Sesame Solar: The fuel convoy is the target

In The Vertical Space episode “The Fuel Convoy Is the Target,” Sesame Solar CEO Lauren Flanagan discusses how mobile nanogrids can help solve one of the most difficult challenges in remote and contested environments: delivering reliable power without depending on vulnerable fuel supply chains. The conversation explores Sesame Solar’s solar, battery, and hydrogen-powered nanogrids, their role in emergency response and defense, and the emerging opportunity to support long-endurance hydrogen drones in the field.

Key Takeaways

• Fuel logistics are becoming a strategic vulnerability in contested environments because convoys, resupply aircraft, and fuel bladders can become targets.
• Sesame Solar’s Mobile Nanogrids are designed to generate power at the edge using solar, battery storage, and hydrogen backup.
• Hydrogen drones may be valuable for specific long-endurance missions such as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, border security, infrastructure monitoring, and disaster response.
• Batteries remain the better fit for many short-duration drone missions, but hydrogen may offer advantages when longer flight time, lower signature, and extended field operations are required.
• Sesame Solar’s strongest use cases are remote, off-grid, fragile-grid, emergency-response, and defense environments where traditional fuel delivery is difficult, costly, or risky.
• The company has field-tested mobile nanogrids in demanding environments, including a 13-month Army Corps of Engineers deployment at White Sands Missile Range.
• The episode also highlights the importance of scaling manufacturing, reducing costs, expanding distribution, and collecting more operational data for newer applications such as drone refueling.

‍

In a recent episode of The Vertical Space, Lauren Flanagan, CEO of Sesame Solar, joined the conversation to discuss a growing challenge in defense, emergency response, and remote operations: how to generate reliable power when bringing fuel to the field is expensive, difficult, or dangerous.

The episode, titled “The Fuel Convoy Is the Target,” explores how Sesame Solar’s Mobile Nanogrids are being used to rethink power at the edge. These self-contained systems combine solar power, battery storage, and hydrogen backup to support operations in places where the grid is unavailable, fragile, or compromised.

Much of the conversation focused on the emerging use case of powering and refueling hydrogen drones in remote and contested environments. Flanagan explained how mobile nanogrids can arrive with stored hydrogen, generate additional hydrogen in the field, and provide power for drones, communications, edge compute, command-and-control workspaces, and other mission-critical loads.

The discussion also addressed the hard questions: where hydrogen makes sense, where batteries may be the better option, how real-world field data compares with simulation, and what it will take for mobile, self-generating power systems to scale. For defense and disaster response organizations, the central point was clear: when fuel logistics create cost, risk, and vulnerability, generating power where it is needed becomes a strategic advantage.

Listen to the full podcast here: