S5E19 - What if your Microbial Fuel Cells could Reach Out on Twitter?

with 🎙️ Carol Maxwell - CEO & Director of MICROrganic Technologies and a Founding Member of ENYA Funds 1, 2, &3 

with 🎙️ Brent Solina - CTO of MICROrganic Technologies 

💧 MICROrganic Technologies builds a Microbial Fuel Cell platform that aims to change the way the world deals with wastewater

What we covered:

📅 How Microbial Fuel Cells open a new paradigm in plant operation - the era of bacteria that can communicate and interact with your Google Calendar 

🧑‍🔬 How limited we are today, with our chemical tests and lab analysis 

🤔 How we don't know much about the root cause of most of the upsets a wastewater treatment system encounters 

⚒️ How Microbial Fuel Cells work and how their core characteristics trigger the operation opportunity we just described 

⚡ How wastewater treatment blowers represent 3-5% of the US's energy use and how microbial fuel cells could enable turning them down 

📉 How microbial fuel cells could represent an overall decrease of 85-90% in energy use 

📈 How beyond today's benefits of microbial fuel cells, there's even more to come tomorrow with for instance microbial desalination cells 

🌱 How MICROrganic Technologies' VIVA modular series could be the fundamental brick for those future applications 

0️⃣ How it all boils down to a fundamental feature of Microbial Fuel Cells: they set the path for a decarbonized wastewater treatment 

🚀 How MICROrganic interacts with companies and acceleration programs the like of Xylem's Innovation Labs 

💪 How anybody can take off a start-up, assuming you’re creative enough and push hard enough. 

🤝 How you can learn sales and marketing the hard way, and how that’s beneficial to aspiring entrepreneurs. 

🏭 How the bottleneck to turn MFCs into a large-scale solution lies on the cathode’s hardware - and how MICROrganic strives to solve it. 

🔋 How building an MFC is very close to making a battery - just with additional constraints, using wastewater as a fuel 

🔼🔽 How large and small plants have different challenges and how that reflects in their KPIs. 

🪜 How MICROrganic’s product works yet isn’t fully ready for commercialization - and what the next steps are. 

💩 Wastewater being liquid composting, wastewater containing 7x the energy needed to treat it, VIVA being the size of a refrigerator, MFCs powering predictive maintenance and potentially decentralized systems, VIVA being a kind of biosensor... and much more!

🔥 … and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 🔥   

➡️ Send your warm regards to Carol on LinkedIn

➡️ Make sure to also reach out to Brent over there

➡️ Check out the full story (and an infographic) on how Microbial Fuel Cells  can turn plant operation on its head!

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