‘WE THINK OF THE FRAMEWORK WE LIVE IN AS SO STABLE, AND IT’S NOT. WE JUST THINK [THAT] SO WE
DON’T
FREAK
OUT
ON
A
DAILY
BASIS.’
met JB. They married in 2014 and had twin sons.
“She was the really outgoing one,” Kelty says.
“You wouldn’t normally laugh much with JB, but
when Boryana was around it’s a lot of laughter.”
In June 2021, Boryana was cycling north of Car-
son City when a car veered across a double yellow
line and hit her. She died at the scene, and Straubel’s
life entered the realm of the unimaginable. “I feel
like a third party looking in sometimes,” he says.
“We go about our lives with a framework of things
we think can and can’t happen. It reminds me also
of how important it is that we focus on taking care
of each other, and also the climate around us, and
the environment. We think of the framework we
live in as so stable, and it’s not. We just think it’s
stable so we don’t freak out on a daily basis.”
Boryana ran a sustainability nonprofi t she and
Straubel had started, and had founded a company
that made jewelry from recycled metals. After she
died, Straubel gave a speech to Redwood’s staff
saying that he would redouble his eff orts toward
the company’s mission of supplying battery ma-
terials for the world’s energy transition, because it
was what she would have wanted. A month later,
the company closed a $775 million Series C fund-
ing round. A deal to supply Ford with battery ma-
terials and recycle scrap from its battery factories
came soon after, followed by a contract to supply
copper foil, an essential battery component, to
Panasonic and Tesla. Straubel began building the
U.S.’s fi rst battery- materials processing complex on
a 175-acre site in the scrubby hills of Sparks, Nev.
WHEN I VISIT, cranes and trucks trundle through
an industrial ballet at the site, heaving soil and
building materials around a huge expanse of
carved-up dirt. On a leveled section of earth the
size of four or fi ve football fi elds, pallets of old
batteries—from cell phones, EVs, power drills,
and every other sort of electronics—stretch into
the distance. Bulldozers methodically slice off
sections of a hillside as if it were a gigantic cake.
Straubel plans to install an 8-megawatt solar
array there, enough to supply a quarter of the
facility’s power.
Straubel seems more at ease as he talks about
the company’s higher- level plans, and shows me
where various chemical- processing lines will be
assembled inside massive, partially completed
structures, explaining the environmental value
of moving battery materials between these build-
ings, rather than across an ocean and back. “Six or
seven years ago, I was trying desperately to con-
vince people that there would even be enough mar-
ket to build a giant [battery] cell factory,” Straubel
says. “[Building this facility] will be equally obvi-
ous in hindsight.”
In my time at Redwood, I got the sense that
those who work with Straubel are a bit in awe
of him. “I feel very fortunate that I’ve gotten to
learn from [Straubel] and work alongside him
and in support of him,” says Kevin Kassekert, a
longtime Straubel lieutenant from Tesla who now
serves as Redwood’s COO. Kassekert and others
also seem somewhat protective of Straubel, as
if their jobs were not only to help realize his vi-
sion, but also to insulate their boss from the evils
of the world. Most public fi gures know how to
dodge a hard question. Straubel takes them like
a punch. His communications manager actually
cried when Boryana came up, and I couldn’t help
but feel that those surrounding Straubel actually
love him. There’s a sensitivity and guilelessness
to him, as if he never quite learned to trade in the
world’s economy of small lies, notwithstanding
his money and intellect. When Straubel describes
his vision for a clean, beautifully engineered fu-
ture, it starts to feel like the best thing to do with
your life would be to drop everything and go help
him get it done.
He would probably be trying to fi gure it out even
without anyone’s help. To him, wasteful systems
and poor engineering are like bad music. Good en-
gineering feels like art. That impulse has spread
Straubel’s vision across the world, accumulated
capital and fellow travelers, and to some extent
swept Straubel along with it. He’s surprised about
where he’s found himself. But there’s no stopping
now, not with so much left to do. “It is surreal,”
Straubel says, as workers and heavy equipment
carry out his latest civilization- scale project. “This
is a lot. But it’s still just scratching the surface of
how much there’s going to be.” □Ecopreneurs, a new TIME series, introduces the innovators taking risks to protect the planet’s future