Climate Confident

A Clear Solution: How 3eNano's Window Tech Fights Climate Change

May 03, 2023 Tom Raftery / Steve Ferrero Season 1 Episode 119
Climate Confident
A Clear Solution: How 3eNano's Window Tech Fights Climate Change
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Show Notes Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of the Climate Confident podcast! I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and in today's show, we have a fascinating conversation with Steve Ferrero, CEO of 3eNano. We explore how 3eNano's groundbreaking window technology is poised to revolutionize the way we insulate our buildings and reduce our carbon footprint.

In our discussion, we dive into the details of 3eNano's innovative window coating that improves insulation, making homes and buildings more energy-efficient while reducing energy bills. Steve explains how the technology works, sharing the benefits of their unique coating that directs heat back into a room, reducing the need for energy consumption.

Steve also shares some exciting numbers on potential energy savings, revealing that by moving from single pane to double pane windows, buildings can save around 20% on energy costs, and even more when using 3eNano's advanced technology. As we talk about the implications of better insulation, we touch on the pressing issue of climate change and how improved window technology can help reduce our carbon emissions.

Throughout our conversation, Steve highlights the need for affordable sustainability and how 3eNano aims to bring their revolutionary technology to the mass market. We also discuss the differences in window technology and energy efficiency consciousness between Europe and North America, and the role that 3eNano can play in bridging that gap.

This episode is packed with insights into the future of energy-efficient windows and how they can play a vital role in the fight against climate change. Join us as we explore the world of sustainable building solutions and learn more about the incredible work being done at 3eNano. You won't want to miss it!

Show Timestamps:

  • Introduction to Steve Ferrero and 3eNano (00:00:00)
  • How 3eNano's window coating technology works (00:08:16)
  • Energy savings and carbon reduction potential (00:25:56)
  • The impact of climate change on buildings (00:27:51)
  • Comparing window technology in Europe and North America (00:30:00)
  • Final thoughts and where to find more information (00:32:00)

And you can check out the video version of this podcast here https://youtu.be/4OgzeNrY-eQ

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Credits
Music credits - Intro by Joseph McDade, and Outro music for this podcast was composed, played, and produced by my daughter Luna Juniper

Steve Ferrero:

In our case, if we've put our coating on the inside, we're gonna reflect that heat back outside. And so by that nature of the, that's what low e coatings do. They stop the heat from inside the building in the winter from just radiating away and they force it to radiate back into the room, which saves energy

Tom Raftery:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Climate Confident podcast. The number one podcast, showcasing best practices in climate emission, reductions and removals. And I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Don't forget to click follow on this podcast in your podcast app of choice, to be sure you don't miss any episodes. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 119 of the Climate Confident podcast. My name is Tom Raftery. And before we kick off today's show, I want to take a quick second to say my sincere thanks, and also apologies to Richard Delavan. Richard is a new supporter of the podcast. He signed up a little over a week ago and when I was getting last week's episode, ready to go live. I forgot to thank Richard for signing up as a new supporter. So apologies for forgetting last week, Richard, but sincere thanks for doing that. And Richard of course, is a friend of the podcast and alumnus of the podcast. He was a guest on an episode back in March of this year. So thank you for that also, Richard. And if you're not already a supporter, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about climate. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable with options starting as low as just three euros, which is, you know, less than the cost of a cup of coffee. And your support will make a huge difference in keeping the show going strong. To become a supporter. You simply click on the support link in the show notes of this, or any episode, our visit tiny url.com/climate pod. Now. Without any further ado with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Steve, Steve, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Steve Ferrero:

Sure. Thank you, Tom. I'm Steve Ferrero, CEO of 3ENano, which is a startup out of the University of Toronto. And we are working on, nanotechnology for Windows, which we're gonna talk about today.

Tom Raftery:

Great. So the company name is three E Nano. Where does the name come from, Steve?

Steve Ferrero:

Well, there's three forms of energy. There's UV light, and then there's visible light, and then there's infrared light. So the company name is founded on the fact that there's three portions of light, or sometimes people could say there's a visible light and. Infrared and, and then the far infrared, there's different ways that you can say what the energy is, but that's what the e is about. Three types of energy.

Tom Raftery:

Oh, fascinating. Fascinating. And what is it you are doing in Three E Nano? Just, I mean, I know you gave us a quick intro there, but let's go into a little more detail about Windows.

