S02E02: Plant Power for Electricity
Marjolein Helder (00:02):
It actually means that we capture more carbon during our process of producing electricity thanis emitted. Now we all know carbon neutral technologies where no CO2 is emitted during theprocess, but actually we capture CO2 while we are generating electricity.
Kyle Fox (00:32):
This is the Smarter World Podcast, focusing on breakthrough technologies that make ourconnected world better, safer, and more secure. I'm host Kyle Fox. Each episode we introduce
bright minds and their approach to a more sustainable world. We discuss the opportunities andthe challenges they face and how technology can change the world for the better. Today I'mdelighted to be joined by Marjolein Helder, CEO of Plant-e, a startup based in the Netherlands,
in Europe that generates electricity with living plants and is the only known company in theworld that generates carbon negative electricity. Welcome.
Marjolein Helder (01:07):
Thank you.
Kyle Fox (01:08):
All right, before we dive into it, Plant-e's technology is very exciting with huge potential but
before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit more about you, Plant-e and what brought you tothis?
Marjolein Helder (01:15):
I'm founder and CEO of the company, Plant-e, and I started the company based on my PhD
research I did a few years ago at Wageningen University. So one of the university professors
actually thought of the idea to produce electricity with living plants and I was one of the lucky
researchers to start working on that project and I wanted to bring the technology to the market
as fast as possible and that's why I already founded the company while I was doing my PhD sothat we could get the technology out of the lab and into the real world really quickly.
Kyle Fox (01:50):
Incredible. So doing a startup while you're doing your PhD. So you say that Plant-e is the only
known company in the world that generates carbon negative electricity. I love that term, sopowerful, but carbon negative electricity, what does that actually mean? Can you explain that alittle bit more?
Marjolein Helder (02:04):

Yeah, so it actually means that we capture more carbon during our process of producing
electricity than is emitted. Now we all know carbon neutral technologies where no CO2 isemitted during the process, but actually we capture CO2 while we are generating electricity. So
let me shortly dive into the technology and how that works.
(02:29):So a plant generates organic matter through photosynthesis, so it captures CO2 and then makesorganic matter out of that. Now part of the organic matter is used for its own growth and part isexcreted into the soil where bacteria breakdown the organic matter and in that breakdown
process they release electrons and we are using these electrons to actually generate electricity
from. Because we generate electricity while the plant keeps on growing, the plant continuously
captures CO2 and we generate electricity.
Kyle Fox (03:04):
That creates an amazing positive feedback loop. I know of no other technology that produces
power and can provide sustenance and helps with reducing global warming emissions all in one
go. What I loved about your TED talk that you did was the opening. You put up pictures of fieldsof green and you say, what do I see? I see electricity. And once I heard that my eyes reallyopened up and as I was driving around, I started seeing the very same thing. Fields of green,especially around where I live, and realizing that every single one of those fields could be apotential for generating electricity and the potential is extraordinary. So I'll ask the toughquestion now. Producing electricity by plants and water could, to some people, sound too good
to be true and I'm curious, how do you actually instantiate it in a small area and then grow it?
Marjolein Helder (03:45):
That's indeed a very tough question. So the TED talk you watched was actually from 2014 and inthat time we still thought that we would be able to scale up to indeed like hectare size systems
that would generate electricity on a very large scale so that indeed the power plant of the futurewould look like a wetland. That was the vision that we started with, but we have to be very
realistic. It is really tough to work with nature and work with biology so we found out that rightnow it's still impossible to scale up to such an extent. So what we're now doing is actually down
scaling to standalone, low power systems where we can generate electricity and use it very
effectively.
(04:32):
So in that way we actually avoid the scale up challenge while we can, at the same time, alreadygenerate electricity on small scale but with a very high impact. For example, powering IoT
devices, sensors in agriculture or in urban environments or in nature. Nowadays these sensors
are all powered by batteries normally, and batteries need to be replaced regularly. They
generate quite a lot of chemical waste in the end. So if we can avoid those batteries, we can andreplace those batteries by a plant power system, we avoid lots of chemical waste and we makeit much more sustainable and durable to power these sensors.
Kyle Fox (05:17):
So you made the statement about Plant-e and IoT. In NXP, we sell a lot of different technology
solutions into the IoT space. Can you elaborate a little bit more about the connection between
Plant-e and NXP?
Marjolein Helder (05:27):
Yes, of course. When we started bringing our technology to the market, we actually thought itwould be pretty easy to connect an application, whatever it would be to our power source so wethought this is a power source like any else. So we can just replace the battery by a plant systemand then make that same application work. Practice is a bit different and the main reason is thatour biological system is not only a power source but can be a battery as well and it has a verylarge impedance, so it has a very high internal resistance and that delivers all kinds of problems
when you actually want to extract the energy out of that. And we worked our way around it
using bits and pieces that we could find on the market and small chips that sort of did the job forus.
