn:And then, in the terms of the grid energy storage sort of sector, if you will, you're primarily in the kind of electrochemical space, but there are other mechanisms for doing this storage. So there's kind of electrical storage hydrogen and mechanical but you're primarily focused in the kind of flow battery piece of the electrical chemical side. Is that fair enough?
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, I think it's one of those cases where there's not going to be a single solution.
David Washburn:Yep, okay.
Dr. Tom Guarr:You know, if you happen to live near a body of water and a big hill, you can do pumped hydro and it's very efficient, yep, high capital costs but great efficiency after that. Certain other areas geographically might favor other technologies, but we hope to be a piece of the puzzle.
David Washburn:And many of these products or solutions in the sort of energy storage space. They measure sort of discharge time and kind of system power ratings. As I have come to understand it, are those the measures that you look at as you're building out your platform and your compounds.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, those are certainly some of the key parameters. The discharge time is partly the amount of material in your storage tank in a flow battery, but it's also determined by the durability of your system. Determined by the durability of your system. And so we have developed chemistry where we lose a few percent a year in the fully charged state. And think about that If you had a battery that lost 3% a year when it's fully charged, that would be a pretty decent battery for a lot of applications. And we actually think that 3% is due to impurities that we can get rid of oh so uh, uh and, and so energy density is important.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Um, how much energy can we store in a leader solution? Um, and power density, how quickly we can get it out of there.
David Washburn:Yeah.
Dr. Tom Guarr:It is important. We're working with a group at MSU Chemical Engineering, David Hickey's group doing some kinetic studies for us. We're finding that our systems are incredibly good at moving electrons in and out very, very rapidly. I mean, these things are faster than anything I've ever seen in the literature, and so we think our power density is going to be quite high when we optimize everything.
David Washburn:Now there have been others in this industry who would argue that organics will never work, and so I'm just curious to that question.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Why organic? Well, I've heard that criticism a lot, and organics offer a lot of flexibility. You can. You know, organic chemists are very resourceful, they can alter the molecular structure to get the desired properties. But you're right, a lot of people don't believe that organics are stable enough for this kind of demanding application. And I point to two different things. One is in the light emitting diode technology. Way back, all light emitting diodes were inorganic systems. All light emitting diodes were inorganic systems and it was believed that organics, even though they were starting to be researched in academia, they would never, ever be stable enough. Well now, the display on your phone is probably an organic light emitting diode, okay, yeah you can go buy uh OLED TVs at the corner electronic store.
David Washburn:Nice.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, yeah, they offer, you know, a wide range of colors, more vibrancy. Uh, you know it, they're incredible. Um, so that's one thing, uh, that, I think, proves that organic systems can be stabilized to last in the rigors of the real world. The other is actually my experience at Gentex, where probably 95% of the patents and papers when I started were on inorganic electrochromic devices, primarily tungsten oxide, and we wanted to see if organics would work. Well, they did, and now probably 98, 99% of the electrochromic devices out in the field are organic devices. Um, so it can be done.
David Washburn:Uh, the company today, uh, is based in Holland, Michigan, which is a beautiful part of the world. Um, how, how many, how many people are in the organization, and can you tell me anything more about the company? Uh, that, uh.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, so we currently lease a lab in the MSU Bioeconomy Institute and, in fact, we just took over a second lab. Because we're growing, we're now eight full-time employees. Great, if I can count, I think that's four PhDs and then several other technical people and business person. We did a Series A last year. Congratulations, thank you. Yeah, we raised $4.2 million. Our lead investor was, in fact, Gentex, where I used to work, yeah, but MSU Red Cedar Ventures was also a partner in that and they were a supporter early on, so we've been very grateful for their support.
David Washburn:Yeah, talk about the kind of West Michigan ecosystem, because I know Holland and certainly Grand Rapids have put a number of things together to try to encourage entrepreneurship and provide resources for for entrepreneurs. And and um, uh, we do the same here in in the Greater Lansing area and um, uh, I guess, has the state of Michigan, been good for you all to launch and grow your company you all to launch and grow your company.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, it's, it's been great.
David Washburn:Um, there's an organization on uh, the lake shore called Lake shore Advantage.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Um and uh. They were very helpful to us early on. Um, and in fact, my co-founder and I met on a bus to Argonne National Lab on a trip that was sponsored by Lakeshore Advantage. I was going as a representative at Gentex, he was going as a representative at JCI. Never met him before we started talking on the bus, found out he's also from Kansas originally, we both like cars, we're both gear heads, and then we started talking science and technology and, you know, shortly thereafter we formed a company.
David Washburn:What a small world, yeah.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, so, so, uh, I think the the ecosystem here in Michigan is great. Um, you know, we've gotten a add on to an SBR grant um from the MEDC. Yeah, we're taking advantage of um MEDC funding for uh interns, uh this summer. Actually, we have one now this spring and then we're adding another uh for the summer. Yeah, so it's been great and the culture, the local culture, I think, is really entrepreneurial in spirit and there's tons of new high-tech jobs moving in. It's really been a very positive place to be.