Steve Ferrero:

Right. So so I'd like to start with this basically kind of a question to people. Relative to insulation values, we know that walls are at R 30 or 40, and sometimes ceilings are at R sixties, certainly up in Canada and colder climates. And I like to ask people, the double pane low e argon filled window, which occupies a large area of the building envelope, you know, to skyscrapers. It's some 90% window to wall ratio. More and more homes want larger and larger windows. So the question is, what is the R value of that opening? And surprisingly, the R value is only three. And so if I would just, uh, describe R value a little bit more. An open window is R zero. There's no no resistance. R stands for resistance. There's no resistance to the flow of heat. You know, if you had air conditioning running, it's gonna go right out the window because it's an R zero. There's nothing to stop it. You can put a single in and get an R one. You can put a double paint in and get an R two. Now, if you put a fancy coating on it and fill it with argon, you can get, an R three. And that's what the industry, sells today. And almost everyone, who buys a new home today will get an R three window installed in their building. Now, from a 3ENano point of view, that's a problem. So basically, we're building homes and buildings with very poor insulated value windows. And we want to use our technology and our methodology of, getting our nano coatings, which we'll probably get into onto substrates in order to drive that r value up so that you are now plugging the hole in your building or skinning your building, if you will, with something that has more insulation value. It's something that's not spoken of, very much. There's talk about U value, but that gets complicated. Most people don't understand U value, but I can think of, all right, if I put on a jacket, I'm a certain degree of warmth than I put on a nice, fluffy jacket, I will be warmer. Basically our buildings in the winter are sitting there in a cold without a blanket on it. If you want to think of it in that way. Okay. So we're working on trying to bring better windows to the industry by using our technology.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And so very noble aim. Can you talk to us a little bit about the technology? What is it that you guys have developed that increases that R value in the windows?

Steve Ferrero:

Sure. so there's several ways to increase R value. One is to create cavities. And basically, you know, fiberglass installation works by the fact that the many, many fibers create little air pockets, and that's creating cavities. So we've all heard of double pane windows, triple pane windows, and quad pane windows. And the more layers you can put in that window, the higher the insulation value would be. Now the other thing you can do is you could put on special coatings onto the windows or onto the materials. And in our case, we have developed a simplified low e coating, or solar energy control coating. And the best way to describe it, Tom, is two layers of transparent aluminum sandwiching, a layer of transparent silver. That's what what it is in its simplest form that I can describe it to you. It's nanometers thick. so it's very, you can't see it. It's, highly transparent. There's a sample of it there. So, you know, there is something there. and what we're doing is we're putting these coatings on different substrates, and in particular we wanna bring in polymers into windows. And the reason we wanna do that is that glass is heavy. And as you work with glass, And you work with more glass, you work with more weight. And the consequence of working with more weight is that now you need more supporting structure. And now that you need more supporting structure, the cost goes up. So if anyone were to Google after this podcast, you know, triple pane windows, you're gonna see they're too heavy, they're too thick, and they're too expensive. Well, we wanna make them lighter, we wanna make them thinner, and we wanna make them less expensive. So, Basically our mandate of the company is to mitigate the reasons why triple pane windows aren't the standard in the industry as they should be, and probably will be once regulations, you know, kind of force the industry to move in that direction. Kind of like what's happening with gasoline to electric cars. You know, it's kind of happening voluntarily. Uh, but you know, there would've been a mandate that forced that. It's just the government didn't go there.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. And the coatings, you said it's a double layer of aluminum surrounding a layer of, silver, if, if I remember correctly from what you said, very, very thin layers correct. So that they're completely transparent. How does that stop heat, uh, entering or leaving a a, a window?

Steve Ferrero:

Yeah, that's a great question. So that's where you start getting into the nanophotonics, and that's why we're a spin out of the University of Toronto. Dr. Kherani, one of the co-founders of the company, we still operate out of his lab. And really what's happening, Tom, is we're messing with, if you will, the relationship between the metal atom, ions and the wavelength of light. So, you probably remember as a little kid, if you're swinging on a swing, and if you do it just right, you can gain amplitude and you can reach a certain degree of swinging. Now, if you wanna slow down, you can kick your legs in the wrong direction, and you'll notice that it will begin to stop you. Now, in the case of these transparent layers, what happens is, different wavelengths of light are gonna interact with the atoms of those particular layers. And because of the resonance that's set up as these, wavelengths try to get through the material, the visible light gets through. It can sneak through there, but the higher wavelengths and the heat gets stuck and it actually gets kicked out, and we design it in specifically to do that. So it's, resonance really is the secret word there that we resonate and more importantly, we reflect. So there is really no, flat, polymer base reflective material in the marketplace. And I spent 34 years in the acrylic industry, uh, and my, uh, one of my jobs was to find something that's not absorptive. So the best way to explain absorptive is you can go outside right now. I don't care what time of year. And if there's a tinted window on a car and its been sitting in the sun for an hour, you can put your hand on that window. And, depending on the latitude, you either have to pull it off really quickly or you'll notice that it's really warm. Right? And that's because the window is absorbing that energy, and getting hot. Now, something that absorbs energy wants to get rid of it, it's just, uh, it can't hold onto it. It has to flow to where it's colder. And that's part of what the coatings do as well. In the case of, well, let me just continue with the radiation. So when you have an absorptive material, like a tinted car window, it will get hot. It will collect all that energy that, in this case, gets absorbed by the material. There isn't resonance going on, there's just simply sucking it up. And then as a window heats up and heats up and heats up, it dumps that heat and half of the heat will go out one face and the other half will go out to the outside. And that's why absorptive materials claim to be energy efficient because they're taking credit for the fact that half of that heat, they're collecting and radiating outward. Well, in our case, if we've put our coating on the inside, we're gonna reflect that heat back outside. And so by that nature of the, that's what low e coatings do. They stop the heat from inside the building in the winter from just radiating away and they force it to radiate back into the room, which saves energy. So I didn't mention we are an energy efficiency company. We're on a mission to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Buildings are responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. And part of that reason is that we're spending a lot of energy on heating and cooling. Why? Because we don't have good enough windows that is allowing solar heat in, in the summer, which you don't want. And it's letting the heat escape in the winter, when you wanna retain that heat, especially if that's comes from oil or natural gas or fossil fuels. So we really need to do something about the global infrastructure. And we also have to fix the fact that today we're still putting, a spring jacket on a building that's gonna be sitting at, you know, minus 20, for two months of the year. And so really that's why we want to, um, commercialize this technology and we want to bring better windows and better window inserts. Cuz it's very disruptive to mess with the window, especially on a skyscraper and in your home, you know, it's not a, it's not a job you do every year. Uh, some people never do it. So it's a, it's a retractable problem and we're injecting ourselves into that space.

Tom Raftery:

Nice. Yeah, no, I switched out the windows in our home here, two years ago now, and it was, it was a big job, I gotta say. And got double-glazed windows with, if I remember correctly, a 17 millimeter chamber in the middle of them. And there's a, there's to, to your point a, a coating on them to reflect the heat out, but, What, from what you're telling me, it only reflects like 50% of the heat out, whereas your coating would reflect a hundred percent of the heat out. Is that, am I getting that right?

Steve Ferrero:

Well, it, it depends on the coating, but there are glass coatings and, in the case of say, a low e uh, triple stack, glass coating it might be 17 to 21 layers thick. And wow. The reason, the reason they need such a complicated stack, as it's called, you're, you're stacking up all these little layers to get this resonance to work right, is that they're coating on glass. Uh, when you make glass, you have to temper it, you have to heat it and cool it slowly so that it's safe for you to be around. Glass is very dangerous in its raw form off of the glass float lines. And so in order for that coating to survive 600 or 700ºC, they need to build a more complicated and special stack. Now we're gonna put our stack on polymers. You don't have to temper polymer. You don't put it through this extra heat step, which of course adds more greenhouse gases through the energy intensiveness of that process, unless you can do it electrically with clean energy, which, uh, someday if we come up with, uh, you know, other sources of, of heat, you know, that'll come to be. But for today, it's mostly fossil fuels, which we need to get off of. So we said to ourselves, well, if we don't work with glass, then we don't have the temper. If we don't have the temper, we can make a more simplified stack. And so it's kind of synergistic how everything works together, in order to reach the same endpoint in a different way. Okay?

Tom Raftery:

Okay. And so for, I can see how that would be great for new builds, but for the current building stock that's there, can they be retrofitted with the, technology that you are going to be producing?

Steve Ferrero:

Yes. So that is another tremendous opportunity because, you know, the average r value on the planet is 1.7. So that means, the whole planet is below the double pane, regular double pane, no coating says. So there's a lot of retrofits that need to happen. And in the case of a retrofit, you know, you don't really want to be handling large single sheets of glass and figuring out, well, how do I get that into the window opening safely. And the fact that it's not, you know, surrounded in a protective frame and of the right thickness. So in our case, this is another place where the polymer comes into play that, a lightweight, non-breakable polymer, is an attractive, material to use to turn a single into a double, if you will. Uh, it wouldn't have argon in it, but, you know we also could have a double pane polymer insert that gets a single pane to a triple. And if they have a double, which we already say is still not good enough, you can get the r value up on a retrofit basis, because it is very disruptive to do anything with a window. You, you. You have to tear everything out and things have to fit properly, and it's, it's just disruptive. There's, uh, no way around it other than if you can just plug it, which is kind of our solution, but you don't want to give up transparency. You don't wanna give a functionality. You want the natural light you wanna see through it. I, you know, I go down to Florida, you can't see through any of the windows. you know, they're all dark and tinted and, you know, and it's an effort to, to trap and, and stop that heat because there is too much heat down there. Uh, you're cooking the building. But to that effect, um, you know, the more heat you can keep out of the building, the more comfortable you'll be. If you're more comfortable, you will use less energy. And we we're working with a one partner that has a, has a insert product with a, um, a nice fitting frame and you can model just from the physics of what's gonna happen to the energy usage of the building. And what they found was there's a curious effect that they always outperform the model when they actually do it. And what they concluded is that, you know, people mess with the thermostat when they're either what, too hot or too cold. Now if they're comfortable, they're not likely to walk over to the thermostat and do anything. Uh, so we think, we think, or the theory is that you're just more comfortable and because you're more comfortable, you don't mess with the thermostat and because you don't mess with the thermostat, you consume less energy. You're willing to let it sit, you know, at state.

Tom Raftery:

Nice, nice. Fascinating. And You said you're working with partners, so it seems to me that you are either not going into full scale production yourselves, or you are doing limited production and letting partners do most of the production on your behalf, licensing the technology to them or something like that. Is it something along those lines?

Steve Ferrero:

Yeah, actually we're, uh, t r L six. so what I'd like to say is that the company was founded in 2015, but funded in 2018. And with the 2018 funding, part of which came from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, which funds, startups working on greenhouse gas reductions, we were able to learn how to work with the coatings. And scale them up. And so we just recently closed a $4 million, series seed round and uh, we got a second follow on grant from STTC Canada for 5 million Canadian. And now over the next three years, we're gonna get out of the lab. We're gonna get from T R L six and seven where we are to commercialize. And then in our Series A, Tom, we're gonna buy our own equipment. to bring manufacturing, you know, under our own belt so that we can control what we make and for whom and what products we sell. So we're, we're in that transition from lab to commercial. And at the moment we do have to use, other partners around the world that already have the equipment, to put these code, like, like this one here was made in Europe.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Okay. And so long term, it's the, the plan is to do it all yourselves and not outsource any of the production.

Steve Ferrero:

Correct. Eventually, yeah. I mean, that's the natural progression. Now we're not doing what, Tesla did and just start right off, uh, you know, from with your own factory. Uh, but we're kind of doing the same thing. You know, there were, there were cars out there. They had four wheels and a steering wheel. And they get you from A to B and uh, they have a new way of doing it. But the vertical integration and the starting with a new starting point, you know, the new the, the battery created the concept of the new way of doing it. And in our case, it's the coating on polymers, our battery. And eventually we will vertically integrate as well because, What's happening over there in the EV space is that they want to pass on all of the savings of the development and the going down the cost curve to the customer. And we wanna do that same thing. We want to give you Tom the choice of an R three, let's say at $40 a square foot, or an R eight at $40 a square foot. We want you to pay the same, and we want you to make that choice to get the higher R value window. Because you won't mess with the thermostat and you will use less energy. And really, you know, for net zero, if we want buildings to be net zero, you've gotta have a double digit R value under window skin. You know, or your other option is to take the windows away and make them smaller. Uh, and people talking about that, having no windows in a building, well that's how we'll solve the problem. Mm. But we are humans. And there's something about seeing nature, about seeing the outside, about being connected to the outside world. That absolutely has proof on productivity, on health, they find children have higher scores when they're under natural light. And this is all, you know, you can just, lots of studies on the, the need for humans to see light, you know, and there's a circadian rhythm that the colored, the colored temperature of the sky we're just connected to it.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. I'm originally from Ireland, but I now live in the south of Spain and mm-hmm. Yeah, I could, I could never, mm-hmm move back to Ireland because the sky, the color of the sky in Ireland is gray. You know, 90/95% of the time, during daylight. Uh, whereas here, it's blue, it's blue sky, 90/95% of the time. So, you know, I'm just so used to that now, there's no, yeah. Could go back. So, I know, I know exactly what you're talking about. Is, is the effectiveness of, uh, your coatings, is it affected at all by, let's say latitude, as in you're in Canada, I'm in Seville. Does that make a difference? Would it be more effective here in Seville than in, than in Canada or more effective in Canada? Or is it just the same?

