2007Neese stops pointing fingers and goes into solar. Twenty years in contract manufacturing behind him, hundreds of factories across tens of countries and about 160,000 people in his organisation, and then the question of whether he was making widgets that end up in landfill. He joined SunPower as solar COO. Somebody handed him Ray Anderson's Confessions of a Radical Industrialist on day one; he shelved it and read it years later.
May 2021Verdagy spins out of Chemetry at Moss Landing. Chemetry had spent ten years in California cutting the carbon intensity of the vinyls feedstocks EDC and propylene oxide, work that needed very large membrane cells run at high current density. Somebody asked whether those cells could make hydrogen, the answer was yes, and the founder went to Coastal Ventures for a spin-out.
May 2021Neese arrives as the last employee in. The team he joined had already worked together eight to thirteen years, so instead of declaring a culture he watched it for a quarter and then wrote down what he saw. A seed round came with the spin-out, then a $25 million A with Shell, Orbia, BHP, Caterpillar, TDK, Temasek, Khosla and Doral.
June 2022Europe is plainly ahead. Asked that month, Neese says he would have called it no contest: a hydrogen backbone strategy, dedicated pipelines connecting the EU into the Nordics and the UK, and serious money and mind share already in place.
July 2022The US wakes up. Hydrogen incentives carved out of the Inflation Reduction Act immediately put marginal projects in the money for at least the next decade, and everybody piled in looking for gigawatt-scale renewables to couple electrolysis to. Neese calls it a gold rush with not enough supply of anything to meet demand created in one month by a stroke of a pen.
TodayUnder three dollars a kilo, and one plant running. The technology is deployed at the Moss Landing pilot and nowhere else, while the numbers he quotes are under $3 a kilo paired with historically priced wind or solar, under $5 almost anywhere in the US, and a $3 production credit on top of that. His own view, offered as opinion, is that electrolysis goes below $2 at scale with no incentives at all.
2040-50The targets somebody has written down. Seven billion dollars of announced funding opportunity for hydrogen hubs, 20 million metric tons of green nitrogen by 2040 and perhaps 50 million by 2050. Conjecture at this point, as the host says while reading them out.
