We are the only organization in the world we know of that can
give immediate pricing for every one of these unique activities.
So whether it's civil engineering, electrical
engineering, substation engineering, permit
applications, etcetera, we can fix those prices upfront for the
first time. You're taking all these things
that like someone else would have charged $100,000 for and
you're like, I just did the math.
You're like Costco, you're like, that cost me $1943.
I don't think I'll just charge a 5% markup on there and just
charge people. I'm like Daniel, you can charge
$20,000 for that. Hello, my name is Jigar Shah and
I'm a clean energy entrepreneur. And I'm Jamie Nolan, a Clean
Energy communications executive. And this is Energy Empire.
Hi Jigger, I haven't seen you in a couple of.
Weeks, I know. Welcome back.
How is your health? It's good for anyone who missed
the memo. I was so sad.
I missed the recording with Katherine Blunt.
I contracted salmonella food poisoning, which like you think
is an urban legend. They always tell you to like,
practice good food safety, but it's real.
I'm here to tell you that it's very real.
And it was extremely unpleasant. So Oh my God, but I'm back.
I'm 100% thanks for covering for me while I was out and I'm
excited to talk to Daniel Deuce. Yeah, this morning I had to go
to my son's school. They all had to pick an
important topic that they wanted to do a presentation on.
And of course, my son picked clean energy and why it's so
important to get off of fossil fuels.
And so like, I'm like crying, you know, over at the episode,
he created a pop up book of like all these like wind power and
tidal power and solar panels that like popped up.
And he even had like a detailed presentation on how a solar cell
worked. That's awesome.
I mean no surprise, but we may need Dylan to make a little
cameo and do a do a show and tell for the audience.
That sounds so cool. Well, Daniel is amazing.
I have known Daniel for years, Full disclosure.
Funny enough, like one of the other people I work with closely
is a guy named Richard Dover. And Daniel and Richard don't
like each other because they they had like a lawsuit with
each other like many years ago when Daniel wasn't a previous
job and Richard was her previous job.
I don't know whether they buried the hatchet, but I like both.
Daniel. Appreciate you airing their
dirty Laundry jigger on our podcast.
Go ahead. I mean, that's how we do.
But I like Daniel and I like Richard, so it's good.
But I think but Daniel is like a class act and he we all know
that he gives up himself all the time, right?
He does the big solar Fight Night thing.
So I'm really excited to get into all of the things that he
does, why he does them. I think I'm I'm here to like
yell at him for like underpricing his services, which
I think he does. I think he provides so much
value he should charge for, but we'll see how he responds.
I do love that refrain that you constantly have.
And I would say his company, Cleantech Industry Resources,
it's one of those companies that when you get the pitch, you're
like, why are you not like huge? Why are you not like famous?
Why are you not rich? Like, it's just one of those
concepts that makes so much sense.
So I'm really excited to share that with our audience.
Yeah. I have no doubt in my mind that
one day he will be rich. But I think that, you know, what
he's doing right now is unlocking real value for solar
projects. As many people know, solar has
gotten a little bit more expensive actually to install
the last two or three years. And I think his product is
getting us back on track to reducing the cost of delivering
solar to customers. Absolutely.
And it all ties back to energy affordability, and this is just
like another company that is doing groundbreaking work and
driving down the cost of power. So I'm excited to talk to him.
Let's get into it. Energy Empire is powered by
Octopus Energy. Natasha Utilities have been
pitching demand response for 20 years.
Nobody signed up. Whose fault is that?
The industries. Those programs were designed for
utilities, not people. Confusing opt in's a bill
credit. You need a forensic accountant
to find no feedback ever. That's not a product, that's
homework. The utility answer is that
customers just don't care about the grid.
And they're right, and that's fine.
Nobody cares about the grid. People care about what they pay.
So stop asking them to care and build something that works on
its own. The car charges when Power's
cheapest thermostat precools before the evening peak.
The home battery cells back at the top and the savings show up
where you can actually see them. So the fix isn't another pilot
program. It's a product good enough that
nobody has to be convinced. Homework gets assigned, products
get chosen. Thanks Natasha Crow, vice
president of Marketing and Comms, North America, at Octopus
Energy. Link in the show notes Daniel
Deuce in the Flesh Jigger. It's great to see you.
Fantastic. Yeah, very good.
It's thawed up here in Vermont. So excited about that.
What do you guys get like 60 days of great weather a year?
Max Max. Oh no, probably less.
Not the best solar radiation, unfortunately.
But everyone loves to come up and stay with you, I'm sure
during the like leaf. Peeping season, yeah, we have
fall and we do have Smugglers Notch, so we've got some
treasures, but they're kind of few and far between sometimes.
You get icy skiing up at Killington.
Not this season. This season we got real powder.
But that was weird, to be clear. Yeah, that was very.
Great. You think it's bad skiing up
there, You should try hanging out with us in like Pennsylvania
or Virginia. It's a great way to break
something. Yeah, I've got a place up in
Deep Creek Lake and we have a ski resort called Wisp, which I
don't know that I can technically be called a ski
resort, but Daniel, we're going to jump right in because you
have an incredible story and I would like to get into it.
So like, just to start, you're the 4th generation of your
family to work in energy, right? Your great grandfather was a
coal mine engineer who became president of Michigan Tech
University. Your grandfather built power
Transformers at General Electric.
Like 3 generations of building the system and you're the one
that pivoted it into renewables, right?
It ended up the second person in the US to reach a GW of solar PP
as after me, obviously. And so like, what did watching
your family work the energy industry teach you that carried
you into Cir. Yes, yes.
You know, I usually don't tell all of my renewable energy
friends about my coal like family legacy, but thanks for
doing that trigger. I appreciate it.
You're like an energy neppo, baby Danielle is what?
You're telling us, evidently, I remember when my peers in middle
school were going to, as they should have baseball camp and
soccer camp. I went to Michigan Tech
mechanical engineering camp. So you can imagine that was a
fun party. But and then going into the
125,000 square foot library, which is named after my great
grandfather, and seeing it filled with energy knowledge,
right, Energy industry knowledge, it's definitely set
the stage. And seeing the transformer
building 2,000,000 square feet that my grandfather built power
Transformers in, it certainly gave me the feeling that humans
can do really big things right, and I just wanted to be part of
it. Well, you know I protested the
Michigan Tech coal lant so. Did you really?
Oh, yeah, I went to Illinois, right.
But all of us had a coal plant that like was joining the
university that then, you know, was like a Cogen facility,
right? So you would take the heat off
the coal plant and heat and cool all the buildings and.
Yeah, coal kept the lights on for a long time.
We no longer need it. If great grandpa was around
today, he would certainly be a solar engineer, I have no doubt
about that. I love that.
And so give me the origin story of Cir. right?
Because you used to run Adani's solar business in the US And
like, I mean, there's a little bit of an origin story between
the two, right? Yes, absolutely.
Working within Adani was pretty amazing.
This is an organization that signed the world's largest PPA
at the time of eight gigawatts, commissioned the world's largest
wind solar hybrid park of 1.6 gigawatts.
Earlier this week, they just announced they've commissioned
the largest battery outside of China, 3.4 GW hours.
So that's the scale of the projects and the complexity of
the projects that's happening there. 10X the United States and
that my team has worked on. And so we acquired Adani's U.S.
business, the intellectual property there and spun it out
into what is now Cir. So direct outcome from what I
had ranked before we left as the world's largest global solar
developer. So quite a spin out story.
And remind me what Cir. stands for?
Clean tech industry resources. The.
Most generic possible name because we don't care about our
brand, we care about serving the industry.
So not super important that we have a memorable brand, I guess.
We're going to fix that. Yeah, I'm like we brands always
there, always, always available to you, Daniel.
OK, So you you describe Cir. as the world's only Amazon style
service store for complex energy professional services to include
site visits, diligence, energy modeling, permitting, grid
studies, merger and acquisition support, construction
management, etcetera, etcetera, all at fixed global pricing.
So for a listener who's never thought about energy project
development as a storefront, explain what you actually built.
Like what does a customer literally do when they show up?
My inability to answer that question in a simple clean way
is actually one of the cores to the value we've created because
it's really a choose your own adventure story, right?
We have clients that can come and purchase a single energy
generation model or they can retain us to deliver a GW scale
battery to NTP immediately, right?
With 0 lag, no bid time, etcetera, just straight into
execution. And so it varies by client and
their individual needs, their internal bandwidth, external
bandwidth, where their bottlenecks are in that moment,
we can apply bandwidth to support them and accelerate in
exactly that that location. In that way it's.
Almost like they're like separate modules and so you can
like go little or you can go big like depending on your needs.
Any system size? Yeah, any system size globally.
But let me get into my pet peeve because I I think your
storytelling is terrible, Daniel.
So like so like I'm reading story worthy right now.
Let me get right into this because like the thing that I
find fascinating about what you do, is it so #1 the reason you
have this business, as I can tell, is that Adani is basically
obsessed with doing everything in house.
So as a result, like you are not allowed to hire any external
consultants. And so you had to do everything
in house from geotechnical reports to, you know,
interconnection studies to all this other stuff.
And so as a result, you inherited a team of like 100
people in India who were experts in esoteric reports or whatever
for US projects, right? And so that's why you have all
of the people that you have, right, because they sort of were
forced to become experts in like each individual thing in the US,
right? And that's really what you're
renting out. And then the next stage, as I
understand it was all these companies came through
powerhouse, right, and other like incubators and they all
basically created their own little app that like made
they're part of solar more efficient.
Nobody obviously wanted to have 74 apps, but you decided to
license all 74 apps, right? And like figure out how to
become an expert at all of them and like help people do things
more efficiently, right? Today you've realized that half
of them are garbage. And so like you only have like
37 apps, right? But you started with all of them
just to see whether you can figure it out, right?
And now you're sort of at a point where you can do
everything for everybody. But in some ways, when you say
that you can do everything for everybody, it's even more
confusing, right? Because in some ways you kind of
need to say we have the like deluxe car wash, the simple car
wash, the car wash with waxing, the car wash with like, you
know, the interior, like, you know, detailing, etcetera.
Like I feel like you need false packages even though you have
the ability to do all of it. Yeah.
And we do in our latest pricing calculators, we do have a fixed
price to NTP, any solar or battery project globally.
So that's literally full performance of the development
work. But we also do any slice of that
entire process for unique clients and we don't really care
which it is. Some clients we build 2 or $300
a month to. Some clients we build $150,000 a
month to task come in one side of the organization and work
product and execution happens. So our execution framework is
the same for all of those clients regardless of scale and
scope. But I agree, yeah, it's very,
very hard to tell that story. It's extremely hard.
Well, Jigger just told it for you so.
All you need to. Do Daniel is just take the
transcript from this conversation and turn that into
your like everyone loves an exciting origin story.
Like you can count on Jigger to be like this is like I get in
trouble with my husband for doing this.
He'll tell a story and I'll be like listening and I'll be like,
well, what really happened is and then I'll retell the story.
I have gotten scolded so much about that, but I try not to do
that now. But that's that's basically what
Jigger did. But I mean, you're a CEO, so
that's going to help you perceived less positively by my
husband, I think, but. Well, you know, like that's what
Jamie and I do. We jazz it up.
Yes, it's true, but that's what we're here for.
So now you've gone out in the world and you've have pitched
the top 100 solar developers, right?
And NTP for those folks who are following along is notice to
proceed. So that's all of the steps
required to start construction basically, right?
And, and you've gone to all of those people and you've captured
I think what 20 of the top 100 are now. 25% plus, yeah.
That's pretty amazing. And most of that, I think has
been accomplished in the last 12 months.
It is, yes. We now have over 250 clients, so
I'd say more than 50% of those in the last 12 months, they were
adding a new client every other day.
We have a single United States sales representative,
essentially. That's wild.
So yeah, yeah, we cannot on board folks any faster than we
are. Essentially we're we're being
governed by our bolting on bandwidth just to do more of
what we're already doing. But it's a strange time to be in
such a good place. But I guess we'll just knock on
wood and call it a day. So you've said that Cir. has
commoditized roughly 95% of the activities it takes to advance
an energy project. For someone in the industry
hearing that number for the first time, what is commoditized
actually mean in practice? Like what is the work now that
wasn't standardized before? Almost none of it, Jamie.
We are the only organization in the world we know of that can
give immediate pricing for every one of these unique activities.
So whether it's civil engineering, electrical
engineering, substation engineering, whether it's permit
applications, etcetera, we can fix those prices upfront for the
first time. And so 95% of these activities
to get projects to construction and finance readiness are
commoditized in our process. The 5% that are not there are
the boots on the site, portions of the site studies, the
majority of environmental assessments, wetland
delineations, these things are actually desktop and we've
commoditized all of those. But the site specific screening,
we will scope them, RFP them, we'll collect a dozen bids and
provide them at cost to our clients, but they're not yet
commoditized. You're taking all these things
that like someone else would have charged $100,000 for and
you're like, I just did the math.
It's like you're like Costco, you're like, that cost me $1943.
I don't think I'll just charge a 5% markup on there and just
charge people. I'm like, Daniel, you can charge
$20,000 for that. They're like, no, I think I'm
just going to take the cost to like mark it up 5%, like charge
my client that. You know me well, and you know
that if I could give our services away for free to
advance clean energy projects, I would.
Yes, you are. I love that.
I love that, Daniel, as someone who jigger, jigger who likes to
tell me that I'm too generous and I want to pay people too
much and I I can't help it. You can't turn it off.
It is the mission that often comes first.
So Daniel, can you give us a concrete example here of like a
price comparison of what a project may cost working through
Cir. versus like the standard process?
Sure. Of course.
I like to use the DOE has APV system cost analysis.
I think the last one was refreshed in 2024.
And if you look at that soft costs are about 17 to $0.19 per
Watt for 100 MW DC project. Our cost to NTP 100 MW DC
project is 1.52 cents. That includes full systems
engineering. Most folks can't even get just
the engineering done for that number.
So that's the magnitude of the advantage.
All right. So we were talking about how you
were able to commoditize 95% of this process.
So what is it that's in the 5% that you cannot commoditize?
And what does that 5% that's remaining tell us about where
the industry still needs human judgment?
Yeah. What's interesting is we
actually have commoditized the human in the loop portion of all
of our work flows. So they're heavily software
dependent, but they also have subject matter experts in every
workflow controlling the quality and advancing those in real
time. So where we need the human in
the loop falls into a few categories. 1 is I would just
call it generally EQ or emotional quotient.
People convincing other people to do things right.
Bob the Fire Marshall is going to have personal opinions that
have nothing to do with the code every time.
And you have to be ready to either educate Bob or agree with
Bob and update and refresh your engineering, technical work,
procurement, etcetera, or come up with some type of a
settlement and negotiate with Bob for for a settled
negotiation. And by the way, Bob is not going
to answer his telephone. He's only going to respond if
you show up in person with a large box of Donuts.
