Drew Baglino
Founder & CEO, Heron Power. On 3 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@baglino ↗heronpower.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
He is the founder and CEO of Heron Power, developing power electronics to modernize grid infrastructure. Prior to founding Heron Power, he spent 18 years at Tesla as Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, directing electric vehicle powertrain design and utility-scale energy storage products.
3shows
4appearances
63statements
27resolved
22supported
3contradicted
81%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Drew Baglino said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Baglino: Nuclear capital cost per kilowatt exceeds highly curtailed renewables
“When you look at the capital cost per kilowatt of nuclear with everything that is known today, it's much more expensive than even highly curtailed renewables.”
Baglino: US-China factory labor differential is under 10% of COGS
“Yeah, I mean, these, today's factories are really automated. If you're building a new factory today, you know, in China or the U.S., the labor differential is less than 10% of cost of goods sold. It might even be less than five percent.”
Baglino: Solid-State Transformers Will Replace Passive Ones
“I believe that solid-stage transformers are going to replace passive ones.”
Baglino: Data center rack voltages will reach 800V+ with SST architecture
“Now the backplane voltage of the racks will be 800 volts or even higher. And then you can use a SST based solution to go from medium voltage, 34 KV all the way to 800 volts with no gray space rooms with UPSs and power distribution panels and anything like that…”
Baglino: SSTs eliminate 70% of data center electrical components and footprint
“And you can remove 70% of the stuff in the in the electrical diagram and a similar amount of footprint”
Baglino: Solid-state transformers can match traditional transformer costs while adding grid functions
“An SST can have a cost similar to a traditional oil-filled transformer but at the same time provide functions that would be That would be provided by popcorn components around the transformer. Functions like overcurrent protection, fault isolation, what an aut…”
Baglino: Tesla excluded nuclear and geothermal from Master Plan due to costs
“It was a little bit of a complexity, and also the, if you took the best known cost of all those technologies and just stuck them into the optimizer wouldn't pick them, is, is really what it comes down to.”
Baglino: AI power demand is overhyped by a 'toilet paper' queue run
“I'm not so sure that it is going to be as dramatic as people think, both because I think
there's a little bit of the toilet paper problem going on here... You've got all of these companies that think AI is going to be massive and want AI to be massive, and th…”
Baglino: Motor design engineering makes magnet materials highly substitutable
“Magnet materials, for example, are incredibly substitutable. And if you think of the design space as not just the magnet, but the magnet plus the, you know, electromagnetic system it's inside of with the steel And the geometry of the rotor and the stator and t…”
Baglino: China's lithium refining dominance is driven by CAPEX, not tech or labor
“It's not like the refineries are in China because the technology to refine lithium is in China. Like, that's definitely not the case at all. It's purely been, like, the capital investment to build the refinery is the lowest in China. And it's not labor either,…”
Baglino: Over 90% of Battery Precursor Plants Discharge Sulfates Into Waterways
“All the precursor, almost, I want to say all, over 90% of the precursor in the world is for battery cathodes is produced in facilities where the wastewater, the, like, sulfates and that are in the wastewater of that process kind of can just go directly into th…”
Baglino: Global clean grid requires 1.5 TW annual renewable deployment
“1.5 terawatts is the total amount of renewable energy capacity that will need to be deployed on an annual basis to maintain the sustainable energy economy. And that's basically keeping up with plant retirements. So on a steady state basis, 1.5 terawatts is how…”
Baglino: Solid-state transformers are 50 to 100x more power dense
“So when we do this with a solid state transformer, we basically move the 60 hertz transformer to a hundred kilohertz transformer, And that makes it much smaller, like, 50 to a hundred times more power dense”
Baglino: Heron Link eliminates transformers and capacitors from solar diagrams
“What we remove from the single line diagram is we remove the legacy transformer. We remove that six, 90 volt, you know, breaker or fuses protection there. And we also, because we don't have that medium voltage transformer anymore with the inductance of that me…”
Baglino: Central inverters average 97.5% to 98% availability, leading solar plant underperformance
“Solar inverters are the largest source of underperformance on utility-scale solar plants. It's not the modules. You'd think it would be the modules, because there's so many of them, and they're out in the field, and you worry about hail, and you worry about wh…”
Baglino: Tesla Energy Relied on Auto Business Before Reaching Standalone Profitability
“The energy business was heavily supported by the vehicle business through many years, to be frank, but finally kind of got out of that bird's nest and was able to fly on its own and generate serious profits and bring cash back to the Tesla broader company, and…”
Baglino: Panasonic supply bottlenecks forced Tesla to cut Powerwall production in 2017-2018
“Especially as we got into the 2017 and 2018, there was a cell sort of pinch. Panasonic was having a hard time ramping, and we didn't have enough cells to go around between vehicles and energy, and so we had to kind of, like, pare back on the Powerwall build pl…”
Baglino: Tesla prioritized vehicles over energy products during COVID chip shortages
“The same thing happened, by the way, in the COVID crisis where, you know, there were semiconductor shortages. It was kind of like, hey, vehicles, the breadwinner energy, you know, you're going to have to get the scraps and figure it out. And I don't, I think t…”
Baglino: In-Office Culture Helps Engineers Spot and Reuse Colleagues' Components
“And this is actually, I think, one of the big benefits of an in-office culture, is you just see. It's like, hey, look at that thing over on that desk. Like, I think I could stick that and use that as my power supply or whatever. You know, it's like, it's more …”
Baglino: Tesla Optimus Progress Leverages Automotive Simulation and AI Stack
“When you look at, like, Optimus as an example, which is the robot program at Tesla, like, why is Optimus going quickly at Tesla? It's because, you know, hey, we're, there's a lot of reuse of platform technologies, whether it's, like, how do you opt, like, a si…”
Baglino: Scaling electricity generation is more concerning than electrifying demand
“The demand side I'm less worried about than the generation side, I guess.”
Baglino: A 30% heat pump efficiency boost beats cheap gas on TCO
“There's some folks out there that are saying they can get another 30% Improvement in heat pump efficiency, which now you're really talking about being competitive on a total cost of ownership against natural gas, even in places where natural gas is the most in…”
Baglino: Overbuilding renewables for winter enables cheap, flexible electrification
“With the current known technology costs for different types of storage and different types of generation, what the model does is it really Largely overbuilds renewables to solve the winter scenario, right? And now you have this large overbuilt renewable base. …”
Baglino: Memory and Chip Interfaces Are Biggest Bottleneck in AI Hardware
“One of the biggest bottlenecks for everything that's going on with AI is actually the interfaces, the memory interfaces, the data interfaces from chip to chip, all those things. And those have not seen as much innovation, actually.”
The other half of the tape: Drew Baglino's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Stephen Lacey 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Green Blueprint 1
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Drew's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CATALYSTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Heron Power | 2 | 40 | 80% 12/15 | full record on Catalyst → |
| GREEN BLUEPRINTLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Heron Power | 1 | 16 | 88% 7/8 | full record on the Green Blueprint → |
 a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Heron Power | 1 | 7 | 75% 3/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |