Aaron talks with Dr. Ryan Wartena, CEO and Founder of Southern Beams Builds and creator of Dragonwings.
If you don’t already know what Dragonwings are, you should. They’re insanely cool. Imagine off-grid power in a box, Blade Runner style.
Ryan has a PhD in electrochemical engineering and a long resume of awesome achievements. He’s now building robotic solar generators that unfold from shipping containers.
Listen to this episode here, or on:
Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn here.
Expect to learn:
How Dragonwings is moving off-grid solar away from slow, custom construction and toward a production line manufacturing model.
Why Ryan picked the 20-foot shipping container shape (it’s perfect for something very specific).
How these cool mobile solar units are powering everything from NFL games to off-grid villages at Burning Man.
Quotes from the episode:
“I think Dragonwings has been part of a collective dream... let’s not have to do a lot of wiring in the field. Why can’t we just have something to drop it down and it opens up and does the thing?”
— Dr. Ryan Wartena
“This may be one of the fastest ways to deploy renewables if we can build solar generators like cars... the economics are there, and now it’s about that speed.”
— Dr. Ryan Wartena
Transcript:
Aaron Nichols: Ryan, I’m so excited to finally meet you. Ever since I saw a video of Dragonwings just unfolding out of the shipping container, like some sort of amazing sci-fi robot, I’ve wanted to meet you and talk to you. Would you please introduce yourself, just kind of discuss your background in the solar industry a little bit and talk about the creation of Dragonwings?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: Absolutely. Well, thank you, Aaron. I’m Dr. Ryan Wartena. I’m the CEO and founder of Southern Beams Builds, and we build Dragonwing Solar Generators. It’s the first to market three-phase power renewable solar generator with all integrated solar, batteries, power conversion, and the key point is it has enough solar panels to generate enough energy to feed a three-phase power system.
And so it’s been a bit of a dream. I think Dragonwings has been part of a collective dream that anyone who’s been involved with solar has been kind of wanting as far as like—let’s not have to do a lot of wiring in the field. Why can’t we just have something to drop it down and it opens up and does the thing?
A bit of my background: I have a PhD in industrial electrochemical engineering from Georgia Tech. I did a postdoc at the Naval Research Lab where I started developing micro battery technologies and then another postdoc at MIT for Professor Yat-Ming Chiang while he was starting up A123. My job was on the self-assembling battery. But through all of that, I realized like, even if we had the “everlasting gobstopper” of batteries, we’d really need an energy operating system to coordinate batteries with solar, the grid, and all the loads.
Aaron Nichols: Mm.
Dr. Ryan Wartena: In 2008, I founded a company called Geli—Growing Energy Labs Incorporated. We were pioneers in software for energy storage, and we sold that company in 2020 to Hanwha Q-cells. After that, I took a step back and looked at how long it took to develop commercial solar storage. I saw productized solutions for residential and utility scales, but nothing for commercial and industrial (C&I). C&I starts at say 20 or 30 kilowatt power and can scale up to a megawatt.
Commercial developers didn’t want to develop small projects because there was as much headache as a bigger project. What if we can provide a product that, as soon as it’s delivered, is ready to provide power service? That’s where Dragonwings came from—a desire to build an all-in-one system to productize solar, building power plants like cars on a production line.
Aaron Nichols: Right. That’s, I think, the thing that I love the most. The cool factor is just so off the charts. Go to dragonwings.co, just watch the video, watch these things unfolding. They’re such a statement. So obviously you were solving a problem in the market, but how important were aesthetics in the design process?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: I am an artist, and I love to make things beautiful. Back at Geli, our first energy storage system in 2006—instead of putting it into a gray box, I designed a turquoise hexagon. We’ve been blind to power systems; we just know they work. There’s always been an intention here to make whatever we do absolutely beautiful.
The design for Dragonwings was functionality-driven. We wanted it to open at the push of a button and not take up much ground space. That led to the horizontal scissor design, which we have a patent on. The form factor was inspired by a 20-foot shipping container—they go everywhere, they’re standardized on fork pockets and corner posts. So the beauty followed the engineering. It is the beginning of solar robotics and robotic architecture.