And so that is. Extremely important Daniel fruit
basket. Much healthier.
So you're saying, you're saying
stakeholder engagement, community engagement,
essentially communications and marketing functions where you
have to actually build trust with people cannot be replaced
with replacement? And and also the other major
bucket is simply liability. We're in constant touch with
professional licensing boards and if you ask them licensed
civil, structural, electrical, financial advisory, legal bars,
etcetera, if you ask them if they are prepared to give any
AIA license, they will laugh at you, right?
And that is not about to change anytime soon.
These are human boards. So therefore you must have the
human in the loop to take full liability for any and all
decisions and actions, and we don't see that changing.
So that's where we spend a lot of our time and focus.
So the other thing I was thinking about is you started
off the company with like a license to all these different
apps from all these companies around the country who are
trying to, you know, like make each one of these component
parts more efficient. But now we have AI, right?
And so you publicly announced that you're going to try to have
1750 AI agents in place by the end of this year.
You have a Google AI lead that like you've been working with
for the past 2 1/2 years to guide you around what was
possible, right? So help us understand the apps
that you were using before and then the agents you're putting
in now, whether any of them interact with each other.
Are they replacing the apps? Do they do some other function
like like how does AI you know really help make this all
happen? Yeah, it's, it's a great
question. And we still have over 52
different enterprise level third party tools that are fantastic.
Of course we have PV case and PV roof and DNVGL solar compass,
Homer Grid, Zen D and on and on and on, right.
And then we have expert operators in each of those
tools. Where we have our AI agents
working is on the automation and acceleration and improvement of
of the human workflows that advance any one of these unique
disciplines. And so for example, the AI data
room diligence process that we acquired from Richard Matsui, we
now have over 25 different highly trained specialized AI
agents executing that process to identify risk in various data
rooms and compile key information and make it
actionable. And so, but you're certainly
right in that we've gone from sort of passive software tools
now to tools that can act on our behalves.
And so that's really where we're spending a ton of time, of
course. And for us, these work
everywhere from generating meeting minutes immediately
following a call to initial pricing and cost estimation for
projects, all of which go through a highly expert subject
matter, but reducing the time that it takes them to prepare
and assess and analyze these things.
There is not a single workflow in the organization that's not
touched by AI automation and Software Zero.
I saw Jamie just perk up there. Are you replacing her Fireflies
meeting notes? You know app here.
We also use fireflies. We like fireflies a lot.
I, I just got, I just got, I had AI did have a client refer me to
another tool yesterday. So we'll have to, I'll have to
try that out. Also love the shout out to
Richard Matsui, who I have to point out was our colleague at
the loan programs office. So hi, Rich, if you hear this.
OK, Daniel. So here's the question you owe
us an honor, an honest answer to you kind of already suggested as
such, but you've said that the commoditization of knowledge
work isn't a future threat. It's already happened.
And I think that you're kind of explaining that as you're
talking about the the structure of your company and how it
works. But for the energy engineers and
developers listening right now, what you've built is essentially
A eulogy for the way their jobs used to work, like how things
were done. So what is your honest case to
that workforce? What should they be doing with
the next 10 years of their careers?
It is the number one pushback that we get from teams that we
want to or are working with on occasion.
They see our process, our process, our workflows and they
think they're just going to get fired tomorrow, right?
We had one engineer tell us some time back that he was not even
going to present our quote to his management because he said,
quote, I would look like an idiot for all the money I've
been spending on the scope for the rest of the portfolio.
And so of course, that's the wrong response.
And the right response is that this is absolutely a Jevons
paradox moment for renewable energy.
If you can reduce as we can the cost of delivered assets by 20
to 30%, then we only increase the demand for solar across
homes, businesses and at utilities.
And so there is no shortage of work to be done and employment
to be had in that dramatic growth scenario.
If we all tighten the belt, get more efficient faster and we
continue to widen the gap of what the cost and price of our
energy in the market versus alternatives, right.
So that is our entire thinking. And by the way, if anyone would
like to talk about working for us, please call me.
Well, and that's what I keep telling people too, who asked me
this is I'm just like, you know, these are all of the tasks that
nobody wanted to do. Like it was painstaking work.
You had to figure out where the mistake was.
It was like a where's Waldo you know, effort because you had
this like complicated drawing. You're like, are we sure that
it's correct? And what part is not correct or
whatever? Now you have an AI agent that
can tell you exactly whether it's correct or not and like,
and then highlight the parts that you should just look at
more carefully. I totally agree with you.
I feel like this is going to allow us to 10X the amount of
solar that we deploy, which is what we need to do in this
moment. The one question I had though on
this is really just how do we restate what I just said to
humans, right? Like what part of their job as
AI and what part of their job is them and how do they feel like
that part of what they have to do continues to be important.
Their judgment continues to be important, right?
That like the AI is there to assist them, right?
I mean, because you know, Jensen Huang talks about this all the
time, right? That like that when Microsoft
Excel came out, it wasn't like everybody who did spreadsheets
manually, like lost their job. Like in fact, 10s of thousands
of additional people got hired to do more spreadsheets, right?
