Pumped hydro is 95% of the world's energy storage. We're running out of mountains. So what comes next?

Mike Norton sits down with Eric Chaves, founder of Terrament - a company building large-scale, long-duration energy storage that replicates what pumped hydro does, but without needing rivers, reservoirs, or geography on your side.

Eric's path to founding Terrament is genuinely unusual: architecture degree, industrial design, a decade in software, and then a moment of deliberate research where he asked himself what the single most important unsolved problem in energy actually was. The answer pulled him toward gravity storage - and a solution that's both ancient in principle and entirely new in execution.

In this episode:

• Why pumped hydro still dominates global energy storage - and why we can't build much more of it
  

• Why lithium-ion hits a hard cost wall beyond 8-10 hours of duration, and what the grid actually needs instead
  

• How Terrament uses deep underground shafts and a modular train of weights to replicate the physics of pumped hydro — buildable almost anywhere with suitable geology
  

• The AI data center energy crisis: grid connections are now backlogged 5+ years, gas turbines the same - and why Terrament can be built right on-site
  

• Why across-the-aisle political support exists for what Terrament is building - energy is universal
  

• The grant process, building research partnerships, and what early-stage looks like when you're validating a technology that's genuinely never been done at scale
  

Plus - Eric's honest take on the administration's impact on the energy transition, and why he's still optimistic.

Eric Chaves | LinkedIn 

(36) Terrament: Overview | LinkedIn