Aaron Nichols: Now, just to bring the story down to Earth—what can an average Dragonwing power? How many EV chargers would the average one be able to handle?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: We put four level-two chargers on Dragonwings. In the wintertime, we’re going to make between 50 and 70 kilowatt-hours; in the summertime, up to 150. So we can do like two cars in the winter and six cars in the summer. We recently sold a unit to Hyundai and they’ve been using it every day this winter charging one or two cars.
Aaron Nichols: I think another obvious place my mind goes is disaster zones or places that need to be electrified. Is that something y’all have worked on?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: Absolutely. Dragonwings can be multi-use. You can use them for charging construction equipment or EVs most of the time, and when there is a disaster, they can be utilized for emergency response. We’re working with state agencies in California and organizations like Direct Relief and the Footprint Project on this.
Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and the portability is a huge asset.
Dr. Ryan Wartena: One of the design goals was to make sure we could put two of them onto a 53-foot flatbed trailer. We have a potential military application coming up for exactly that. Because we fit into the shipping container ecosystem, we fit right into the global logistics industry.
Aaron Nichols: Very cool. And what’s been your crowning moment so far?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: We have two Dragonwings at Levi’s Stadium right now for the Super Bowl. They’ve been operating great in conjunction with Sunbelt Rentals. We also had units at the Google I/O conference. NextTracker bought a Dragonwing and has been using it for nearly two years on construction sites.
Aaron Nichols: I imagine it’s faster to put a hundred Dragonwings in a field than to build a traditional project.
Dr. Ryan Wartena: I believe that too, Aaron. We’re talking with Tier 1 construction companies who are building data centers. We’ve actually started looking at our first data center rack over here that we’ll be putting into a Dragonwing to do certified renewable AI compute. Delivering Dragonwings to a site the day you sign a lease means you can start generating revenue immediately.
Aaron Nichols: Roughly how many Dragonwings exist in the world today?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: We’ve built eight. One prototype and seven that are all online and deployed across California, Arizona, and the Mojave Desert.
Aaron Nichols: Nice. Haven’t they been deployed at Burning Man yet?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: All of them have been to Burning Man. This last year we had five Dragonwings powering a whole village of 330 people—kitchens, sound systems, and even an electric sauna.
Aaron Nichols: If you had your way, where is it going?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: I see it developing into fields of Dragonwings for fast setup. This may be one of the fastest ways to deploy renewables if we can build solar generators like cars. We’ve had inbounds from over 50 countries. A lot of the world runs on gas and diesel generators at the edge of the world; I’d love to see us have an international reach and develop projects of 20 or 50 megawatts.
Aaron Nichols: I hammer on this all the time—there are enough parking lots in this country to cover several states.
Dr. Ryan Wartena: Exactly. Through my experience at Geli, I saw the hurdles of C&I solar. Often it’s a REIT that owns the building, managed by a management company, with a short-term lease. No one is motivated to put in fixed solar. But with Dragonwings, you can. It doesn’t necessarily increase the property value or the taxes because it’s mobile. Having that flexibility and multipurpose use is what opens the market.
Aaron Nichols: Ryan, what do you believe clean energy looks like 80 years from now?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: In 1999, I asked myself the same question. At the time, it looked like it would take 1,000 years to get to 100% renewables. Then China stepped in and increased solar panel production by 10x, and financial solutions like PPAs gave it another step function. I’d like to believe in 80 years, we will be running on 500% or 700% renewable energy. I think we can get to near 100% in the 2030s.
AI and electric vehicles are asking us for more and more energy, so it’s about who can build and deploy it fastest. I can see the world running on 500% renewables in our lifetime.
Aaron Nichols: If you like to be found online, where do you like to be found?
Dr. Ryan Wartena: LinkedIn is a great place. We have an Instagram under Southern Beams, or you can contact me directly at ryan@southernbeams.com.
Aaron Nichols: Ryan, thank you so much. That’s been This Week in Solar.
Dr. Ryan Wartena: Awesome, thank you, Aaron.