And so like, so I feel like everyone thinks that AI is
coming for their job instead of thinking that AI is going to be
a tool that helps them do their job more effectively.
What I think is important for us all to remember is that we have
all been subject to way too much data and plenty of great advice
for a really long time. It was all just one Google
search away. Subject matter experts have been
dumping it online for years and years.
So yes, AI now gives us a million times more data and
analysis and great advice. It still has to be actuated in
the physical world. It still has to be turned into
action. And so that's where we lack the,
I think fear that exists often in the market.
What our AI advisors point out to us is that AI is going to and
and has already started inventing amazing new medical
devices, technologies, etcetera. Those require factories to be
built, they require sales teams to be sold, they require human
relationships to be deployed. They require electricians in the
field, right. And so the number of new
technologies and advancements that we're looking at, including
in our field is going to be substantial and require humans
to execute bottom line. Daniel, you're one of the six
founders of the Solar Fight Club, which has grown Solar
Fight Night into one of the largest renewable energy
fundraisers in the world. 22 events, more than 14,000
attendees, over 1.8 million raised to date for clean energy
nonprofits. I know it's the party of the
year for the renewable energy industry every year at RA Plus.
I never miss it. Jigger and I have gone been
going together for years now. For listeners who have never
been to one, what actually happens at a solar Fight Night
and why does this scene exist in clean tech?
Well, what actually happens at Fight Night, I guess.
In Vegas last year I had a sway pool performer representing
wind. I had synchronized swimmers
representing hydrogen. I had a guy running around in a
tinfoil hat with a Pinocchio nose talking about how windmills
kill whales. And I had a Joker running around
giving people tariffs for absolutely no reason.
Like your shirts too red. I didn't that's.
Hilarious. Though, Yeah, so we have fun
with what's happening in the moment because sometimes if you
don't laugh, you cry. But at its core, Fight Night has
the exact same mission it's always had, which is to
celebrate the industry and the people that are making this
transition happen, that are fighting for a cleaner future
and to make the human connections that get projects
done right. That mission remains to this
day. It's the best networking event
in the industry, in my opinion. And that is Fight Night in a
nutshell. All right, take me to the bar.
How did the six of you get together and what was it like
when you came up with the idea? So the original idea was from
Todd Friedman, now development at Altis, and it was about
survival back then, right in 2008, it was about how to not go
bankrupt or leave the industry. My first two years in solar, I
made exactly $0.00. And so that's what we were
talking about. How are we going to get the
first projects that we were getting signed?
How are we going to get them done?
I'll never forget I showed up and I was talking about how I'd
signed 100 kilowatt PPA with the city of Santa Monica and
everyone was like 100 kilowatts. Like, how are you ever going to
do that, right? It's massive.
And so that that's, that was really the genesis.
And of course, we all know that we have more passion in this
industry than others. I think Jamie, you were alluding
to why is such an event exist in the clean tech space versus
maybe some others. So for fun, if you Google
nonprofit fundraising event for oil and gas nonprofits, you will
come up with exactly 0. And so it's, it's not as if
there is much competition. And I think it really comes down
to the core heart and soul of our industry being more than
just an economic initiative, but a moral and imperative as well.
So I think that's why, Solar Fight Night insists.
Can you give a quick shout out to 1 of what group you've?
I know every year you support a different nonprofit
organization, but either the group you're supporting this
year or one that stands out to you from the last few years.
This year we are promoting our leading industry advocates
because as Jigger likes to point out, political power is our
first, second and third priority.
And so we are supporting solar Energy Industries Association,
SIA. We're supporting both solar
who's the leader at the state level.
Of course, SIA is the leader at the national level and we're
supporting run on Climate, which is a leader at getting mayoral
and county government candidates elected who are pro climate.
And that's where we see a lot of projects dying these days,
locally, hyper locally. So huge fan of their work
especially. So now let's turn this back to
capitalism. And so so Cir. actually gets a
lot out of solar Fight Night. So like I'm not suggesting you
started it for this purpose, but now that you have like a party
that everybody wants to get into that gets sold out, you have
AVIP line and also stuff like how do you guys use this
strategically to get more customers to notice Cir. and in
the door and all that stuff? It's a great question.
Actually. No one has ever asked me this
question before so, but people have asked me why do you have
you spent 1000 hours arranging or and coordinating and
executing solar Fight Night over the years for $0.00, right?
That's a that's a perfectly reasonable question and there's
certainly an element of it just gives me hope in humanity.
Again, we go through the year, we read all these terrible
headlines about all these stupid things we're doing as a species.
But you go to Fight Night and you remember that there are so
many good people doing such good work and that is more valuable
than the almighty dollar sometimes.
Now going back to Capitalism Jigger, it is a secret sauce
item for Cir. Although I've never taken the
mic and spoken about Cir. who runs and manages and execute the
the event or myself. For one concrete example of the
outcomes here, we have everyone's contact information.
We have 63,000 contacts for every vendor on planet Earth,
globally. And so when we support our
clients in executing procurement activities, on average our
clients internal teams might go to three to five bidders.
