Luis Chavez is the CEO and founder of Hydrosonics, a startup building electrolysis technologies that enable small-scale and affordable on-site hydrogen production fully integrated with renewable electricity. Hydrosonics’ products are unlocking hydrogen as the fuel of the green future.
What led you to start Hydrosonics?
I grew up in Juarez, Mexico during the 2000s, the most violent era in its history. In 2011, I came to the U.S. and completed my bachelor’s and PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas, El Paso, where I studied different material systems and manufacturing techniques.
At first, my goal was to become an academic—to push the boundaries of technology and have a direct impact on students. As a Latino, it can be very difficult to find role models in higher education in STEM, and I wanted to be one of those role models. Then, my advisor recommended I work at one of the national labs because they can open doors to opportunities in academia and are filled with world-class researchers. I joined Los Alamos National Laboratory, first as a summer intern, and then as a postdoctoral researcher. At Los Alamos, I started to see how hydrogen could change everything and began working on the technology that would eventually become Hydrosonics.
WIth climate change as the biggest threat facing our world today, hydrogen is the most promising technology area to work in. If we want to achieve a truly decarbonized and sustainable future, we need to make hydrogen accessible and economical. I started Hydrosonics because I believe the electrolyzer technology we are developing has the potential to unlock a sustainable, affordable, and equitable future that is powered by hydrogen.
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How do you think your experience in a national lab prepared you for entrepreneurship?
My experience at Los Alamos played a crucial role in my decision to start Hydrosonics. I had the unique opportunity to work closely with—and be mentored by—some of the brightest minds in the world. The training I received was invaluable to developing and validating our electrolysis technologies.
Los Alamos was where I started to realize that my work could be more than just research papers about very interesting science. I realized that I wanted to have an impact in the real world. Hydrosonics is how I’m doing that.
I am not sure I would encourage all researchers to start building companies. Building a company isn’t for everyone. However, I would encourage all researchers to push the boundaries even more—to think about where their ideas, inventions, and technologies could have the most impact, and work hard to achieve that.
What is the state of the hydrogen ecosystem today?
Most hydrogen developers are building gigawatt-scale plants—producing a lot of hydrogen—to drive down costs. Because of their size, these projects are deployed in a few centralized locations—California, Houston, Saudi Arabia—where there is a lot of money and excitement about building a sustainable economy with hydrogen.
The current model requires huge investments in new infrastructure so the hydrogen can be exported—usually to faraway locations. It also requires developing dedicated facilities to generate both renewable and non-renewable energy for powering these hydrogen production sites. Hydrogen developers are creating an entire energy ecosystem to generate and sell hydrogen. The current approach to the new hydrogen economy is expensive, resource intensive, and polluting. In the end, it may not even help us achieve our decarbonization goals, and its benefits are unlikely to extend to other countries or even most of the United States.
Hydrogen can be the bridge to a decarbonized future. But we need to change how we approach its production and usage. Every year billions of dollars worth of solar and wind energy is wasted because of curtailment—when renewables flood the energy grid during times of low demand. Our technology and approach allow us to deploy small-scale electrolysis and capture curtailed renewable energy and turn it into hydrogen—for less. Batteries and other energy storage technologies will still have an important role to play. But our distributed approach to hydrogen will help unlock decarbonization of the hardest to abate sectors: long-haul transport, industrial heating, and dispatchable power.
Why is an electrolyzer and what makes Hydrosonics’ different?
There are two main electrolysis technologies: polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) and alkaline electrolysis.
PEM electrolysis, which relies on precious metals and forever chemicals, is expensive. Its main advantage is the ability to efficiently capture renewable electricity, with the flexibility to turn on and off as needed to match energy generation. However, the high cost makes it financially challenging to utilize fully. The expense also means the opportunity cost of turning off a PEM electrolyzer is prohibitively high.
