Author here. There's a good amount of hype around fintech lately showcasing many of the latest fintech successes as brand new and different. My point was not that they weren't doing innovative things, it's just that fintech has been embedded in Silicon Valley since the 1950s and new fintech startups have been built around new technology every decade. https://www.forbes.com/fintech/2020/#66762c394acd
there's definitely an opportunity in providing thermal at factories. lots of remote sites in India and China have their own purpose-built coal plants that could potentially use something like that...I have a harder time seeing the financing line up for serving remote villages that can't afford any power today. In those cases finance will always flow to smaller increment technologies, even if they're higher $/kWh, like solar + battery or diesel
I studied energy at Stanford and joined the team that spun TerraPower (www.terrapower.com) out of Intellectual Ventures with Bill Gates' backing. I spent a lot of time looking at these nuclear batteries and economically it's very hard to see them working out as anything close to competitive to natural gas, coal, or wind. The amount of security, containment, etc. that you need for a large plant vs. a small plant doesn't vary much, so the costs per kWh don't scale down as you move down in total plant size, they scale up - and the idea as the techcrunch article suggests that you could sell just a "thermal" battery and let the utility or whoever add the actual steam-to-electric conversion on their own is laughable. Utilities don't do anything on their own.
I do hope these guys figured out something novel about the economics -- and I certainly applaud YC for going into energy.
I went to Stanford for undergrad and am in business school at Harvard now. I'm incredibly grateful for both opportunities. But here's the thing: Stanford teaches you to love and to care and to have passion. Harvard teaches you to think and to act and to have impact. You should totally learn to do both, and you have time to do that - but if you pick one, go to Stanford.