Steve Ferrero:

Yeah, what we would do, Tom, is we would tune it. We would tune it for, the latitude that you're in, and there are international building code, climate zones. So Canada is 6, 7, 8, and way up is nine, you know, northern Finland. And what all that is, is a recognition of the fact of the amount of energy that's coming in by latitude because it is different. And uh, you know, you get down to Florida, Florida's climate zone one. And in that case, you just simply have more radiance per unit area. And, uh, we will tune the coating to have a higher demand to kick out that heat and, drive more of that heat out through the coating. But we, you wouldn't want to put a Miami coating in a northern building and you wouldn't wanna put a northern coating in a southern building.

Tom Raftery:

Ah, makes sense. My, my question wasn't as stupid as I thought. So it seems,

Steve Ferrero:

Oh no, there's just a lot of science get and uh, uh, really it comes down to the irradiance that's coming in. You know, it's amazing we have this thermonuclear reactor sitting out there and it's pumping out all kinds of energy at us, and, uh, we need it. But, uh, some of it causes problems and, uh, we expect ourselves into, into controlling it so that it's helpful and, and, um, healthy for us.

Tom Raftery:

Yeah. Great, great. And let's say that I wanted to apply one of these inserts to these reasonably new windows I've got in my house and a glass door as well, you know? Yeah. What does that look like? What I mean physically, does it go on the outside? Does it go on the inside? Does it go within the frame? How, how does that work? Just from a practical perspective?

Steve Ferrero:

Yeah, yeah. The, the, the simplest, approach is a insert that's fitted for that window. And you could have a soft frame that enables it to sit in with no tools. It just presses in place. And in our case, we would provide the substrate with appropriate coating for the appropriate climate zone for the appropriate, thing that you're trying to solve. whether you're trying to stop solar heat or whether you're trying to preserve, the Lowe functionality in the winter. And it would fit perfectly and it would, it would go right in there.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Interesting. And actually, I've, I've just. Before I put in the windows, one of the reasons I did was because I noticed that my electricity costs, were six times higher in winter than in summer. Mm-hmm. And it's just cause the, the house is poorly insulated. And, the daytime temperatures in winter here, uh, drop down to about, uh, 10 to 15 degrees centigrade. So not very cold, but if you don't have a well insulated house, if the inside of the house is 15 degrees, you know, you're gonna feel it, and you're gonna wanna put on the heat to bring it up to 21, 22 degrees, you know, something kind of more comfortable. So yeah, we have electric heating, and, and solar panels. Yeah. Uh, so the electricity price just goes up and up and up in winter and, right. It's not that it, the, the houses here are built for the summer. So we don't, you know, it gets over 40 degrees here in summer, but because they're kind of more architected for that, there isn't the same requirement to put on the air con in the summer as there is to put on the heating Right. In the winter, so, right. Yeah, it's right.

Steve Ferrero:

Yeah. It's all about comfort and the window insert does make more comfort and the fact that there's a frame around it, which seals the air. So air infiltration into windows is regulated. But of course, as things get old and there, maybe the cock isn't so good and the wet wood, if there're wood is swollen and there's gaps and you know, you have that airflow. And when you put in a, uh, an insert, you will dread it dramatically reduce that influx of cold air, which you don't want in your space. And also if there's not a low e coating on the window, the radiative energy that you are creating by that heater, electric heat is radiative heat. You're creating radiative heat. It'll go right through that window without anything to stop it. And that's what our coating does. It says, okay, heat, we want you to go back in the room and, uh, we want Tom's electric bill to stay low.

Tom Raftery:

Nice, nice, nice. And do you have any, like numbers around how much a household or a building could save in terms of a money and b, carbon costs?