Alkaline electrolysis is the majority of global electrolysis capacity, and it has been proven reliable, robust, and cost-effective over decades of use in the industry. But it lacks flexibility. It doesn’t perform well when frequently turned on and off, or when it’s required to produce higher rates of hydrogen. Additionally, if it is nearly turned off, it can dangerously blend hydrogen and oxygen. These limitations prevent alkaline electrolysis from effectively capturing excess renewable electricity.
Hydrosonics uses acoustics to control the chemistry of alkaline electrolysis electrodes. This gives us an ability to capture renewable electricity the way PEM does, while also availing us of the benefits of alkaline electrolysis. It’s a breakthrough in electrolysis because it enables the best of both systems.
How does hydrogen fit into the future renewable energy ecosystem?
Bill Gates recently wrote there are no silver bullets with climate change, but that hydrogen is pretty darn close. Hydrogen is not competing against any other renewable resources or technologies. It’s actually a complementary solution.
The exciting thing about hydrogen is that you can convert it into different types of energy. You can use it to turn it back into electricity, but you can also use it as a fuel. There is hope that it can replace fossil fuels almost anywhere and help take excess renewables off the grid. Hydrogen fits into the current energy ecosystem, and it acts as an enabler for more renewables to come online. Hydrogen could enable a virtuous cycle that would greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The challenge is just going to be making it affordable and accessible. That’s what Hydrosonics aims to solve.
What is the current status of Hydrosonics’ electrolyzer and what’s next?
We are up to a 1 cm² cell proven inside the lab and are in the process of showing now that it scales up to 100 cm².
The current trajectory for the company is to have pilots by the end of the year. We’re looking at ideally three pilots where we’re going to deploy our electrolyzer. We’ll directly plug it into the grid or a solar deployment to show it works under real-world conditions. We’re scaling up from here.
That’s what the next six months look like. For now, it’s only me and another engineer. As soon as we hit a couple of milestones that we’re expecting to deliver by the end of August, then we’ll start hiring. I’d love to hire four full-time engineers by the end of the year.
What are some key benefits of launching with a venture studio?
As a technical founder, I think the pitch of a venture studio is pretty clear. With a venture studio, I don’t need to go and hire an accountant as there’s someone on-site who does that for me. I don’t need to go and find a lawyer, they will help me figure that out. I think especially for technical founders, it’s not about whether you can figure out how to do something. It’s about the time you’re using to figure out how to do that instead of focusing on building the technology.
Do you see your electrolyzer as a way to unlock energy abundance in developing nations?
I don’t think about targeting specific countries. But I do think about making sure that what we’re building will be able to hit those very low costs so that everyone has access to them. I was mapping out what each market can pay for hydrogen. If you look at what any other technology can do in an ideal world, they’re probably looking at $5 per kg. Ideally, half of the potential market in the next ten years and beyond will never pay that, which means there’s a huge bottom of the market.
In everything related to hydrogen, it’s all about cost. If you want to tap into any big market, you need to make very cheap hydrogen. Because we’re capturing curtailed electricity, we have a unique position to offer that very cheap hydrogen. So it’s the technology enabling us to go after that market, but it’s also our approach to targeting that market that will differentiate us.
In an ideal world we’re probably looking at deploying to those lower-margin economies in about six to eight years from now.
What’s your long term vision for Hydrosonics?
When I talk to my investors, I tell them this is not a quick-return company. We’re not going to license the technology to other companies. I believe we will be the biggest hydrogen company, but obviously that’s not going to happen overnight. That’s the first thing I tell them: I am in this for the long haul.
Looking past that, there are other impacts I want to have. Water and food security are very big problem areas that I’d like to help solve someday as well—but only after we figure out the hydrogen economy.
At the same time, I also want to help Latino founders do difficult things. I think there are a lot of Latino founders, especially in fintech and small business. However when it comes to building a huge company—the next NVIDIA, Apple, or Amazon—many Latino founders lack that vision. It’s simply because no one’s pushing us to really think big. But I want to show them that it’s possible. All of these things are part of my life’s work.