Tony Pan came to the United States from Taiwan in 2004 to study physics at Stanford University before getting his Ph.D. in the same subject area from Harvard University. Now, the 37-year-old is the chief executive of Washington State-based Modern Hydrogen, making energy cleaner and cheaper with a formula endorsed by a former U.S. energy secretary and Microsoft Founder Bill Gates.
We’ll get into that in a moment. But utilities have invested in and bought the technology — a potentially humongous market in the pilot phase. The chief executive says it will go commercial in 2025 and gradually scale up.
“Right now, it is like Tesla in 2008,” CEO Pan told me in a virtual interview. “Utilities are the target audience, which serve millions of customers — residential and business. They have pressure to reduce carbon emissions. Otherwise, they could do nothing. They want to switch to hydrogen because it burns cleanly. It is about decarbonization — quickly and at scale.”