Steve Ferrero:

Sure. Yeah. I mean, uh, if you go from a single pane to a double pane, the building will save 20% just in rough numbers. And if you go say R one to R eight, that number can go up over 70%. And it also depends on the window size and the wall area. Um, course. So basically the, the, the thicker and warmer jacket you put on in the winter, the more comfortable you're gonna be. And, uh, you know, your heart won't have to pump as hard to keep you warm. And it's the same principle. So that's, the savings can be significant. Now, in terms of carbon, of course, really the winter is the more painful problem because we're heating a lot of it with natural gas. So in North America, you know, a lot of oil in the northeast. Now in the case where you have electricity and the option to get clean electricity, well then it's just a matter of you're consuming more than you, I don't wanna say should, but you know, you're, you can reduce the amount that you're consuming to take the load off the grid. Especially at those peak periods where people are demanding electricity and uh, for cooling to stay comfortable and the planet is getting hotter and hotter, as you know. I mean, they've had 40C in Vancouver. Boston today is the climate of Atlanta, 40 years ago. And the buildings weren't built for Atlanta. They were built for Boston. What the way it used to be. Yeah. You know, 85 was a hot day. You know, now you can have, uh, a string of days over a hundred, in buildings and you know, this is where the whole retrofit and the, uh, you have to upgrade the building cuz the the climate has changed, the building has not. Yeah. Um, and 50% of the buildings that we have today will still be here in 50 years. so yeah.

Tom Raftery:

And, and we get these big heat waves. Yeah. And we get these big heat waves now happening, during summers, which, you know, happened once, maybe every 10, 20 years, 30, 40 years ago. Now they're happening every two, three years. And you see the, the, the figures, the. Number of people dying in those heat waves can go into the tens of thousands and presumably something like this would help with something like that?

Steve Ferrero:

Correct? No, and we, you know, we recognize, and that's, uh, why we were funded actually by climate tech VCs that see the window space as needing what, our tagline is affordable sustainability. So there's lots of solutions that not everyone can afford, so therefore it doesn't become a mass solution. And in our case, we want to bring the technology on a new platform polymer to the glass industry and, uh, window manufacturing and give them another material to work with, in order that the higher performing windows will get installed such that then we can start decarbonizing the existing infrastructure. And also, you know, I hate it when I see a new building getting skinned with double pane windows. It's, it's like learning our lesson then now hopefully Energy Star 7.0 will finally put some, meat behind getting rid of the double paned window, which is what will happen if that new standard comes into play. You know, but the industry is kind of happy the way it is now, and we wanna disrupt that.

Tom Raftery:

Cool, cool, cool. Steve, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question that I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this that we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of?

Steve Ferrero:

Yeah, maybe one thing was about the, uh, you know, if you go to Europe, you see very good windows, in almost every new apartment. And in the hotels you can actually open the window in a hotel in Europe. And the windows are about, you know, this thick. Yeah. Um, so there is a better window technology. And the reason they have better window technology is that they have more of a consciousness on the energy efficiency of buildings because Germany has focused on energy efficiency. They have had, moments of a hundred percent renewable energy powering the whole country. You know, so they have a different focus than America. So America needs to bring over that technology, but we also need to not have windows that are this thick. We need to decontent them. We need to take mass out of them, and we need to make them thinner, but not take away the effectiveness. Um, so that might have been one aspect that, you know, there is pockets of the world where the windows are treated differently, they're manufactured differently, and we want to bring over the good elements of that. You know, triple pane windows are simply quieter. You'll have less noise. There's less internal mold and, condensation, which is good for the building and the health. So maybe that was one aspect. Um, and maybe one other thing that I, I sometimes mention is that, Relative to glass. when you melt all the materials that go into glass and generally use natural gas to melt all that stuff, even if you could replace the natural gas, let's say with hydrogen as a, as a thermal source, if you take 250 tons of raw materials and melt it, you get out 200 tons of glass, but you also generate 50 tons of co2. From the liberation of co2, from the melting process. Now, if someday in the future, companies like 12 and others will capture that co2. But between now and then, we would like to use polymers and with our nice coating on it.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, great. Great. Steve, that's been fascinating. If people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Steve Ferrero:

Sure. I mean, you can go to three e nano.com, that's the number three, the letter E, the word nano.com, all as one word. Or send us an email at info three e nano.com and we will love to connect with you.

Tom Raftery:

Superb, Steve that's been great. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Steve Ferrero:

All right, Tom, enjoyed it. Thank you.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to Tom raftery@outlook.com. Or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please, don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.

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