David Washburn:Great. I wondered if you could also talk about some of your partners along the way in terms of commercializing organic chemistry. You've had some partners. You've gone through an accelerator program at Argonne which was not easy to get into. You've worked with the premier national energy lab, NREL, on programs and projects. Those are not trivial partners or accomplishments for you all. I mean, these are sort of world-class organizations. So, um, tell me about the Argonne Accelerator program.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, um, so that that was great fun. Uh, it's called Chain Reaction Innovations, uh, and it's a program for small companies, startups, that allows them to work with Argonne, principal investigator, inside Argonne Lab and help develop the company's technology. Argonne does not take an equity stake and they provide salary, a stipend for the representative from the small company and they provide money to carry out the work at Argonne. So it's a great program. Now exists that, I think, four different national labs.
Dr. Tom Guarr:The downside for my particular experience was that was COVID, um, right, and so it hit in the middle of the time I was supposed to be there. Um, uh, Argonne was, uh, not occupying a full capacity. I think they actually went down to 20 or 25 percent, yeah, staffing levels and I wasn't on the list, understandably, and so it kind of short-circuited some of the progress that we had made, right, but it's still a great program and I highly recommend it to anyone. And NREL has one, Berkeley has one, Oak Ridge has one. Yep, uh, nrel has one, berkeley has one, oak Ridge has one. Um, the the NREL experience was also uh, fantastic, uh, that was on. Uh, we won, uh, uh, I think there were three or four, three winners that year, uh, from 80 companies that were picked. The Shell Game Changer program it is sponsored by Shell Oil and they pay for research to be done at NREL and we're still impacted somewhat by COVID. It by COVID.
David Washburn:Yeah.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Uh, but uh, uh, it was a great program. Uh, we got a lot done at NREL. Uh, this was not one where I was in residence, so at Argonne I was in residence NREL Uh we just kept in touch virtually, yeah, uh, but uh, we actually continued that one with our own funding, uh, because it was so successful.
David Washburn:Yeah, Well, I think what I like about those stories you know you have Argonne and NREL, two you know, really important US research assets, and the work that you've done, it's sort of the combination of the sort of scientific collaboration and it's sort of the combination of the sort of scientific collaboration. But then also both of these very much have a commercialization aspect to them, which I just think is absolutely critical. I mean, these things bringing them out of a laboratory and into the real world, it's a heavy lift in a lot of cases. And so these, these programs, uh, the sort of scientific collaboration, the access to the sort of the partnership, uh capital or other resources to help pay for science, I think these are just just really really important um, uh collaborations and uh, so congratulations to you all for uh all all of your accomplishments.
David Washburn:With those I wanted to sort of tidy up with, you know, a conversation is a real opportunity to sort of reduce our reliance on rare earth minerals and that some of these chemistries can be sort of domestically sourced over the long run. And I just wondered if you could comment on that a little bit more. I'm just sort of paraphrasing from some of the homework I did prior to our conversation, but it certainly looks, it seems, like there's some advantages there, opportunities there.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Yeah, I think you're right. Opportunities there. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that there are some uh, you know, with lithium ion um uh. There there are some materials issues, uh, specifically uh cobalt and manganese, I think. Still 70% of the world's uh? Um cobalt comes from mines in the Congo, Republic of Congo and typically mined by 10 and 12-year-old kids. So that's a less than perfect situation. Obviously, in the flow battery world, vanadium is the front runner and it's not a rare earth, but it's pretty scarce and it's used in other industries one making high strength steel or higher strength steel, typically for construction in earthquake prone regions. So fairly important as a result, vanadium, because of its scarcity and its other uses, it's in relatively short supply. The prices tend to be high and they're very volatile In our case. One of my favorite quotes is you know, if you want to make something as cheap as dirt, you make it from dirt.
Dr. Tom Guarr:There you go and that's kind of what we're trying to do. Maybe glorified dirt, but you know, organic compounds are everywhere. There's a lot of waste products in the petroleum industry that we think we can utilize to make our specifically designed compounds that will then be able to be used over and over and over and over again, instead of just burning them in an internal combustion engine, over and over and over and over again, instead of just burning them in an internal combustion engine. So, even though a lot of the materials that we're using at this prototype stage, the raw materials come from India and China.
David Washburn:we think there's an opportunity for an all-domestic supply chain. Great Thanks for that. So the next six months I think you have written that you are working on a prototype to hopefully deliver by the end of the calendar year of 2025.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Can you talk about that briefly? Yeah, that was the goal, and you know it's proven to be a do science. There are always hiccups that you don't expect. Even though you try and account for them and plan for them, there's always something out of left field. So we will have a prototype system. It may not be as large as we had hoped, but it's one. The key thing for us is we want to be able to generate significant data in a sort of real world system, even if it's relatively small in scale, but a real world system that we can then use to justify and optimize. So we still have to get there by the end of the year.
David Washburn:Awesome. Well, my guest today has been Dr. Tom Guarr. He is the founder and CTO of Jolt Energy Storage Technologies out of Holland, Michigan. What is the URL for your company?
Dr. Tom Guarr:Holland, Michigan. What is the URL for your company? It's www. jolt-energy. com.
David Washburn:And that's a dash, not an underscore. Okay, Tom, thank you so much for being here. Oh, it's been a pleasure.
Dr. Tom Guarr:Thank you, Dave for having me you.