On average, we go to 150 bidder organizations and we have
everyone's personal Gmail addresses because of Fight
Night. Thank you.
And so we're able to get to them and make sure that they're
responding to opportunities that fits with their scope.
So on average, we're able to drive procurement cost down by 3
to 5% even at the 100 or MW or GW scale project.
That's a lot of cash and value to our clients, and probably a
full third of our clients have come from being in touch with
folks just outside of the commercial relationship focus,
right? It just gives us something to
connect with. There are too few opportunities
for us to connect as humans these days outside of a
commercial environment, right? Everything is an ad and Solar
Fight Night is the opposite of that.
I invite every one of our competitors into to the event to
celebrate the industry because it's about all of us.
Awesome. I love that so much.
So you've also launched Cleantech Fact Check through
Solar Fight Night, which is a platform built specifically to
push back on misinformation and clean energy.
You've said critical decisions in this industry are getting
made on incomplete or misleading information, which I think we
can all agree with. So what's the piece of
misinformation that Cleantech Fact Check is built to take down
right now? And who's the audience that
you're trying to reach with that beyond just our colleagues in
the industry? Yeah.
Well, first of all, I'm trying to stop calling it
misinformation and just call it lies.
They're lies. This is really the truth of the
matter. And it's it's ironically one of
the great disadvantages of our industry is that our executive
teams are moral and would never lie.
I do not know a single renewable energy industry executive who
would get on and lie, for example, like the coal lobby
saying that pollution is good for us, for example.
Now we've database dozens and dozens of these lies and then
prepared well researched scientific responses as well as
comedic responses if that's what you want to respond with.
We've also databased all the industry videos of every farmer
whose farm the industry saved, every homeowner who's put panels
on their roof and wants to brag about their $0.00 energy bill so
that folks can access those videos and respond wherever they
are. We've databased where those
folks are and those stories come from.
So there's a repository of of responses to the lies and
misinformation in real time. So because it can take a long
time to research and respond and reply.
So instead you can go to cleantechfactcheck.org,
immediately search, find the lie, cut and paste response of
your choosing because we just have to be in the mix on the
discussion. That's an awesome resource that
I have. I am embarrassed to admit that I
didn't know that it existed, but I'm gonna go check it out right
after this. Brand new, brand new.
We launched two or three weeks ago, so.
Oh, awesome. Great.
All right. We'll definitely have to put
that in the show notes as well as a link to where folks can go
to potentially become a customer of Cir.
Because I mean, I think if they, if you listen to this episode,
if you're in the market for any of these services, the value
prop here is just completely undeniable.
Last question on my side, Ari Plus got pushed out to November
this year in Vegas. I think it's the same week as
the F1 race. So that's going to be crazy.
And so like, where is solar Fight Night?
Is the F1 race also in Vegas? It is, and it's that Thursday of
that week, and so I'm out on Wednesday this year.
We better all go make our hotel reservations now.
Yeah, exactly. Immediately I, I did notice that
our suite booking was 50% more when we booked it last month.
And I thought it was just for the conference, but that makes
much more sense. I think the F1 set probably has
a little more cash to spend on on fancy hotel rooms that our
renewable energy industry friends do.
We are at the same venue, Soup Nightclub, IU Day Club.
I want to say it's a 3500 plus person venue, really nice,
super, super high tech and we're going to have a lot of fun.
And hopefully I'm going to knock on wood after the recording
here. Hopefully we'll be celebrating
the midterms, right? That's what that's what we hope.
High energy. We definitely want a lot of
clean energy champions to win their seat in midterms.
Has to happen. Well, we can't wait to see you
at Solar Fight Night, Daniel. We'll be there.
Yes, we're doing one at ACP 2-3 a year now.
Amazing. Well, thanks for coming on,
Daniel, and thanks for all the great work you've done for years
for our industry. It really is important.
And just a reminder, double your prices.
He does this to me too. It's just paradox, Jigger
Javid's paradox, right? Our, our conversion rate from a
cold call to a client is 60 plus percent for a reason, right?
So there's a there's some upside in being aggressive on our
pricing structures. I love it.
Thanks Daniel. Thanks.
Energy Empire is supported by S2G Investments.
If you haven't checked out their podcast, I highly recommend it.
They have a great recent episode on the long term effects of the
Iran war and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
In the episode, Sanjeev Krishna and Franco Sullivan and Bala
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Go find the S2G podcast and start with the global energy.
Order has changed Now what? Well, that was fun.
Yes, So great to talk to Daniel. He's really inspiring.
He's one of those people who is absolutely driving change in our
sector with an incredible company that is driving on the
cost of power and just making our, you know, these, these
services and this generation so much more scalable in a really
powerful way. So I can't wait to see what they
do next. But it is kind of hilarious that
he is not at all a self promoter.
He's not. I mean, it was funny to me when
you were kind of like, I'm going to retell that story for you.