(06:20):
They were effective but not ideal. And then at a certain point we ran into someone of NXP whobasically said, "Oh, we can do that so much faster and better and easier for you, so we'll develop
a dedicated bio electricity harvester for you so that you can actually use that to power all kindsof applications." And then half a year into the collaboration, I remember one of the guys of NXP
telling me "This has proven to be way more difficult than we thought." So even though it was asetback in terms of a development time, it was a compliment as well because it meant that we
hadn't done the completely wrong thing before. It indeed was more difficult than everyone
anticipated. Having said that, we have collaborated for almost two years in trying to develop a
dedicated bioenergy harvester and at the same time proving this in a pilot project with one of
the water boards in the Netherlands for a groundwater level sensor.
(07:24):
And we have managed to do that and we presented that at CES in beginning of 2022, and that
was a kickstart to our IoT use cases and our IoT business development so it has definitely helped
us that we had this collaboration with NXP because it gives lots of credibility. Being able to tellothers that's what we developed together with NXP, that gives you a lot of credibility as ofwhere you would do that by yourself as a startup, people are like, so how good is that stuff? And
now no one questions the level of expertise in our electronics actually.
Kyle Fox (08:03):
Well that's fantastic. We spend a lot of time with our solutions to focus on low power and this is
one of the more important examples of where somebody like Plant-e is able to take advantage

of it and the technologist in me immediately starts thinking, you put a microprocessor in front ofsomething and you can power it, you start opening up use cases that you never even considered
because you actually have the ability to process information and provide it out to the world andthat's where you get these feedback loops of innovation that come from it because you've put
intelligence literally at this point, right at the edge, right next to a plant and a bio-energy
harvester, and actually a note to our listeners, I was at CES earlier in January of 2022, there areseveral videos showing the Plant-e technology so I recommend you go check those links out andsee that and see that kickstart in action.
(08:49):So the picture in my head that you're drawing is lots of smaller instantiations scatteredthroughout perhaps a city, right? Whether it's in an airport or in a park or whatnot, you'rebasically just needing some land to be able to grow plants to be able to generate that electricity.
Marjolein Helder (09:01):
Indeed.
Kyle Fox (09:02):
I come from a family of farmers and even here in the US, the importance the electronics have ina farming community, even in rural spaces, the ability to have a small plot of land that canactually generate electricity is huge. We could use that immediately. So you said that you havesome challenges to be able to scale this up. I also remember you mentioning that there areapproximately 1.7 billion of people that are without electricity. That's something like 20% of theglobal population. Do you feel that bio electricity is something that we will do for the future? Isit something we can scale up or is that something that we can implement on a global scalecommercially?
Marjolein Helder (09:33):
Yes, I would definitely hope so. We're currently not at that level yet, but that's definitely what
I'm striving for. I believe that indeed this technology has way more impact on those people who
don't have access to electricity yet rather than in western developed countries where everythingis already electrified. At the same time, we have decided to start marketing our technology indeveloped countries where people are able to pay a bit of a higher price rather than indeveloping countries where price is definitely an issue still because this is unique, innovativetechnology, it's still under development, so prices are still relatively high, but as soon as wereach a fairly large scale of production, then prices will definitely drop and then it becomes
available to developing countries and developing communities. And my personal mission would
be to deliver it to those people who need it most.
(10:31):
Now, if you already have electricity from the grid, having a little bit of electricity powered byplants, that gives you extra light or an extra sensor, it is just fun to have but if you don't have

any electricity yet, this could be a real big difference to your life and, for example, I have been to
the Amazon rainforest where I found a huge solar panel in the middle of the forest, completely
overgrown and the indigenous tribe who was living there, they told me, "Well, yeah, we got thisfrom the government, but it's not working." I said, "That's not a surprise because it needs sun."
And they were like, "We just don't know how to fix it." And that's the whole thing. So thepoorest and the most remote communities in the world don't have the technical skill mostly toobtain technical products.
(11:21):
Now that's the difference with the biological product. So in rural communities and very remotecommunities, everyone knows how to grow a plant so if we can help them grow that plant andat the same time generate electricity so that they can have light to read by at night or indeed
have a sensor that tells them how much fertilizer that crop needs, that makes a big difference.
Kyle Fox (11:45):
What you're describing is something, it can make a big difference to their way of life. The picturethat you're describing is extraordinary and I never really thought about it that way in terms of
we have high tech solutions to power, but the ability for this to be deployed into an area that
doesn't have that technology base, your solution is perfect. And you said it best if you know how
to grow a plant, you can use this. So its barrier to entry to use it is quite low.
Marjolein Helder (12:10):
Yeah, indeed. At least it should be. So as I said, the technology is still developing, so we still needto make it fully plug and play. We're very much looking forward to actually deploying this in
those places where it's needed most. Yeah.
