Drew Baglino
Founder & CEO, Heron Power · 2 appearances on the record.
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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.
40statements → 28claims → 15claims resolved → 80%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 2.2/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
12 supported 2 partly supported 1 contradicted 3 not yet assessed 10 not checkable as stated how the 28 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
7 predictions · 21 assertions · 3 opinions · 4 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 28 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 15 are resolved, 3 are not yet assessed, and 10 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Drew argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Drew Baglino on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Drew Baglino said on Catalyst that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: 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: 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.”
Baglino: AI Investment May See Correction Without Real Revenue Inflow
“Until there's applications where there's real money flowing in the other direction, we may see a little bit of a correction as well.”
Baglino: Government will use rail and highway corridors for transmission if pressured
“And if this becomes enough of a hot button issue, I see we will be, I think the government will do that.”
Baglino: High-voltage underground cables are comparable in size to fiber bundles
“Those fiber bundles are not that much smaller or different in size than what you would bury for a high voltage transmission line”
Baglino: Total annual global mining outweighs renewable buildout materials 10x
“One of the fun things that we put in the paper was a comparison of how much material humans just move out of the ground every year in total, and the amount of material required for just the This renewable energy economy, and it's actually like a factor of 10, …”
Baglino: Silicon carbide inverters saved Tesla $400 to $500 in battery costs
“You know, while I was at Tesla, we started using silicon carbide to make drive inverters in cars because the incremental cost of the more expensive transistor was more than outweighed by the savings in battery because the drive inverter could be so much more e…”
Baglino: Silicon carbide doubled the power density of Tesla onboard chargers
“And so we really wanted to make the onboard charger smaller, so we used these early silicon carbide devices to make the onboard charger. Yeah, I think we reduced, increased its power density by, like, a factor of two. We dramatically reduced its cost.”
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| The rise of grid power electronics with Drew Baglino | Feb 19, 2026 | 33m |
| Drew Baglino on Tesla’s Master Plan | Jun 6, 2024 | 37m |