It takes a combination of passion and discipline to solve any big challenge – climate change included.
For Tim Rackers, Test Engineering Manager, at Electra, the passion came from seeing up close the impacts of fossil fuel production in the Amazon rainforest. As for the discipline, his career as a collegiate and professional long-distance runner was a big help.
“In running, you have to set big goals to be truly successful,” Tim says. “Then you have to make a plan and have the patience to see it through. If you take on too much too soon, you’ll burn out. But if you don’t work hard enough, you won’t succeed either.”
“I see the same disciplined approach at Electra every day,” Tim says. “Simply solving problems is not enough – you need to solve the right ones. You need to know the ‘why,’ from big questions like ‘Why do we need to decarbonize the steel industry,’ to the small ones like ‘Why does a chemical reaction have this effect.’ That expectation can be overwhelming but ultimately leads to a more fulfilling conclusion because we know why we push ourselves.”
Tim comes from a family of engineers, including his father, a former Navy engineer who later went to work for Boeing. After graduating high school in St. Louis, Missouri, Tim pursued an engineering degree at the University of Tulsa while competing on the school’s track and cross-country running teams.
As an engineering student in Oklahoma, there was a strong pull to specialize in oil and natural gas production and eventually work in the fossil fuel sector. But Tim wanted to keep his options open. While accepting some internships in the oil and gas industry, he also worked in the tech sector, developing software and hardware for use in automobile accident investigations.
But Tim’s final internship, monitoring oil and gas pipelines in the Ecuadorian Amazon, made up his mind about choosing a career in cleantech.
Tim was mostly interested in the internship to improve his Spanish language skills. But in Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park, he also helped to evaluate corrosion levels on pipelines used to transport oil, gas and the salty groundwater that’s a byproduct of fossil fuel production.
Through that experience, Tim learned that the stereotypes about reckless oil and gas production weren’t true – the professionals he worked alongside did their best to be environmentally responsible. But Tim also learned that some negative impacts simply can’t be avoided when producing fossil fuels in environmentally sensitive areas.
“When you are extracting oil in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, there will be leaks,” he recalls. Some of the most damaging leaks didn’t involve oil, either. Salty water from pipelines would kill nearby plants and trees and nothing would grow in their place until the contaminated soil was completely dug up and replaced.
“This experience helped catapult me away from oil and gas,” Tim says.
After graduation, Tim found his first cleantech job, working as a lab technician for battery startup just outside of Boulder, Colorado. Tim rose through the ranks, working with a group of scientists and engineers led by Sandeep Nijhawan and Quoc Pham – the co-founders of Electra.
While starting out in cleantech, Tim also made time to continue his athletic career, racing professionally for five years.
Since joining Electra in late 2020, Tim has played a key role in building and improving the electrochemical cells used to convert iron ore into pure iron. Tim has also developed monitoring and data analysis tools that help Electra’s scientists and engineers quickly test the effectiveness of new cell designs and other changes. The faster these improvements can be tested and classified as successes or failures, the faster the technology can be scaled to decarbonize the global iron and steel sector – one of the world’s largest sources of carbon emissions.
“If you spend all your time thinking and not doing, you won’t succeed. That’s true for running and it’s true for technology startups,” Tim says. “When a new challenge or problem comes up, you can’t be afraid to take the first step towards solving it, even if you don’t find the solution right away.”
“That’s one of the things I am best at: Taking the first step.”
Tim says this approach to problem solving is encouraged across the whole company. For proof, you need only look at the whiteboards scattered throughout Electra’s headquarters in Boulder.
“I love whiteboards in a workplace,” Tim says. “When you look at them, you can tell whether or not ideas are being shared. An unused whiteboard shows that people aren’t asking ‘can I get your opinion on this,’ but instead they’re working in isolation.”
“A whiteboard with smudges of old color, different handwriting, and lots of sketches shows the kind of informal collaboration that makes coming into work enjoyable. At Electra, the whiteboards are never empty.”
In his spare time, Tim enjoys indoor gardening, and has been known to name different pieces of lab equipment after his favorite species of plants. Also, as a retired professional runner, Tim enjoys the ability to sleep in more than he used to.