I mean, I really hope that he takes that to heart because he
should toot his own horn a little bit and it doesn't come
naturally to some people. But then in other places, I
thought he was really eloquent, like he had a really great
response on like some of the workforce issues related to AI
adoption in the sector. And he really understands like
the human element of the work and how important the trust
building is. And just there's so much heart
in what he's doing, like with Solar Fight Night and all of his
nonprofit work. So it was great to get to know
him a little bit more. Oh, he clearly cares.
I mean, that's when he lights up.
Is he really cares when he's talking about others?
And he clearly like clams up when he wants, when I'd like ask
him to talk about himself. I'm like, no, I want you to talk
more about yourself. Yep, Yep.
He's obviously, like so many of us in the sector, really cares
about climate, is like here to to just do well by doing good.
Well, and I'm super excited to see how the tools that he's put
together really can reduce the cost of the soft costs on solar.
I mean, I was shocked by his numbers where he was like, it's
like 17 and $0.19 per Watt on the cost of installing a solar
project. All those soft costs and he's
reducing them down to, I think he said, 1.52 cents.
Yeah, wild. Like significantly greater cross
cost reductions than I anticipated he would be able to
tangibly demonstrate. I don't see any reason why
anyone who wasn't in the market for any of those services
wouldn't be reaching out to Cir. after listening to this episode.
Like the value is just absolutely undeniable.
Well, we're going to put a link, I'm sure in the show notes and
folks should click on it and make sure that they start saving
money. I mean, it's important.
Totally. And then also for my other comms
and marketing folks that I know you're listening to this
podcasts, definitely also go check out Cleantech Fact Check,
which is the new website that Daniel mentioned just launched a
few weeks ago. I am going to go check it out
and post on LinkedIn about it. Can't wait.
Well, and as you know, Next up, the Ass Jigger segment that is
sponsored by our friends at Octopus Energy.
I can't wait. I'm really excited.
Welcome to Ask Jigger, our weekly segment where Jigger
answers your questions about energy or anything else you're
wondering about. Huge thanks to our sponsor
Octopus Energy for making the segment possible.
Before we get into this week's questions, a bit of news.
We have a brand new merch shop, very excited about it.
Right now it's Energy Empire merch, but we have plans to add
more general energy merch, so definitely send us your ideas
for what you want to say. And to celebrate, anyone who
sends in a question that Jigger answers on the show gets an
Energy Empire hat. So send them in.
All right, let's get to it, Jigger.
Our first question comes from Darren Lehman.
And Darren says Jigger. I've spent a lot of time on
residential roofs, installing solar panels and all the
electrical work that makes the system run.
So here's what I can't figure out.
Data centers keep citing these massive new power needs.
So why is an on site solar and battery storage a routine part
of their plans? I get that rooftop and ground
mount solar plus batteries won't cover all of their load, but it
boggles my mind that the cheapest new generation we have
isn't standard in the build out. Why not?
It is such a good point, but basically it is the battery that
matters, not the solar, right? And So what happens when a data
center comes to town is that they use up a lot of the excess
capacity that's left in the grid.
And so if you can put everybody on that circuit on batteries and
that when there is like a grid crisis or some sort of
emergency, you actually take those loads and have them run
off the battery, that frees up capacity for the data center.
And what a lot of the experts are saying is that if you give
local residents free stuff, meaning a battery and then maybe
a solar system to refuel the battery, then they suddenly love
the data center. And it's less than .1% of the
cost of a new data center to provide all of those batteries
to those residential customers. And so I totally agree with you
that residential solar and battery storage should be part
of the solution. One other fun fact, we have
about 6,000,000 residential solar systems in the United
States. That represents maybe 10%, a
little less of all of the single family residential systems
houses in the country. I think Australia is over 40%,
maybe 50% of their rooftops with solar on it.
So if we just matched Australia, we would free up so much
capacity that we could say yes to all of the data centers and
reduce everybody's bills by 10%. Well, those are some big
numbers. I mean, I think we understand
what the solution is, but why are the hyperscalers not hip to
this? Like why aren't they doing it?
Because the people who understand the grid are not the
people who are trying to move fast and break things.
And so, like, part of this is actually forcing the people who
move fast and break things to understand that their way isn't
working right. I mean, like 70% of all the data
centers that were supposed to be online this year are delayed.
They're not even under construction yet.
And so their way is not going fast.
They have to move a little more slowly to go fast later.
And a lot of the energy experts who work for the hyperscalers
know what the right answer is. But people aren't listening to
them. So keep beating up the
hyperscalers. They'll do the right thing
eventually. All right, I'll take our next
question comes from David Savage.
And David, says Jigger. I'm a staffer at a Public
Utilities Commission. I'm so happy you're here, David,
Thank you for listening to the podcast.
You've talked a lot about the need for commissions to be more
proactive. And I wonder where you think the
balance lies between a Commission taking action on its
own versus needing to be empowered to act by the state
legislature. It's a great question and one
that we struggle with all the time.
You know, I think that commissions do, I think have the
right to say and to nudge utilities in the right direction
and say, hey, it'd be good to get more out of the grid.