Kyle Fox (12:23):
I'm quite good at killing plants. I don't have a green thumb by any means, but I was thinking
about sensors in the home so if we're actually growing food for ourselves, then the ability tohave a sensor that lets me know if the plant's thirsty and that sort of thing would be very
beneficial in my own home. And when you're describing some of the challenges that you haveabout scaling, what I heard was high tech is quite good once you get movement to reduce costs
over time. As new versions come out, new technologies, new breakthroughs and getting
economies of scale, what are one or two things that you would like to do, and some of ourlisteners could help contribute to this to help get this onto that cycle? What else could we do tohelp you accomplish your mission?
Marjolein Helder (13:00):
Wow, that's a good question. I think there's two things that will help us scale. One is we needcredible investors that have a long-term vision and that they're to invest in something that's amoonshot maybe and it feels like that for most people. And even though the investment

landscape in Europe is changing, still most of the very innovative investors are actually comingfrom the US so we still see quite a big discrepancy between investors in the US and in Europe. So
that's one.
(13:33):
And then the second one is we're looking for launching customers for the two products that wealready have on the market. The one is a lighting system, so standalone for example, for parks tohave a little bit of light in a very dark corners of a park powered by the plants that already growthere. So the grass that you walk on. And the other product is our IoT product, which is still
under development, so groundwater level sensors, soil moisture sensors. If we would be able tofind customers for these early stage products at still a premium price, that would be awesome
because it actually helps us validate our products and at the same time develop the technology.
Kyle Fox (14:13):
When I think customer, it would be something like me as a homeowner, would I be a customer
or would this be more of an institution or a company that would be a customer in your mind?
Marjolein Helder (14:21):
So most of our early stage customers have been governments, municipalities, councils,provinces, even ministries who wanted validated technologies, see that it works, show it off to
the inhabitants of a city. That was at a stage where the products were still under development
so for the lighting product, nowadays we mainly see it adopted again by cities for, as I said, forparks for example, but it could be rural pathways as well.
(14:49):Have a little bit of light there where there's not a power cable, like standalone lighting by theplants that are growing there anyway so that's an option. We would love to have a product forconsumers, but right now it's really difficult for us to actually deliver the services that comeswith selling a product to individual consumers because if something goes wrong with one large
corporate or government customer, then we have one [inaudible 00:15:16] to answer to. Now if
we start selling a consumer product on a large scale and something goes wrong, we might haveto answer a thousand of them. Now that's a challenge as a startup company. At the same time, I
would love to take up the challenge if we feel that there's a product at a price range that would
be attractive to individual consumers. However, currently I'm not quite sure we're there yet.
Kyle Fox (15:40):
It's interesting when you talked about a moonshot, I'm a bit of a space geek, so one of the very
first thoughts I had was this stuff would look really good inside of a space station or if we ever
get to a moon base, actually having living plants, being able to feed astronauts is quite a big deal
and being able to generate electricity at the same time would be quite useful. It'd be quiteinteresting to see if there would be a moonshot option there, quite literally. So before we close,
I'll just ask, what do you envision the world looking like 50 years from now?
Marjolein Helder (16:07):
Ooh, quite different from now. I think we're at this point in time where we see that changes aredefinitely needed. So we see the vulnerability of our planet, of our climate system. So things are
shifting already. Climate is getting more and more extreme in the places where we live so weneed to do something to mitigate the effects of climate change, adapt to it but at the sametime, we need to rethink how we live and how we use our knowledge and our technologies. AndI think that bio technologies could be at least part of the answer. So the idea behind using living
plants to generate electricity is that we balance it out with the natural system. So we never overask the bacteria in the soil who are the ones that are actually generating the electricity for us,
but because if we ask too much from them, the system collapses and the power production
stops.
(17:07):And I think this is a perfect example of what's wrong with our current system. We just want tocontinue to produce more and more and we've over-asked our planet, we have gone over theboundaries of what's actually possible. And if we've learned to get the system back into abalance, into a stable equilibrium, that would be awesome and I think this type of technologies,
like the one we are working on is a very good example that it is actually possible to generate
stuff with nature rather than from nature. And I think that's a very important lesson.
Kyle Fox (17:47):
It's so powerful and it has been an absolute delight talking with you today. What you're doingwith Plant-e looks like it has a potential to change the world, which makes you one of the worldchangers. So I encourage everybody that is listening to this to go check out Plant-e. Take sometime and learn about that technology and see what you can do to contribute. With that, we'regoing to go ahead and close our podcast. Thank you so much, Marjolein, for being with us today,and we look forward to talking to you in the near future.
Marjolein Helder (18:11):
Thank you very much.
Kyle Fox (18:12):
Thanks everybody for listening, and we will see you next time.