We've already paid for using grid enhancing technologies and
virtual power plants. But for a lot of utility
commissions, they view themselves as traditional
bodies, right? And so the utility goes forward
and says here's our integrated resource plan or here's our rate
recovery request. And folks have to go through and
say here's what's prudent, here's what's not prudent.
They're not really supposed to tell utility companies how to
operate their grid. So they want air cover from the
state legislators to say, hey, you have to achieved this higher
grade utilization which is what passed in Virginia.
There's other states that are looking to do the same thing to
give their commissions air cover.
But I would suggest if you look at what Dan Scripps has done in
Michigan, he's absolutely said to consumers and DTE, hey, I am
not looking at any more of your rate requests unless you pair it
with whether this particular project could have been done
cheaper with a virtual power plant or grid enhancing
technologies. And so I do think that kind of
boldness is something commissions have the legal right
to do. But totally agree with you that
most commissioners don't feel like they have the air cover
from their governors or their state legislators to be that
bold. So what's the solution?
Well, some of the folks have been bold, right?
The Minnesota Commission, the Michigan Commission, but others
have been bold, like, you know, our friend Marissa over in
Connecticut, and she lost her job over being bold, right?
Then the governor didn't have her back, right?
And so you see a variety of different approaches.
But part of the reason why we're trying to get bills passed
across the country to explicitly require higher grid utilization
is to give people air cover, right?
And to send a signal directly from the state legislators to
the utilities saying we're watching you, you need to do
things that are in the best interest of ratepayers, not just
the data centers and shareholders, which is what
everybody's accusing them of. Absolutely.
And I'd actually add that if you're interested in this topic,
you should check out the work being done by the utilized
coalition as well as deploy action.
Those are both groups that are working at the state level to
try and get more legislation passed and potentially put
together some model legislation around grid utilization.
So thanks for the question. That was a really good one.
OK, Our next question comes from Steven Scarpula and Steven says
Jigger. I'm a finance professional and
listening to the show has me seriously considering a career
change to help move the energy transition forward. 2 questions.
What's your advice for someone making that jump from finance?
And are there specific people in the industry I should be
reaching out to? Well, it's a great question and
one that, you know, I don't know that I know which place you
should jump into from finance, but finance is a great place to
jump from. But there's a lot of, you know,
important roles in our industry. I mean, the beauty and you know,
Jamie, you know this better than I do, The value of marketing and
comms is super important. The value of construction
management is super important. There's a lot of folks that are
figuring out how to use next generation AI tools to reduce
the cost of building new, you know, plants.
There are folks who become experts in working with
regulators, who are working with state legislators and
policymakers to be able to, you know, educate them on finance
related issues and how money views certainty or uncertainty
or some of those other things. And so I think that no matter
what you want to do, there's room for you in the industry.
It's so diverse. Absolutely.
And I would add there are, there are lots of finance jobs in this
industry as well. I mean, I'm sitting here today
at the offices of Galvanized Climate Solutions.
They're, you know, working in the space Jiggers former firm
Generate Capital. I mean, there are a lot of
similar types of groups that work at the intersection of
clean energy and finance. So it can be done.
Definitely take the leap and you won't regret it.
It's very, very rewarding, gratifying work.
OK, our last question comes from Arjun Mehta.
And he says, Jigger, you spend all day telling the rest of us
to electrify everything. So I have to ask, what's
actually in your house? Uh oh.
He wants you set up solar on the roof, heat pump.
What do you got? What are you working with?
So I've got 2 houses, one in Bethesda, MD and then we have a
vacation place up in Deep Creek Lake, MD.
The one in Bethesda has a lot of tree cover on the roof and so
I've had it fully mapped and found the like little slivers of
places where the sun consistently shines.
And I put 2 kilowatts of solar there.
So I've done that right. My house had I ripped out the
natural gas heating and cooling systems to put in heat pumps.
And so we're all heat pumps. I've got a natural gas water
heater and so I'm waiting for that to kick it before I replace
it. And I'm natural gas stove which
will never die. I'm sure the stove will last for
years. And so we'll see when we can
actually shut off that at the vacation house though, we
actually built that from scratch.
And so that's an all electric house.
There is no natural gas service at that house.
It is super energy efficient, one of the most energy efficient
homes in Garrett County and in Maryland.
And so we actually need to bring in fresh air so that, you know,
the air is rotating. It's got induction stove, it's
got a heat pump. It's got, I think almost 16
kilowatts of solar on the roof. And so if the end of days comes,
I'm going to be able to be a prepper in that house along with
my two EV chargers that I've had installed there.
And so all my neighbors know that if something bad happens,
they can hang out of my house. Rad, I want to know more about
this setup in Deep Creek Lake. I am looking forward to visiting
your home there this summer when I also will just coincidentally
be in Deep Creek Lake to see your setup because that sounds
so cool. All right, so that's all for Ask
Jigger this week. Remember, you can send in your
own questions and like I said, if yours gets picked, we'll send
you an energy empire hat, the links in the show notes.
Thanks for listening. As always.
You can find us at energy empire dot FM and wherever you get your
podcasts. If you've got a second, please
leave us a review on Spotify, Apple podcast and also subscribe
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Thank you.